Mutual Matching for HN Hiring Threads

After each monthly Hacker News hiring thread appears, job seekers and small-team recruiters must sift through long chains of free-form posts while fielding a flood of poor-fit messages. The product starts with posts participants submit themselves and turns each one into an anonymous opportunity card covering technical focus, location or time zone, salary range, work arrangement, and non-negotiables.

Job seekers see role cards before they see company contacts; employers likewise see candidate criteria cards rather than identities. Either side can signal interest, but the system reveals no identity until the other side also wants to proceed. Only then are both original posts and contact details unlocked.

Once a match is made, the product drafts a short introduction noting the conditions the two sides share, such as Rust, European time zones, and remote contract work. Both parties can edit or delete it before sending, avoiding the feeling that “an algorithm wrote generic enthusiasm for me.” Cards without mutual interest automatically disappear when they expire, so no one has to deal with unsolicited cold messages.

The first version serves only that month’s HN “Who’s Hiring?” and “Who Wants to Be Hired?” threads, and lets users correct parsing results manually. It does not automatically reject candidates for employers, rank job seekers, or sell anonymous cards to recruiters. Its initial job is simply to make the first mutual yes in public posts work smoothly.