Item — HN Reader

I feel it doesn't really hurt the candidate in my mind to use a service like this—provided I also get a very personalized email / cover letter.

The execution here really looks pretty good. However, as a business, I have two concerns:

1. I am generally wary of "life event businesses": things like job searching, weddings, etc. Why? Because the already hard prospect of customer acquisition is now even harder: Not only do you have to reach your target market, you have to catch them right at the point of need. It's a rapidly closing window. I think you'll hear a lot of: "Looks great, I'll take a further look when I start to think about changing jobs".

2. All the money to be made in the jobs industry is paid by the employers. I think you might be trying to target the wrong party. It's really tough to find good candidates, and employers are ready and willing to pay $1,000 to recruiting firms for the right candidate. Plus, larger companies are almost ALWAYS hiring, so there's no "event window" like described above. I'm not sure what your revenue model is, but I'd certainly look to be earning revenue from the employers and keep the service free to the job seekers.

1 comments

Our intention is to charge on the employer side to search for and be matched to candidates if job seekers opt-in to making their profiles searchable (think OKCupid for recruiters with actual evidence of skills & experience for you to browse through) . The idea is that the cards that you use for job applications can be generalized and turned into a profile (either public or private) to show to future stakeholders as well as for reuse in future job applications but that you can create new cards for new projects, courses, etc. without having to apply for a job at the same time. We've had some good ongoing activity with users in our closed beta who are using Accredible as a way to track their ongoing learning (especially MOOCs - most of our early beta testers came through the Coursera forums) and using it for much more personal reasons - almost like a trophy cabinet of their learning. So we think we have a good chance at avoiding the trap of users only using it for life events. Appreciate your thoughts on this - thanks!

I think the cards are, at least as presented on the landing page, really elegant and sharp looking. I would present my career related information this way.

Constructive Criticism/ Devilishly Advocating:

In agreement with root comment, it's much saner to target employers, which you seem to agree with. Therefore, it seems like presentation of the information doesn't really matter to employers looking to fill a role when compared to how easily searchable, filterable, and readable (both machine and human) that information is.

Therefore, having the service become something more of a "General purpose learning tracking" tool feels at odds with this. Inherently increasing the noise in your system and making it harder for employers to find experts that possess the skillset to meet their need.In other words, it seems like general purpose accomplishment tracking would increase the noise (as presented to employers) and diminish the signal employers are willing to pay for. Have you noticed this issue or given any thought to how to handle it?

Of course, I'm not privvy to your back-end or what you're presenting to employers; the above criticism was just my first thought based on your reply.

Thanks for the kind words! The feedback is much apprecaited too. It's currently used largely as a learning tracking tool by our beta community (we intend to launch the open beta early Q1 2014!). We started to focus on the employer side a lot earlier than we had planned due to user feedback and encouragement from startup employers (we wanted to avoid the chicken/egg situation, which is why we focused on building up the consumer side as a learning tracking platform first). Keeping people's data searchable, filterable and readable is certainly top of our minds as we flesh this side out and this is indeed one of our bigger challenges at the moment. We are still working out the best way to tackle this without sacrificing too much flexibility, but at the moment (with a smallish user base) a system of tagging your cards and narratives with skills and then backing that up with a combination of attached evidence and references (using LinkedIn profiles to verify referee identity) for credibility seems to be working pretty well.