- HiringCafe uses ChatGPT to scrape job openings directly from company websites.
- Founders Ali Mir and Hamed Nilforoshan aim to focus on job seekers, eliminating recruiters and agencies.
Ali Mir and Hamed Nilforoshan believe job sites should be more focused on job seekers because both think they tend to optimize the experience for employers.
HiringCafe is the pair's answer to this.
Mir, previously an engineer at Meta, Rippling, and DoorDash, and Nilforoshan, a computer science Ph.D. student at Stanford University, created their own job board.
First formed last year, HiringCafe has just launched its fourth version. It uses OpenAI's ChatGPT to regularly compile job postings directly from company websites, eliminating the roles of recruiters and third-party offshore consultancies.
It has over 1.5 million jobs, and the founders hope to gather 2 million more.
Taking job listings straight from the source
HiringCafe uses a web crawler to go through tens of thousands of organization websites twice a day, every day, to collect open positions in the hope of preventing employers from manipulating listings, Mir told Business Insider.
"Once we build this database, we extract and summarize the information from each of these posts that we've scraped using AI, so it's very easy to search using personalized filters," Nilforoshan told Business Insider.
These filters include options like salary information, years of experience required, and industry.
"Before AI, the assumption was that employers have to give the input," said Mir, "they have to actually come in and post jobs and even if things are fully automated, at the end of the day you still have these human touch points who are creating these job posts."
Mir and Nilforoshan looked at ChatGPT and realized that this human involvement wasn't strictly necessary.
"You don't need a human to tell you what the salary range, job type, and job function are. You can actually just extract and infer all that information using AI," said Mir.
For Nilforoshan, scrapping listings by employers, recruiters and offshore agencies has resulted in higher quality openings, as he said this move has minimized the risk of spam, fake jobs, randomized positions, and untrustworthy data collection.
A personal motivation
They also explained that both have a personal motivation to improve the search experience for job seekers. Having been on the job market themselves for some time, Nilforoshan said neither he nor Mir ever found an opportunity on a job site that led to anything.
"Our priority has really been, so far, the job seeker and not the employer," Nilforoshan said, adding that although HiringCafe has been sending companies traffic, the energy will remain on applicants.