[HN Gopher] Show HN: I'm deprecating LinkedIn recruitment with a...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I'm deprecating LinkedIn recruitment with a Lisp, SQLite
and htmx
FAQ: https://withoutdistractions.com/cv/faq Feel free to ask me
any questions. FAQ archive in case the website goes down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220503102946/https://withoutdi...
Author : harryvederci
Score : 58 points
Date : 2022-05-03 10:35 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (withoutdistractions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (withoutdistractions.com)
| CtRoeFUL wrote:
| Cool project & pretty interesting stack. Congrats on the launch!
|
| I have a few questions, though. Your FAQ says:
|
| > A company is looking for someone with a skill that you have.
| They find your CV on this website. They tell us they're
| interested. You get an email from us asking you if you're
| interested as well. Only if you are interested as well, we'll
| share your email address with them.
|
| That's fine... but thinking purely from a candidate's/job
| seeker's POV, I might need certain questions answered before I
| can say that I'm interested. For instance, I normally don't agree
| to interviews until I know if a job is fully remote, and until I
| have at least a ballpark idea of compensation, benefits, contract
| status, length etc. Will I be expected to communicate all these
| questions directly to the companies themselves on a one-on-one
| basis? At that point, what's the value proposition for me as a
| candidate here? It's just LinkedIn lite with a far smaller reach.
| I'll still have to do the same song and dance as if I were
| dealing with your garden variety LinkedIn recruiters.
|
| What I'm trying to say here is that skill-matching is only one
| part of the sourcing and hiring process. And that it may well not
| be enough to provide enough information for either party to
| ascertain if it's worth investing a significant amount of their
| time.
|
| I hope you'll take my questions in good faith as they were
| absolutely meant in that manner. I did sign up and will
| definitely keep an eye out as the platform grows. Good luck!
| harryvederci wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback, and yes, this is definitely on the
| roadmap!
|
| For now the focus is mainly on the creation of CVs, but I'll be
| adding criteria to both the employer's side (= search) and the
| CV creator's preferences (= manage). Examples:
|
| - How many steps is the interview process?
|
| - Remote vs on-prem work? If remote: what time zones are you
| available to work in? If locally, how long are you willing to
| travel (/ which city do you want to live or work in)?
|
| - Salary. I don't know why this is such an issue to say for
| companies. Maybe they'll be more okay with saying it up front
| if the CV creator is willing to say what they want to earn up
| front? -> Feedback is very welcome here!
|
| - Maybe something like "don't bother reaching out to me if I
| won't be using technology X"?
|
| - Etc. Not having enough ideas is never an issue for me, often
| I have too many :)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Very cool, glad to see htmx and lisp working together!
|
| Hypermedia On Whatever you'd Like!
| harryvederci wrote:
| Htmx creator calls my stuff cool, I can die happy now!
|
| Seriously, working with htmx is a pleasure, thank you so much!
| swlkr wrote:
| The tech stack behind this is pretty novel, janet, htmx, and per
| user sqlite files, check the FAQ for more details, it's pretty
| interesting
| jothac wrote:
| https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/15162933513848340...
| - not far off! Would be super interesting to find how this
| scales!
| harryvederci wrote:
| Thanks! I think the tech stack actually deserves an HN item of
| its own, as I don't think many people know this is possible and
| may resort to something like rqlite without really needing it.
|
| I don't expect everyone to read the full FAQ, so TL/DR:
|
| Every user gets a separate DB file, and a cron job syncs their
| records with a read-only[0] DB file with the same schema. That
| way, writes to individual DB files won't block reads from the
| "global" one.
|
| It's not a fit for every use case, but so far it seems to be
| working fine here!
|
| [0]: read-only for incoming requests, not for me.
| jhgb wrote:
| > Every user gets a separate DB file, and a cron job syncs
| their records
|
| Call it SQLitus Notes or something like that?
| harryvederci wrote:
| Haha, I might rename it to that. Currently it's something
| along the lines of "import-user-db-into-global-db".
| anyfactor wrote:
| Holy heck. What a coincidence. For the last few days, I was
| thinking about databases and was wondering if per user
| database can be possible. To be honest I was thinking about
| duckdb and sqlite3, with a mothership kinda postgreSQL
| database.
|
| I was thinking having a "your very own database" could be a
| justifiable reason for a price bump from pro to enterprise
| version. Then I was thinking of the idea of SQLite being
| something like a web-deliverable database instead of JSON
| responses through an REST API.
|
| Edit:
|
| I would really love to hear about this database per user
| approach. The more I think about this the more I am
| fascinated.
|
| Like for what amount of data-size justifies to have an
| SQLite3 db or something more bulkier? A CV has very small
| amount of data, so why not just use a JSON file? I wonder in
| that case if accessing a JSON file from a cloud storage could
| be more performant compared to SQLite3. You don't need to
| have the full set of utilities of SQL if you are just showing
| the entire data.
| harryvederci wrote:
| Haha awesome! Good to see lots of people are starting to
| see SQLite as an option, I think it used to be
| misunderstood as a toy database.
|
| It'll take some time before I can really recommend this
| workflow, I'll make sure to add a blog to the
| withoutdistractions.com platform soon. I didn't expect this
| to hit the front page as it's my first "Show HN", otherwise
| I would have created one up front with an RSS feed.
|
| For me I went from Postgres to one central SQLite file to
| the current approach. I don't what the best approach would
| be, but I just put a user id column in every table and
| instead of having an integer primary key, I have a primary
| key of user id + table id. Then I have some Janet logic in
| place to get all table + column names except for a few
| private ones from the user's DB file, and put those in the
| "global" DB file.
|
| If anyone knows a better way to do this I'm all ears! I
| think SQLite has some kind of native way now to merge DB
| files with the same schema as well, but I think there was
| some limitation on the amount of tables you could apply
| this to. Not 100% sure, though.
| metadat wrote:
| Needs a LinkedIn import function to reduce platform seeding
| friction.
| nikivi wrote:
| Take a look at https://otta.com
|
| I find it has the best UX out of all hiring platforms right now.
| harryvederci wrote:
| I see quite a lot of new registrations, awesome!
|
| I can't imagine everyone thinks this is 100% perfect though, so
| please let me know what you'd like me to improve! None of this is
| set in stone, I really do appreciate all kinds of feedback.
| Thanks!
| martinsmit wrote:
| The one thing that holds me back from really liking this is
| that skills have to be rated out of 5, which I believe is
| entirely arbitrary. Especially for someone like me, a maths
| student.
|
| How good is my Python out of 5? In what areas? Compared to who,
| someone with 30 years of Python experience or my peers who've
| never coded before?
|
| Furthermore, with natural languages, there are commonly used
| scores (CEFR in Europe at least) that are more or less
| objective and don't depend person to person. If someone says
| they're B1, you know what to expect. If someone says they're
| 3/5, what does that mean?
|
| I would like the option to not justify how skilled I am at
| something, or have more flexibility to qualify/quantify my
| skills such as, but not limited to, number of years of
| professional use.
| harryvederci wrote:
| Thank you, this is valuable feedback!
|
| I agree 100%, I'll think of a good indicator to add some some
| kind of standard there. Otherwise it's probably going to end
| up with CVs that all only have 5/5 stars, making the whole
| grading thing worthless.
| conqrr wrote:
| Very cool project. I have had the exact same thoughts for a
| solution to kill Linkedin. The icing on the cake would be to use
| Linkedin Auth and help pre-poulate this. This will help with the
| adoption and once recruiters start using it, we have a winner
| (And a dead linkedin too).
| harryvederci wrote:
| Haha, I like your thinking! I'm not waging war on LinkedIn
| though, it has definitely helped me in my career. I just think
| some things can be done way more efficiently. I also mention
| this in the FAQ, where I actually have a link to my LinkedIn
| profile. LinkedIn is perfect for keeping in touch with your
| professional network! I just don't think it's an optimal
| platform for recruitment purposes :)
| Freeboots wrote:
| Just a nitpick on your homepage: link is blue on blue, had to
| highlight to read.
| harryvederci wrote:
| There are still some quirks, such as when editing multiple skills
| at the same time, but creating a printable CV works quite well.
|
| Any feedback would be highly appreciated!
| walrus01 wrote:
| sort of a tangent but I wonder about the cultural norms, which
| vary with continent, region and country where people are
| _expected_ to include a head shot photo with their CV. and the
| places where getting a photo with a CV would be very abnormal.
|
| the faq does say:
|
| My name and picture are in my CV. How do you prevent
| discrimination there? Your name and picture are completely
| optional, and are only part of your own private version of your
| CV which you can use to save a PDF or print a physical copy. They
| will never be included in the searchable version. You can see
| what your searchable CV looks like here.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-03 23:00 UTC)