harrisosserman

I wish we could offer more, but employers are only willing to pay so much to get someone to apply for a job

Job searching can feel like a job, so I've been working on something to give job seekers rewards for applying to US-based jobs. Most jobs on the site pay at least $1 for applying. Wondering what the HN community thinks about something like this, when it's getting increasingly hard to find a job in tech?

I’ve talked to hundreds of job seekers about their experience job searching. And the job seekers who get frustrated/exhausted/depressed by the search all site that they’re putting in all of this effort and feel like they’re getting nothing out of it. That’s totally understandable!

For the past year, I’ve been working on a way to give job seekers something for their time and effort job searching. We’re all used to earning cash back in other areas of our lives, but that concept hasn’t been applied to job searching. What I’m trying to do is pay job seekers for simply applying to good-fit jobs. We're cutting job seekers into the money that employers are already spending to recruit candidates on the major online job sites.

The product is called Hire Rewards (where job seeking makes the most cents)…and here’s the link (talkhiring.com/jobs). So far, job seekers have been paid out over $30k in cash back and there are millions of US-based jobs on the site.

I'm an indie hacker, so please lmk what you think!

I think that even in areas where a list of projects, references, and skills are required, it is still the one who has great personal contacts who often succeeds. For example, the great accountants get many of their new clients from other clients who think they do great work. Or the great bioengineers get connections to people in industry from professors who think highly of them. An introduction from someone who thinks very highly of you is often much more powerful than a list of projects.

I completely agree. One of the most effective ways to find a job is to go into the interview with something that will help the company that you are interviewing for. For example, if you're looking for a business development internship, you should go into the interview with a concrete plan of some initiative that the company could execute on, and give hard data on why the company should do that. These types of applicants are always more impressive than those with just a nice resume.