June 2024 newsletter

Hey

Last month I wrote about some product improvements to employbl and the launch of the free trial to use the job hunting and startup search platform.

This month I’d like to share some updates about what’s trending, new features we’ve released and what’s coming next.

📊 What’s trending

LinkedIn’s a primary growth channel for us. As such I’ve been posting regularly on their platform. These are our top performing posts from the past month:

• 25 companies backed by Y Combinator that raised money recently and are hiring now

• 25 Growth Stage startups that Y Combinator has invested in that raised Series B or Series C recently

• Here’s who’s hiring Software Engineers right now

• Companies with the most active, open job listings on employbl

• 25 Y Combinator backed companies that raised Series A recently and are headquartered in San Francisco

💸 June 2024 funding rounds

We pull data on American (and some Canadian) tech companies and startups. These are some of the latest funding rounds that were announced last month:

• Cohere - API for LLMs - $450 million - Series D

• Xcimer Energy - fusion energy - $100 million - Series A

• Pika - AI videos - $80 million - Series B

• Restor3d - surgical and medical instruments - $55 million - Series A

• Twelve Labs - AI that understands videos - $50 million - Series A

Those are some of the largest tech startup funding rounds that were announced in June! To explore the full data set login to your employbl account or kick off a free trial.

📰 In the news

I can be a bit of a news junky, especially when it comes to concentrated corporate power and decentralizing the economy. Here are some stories I’m following:

• What Is Chevron Deference and How Much Does It Matter? The Supreme Court overturned a longstanding precedent that enabled the government to regulate industry. The ruling will move power from government agency bureaucrats to judges, potentially straining the justice system.

• Inside FICO and the Credit Bureau Cartel Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra called out FICO, Experian, TransUnion and Equifax to a room full of mortgage bankers and had them all nodding in agreement.

• NFL has to pay $4.8 billion in damages for ‘Sunday Ticket’ antitrust violations It’s nice to see antitrust laws being enforced again, resulting in more competition and fewer corporate abuses.

• LangChain Master Class for Beginners 2024 YouTube video on how to use one of today’s most cutting edge open source AI tools.

✨ New features and functionality on employbl

Over the past month we’ve made a lot of improvements to the employbl job and company search platform. I really appreciate all of the conversations I’ve had with people. There’s still a ways to go but it feels great making progress and building the momentum.

If you would like to see a demo of the platform or chat job hunting strategies please feel free to book time on my calendar here.

⬇️ Added sorting to company and job search pages

This one I’m pretty happy about. A lot of job search platforms don’t give users any control of the sort order of job search results. Part of the reason why is that they’re sponsored by companies that pay to feature their job listings, giving less control to candidates.

At employbl we’re sponsored by user subscriptions so can invest heavily into making the best search experience for candidates, not companies paying for clicks.

On the company search page you can sort the results by:

• Recently raised: Show companies with recent investment rounds at the top

• Recently founded: Show the newest startups at the top

• Most raised: Companies that have taken the most money from investors at the top. This is helpful for example finding the most well funded Series A companies in San Francisco or the best funded climate tech companies.

• Least raised: Maybe you want to find the scrappiest startups ;)

• Verified companies: This is something we’ll be rolling out more soon but these are companies I know someone at or have a connection to. Verified company profiles may have extra info and insights on them soon.

• Most job listings: Show companies that are hiring for the most jobs at the top.

On the job search page you can sort the results by:

• Recently updated job listings: We pull job listings from company’s Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Jobs that recruiters have updated recently show up at the top.

• Recently raised: Jobs from companies that have had a funding round recently show up at the top.

• Recently founded: Jobs from the newest startups show up at the top.

• Most raised: Jobs from companies that have raised the most money show up at the top.

• Least raised: Jobs from companies that haver raised the least money show up at the top.

We might add a “Recently created” to showcase new jobs pulled into the employbl system. We’re also working on getting more active job listings into the platform. If you have other ideas for sorts or filters let me know!

🔎 Improvements to the jobs search page

Over the past month the most pervasive feedback we got was the job search was missing key filtering capabilities. There’s still improvements we need to make but here are the highlights of what we’ve shipped!

The new filters

• Remote + job location filtering: Find remote jobs or ones near you using Remote / Not remote or Job Locations filters.

• Filter by investment stage: Find jobs based on the company’s most recent funding round like Seed, Series A, Series B etc.

• Filter by industry: Find jobs based on the company’s industry like Climate, Defense, FinTech or Artificial Intelligence.

• Filter by investors: Find jobs at companies that top tier Venture Capital funds like Y Combinator, Accel, First Round and more have invested in.

🐛 Bugfix: Forgot password emails work now

There were some various bugfixes and improvements that come through the lifecycle of any software product. One major one and major headache was getting DMARC and DKIM records set up for sending emails through Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Email Service (SES). If you don’t know what any of that means god bless you. Bottom line is now if you forget your password you’ll receive the “forgot password” email and it’ll be a hell of a lot harder for hackers to spoof sending emails as me.

There was also an issue with some job descriptions not loading within the UI. That’s fixed now! 🔧

📈 What’s coming next?

Recently I’ve been exploring AI programming, specifically a relatively new open source tool called LangChain. I’m optimistic that LangChain or similar tools, paired with Large Language Models (LLMs) like those offered by OpenAI and Anthropic can really revolutionize the job hunting platform we’re building.

I know that word “revolutionize” gets thrown around by new companies way too often but I believe that job seekers are severely underserved in our economy and we can have way better tools.

Some things that are top of mind for us:

• Further improvements to the job search page: We’re looking into processing the job listings by running them through AI to extract:

  • Salary info: many job listings include salary. It’s an important filter we’re looking at adding

  • Required skills: Right now we have general search but are looking into getting more structured skills information from each job listing.

  • Job level or years experience: Filter by years of experience, junior roles, internships, management or director positions.

• Dashboard improvements: Right now the main dashboard page is pretty minimalistic. We’d like to have this be a one stop shop where you can see the state of the tech labor market, industry trends and new opportunities that you match with.

• Personalization: Candidate profiles, resume upload, questions about what you’re interested in so that we can connect you with companies and opportunities you vibe with.

There’s a lot more opportunity to pull in more job listings and have more company and job listing curation too. We’ve come along way but still have a ways to go!

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