Every month the "Who Wants to Be Hired?" and "Who's Hiring?" Threads come through I would think to myself, "there should be a match maker for these two threads".
So I had abacus.ai whip one up. The methodology is pretty simple, data is extracted from posts using an LLM, score matches based on salary, domain experience, remote/onsite, etc., and then eliminate incompatible postings, like 'looking for remote work' and 'onsite only'. The result is two views: jobs-by-user and user-by-jobs.
If you've submitted a post to this month's 'Who Wants to Be Hired?", you can find your matching job listings at https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/:user_name, for example https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/G4Vi
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Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:
Poke around, let me know what you think!
Ultimately, I hope this is actually helpful to some folks.
Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.
Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.
Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.
Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.
Not that you don't get spammed anyway, but still.
Yes, it can be done in full view in public, and still be an invasion of privacy. why do you think they’re called glassholes and pervert glasses?
We are living in the Wild West of privacy. If you don't like it, you can share your grievance with the people running the public space or disengage entirely. It's still going to happen.
It's public information on a public forum. I'm not sure what the big deal is. There are lots of tools that do essentially what I've done here for various purposes.
> Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.
I have an account with them. I figured it was fair to say "I used this tool for vibe coding the idea". I suppose I could have left that out.
> Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.
Yup. I got distracted before I finished writing the post. I'll enumerate those things in another comment here in a minute. Life prevails.
> Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.
I'm not sure what you mean. I made a thing, I shared it. I dunno what else you want from me.
People have been building HN job listing scrapers for years. Heck, I built one over a decade ago[1] (though it's offline now). This is a very common "Show HN:" project, and the argument that it's somehow bad faith and creepy is just absolutely nuts when posting on a public forum, specifically to get more exposure.
[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob
My claim of "bad faith" was specifically because the post, between 1) explicitly pointing to a "full stack ai dev platform" ("So I had abacus.ai whip one up"), and 2) the entire missing list of "observations" (mid post), came off more as a shadow advertisement for an ai dev tool than an actual project.
[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob/blob/master/assets/app/compon...
Ever since I posted once 6+ months ago, I've been getting random emails from people who found my "posting" on a bunch of different listing websites. I feel bad for them, some of them are even tailoring the resume. The position is no longer available..
So here it is:
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Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:
- individuals looking for jobs have extremely general postings
- companies looking to hire have extremely specific postings
- generally, match scores are very low (<50%) because of this mismatch
- individuals don't typically mention domain knowledge in any specific way
- individuals don't typically mention prior work history beyond time-in-industry (this makes sense on a public forum)
- individuals typically list technologies used
I don't have any conclusions to make right now, no advice for job posters or job seekers. It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.
I don't understand - there's years of historical data to look at?
Tbf, at this hour, it hadn't even occurred to me.
I am refreshed when I such honesty like this.
No defensive quip. No snarky response.
A gentle reminder that we are all human and we get tired and miss things.
Cool product though.
how did you think about evaluating quality when designing your ranker / fit scoring?
There's a few metrics: seniority, salary range, enumerated skills (as requirements or as a person's skill set), and domain specific knowledge.
These are far from perfect, and I think in the future I will probably tweak how matches are scored, because how job postings are written and how 'Who Wants to Be Hired?" posts are at odds.
The former is one-to-many, where the job posting enumerates very specific requirements in order to filter that 'many' down to as few eligible candidates as possible.
The latter is one-to-many, where the 'I'm for hire' posting seeks to match as many of the 'many's as possible. This means down playing domain experience or specific technologies in order to appeal to as many possible viewers as possible.
Trying to pair 'precise and specific' with 'as general as humanly possible' is ... hard. Here we use 'tags' extracted from postings to match the domains and skills together. It isn't perfect. From what I've seen in this first run there aren't any matches that make it over 50% -- where 50% is a heuristic for the metrics mentioned above. This just means there's room for improvement.
The other side is the old game of 'tailor your resume to the job', which isn't in the spirit of 'Who Wants to Be Hired?' posts. You could very easily game this by just dumping a bunch of keywords into your post.
• Disable illegal university recruiter pipelines that label all other candidates as “external” which gives them entirely different recruiters and is also illegally shown to the interviewer drastically lowering the chance of the candidate moving forward making it far easier for university and Ivy League grads to get hired over anyone else with the same or better credentials
I guess this boils down to the Copyright of posts on HN, and what is considered to be fair use.
No, I'm not paying anyone. The compute is on my own dime and I'm not making any money off of this.