

The Best Recruiting Is Done Face-to-Face - mike2477
http://blog.highfive.com/why-the-best-recruiting-is-done-face-to-face

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lumens
While the "third space" concept presented here is interesting as a social hack
to get the most out of the conversations you do have, I think the real lesson
here is actually something else:

Outsourcing parts of your hiring process, especially first-round interviews,
can be detrimental to the quality of your second-round candidate pool.

Mentally divide all potential candidates into three buckets: Definitely not,
definitely, and possibly.

The first group, "definitely not", should be immediately discarded in the
interest of time-savings. Of all tasks, this makes the most sense to
outsource.

The second group, "definitely", are folks that you obviously want to
interview. Folks that EVERY company in your space hiring for a similar role
wants to interview. They're expensive and hard to get.

The third group, "possibly", is where the real gold is found. There will be
candidates here who are perfect fits, yet undervalued in the market. Third
parties tend to be bad at identifying the traits about these candidates that
make them so special. The secret to getting the most value out of this group
is to have someone in the know (first party hiring manager) talk to A LOT of
them. Ideally these conversations are intentionally brief — this is a volume
game, after all.

Some more relevant info:
[http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/63656960436/hiring-
diamond...](http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/63656960436/hiring-diamonds-in-
the-rough)

Full disclosure:

I'm the founder of Mighty Spring
([https://www.mightyspring.com](https://www.mightyspring.com)) and we help
companies with this exact challenge. Our method, in short, is to expose more
information about these "possibly" candidates to make it easier to decide if
they should be in one of the other two buckets. Then we make it super simple
to talk to the candidates you like. A bit like your dream recruiter, but
online and without hassle.

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donretag
Is the company willing to do video chats after work hours, for example 8pm? I,
and I assume many others, will not be able to have a video chat during work
hours. I can get away for a phone call, but not a video chat.

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dannyking
I think this personalized approach is really important - showing that you're
not a faceless corporation but in fact a team of people working towards the
same goals is a great thing to strive for.

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mike2477
Would love the hacker news community's thoughts on the subject too!

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ryanevans253
I totally agree, great article!

