WhoIsHiring – Tech job aggregator [expert interview]

Whoishiring is a job platform which aims to map all the IT jobs worldwide. We have more than 30 000 job offers mapped from 25 carefully selected sources, plus we have curated job offers that are unique on our website.

Today, we talk with Sebastian Pawluś, a software developer with a will-do attitude. He started writing code on C64 today writes code for fun and profit. Likes staring at maps and always has one more idea to do. One day he will learn how to use Haskell. Founder of whoishiring.io project.

1. There is an exceptional need for job aggregators on the market. Let’s start by explaining what is different about whoishiring.io

Whoishiring is one of the only platforms which contain IT job offers from the best IT sources.

Compared to other job aggregators, we showcase only the job offers coming straight from companies (no agencies involved) and we are doing everything to make the IT job market more transparent.

On our website, you can find information about salary, location, the possibility to work remotely, and if the company is helping with issuing visas. In a nutshell, all the important information a job seeker needs to know before applying for a job.

2. Sebastian, you’re a developer. Did the company come from personal frustration, dissatisfaction with what is available on the market in terms of finding the right job and advancing one’s own career?

The project started as a side project, more as a tool to visualise the jobs offers from one place – a forum called Hacker News. I don’t want to go into details what Hacker News is, as this could be a separate topic, but to keep it clear, it is like Reddit for programmers. Also, it so happens that on this page the users (who most likely are programmers) exchange information if the project or a company that they work for has a vacancy. It’s called “Ask HN: Who is Hiring?”. In my personal opinion, this is the best source to look at if you are programmer looking for a job. At the same time, it’s also one of the hardest to read. It looks like this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460777). I was between jobs at that time and spending some time on this page. I got a bit annoyed by the lack of a good search. So this was the first version of whoishiring.io, I posted the link (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838955) on the same forum and it got a decent amount of feedback and suggestions. The other thing is if you are programmer looking for a job you have to visit around 10 different pages. I found this ridiculous. The next step was obvious: why to stop there? I’ve added more sources and then even more.

3. We see some clustering of IT jobs in particular cities or areas. Do you think it is important for developers to physically join those communities?

Physically joining technical communities has lots of advantages. Networking is a lot easier and so is F2F communication, allows less misunderstandings.

But not everybody has the chance (or simply wants) to move to Silicon Valley or to Singapore. We have seen a trend that remote working is on the raise.

Whoishiring wants to give a chance to both of these groups. People who want to know which is the best spot for their talent can check our map, pick the city that suits them best and look for a job there.

For people who are having family priorities or are digital nomads who don’t want to be bound by location, they can run searches using the remote filter which will allow them to work from everywhere.

4. What are companies doing to stand-out? Do you see any trends on the market?

A lot of companies today are struggling to get the best employees, and they try to hire recruiting agencies to solve their problem, but in my view, this is not very effective. A lot of IT recruiters are pressured to deliver numbers to their management and they end up spamming the candidates.

The companies that are currently standing out on the market have rethought their marketing strategy and started treating their candidates as clients.

This should start straight from the transparent job description (salary and technologies used in a project have to be stated upfront and in a clear way) and continue to the company website, giving the information about the company, projects and why this company is cool (being “the best” or “using innovative solutions” will not do the trick, especially because programmers tend to be put off by too generic information.

And, last but not the least, the most successful companies are the ones willing to pay a good salary for the talent they are hiring.

When it comes to trends, I still see that the IT market is candidate-driven (more on this below) and that remote work will become even more common, because the best companies will look for the talent on a global scale.

5. Do you think the market will remain so candidate-driven in the foreseeable future?

IT recruitment is an incredibly competitive market and extremely candidate-driven, and I think this trend will last for a long time. There are many coding schools and other programs trying to meet the constant demand for developers, but they will take the time to get effective and they won’t even be for another 5-10 years min getting close to meeting the need for senior developers, which I can predict will be rising even more in the future.

6. What had been the greatest challenge for you so far?

Data categorization and data cleaning are quite challenging. We aggregate offers from many sources, each with its own rules. We are trying to find sanity in it, and present the offers in easy, unified way to our users.

These days we put focus on data analysis and profiling users. It’s very challenging from all perspectives: the product, the business, the technology. We’re doing this for the purpose of improving matching candidates with jobs and suggesting potential candidates to hiring companies. Based on this we’re building a product for the business.

7. What are the biggest areas of improvement for whoishiring.io at the present time?

We want to have all relevant job offers available on our map, and that requires constant maintenance of the current sources as well as adding new ones. We started with just 600 job offers and now we have 30000, but we are still on a hunt.

You can set up a daily alert with us about the new positions in a particular area in the world. Around 2000 people already have and we want to make sure everyone actively looking for a job in IT knows about this helpful feature.

Also, we constantly work on improving UI/UX of our app, including the mobile version. Users let us immediately know if there’s a glitch somewhere. 😉

8. Obviously, both DevSkiller and whoishiring.io form part of the CEE startup ecosystem. What is specific to companies coming from this part of the world?

Many of the start-ups here can draw from a lot of technical talent (Polish developers are among the best in the world), so they can be very picky in terms of technical skills, but they are not as effective from the marketing/sales point of view.

Anyway, what I noticed is a steady improvement in this regard. More and more CEE startups want to grow into global companies, and they start from a very early stage to use English as main communication language within the company (something we are doing in whoishiring, because one of our interns does not speak fluent Polish).

9. What are the most relevant blogs you follow to keep up with the pace of the market?

Although is not exactly a blog but more of a forum, https://news.ycombinator.com/ is a very valuable source when it comes to which are the main trends in the global and IT start-up world. Another valuable source is reddit.com, which we use to connect with one of our main groups of users (programmers) and when it comes to the latest trends in recruiting, we are following https://www.socialtalent.co and I also see that your blog (https://devskiller.com/blog/) is full of interesting ideas. Will put it in my favourites list from now on. 🙂