I used SO for candidate search. It worked well for SF, but I recently moved to LA to start a team down here and it was just ridiculously... bad. LinkedIn was better, and that's saying something. But I think it's the scale effects of the social network at play here. SO just doesn't have the scale LinkedIn does. Neither does angel.co, though I can't say I've tried to do recruiting on github or reddit (is that something people do?).

What I am saying is that after having used this thing for so long, I want to improve upon it. If it were open, like HN's Who's Hiring threads, I could just run a BigQuery job on it and do a sophisticated search for the candidates I want. I can maybe even do that and open it up for anyone to use, or sell it, whatever! It would provide value for people.

But the thing that sucks about LinkedIn, aside from the spam by their growth-at-all-costs team, aside from the 5 second page load time, forget the terrible caliber of thought leadership... the BIG THING that makes it really hard to use is their data, or what they expose of it. And I'm wondering if it's just because figuring out the true years of experience (or something else) of someone is too hard for all jobs, but I know some tricks I can use to gauge that for an engineer.

Because if I know everyone I'd want to hire is on the network, I would pay a lot of money to get full access on querying that data. But what LinkedIn has built for it is just sad. And the biggest barrier to building an amazing recruiter search tool is the fact that the entire network belongs to this giant corporation that isn't even doing a good job generating value from it!

So let's open it up!