As a Roblox developer who is aiming to earn a living from developing for Roblox, the Talent Hub has continuously been a user experience nightmare. From talking with others who have tried to use it for hiring for professional developers, they have faced similar issues.
As a developer who has used this, I have had to sift through double digits of pages, glanced over 100s of postings, read through maybe 10 postings inorder to find work which I believe to be suitable for myself (in other words, well paying work that is based on actual prospects for a reasonable employer - 100s failed to pass the first step of being well paying, then the others lacked any sort of prospect owing to what appeared to be shoddy project management or shoddy financing).
Currently, I have to take multiple steps to actually vet that I’m applying to reasonable postings, having to search through the games they’ve produced, current developers, investing reports, and social media; just inorder to guarantee that the company will have the finances to provide pay, that they actually provide pay, and that they treat employees with dignity and respect.
When I do apply to positions, you can expect to receive no response for a month and then find that you’ve been declined for the position (most likely because any well paying work will post in multiple places, and you can guarantee that well paying work will be taken in a month).
Applying is made even harder by the fact that you are expected to convince a person to hire you through one tiny textbox, the contents of which will be mangled by censoring and left unreadable in the majority of cases (censoring which you don’t even know how your message is affected by until it’s sent), and the inability to send any further messages until you receive a reply (which you won’t because your message was mangled by a robot filter).
On the other hand, hirers complain that the replies of developers are often inadequate, poor and that many people who reply are wholly inexperienced and unqualified.
Inorder to fix these issues, I propose the following solutions that should improve the experience of both developers and hirers:
- Provide the ability for developers to sort the postings by date created, or last time checked by poster, or by pay
- Require posters to provide numbers for compensation, whether this is an exact figure or the range available (the number of posts which don’t actually state any numbers but instead “up for negotiation” is inconceivable)
- Require posters to outline the schedule on which you can expect pay (weekly, bi weekly, monthly, upon completion, amount upfront, amount on completion, etc)
- On posts, require the posters to provide details of the sourcing of finances (require monthly revenue to the nearest 100,000 [or 10,000/1,000 for lesser amounts] robux and amount of investor funding if applicable) - myself and other developers seeking high-paying jobs are often worried that the posters cannot properly provide pay (usually due to the massive number of postings that offer literal pennies, the massive pay ranges given, and the general poor quality of the majority of postings)
- Increase the number of specialties available to programmers, programmer is meaningless for many high paying work, and the ability to use external editors or resources such as VSCode, Rojo, Git and others is highly valued in those areas, allow for tagging of posts as object-oriented, frontend, backend, fullstack, etc
- Allow posters to tag with such details as the above as many programmers are quite specialised in such areas
- Improve the notification given to posters, everytime I use it only to receive a notification a month after having applied that I was declined makes me lose further hope in it’s worth
- Improve the application process, a tiny box that is filtered after being sent, where links which are allowed in descriptions are forbidden, where you can’t send further messages after your message was mangled is worthless and the main issue
In the current state of the Talent Hub, it’s left as an afterthought by the professional user (developers and hirers alike) because of it’s largely poor quality in both postings and responses. The professional user needs some way to filter out poor postings while the professional hirer needs some way to filter out poor responses.
The Talent Hub has shown it’s use in serving the amateur market, but without major improvements it will not serve to attract professionals.
