This might fix it: charge the candidate some $amount for each application they send. Also charge the employer $amount * some_factor for each application they receive.
This can filter out candidates that aren't really interested, and companies that aren't really hiring.
The cost to an employer to accept (not review) 100 applications is about 1/100th of the cost to the candidate.
Employers have more information about the applicants individually and in aggregate but candidates don't about the companies.
Employers don't give much basic feedback to candidates, like underqualified, overqualified, not sure, something else.
Location: NYC
Remote: yes
Willing to relocate: no
Technologies: Python-like or C-like. Databases. No C++/C#.
Contact: https://fairthejob.com/profile?public_token=per_lqpFOoDhdhUqJsaVeDSMoGfVNKLaAECu
> if you're allowing the general public to submit reviews.
Why? Do you believe it would accumulate spam and negativity because it's inexpensive for anyone to submit a review? What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?
For a ton of reasons. Fake or purchased reviews is a big part, but also the fact that honest reviews are often misleading or incorrect. As one example, I've often read reviews where the people submitted them before or immediately after they've received the product, and so can't possibly have enough information to write a useful review. Or reviews that are often skewed by price point, encouraging people to rave about crappy products simply because they were cheap.
Amazon reviews are a great example of all of these problems, I think.
If the reviews are about an employer, then there's a whole other level of problems with them. Perhaps the reviewer didn't get along with their manager and so have an honestly terrible opinion of the place, but really, the place is generally great. Or perhaps the opposite -- the reviewer got along wonderfully with their manager and so they're ignoring all sorts of real issues with that employer.
> What if there was a cost attached to posting a review?
I don't think that would help. It might even make things worse, because it would filter out more ordinary people and tilt the balance more towards paid reviewers.
I mean, I could be wrong here. But I've not yet seen a place that allows the general public to submit reviews where the reviews were helpful or accurate in terms of figuring out if the product or service is worth purchasing.
If you think of reviews not as score but subjective opinions and do not try to fool yourself by trying to come up with some magic function that extracts all the valuable data from them and nullify subjective judgement, they are valuable. The hard task is to read them and extract valuable information, so that sometimes the effort does not worth the result, but this one is also a bonus, since non-structured data is hard to game.
> If you think of reviews not as score but subjective opinions
I do think of them that way. But I have no context in which to interpret those opinions, so they are valueless to me. If I don't know what the reviewer values and doesn't value, I can't know how to interpret the review.
It's like with movie reviews -- a movie review from someone I don't know is without value, because I don't know what their tastes are. Did they dislike the movie because it's bad, or because they don't like that particular style? There's no way of knowing.
This all would be more workable if all reviews were honest, but they aren't. When you toss in the need to try to discern what reviews are real and what reviews aren't, the entire task becomes impossible.
This is why I've learned to ignore all reviews that aren't from someone that I am already familiar with.
Let's try and see if the problem can be reframed. It isn't really about reviews. It's about effective hiring. If you wanted to optimize hiring how would you do it?
Reviews might be unnecessary if candidates can collectively gather up the data that shows if a company is actually hiring, and actually reviewing resumes, and actually responding to candidates with above-generic feedback.
The reason this data isn't collected and presented is that job sites and application tracking software make their money from companies. There isn't a site that makes money from candidates to counteract this force. The power imbalance between candidate and employer is tilted in favor of the employer.
If a job post showed there are 286 applicants for a job would you bother writing a cover letter? I wouldn't. I would move on to the job posting that responds promptly and has fewer candidates.
If a job post showed there are 100 applicants, the job posting has been open for 30 days, and there are zero resume reviews, would you bother applying to this job and others like it in this company? I wouldn't. It means the employer isn't really hiring or is disfunctional enough to announce a position without giving it attention.
I'd even be willing to pay the recruiter for their time giving me somewhat helpful not legally binding feedback like we think "you're overqualified", "you're missing an important skill", "we're not sure yet". If the recruiter starts generating revenue for the company, the company might hire more of them.
I'd also be willing to recommend my friends to good companies.
IIRC LinkedIn actually does tell you how many applicants have applied via their platform, but since it doesn't tell you 90% don't have the right to work in the country never mind meet the job spec in other requirements, it's not information that's particularly useful.
"We're the job board that forces you to jump through hoops to provide evidence of how active your hiring process is" isn't a sales pitch particularly likely to attract employers (in which case there's not much incentive for candidates to pay them either). And even if it did, it wouldn't replace Glassdoor' reviews - with all their inadequacies - for people that care more about whether the employer sounds better or worse than their current employer than whether they will get a job offer by the end of tomorrow.
> but since it doesn't tell you...it's not information that's particularly useful.
If it did it could be - if it could show how many applicants are actually qualified. Then a job board that listed more prominently jobs from responsive employers could get attention.
I'm not sure it's "jumping through hoops". In a well functioning company, providing evidence for a hiring decision is something that must happen anyway. How can the recruiter justify why they said yay or nay to a candidate? They might not remember the details but they're probably scoring candidates in broad categories. These categories tell you "90% don't have the right to work in the country never mind meet the job spec in other requirements".
If this data is available and isn't communicated to candidates there could be some other reason, likely that job boards make most of their money only from companies.
Expecting companies to do their candidate scoring on the job board's platform sounds like "jumping through hoops" to me. If I have a choice of job boards that let me and my team make my own decisions about filtering candidates and when and how to invite candidates to interview and one that expects us to use theirs, I'm probably not using the latter one.
Consistently identifying whether an individual has the right to work in a country from the semi-structured data in a resume is a surprisingly hard problem for software to solve (for n>100 countries, where the right to work is often a requirement not stated in the ad). And actual humans working in recruitment fail pretty spectacularly at "is this individual's programming experience appropriate" often enough
(There probably is a market for software that does that - and plenty of controversy when it turns out the AI process uses heuristics like "is his name Muhammad" to filter out 'unqualified' candidates - but not something you'd be likely to focus your effort on if your business is selling ads rather than HR systems ad buyers probably don't want to use)
I didn't say you can't make your own decisions. I didn't say it has to happen on the job board's platform either.
> Consistently identifying whether an individual has the right to work in a country from the semi-structured data in a resume is a surprisingly hard problem for software to solve
Many job posts provide a field that requires the candidate to enter if they have the right to work in the country the position is located.
> I do not see how anyone could make money unless they play ball with the big companies
One way is to play ball with the candidates. A big casualty of the job search is the candidate because they deplete their savings while looking for a job. Companies on the other hand can afford to not spend the money on a hire, or delay hiring, or put job postings that aren't really hiring to keep up pretenses or as marketing or feel they're not losing anything. The candidate doesn't have a concentrated force to counteract this.
If candidates wised up it could get interesting. A web app that is the other half of LinkedIn could be there waiting to be discovered.
The concentrated force for candidates to counteract this would be an industy-wide union. Which isn't happening.. but if you look at unionized industries this is one of the major benefits for candidates, or at least for candidates who make it into the union..
What if candidates paid you to? Would you want to?