A job search today is like having to arrange a lot of blind dates, with your focus at each being on trying to convince them you’re the best thing for them on the spot — that they should pick you. And if they agree, you then commit to a "long-term relationship" with them right away. But if you leave before a year is up, people will often think less of you, and it may harm your ability to date after.
You’re never really taught how to pick the right “date,” nor provided adequate resources to help you figure out who might be a good fit for you.
And yet, if your best friend told you they were going to jump into a serious relationship with someone (this time in the real sense) — or heaven forbid marrying them — right after meeting them, you'd probably caution them otherwise.
We want to help people pick a job (and career) that fits them, one they may actually get to know better (and like) before having to go all-in on date three. Interviews are often a bad environment to fully learn about a job because the interviewee is primarily there to sell themselves, they may not want to ask too probing of questions about the job as that may turn off the interviewer, the interviewer may not have all the answers to your questions (perhaps they've never done the job you're interviewing for), and interviews are usually too short to really understand a role.
We want to improve that process. We're going to do that by providing people with an opportunity to learn directly from those who've done the jobs, who've worked in the careers, in a more neutral way, outside of interviews. These are detailed, first-hand accounts (reviews) that will better educate them on what a job truly entails. Our hope is that it allows people to ride shotgun as if they're on a job shadow, without actually having to get in the car.
Seems like it's not that far off the conventional monetization route of a recruiter. If you could increase the recruitment/candidate success rate after 12 months for new hires, even by a little bit, that'd probably be a pretty nice selling point.
I mean both the probability that they are happy in their position and stay, and the probability that they are an acceptable candidate. These are two very different things though probably quite correlated.
That's a great resource for high schoolers who are trying to find a career path. I have also seen something similar to this at Khanacademy - their "meet the professional" series and also some video interviews on different careers [1].
I personally would rather read than watch because I can take-in more information faster, and I'm less willing to sit through a video from a source I'm not already connected to or familiar with (as oppose to say my favorite comedian). But given how popular many YouTube channels and videos are for people teaching various skills, maybe I should include video.
Edit: after looking at this part of Khan Academy (which I'm a fan of), the frustration I have with many of these career sites or content is that they don't focus on what doing a job is actually like nor provide enough detail. You do a job for 8 hours a day, I want to know what I will be doing during that time. Bonus if you also tell me details about what a career path for that job looks like.
> Interesting fact: Diet Coke is many flight attendants least favorite drink to pour because the fizz takes forever to go down. They can pour three drinks for everyone one Diet Coke.
I've had a related idea a while back - I wish there were walkthroughs for university fields of study. Like a class that discusses the tables of contents (not so much the actual contents!) of courses of other fields at a level that would be understandable to prospective students of the field.
This would reduce unknown unknowns.
As someone who has studied CS, at times it would've actually been useful to know what areas electrical engineers and mechanical engineers are studying, and what the major topics in each course are. Be it to work closely with people who did study those fields, find the right people in the first place or possibly even as a seed to be able to learn just enough of their field to help myself.
Of course for such technical fields I can read the course descriptions myself and make educated (hah!) guesses, but if I turn to some unrelated fields (e.g. veterinary studies) out of sheer curiosity I'm lost.
Interesting idea! The name is a little hard to take seriously with the misspelling.
Some of the reviews are very detailed with expected salary ranges and career progressions, and others are really sparse- the Sales Engineer for example, or the Flight Nurse which is basically an anecdote that tells you nothing about the field, how to get into it or what it's like. I'd have a template or guidelines for your reviewers, and reject anything that doesn't match the quality of, for example, the Investment Banking VP or the Crane Operator.
Finding salary ranges is pretty easy these days. Knowing what a job is actually like before doing it is not, so that's going to be my focus.
You're right some posts are really sparse. And I hope to fix that going forward, perhaps via some guidelines as you suggest.
Though, I'd prefer not forcing too many restrictions on what people share. If you envision looking at say 10+ posts for a given job, some with just interesting anecdotes about specific experiences or situations would be useful I think.
I thought having a varied structure is better because it allows people to talk about whatever they want to talk about, however they want to talk about it. But when I watch or read good interviews (not job interviews), the interviewer asks good questions, listens a lot, and asks subtle (yet effective) follow-up questions that creates an engaging conversation because of the stories or details that you learn. Bad interviewers get in the way by not listening well, talking too much, or asking bad questions.
I'm just not yet sure if there are universal questions that can be applied across all job categories and functions, that will also get people to provide good anecdotes and details. For example, are there questions you ask a football coach that are equally applicable to asking a software engineer?
This is a cool idea and I dig that you're focusing on content. One thing I noticed after clicking through a few was some are far better than others. The flight attendant provides awesome details and pros/cons. Whereas the F1 performance engineer is a single paragraph with nothing more than what the title means.
Nice idea. Good luck on seeing it grow out. Do you have a revenue model long term?
Right off the bat, I think you need a search box. Probably with autocomplete to the job titles. I was a bit frustrated trying to click through to the various titles, and I could not find the search box.
I'm not exactly sure on a revenue model yet, but I think job ads is one idea that could work. However, when I was researching companies that are trying to match people with the right career, several ended up partnering with Fortune 500 companies to essentially be their marketing channel. I won't be doing that, as I think it creates a conflict of interest. Having good content is my top priority.
Adding search is the first feature on my list to build out, sorry for the frustration. And thanks for the feedback.
I think the workers should be your revenue model. But I also don’t see that generating quite enough revenue without some creative means. Definitely have a tip jar. Maybe non targeted ads?
Crazy idea time. Build out a suite of features for someone to fully document employer abuse. Request a portion of legal windfalls as cost for downloading the data.
Or maybe partner with labor unions? You will have to refrain from the crazy idea though.
This is actually a market where there are many real business models that work. Advertising is the most dominant one via job ads, and that could be a way to go.
Alternatively, I think people would pay for accurately telling them what they should do with their life that would provide them with the most fulfillment; and more if you're directly able to place them in that job/industry (similar to how a dating service could find you the person to marry).
One thing that sticks out to me is once you get past the overview of what a job entails, you'll probably have a lot of specific questions where Q&A or mentorship with someone that's done the job might be a better fit than a pull-only model.
So I thought about implementing some type of comment system or Q&A feature, but decided not to right now because I often find that posts on many websites don't have much activity on them, the original poster not responding (especially in a timely manner), as well as having to deal with spam.
Instead, I was thinking about encouraging people to include their emails in posts for people who are open to being contacted with questions. What do you think about that?
The email idea would be great. I've had trouble responding to comments on articles I've written until I learned I could just subscribe to Disqus comments. Ideally the author would publish the email response to the article if appropriate.
And for articles where the author doesn't provide an email address they can be reached at maybe those don't have comment sections as it does now.
Years ago I got the chance to try and operate a friction crane during some down time. I was just a laborer on college break but we were waiting on another large machine to do its work so the crane operator told me to come up and he showed me the basics.
I learned a completely new respect for what he was doing when I gave him signals. Good operators are amazing, the not so good ones are terrifying.
Ya, I pulled some content from a Reddit thread. I also did some research for some of the posts and wrote them myself, pulling together various info from quality sources I could find. And the other posts are direct from the source, as I coordinated the writing of them.
The flight nurse seems like an of choice if you intentionally copied that one (without citation, apparently?). It's just a specific anecdote used to justify a rant about a single (unnamed) company...
I mean, I guess I can copy a bunch of unverified AskReddit thread responses, make a website, mix in some javascript, and get a bunch of news.ycombinator karma?
Like if OP had gone back and interviewed some of these people and got some validation they are who they say they are, sure.
Validation is something that will likely happen in the future. But I also think anonymity is important as well. So figuring out that balance is key.
You're right I should have tried to corroborate the Reddit users' stories. Sorry about that. However, many stories on the site are corroborated and will be going forward.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm hoping that's only going to be a short-term problem. Perhaps you'd (or anyone else) be willing to write a review for one of the categories that doesn't have content? :)
Categories that currently don’t have content:
Administrative, Arts & Design, Consulting, Customer Service & Support, Legal, Information Technology, Marketing, Media & Communications, Other, Product & Project Management, Research & Science
You’re never really taught how to pick the right “date,” nor provided adequate resources to help you figure out who might be a good fit for you.
And yet, if your best friend told you they were going to jump into a serious relationship with someone (this time in the real sense) — or heaven forbid marrying them — right after meeting them, you'd probably caution them otherwise.
We want to help people pick a job (and career) that fits them, one they may actually get to know better (and like) before having to go all-in on date three. Interviews are often a bad environment to fully learn about a job because the interviewee is primarily there to sell themselves, they may not want to ask too probing of questions about the job as that may turn off the interviewer, the interviewer may not have all the answers to your questions (perhaps they've never done the job you're interviewing for), and interviews are usually too short to really understand a role.
We want to improve that process. We're going to do that by providing people with an opportunity to learn directly from those who've done the jobs, who've worked in the careers, in a more neutral way, outside of interviews. These are detailed, first-hand accounts (reviews) that will better educate them on what a job truly entails. Our hope is that it allows people to ride shotgun as if they're on a job shadow, without actually having to get in the car.