In addition to this, theres a lot of research in the Figma as well / reddit competition and otherwise.

Something that I’m finding again and again is that the whole process is full of bad data.

• Resumes have low signal that a candidate is actually qualified
• Companies flood the market with fake “ghost” jobs so it’s hard to tell who’s really hiring.
• Culture-fit is often just treated as a proxy for “does the interviewer like you”
• Take home test that aren’t realistic to the real work environment and therefor don’t indicate much other than your willingness to supplicate yourself to your company. (ok maybe realistic)

And it really, seems to be just like online dating. A vast pond on suitors. A damsel who is “casually looking”

How do help these two find eachother? When 1/3 damsels is a bot?

It makes me think about “why do hiring managers actually hire?

• is it because they’re going to get their budget taken away if they don;t fill headcount?
• is it because their team is falling behind and needs help?
• is it just because they raised a new round of startup funding and “that’s what startups do?”
• Are they “kingdom building” with a ton of direct reports who can elevate their status at the company so they can reach a higher position?
• Did their boss ask them to “build out the team?”

Mentee (Forgot who)

Junior level product designer.

God, this is an old note but I talked with one of my mentees (can remember who it was) But they were a young Product designer looking for their first or second job.

One of the things that he showed me that he was using for his job search was He basically built a web scraper that would scrape all the top job boards and would take that data. He sent a little AWS instance and was storing those Fields in s3 and then basically made like a little mini app with just AWS and then would put in keywords and was sharing it with his friends.

Some of his friends were software engineers, but he'd like → put it “product designer” “UX designer” as keywords. → Run the scraper

→ get the output so instead of having to look at all the different job boards He was just getting all of them in one single place.

And one of the things I said to him is like Why not just look at jobs where there's a cross like could you cross reference that with your LinkedIn network to actually get a higher quality of Lead essentially for those jobs.

He's like, I don't know if LinkedIn's API offers that so that might be something for me to look in because I can imagine like that would be If people are building that has a feature for themselves because they want it There's got to be something there and if we could just enrich it a little bit more with good data Then you're basically giving users great leads for jobs. I think that's pretty valuable".

(there’s an real idea here around, hey I wonder if we could rank job listings leads based on a scrape across multiple platforms and guess which jobs are GHOST jobs and which are serious. And communicate that to candidates)

Michael Harney

Michael is a mid-senior level software engineer.