Whenever I’m asked where one should go to find startups who are hiring, I always reluctantly point to Remixjobs. It’s not that I don’t like the site, or founder ‘Manu’ Dorne, AKA Korben, one of France’s most well-known independent bloggers, it’s just that the site lacks so much of what I would want in it. First of all, it’s in French, so that’s always a downer to me, because most of the people who ask me aren’t (French), and want to work for awesome globally minded French startups, and that means I have to give them a hand-compiled list of startups I know are hiring. Second, while the site has managed to attract the likes of Google, Dailymotion, Netvibes, eBay, Groupon, Deezer, and others, it’s also polluted, like Frenchweb’s job board, with listings from head hunter like Urban Linker or Altaide, which, frankly, I just don’t want to see.
the rest of this post is inspired by this post by Sarah Perez about MySpace.
When I heard that the iPhone version of the application had launched, I decided to check it out, hoping that I would find something a little easier to use – perhaps a way to look by company. I hadn’t use the site in so long that I had forgotten by username, so I decided to sign up on the app – boom, redirected to Safari to sign-up via the web. No Facebook connect? No Twitter connect? Très Dommage, Remixjobs. I close your application and come back to it 30 minutes later.
Second attempt – OK, maybe i use the same email/password I always do. Nope. Gotta go on the website and login to find my password, because there’s no “forget your password” and I’m sure as hell not signing up on that tiny screen. OK. Click “forgot password,” make a new one on the desktop, now back to mobile to finally sign in.
OK, I’m in the app, and it looks like the website with an iPhone interface. I can see logos next to the job listings, which makes it easy to scroll quickly. I see Joshfire is hiring, and then I’m at the bottom of the page. Wait, no infinite scroll? I can only see today’s posts. What about yesterday? Oh, OK. Now it’s working. OK fine, I’ll do a search to find more. Where’s the search?
The hour-glass on the top right is just a set of filter options – no search bar. I click my profile, ah there’s the search option. Three more clicks and I’m at the search page. I have to choose keywords, and by default it only searches in a 1 kilometer radius around me – 1 kilometer? I think that’s how far away the nearest metro stop is from my door. I change it to 10. I search “English” and hit “save.” Where’s the results? Oh, i have to scroll down past all the settings and hit ‘search.’ Cool, results. Dashlane is hiring, Deezer is hiring, and there are only 6 results. There are no dates on the results, so I click through the last one – oh, it’s from 2011. Hmm, I wonder if KRDS is still hiring.
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I was never a big fan of Remixjobs’ website, but it was always the best solution, beyond me posting to twitter “who’s hiring?” and waiting for a response. With the new iPhone application, I’m just completely lost. Why limit my search results on the default? Why not let me see a list of companies that are hiring? Why are student jobs shown when you have my Facebook information and know I’m too old to qualify for those positions, or that I’m not in university?
This quality of app would’ve been acceptable in 2009 – we were just figuring out what mobile was for, and learning to keep things simple. But this is 2013 – there is a company that got bought for a billion dollars that was just an iPhone app. Seriously. A billion. If that wasn’t a gut-check about how much more important UX is on mobile than on mobile, I don’t know what it is. Well, maybe this iPhone app is.