Apply HN: 925 – Job Search Assistance via Text Message (not a chatbot)
925 (text925.com) is a phone number that you can text for free assistance in your job search. A real human replies immediately and helps you find opportunities that are tailored specifically to your needs. Your assistant continues working with you until you find a job. Down the road, we plan offer more in-depth job-search assistance to candidates, including reviewing resumes, offering interview coaching, and submitting applications.
Why use this instead of...
—Job boards: it's overwhelming to search through the morass of listings on public boards. Good opportunities are hard to filter out from garbage, the search engines suck, and the entire process is time-consuming and impersonal. We provide instantaneous, high-quality customer service, are experienced at finding quality listings, and will work with you until you find a job.
—Recruiters: most third-party recruiters are employed by a small number of companies and will work to steer you towards those (so they can collect referral bonuses). It's also much more of a pain to work with one, requiring lengthy phone calls and meetings. We provide unbiased service and are always available via text.
Traction: We launched our public beta four weeks ago and have over 300 sign-ups, and have exchanged over 4,000 texts with our job-seeking users. Some of our first batch are progressing through interview processes that we helped setup. We talk to our users every day, by nature of the product, and they love it! (Unprompted customer testimonial: “You guys are so fantastic. I know I speak for thousands when I say THANK YOU”)
Team: I left business school to teach myself iOS development, and have been coding for the last 3 years. My cofounder is a Javascript/full-stack developer. We both have suffered through horrible job searches, and want to help people in our position.
Would love to hear your feedback. How will you be unbiased when you start to monetize this? Are you planning to find a way to be compensated that is independent of whether someone gets a job using your service? There's two ways we think this could go: 1. We make money from companies via recruiting fees. In this scenario, our goal would be to present listings that we make money from via "sponsored links" a la Google search. As we grow our pool of job-seekers, we'd concurrently be able to expand the number of companies we have recruiting agreements with, thus making our implicit incentive to be biased towards a small number of companies weaker and weaker. If we got a significant portion of all job-seekers using our service, we'd probably be able to introduce a standardized recruiting agreement that companies could sign onto online in a self-serve fashion, minimizing our need to do "on the ground" sales. 2. If that approach doesn't work, we'd hope to offer services to job-seekers that they're willing to pay for, such as resume reviews, interview coaching, and the like. There's also the possibility that we could come to some agreement with seekers for a (very small) percentage of their signing bonus/salary at a new job that we help them find. Obviously we have to provide excellent service to earn this, but that's what we aim for! Approach #1 sounds like many that of existing recruiting firms. Until you achieve scale, you will be influenced by the same incentives that haunt this industry. Approach #2 is more interesting. You're basically acting an "agent" for a job seeker. It's an idea I've seen discussed a fair amount (including on this site), but I don't know of anyone who's succeeded at it at scale. Good points in both cases. For approach #1, I do think the Google example is somewhat analogous—ideally we'd survey all existing options more and more effectively, and explicitly call-out our "sponsored links." The incentives are more clearly aligned with the seekers in approach #2, but we're still in the early stages of exploring the willingness-to-pay or willingness-to-revenue-share of our users. Our near-term goal is to grow the pool of seekers as quickly as possible and test the viability of both approaches. Having worked on some products that people like-but-don't-love, this one is much easier to market because the users genuinely love it. Having dealt with recruiters who simply scraped the web and job boards, I'm curious about how potential positions are discovered, evaluated, and acquired. At the moment, this is mostly the service we offer, although we have done some extra work for our early users (resume reviews, interview prep). But the listings are hand-picked by a competent human, we do it for free, and we aren't trying to push you into companies that we are hired by. Going forward, we're hoping to expand the pool of job-seekers and companies we work with so that we can offer job opportunities that aren't publicly available.