Ask HN: Is Jobsy scraping HN and signing us up for spam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Jobsy scraping HN and signing us up for spam?

10 pointsgnicholas8 comments

Got a bunch of emails overnight from Jobsy, and it looks like they're scraping the HN freelance/who's hiring threads and then creating accounts and job listings that can only be unsubscribed if you go in and create an account. I can't imagine the HN crowd will take kindly to this entrepreneurial approach to spamming, and I certainly won't ever use them.

You're not alone.

Welcome to "growth hacking".

This thread made me check out jobsy, they have an image of the NSA headquarters for their 'data analist' picture lol

https://i.imgur.com/1NnMpJs.png

It gets worse — their copy/paste bot is busted, so we have a (really weird) typo in "our" job listing. If they can't build a bot that copies and pastes, I sure wouldn't trust them to do anything more complex!

I just tried emailing their support@jobsy.com address and asking them to please remove their scraped iRobot jobs. We'll see if anything happens.

I got a reply right away:

Hi Christopher,

We posted your job with the aim of getting your iRobot higher exposure among candidates. I know how competitive the market can be, especially for finding great developers.

I'll gladly remove the position but, personally, I highly recommend keeping it just to see which candidates the position attracts (at no cost to you). Any CVs submitted are emailed directly to you.

Please consider keeping the jobs and posting any future openings that you may have at Nava on Jobsy.com (free).

Thanks,

Allon Jobsy.com

And they removed it. Annoying to have to mess with them in the first place, but at least they were responsive.

Good to know — I'll be sure to do the same. I've seen other sites that scrape HN job posts, but none that had the balls to send a bunch of spam to the HNers to let them know that their jobs are pending, have been approved, etc. Thanks for your sleuthing!

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