Ask HN: How to make job search better for both the applicant and the advertiser?
One of the biggest issues for me, browsing jobs and contracts on LinkedIn and elsewhere as a candidate&#x2F;freelancer&#x2F;consultant is this:<p>Most job ads (and incoming messages) are from recruiters, who:<p>- completely obfuscate what the product or service is<p>- thoroughly obfuscate what the work is<p>- often obfuscate where the work actually is<p>- virtually always obfuscate who it&#x27;s with<p>- replace what I want to know with details of the tech stack, beer days, etc.
  which, though maybe important, aren&#x27;t the most important things<p>- talk up weirdly irrelevant things like &quot;you will review code, meet weekly to discuss requirements, blah blah&quot;.  Sure, I&#x27;d expect something like that in the job, but it sounds like filler in an ad which omits the distinctive items I actually want to know.<p>While these are understandable given the recruiters&#x27; needs, the effect is that 99% of all ads I see go immediately into my &quot;doesn&#x27;t sound interesting&quot; pile.<p>Meanwhile, I read complaints that it&#x27;s hard to find good engineers these days.  Well if you can&#x27;t be bothered to say what the company makes, perhaps it&#x27;s not surprising that good engineers ignore your ad among a sea of equally generic ads?<p>I&#x27;m pretty sure both the companies and recruiters would <i>rather</i> their ads be taken more seriously, but the way they write them just doesn&#x27;t work for people like me.<p>To use an analogy, property listings that say a room is for rent sometimes neglect to say which part of a large town or how much the rent is.   Surely those listings can&#x27;t be very successful.<p>Naturally, most jobs won&#x27;t be interesting for appropriate reasons; we&#x27;re all looking for different things.  That&#x27;s fine.<p>The problem is, I&#x27;m pretty sure the number of actually interesting and worthwhile jobs is much higher than the number which is detectable from the unhelpful ads, and most of the effort of browsing and making queries is a big waste of everyone&#x27;s time.<p>There are some basics I&#x27;d always want to know, which other comments mention.  For example pay ceiling, relocation, etc.<p>But setting aside things which are that obvious, the #1 thing I&#x27;m looking for in ads is, what is the product or service I&#x27;d be helping to create or maintain, so I can decide whether it&#x27;s something I&#x27;d feel good working on.<p>For that reason, company-oriented sites like AngelList, HN&#x27;s Who&#x27;s Hiring and so on are much more interesting than the ads on LinkedIn and Indeed.  However, I browse LinkedIn mainly, because the website and app are pretty good compared with others, and I can see stats and information about people working there that I can&#x27;t get elsewhere.<p>Another comment suggested standardising some information in job ads, to help candidates compare jobs.  That sounds like it could be interesting, and if done well it might nudge ad writers towards providing the kind of information they don&#x27;t currently think to provide.  (LinkedIn is good at this for people&#x27;s profiles, but doesn&#x27;t seem to be doing it for job ads).  I suspect some of the ad genericness is just out of habit, with people copying ad styles from other ads in a hurry, not knowing how to present jobs effectively to selectively get the attention of the most appropriate candidates.<p>Lastly, one thing I&#x27;ve found unhelpfully weak on LinkedIn is better tracking of the status and priority of active conversations, and of relatively interesting messages.  There&#x27;s basically one linear mailbox, with no tagging or folders, and once there are a number of active, slow conversations, with people I don&#x27;t know (usually recruiters but sometimes from companies), mixed with lots of low-quality messages (which I often reply to as well to say no thanks), it gets rather hard to track which ones I should stay on top of.<p>Most of those are back-and-forth conversations where I&#x27;ve been approached and then I&#x27;m trying to find out if it&#x27;s interesting, because invariably the first incoming message to me is uninformative, and often so is the second.  Because it&#x27;s surprisingly common to get a cold but personalised incoming approach, I reply quickly, and get no reply, or I get a reply but after a week, or it takes me a few days to decide what to say, or they have asked for more detailed info about me that I don&#x27;t have time to do when I first see their message, I need tools to help me remember which ones are in which state, and on LI I find myself scrolling through that long, linear list over and over.<p>Questions asked to me like &quot;would you be willing to relocate to X&quot; are not questions I can answer quickly, because I have to talk it other with other people first and that may take days.  So that&#x27;s another reason the LI linear message list is not a great tool.