Ask HN: What are some of the best job boards you have seen (any industry)?

300 points by seanpackham ↗ HN
What job boards or apps/services, from any industry, does the community think are great examples of the job application process done well and what is it they do better than the others?

Lastly, when a job application does use LinkedIn's auto-fill feature what are your experiences with it?

120 comments

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http://www.gaswork.com/

For anesthesia providers. Simple, and to the point. Job searches are needlessly complicated and so many employers are extremely closed off in terms of revealing compensation and details of the work you'll be doing, which I find minimized on this site.

Great tabular layouts, makes it super easy to compare/prioritise CVs/jobs at a glance, and see what information is provided/withheld.
> minimum income: $420,000

Not bad! However, I imagine there's robots gearing up for this type of job.

Realistically I'm 24, can I still make this career switch? Anybody have insight? No college education. Can I make it by 35? The ROI is much better than development.
Of course you could. But if you are only interested because of the ROI, you will most likely not succeed.
This is very true. You'll probably hate your MD studies with all your guts by the end of the first year. You'll hardly make it though if money is your only motivation.
Isn't the 420k min partly to compensate for the amount of responsibility and liability, thus stress, if anything goes wrong?
Not to mention the student loans (/r/personalfinance is littered with doctors trying to figure out how to pay off their $300k student loan tab in anything less than a decade) and the decade+ of opportunity cost and lost income from those working years.

Most doctors make very good money, don't get me wrong. And most anesthesiologists make good money compared to other doctors. But there are much, much easier and less risky ways to achieve nearly the same standard of living and financial security.

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Care to throw some examples out there?
Nurse anesticist is a better "value". The catch is that the education is extremely difficult and expensive.

Also, you have long term risk of cancer and other nasties from exposure to the chemicals.

Are you claiming there is a higher occurrence of cancer among anesthesiologists, and that it's linked to the drugs they administer?
Not me.

"Despite questions about design issues or selection bias in some studies, the weight of the evidence regarding potential health risks from exposure to anesthetic agents in unscavenged environments suggests that clinicians need to be concerned. Moreover, there is biological plausibility that adds to the concern that high levels of unscavenged waste anesthetic gases present a potential for adverse neurological effects or reproductive risk to exposed workers or developmental anomalies in their offspring (Cohen et al. 1980; Rowland et al. 1992)."

Some of these ads the signing bonus include paying off significant amounts of student loan debt, a salary >$600k, 8 weeks vacation, and no overtime.
Would be interesting to see an ROI by career.
Do you have the academic record to get into a good college? You'll graduate by 29. Maintain good enough grades in a relevant natural science curriculum to get into a good medical school? You'll graduate that by 33. Three years of anesthesiology residency has you completing that by 36. The median salary is $425k[0] - how many first-year programmers make the median salary right off the bat?

Since you mentioned ROI, let's look at the financial aspect. You'll need loans for college and medical school. Let's say college is $75k for 4 years all in, including living expenses, and $160k for medical school. For your residency, you'll be making barely $50k a year, likely in an urban environment. It's not unreasonable to expect additional loans on top of that just to survive, in addition to three years of interest on top of the ~$235k in student loans you already have. Is $350k in student loans unreasonable by the time you can actually start paying them off? Probably not.

Some napkin math on $350k at 5% (it will absolutely be higher because you'll need private loans) shows that you'll have a $2300/mo student loan payment for 20 years, until you're 56. If you more than double your payments to $6k/mo it will still take you 6-7 years to pay off the balance (with the benefit of saving you over $150k in interest).

A lot of people spend more than that on their house, and I'm sure $2300 is not a lot of money when you're pulling in $650k a year as an anesthesiologist with 15 years of experience. But to me there is a ton of risk in doing something like that that you may hate.

And let's not forget, you don't even have a college degree. You might find out that you just suck at chemistry. :)

[0] https://residency.wustl.edu/CHOOSING/SPECDESC/Pages/Anesthes...

Yes, you could. But as someone who quit after medical school (now program for a living) -- make sure you actually like it. Because its a pretty demanding and time consuming job. Additionally, my wife is a Dentist. Dental school is both easier, shorter (no residency, some 3 don't even require a full undergrad) and depending on the job, makes comparable salaries. I know few dentists that work > 4 days a week. Personally, I'd hate the work. And I know plenty of M.D.'s who love medicine and would not be happy being a Dentist. But if you think you'd like it, I don't think there's a better job out there.
Robots are currently far from capable of replacing anesthesia providers, MD or CRNA. Anesthesia does more than putting you to sleep.
I guess "replacing" is not the right word. With the right type of technology you can enable one doctor to do the work of six. It's becoming especially true as AI is advancing so rapidly. Based on the number of job openings here I think that will probably be a good thing for everyone.
efinancialcareers is unavoidable for finance. I wouldn't say they're better than others in terms of features, but they're the market leaders and so they have most jobs. Also they do salary/bonus surveys, which is always really interesting for people in the industry.
It is but for some reason it showed solely Polish jobs to me.
same for me. Too bad, this board looks very nice to use
In fact it's a Polish project. They've disrupted dev job boards market in Poland, mainly because salary range strict requirement. IMO their Sales should focus more on bringing international offers because this project have a huge potential.
I believe they have been around for about 4 months, if that - I suppose they want to test and expand the site on local waters first, before marketing internationally more aggressively. It's pretty obviously designed with the global community in mind.

A pity their blog is purely clickbait fluff, genuinely valuable market analysis posts would help with marketing a lot.

Clarification: yes it is a Polish project, and I'm aware it's thus of no practical use to most of you.

I'm linking to it as a showcase of a "job board done right" rather than for actual job searching - that's how I understood OP's question.

Two best one from Russia:

hh.ru - Russian Linkedin. Main difference - works 10 times as fast( while having a quadriple amount of lines in JS ), best UI of any "webapp" I've ever seen for both mobile and desktop versions.

moikrug.ru - used to be an amateur blogging website/semi-opensource project to which I contributed at around 2006-2007. Now after being resold and respun 10 times over, it has been turned into a job site as the only demographics there were software devs... They managed to best HH.ru at scaling down the UI even further. Currently, they run the best job board for tech talent in Russian speaking countries. They have very select clearing criteria for clients to minimize "spamcruiting," and other bad recruitment practices (thought they did bend over for the biggest players there like MS and Yandex.) That focus on working with right clients is what has been propelling them ahead of others.

> hh.ru - Russian Linkedin

I'm genuinely impressed. Do you know what is their technology stack?

F/E:

Handwritten ES5 to big extend. They are very choosy on use of browser features and amount of fallbacks they bundle (no point of using polyfills if they work at 1/10th of native speed.) They carved out some of react core code for event handling, and use 3rd party remote JS debugging lib. Everything else was developed in house over the course of 20 years. Some of their front-end code featuring seemingly new approaches to handling JS, can easily be written over 10 years ago as they were one of web 2.0 pioneers.

On the backend side, they are a Java shop with immediate front-end interaction being partly handled by purpose built API servers on C++.

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http://zonino.co.uk - We had a stab at building our own that mined jobs directly from the websites of (London) startups. It's mothballed so the data is all out of date but I still think the UI is a good example of how job searching should be really simple and uncluttered.
I started https://www.latitude.work with the goal of featuring quality opportunities for other software engineers in a way that puts the information up front that's important to us. I stayed away from only having paid listings since that seems like a race to the bottom and am focusing on having a great experience for engineers. Would love any feedback on it.
Any board that allows you to filter out recruiter postings is good in my book. Many claim they do but very few actually successfully do that.
That's primarily down to the fact that those boards require companies to identify themselves as a recruitment agency when they first sign up and more often than not, agencies 'forget' to do so knowing it'll get more eyes on their job postings.
That's primarily down to the fact that those boards require companies to identify themselves as a recruitment agency when they first sign up and more often than not, agencies 'forget' to do so knowing it'll get more eyes on their job postings.
https://www.wfh.io does not allow job postings from anyone who masks the identity of the actual employer. This was something we set out to refuse from inception.
It would be great if you included salary range as well. I'd much rather apply through a recruiter who posted the salary range than directly with a company who doesn't.
Does anybody know a something which features embedded software listings? for me the iot developer of the future
startupjobs.cz - it's a czech job board in the IT niche. Pretty neat.
Www.unicornhunt.io is about as good as it gets for digital & startups*

*Disclaimer, i'm a co-founder.

I referred a lot of people to Unicornhunt - in fact it s really good in London that Im trying to get my sister to use it to find a new job because I keep telling her she needs a career change from the chemical eng industry. A few days ago I actually saw her browse the site on her phone, so that's a win for me!
I'll be honest, I think that's your bias talking.

1. No remote-only search

2a. No salary range

2b. No search by salary range

3a. No equity range

3b. No search by equity range

4. No information about the company other than whatever they put in the job posting (funding is pretty important if you're branding yourself with "unicorn")

5. Giant gif from Silicon Valley on the pricing page but that might just be personal preference

www.authenticjobs.com - used it first time around 5 years ago. It looks like they have further polished their UI, job offers look good, solid product.
Agreed, and Cameron runs a fantastic money-back guarantee if you're not able to find suitable candidates (I've used it before, and then re-listed later to find great candidates who we hired).

Also recommend https://dribbble.com/jobs for design jobs, and searching through profiles with the "Available for hire" filter.

Worst: LinkedIn with direct application. Never got even on reply from that.

Tangential: Glassdoor (in my case actually LoveMondays, a local copycat that Glassdoor bought) is very useful when deciding to accept an offer.

I've got a 100% success rate with applying for jobs directly from LinkedIn. I imagine it's heavily dependent upon industry and region.
LinkedIn can also be a good way to circumvent the HR middlemen, which is important for autodidacts. I've found clients by sending InMail to people who had active job postings.
https://unicornhunt.io/ ~ From the peeps behind Silicon drinkabout, it's got a good balance of startups, remotes and SMEs roles.

As an employer too, the pricing model is super.

Seems very focused on the U.K.
I'll go a step further and say it looks very focused on London.
A byproduct of where we were born, and how we got known. We users and jobs from all over, but yes, it's got a London bias, we're actively working on that over this year, and making the progress we wanted to. Any thoughts are appreciated.
Any chance of a remote section?
Unfortunately, the whole UK tech scene is massively weighted towards London which kind of sucks for those of use who don't want to live there.
Isn't that the case for almost any metropolis? Tech scenes tend to be focused in the capital, in most countries.
Well, that's a nice change from being very focused on the US and Silicon Valley, especially where startup jobs are concerned.
We're certainly best known in the UK, but it varies but yes, we're British, and our word of mouth growth has certainly had that bias.
Unicorn Hunt is definitely the best place to look in the UK. Many of the other job boards are just full of agency posts.
Could this support contract jobs too?
Yeah, UH were great for us. We had an urgent need for a front-end dev, and within literally 2 or 3 days of posting we had someone amazing sat in the office churning out great work. From memory it was really cost-effective, too...
I'm a huge fan of AngelList Jobs [0], and made extensive use of it during my last job search, for one very important reason: they require all job listings to disclose salary/equity ranges up front.

Some of the listings there have ranges that are more useful/realistic than others, but I find having at least some indication of potential compensation for a position is infinitely better than not having any idea at all, and avoids so much potentially wasted time on both sides of the job search due to unrealistic expectations around compensation. This is especially important for startup jobs, which can vary wildly in compensation from one company to the next.

Their search and filtering tools are top notch too, as you can break down listings by just about any criteria you might think of, such as industry, tech stack, location, size/funding, role, and of course, compensation, for which they even have a dedicated tool [1].

Of course, money isn't everything, and if you're even considering working for a startup like I was, it's probably not your number 1 priority, but nevertheless it's still an important consideration that can pose as a potential deal-breaker for many candidates, especially when looking for jobs in big tech hubs that have higher than average cost of living.

Candidate matching services like TripleByte [2], Hired [3], underdog.io [4] and AngelList's recently introduced A-List [5] can also work well for the right candidates, though I've personally had mixed results with TripleByte and Hired, and haven't yet tried underdog.io or A-List, so YMMV.

The tools I listed are are mostly only useful if you're interested in working for a startup, and not so much if you're looking specifically to work for larger, established companies. But since this is HN, I suspect a non-negligible percentage of people who come across this thread will fall into the former group, so I hope some may find this post useful.

[0] https://angel.co/jobs

[1] https://angel.co/salaries

[2] https://triplebyte.com/

[3] https://hired.com/

[4] https://underdog.io/

[5] https://alist.co/

If you are looking for a small (or smallish) company, Angel List is a great place to look. I found the listings to be high quality and the showing interest system works well.
The problem I've had as an employer on Angellist is that the posting has a clear 4+ years experience requirement and I'm inundated with fresh coding boot camp grads. It's gotten to the point that I don't even check it anymore as I am yet to receive a quality candidate after hundreds of "interesteds".
(Full disclosure: I work for Triplebyte) If you want to share publicly or privately, I'm curious to hear about your mixed results. FWIW, our quiz & interview process may have changed dramatically -- not sure when you last tried it. Also, we're now also connected with larger, established companies like FB and AAPL (in addition to startups), but this might be a new development on our end since you last tried it out.
I last tried Triplebyte in 2015, so indeed, a lot must have changed since then, which is why I didn't want to get into any specific details about my experience at the time, as it's probably no longer representative.

For what it's worth, my issue with the process I went through was the significant workload required for the take-home project I chose.

Some background: I semi-specialize in frontend work because I enjoy building great products and user experiences.

Out of the 4 take home projects you offered at the time, only 1 had anything remotely product-oriented: a _multiplayer_ snake game. The take-home projects were estimated to take at most 3 hours, which seemed about right for the other 3 project options, but definitely not for this one, which involved non-trivial frontend work and realtime networking in the backend, which seemed like more of a whole-weekend kind of deal at the very least. Nevertheless I chose this project because the other projects simply didn't interest me at all, and probably wouldn't have given me any opportunity to showcase any product chops because they didn't involve any non-trivial frontend work.

I was also interviewing outside of Triplebyte at the time, so I didn't have a whole weekend to burn on this project. In the end, I worked on it for the estimated 3 hours and had a decently working & polished frontend but couldn't finish the backend component, so that's what I went to the interview with and was rejected for not being able to finish.

In the end I think this was an issue of project selection/scope. I don't think 3 hours was a very honest estimate for the time commitment required for the project I chose, and any project that takes more than 3 hours feels like too much more time commitment than most would be willing to accept.

My personal recommendation for take-home project selection would be to offer the same project choices you'd offer candidates who take the real-time interview path, but simply expect more polish, better code quality, architecture and testing.

Though take that recommendation with a grain of salt, because you guys have probably put way more thought into this than I have. Nevertheless I'd love to hear how your project selection process has evolved since then.

Anyone knows a good job board for remote jobs in Germany? Thanks!