

HireArt (YC W12) Helps employers screen job applicants through work samples - nsedlet
http://hireart.com

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tsunamifury
I've gone through a few hireart applications and I find them rather
irritating. They allow the hirer to ask an ENORMOUS amount of work for an
application. The last one I did took over 3 hours to complete, 7 essays and
two videos, one a rather long screencast.

I think hire art gets in the way of finding talent, but a lot of people
looking to make a good connection dont have hours to complete a long list of
questions created at the whim of a founder or HR rep.

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emotta
Seems like a good thing. If you can fire off 100 resumes at no cost, while a
company has to spend time reading each one and filtering out the junk, doesn't
that seem asymmetrical? Large companies often have screening tests, or let hr
people phone-screen candidates before moving on, but smaller companies don't
have the resources.

If you want the job, you'll put in the time. In the process you'll also learn
about he skills and culture the company expects, and they'll also be trying to
present themselves as an interesting place to work.

It's the same dance, but now you need to be involved from the start.

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sliverstorm
Yes, but what if you still have to fire off 100 applications at 3hrs apiece?
Effectively equivalent to 2.5 months of working full-time, and you may not
even get an interview.

It makes sense for the company to invest more in finding the employee than the
employee invests to find the company; the company has more to gain.

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emotta
How much time did you spend on your college applications? Why should applying
for a good job be easier?

Say it takes 3 hrs to do the application (probably not, but I haven't done
one). The resulting candidate pool will be smaller, and consist of more
dedicated applicants, who aren't just firing off blanks. I think both the
employer and the applicant might get a higher "hit ratio".

If a recruiter has to sift through thousands of resumes, then good talent gets
missed, bad talent gets interviews, and 2.5 months later you'll still be
unemployed.

Maybe companies could still accept resumes and "regular applications" in
addition to the HireArt channel. I think applicants going the HireArt route
would be more likely to get consideration/interviews.

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tsunamifury
I think you're right, the hire art method may filter out people who are just
fishing and help a person looking to hire someone to find people who are
focused on doing the work to make it.

This is far more fair for workers in a non-recession than in a recession
though -- where desperation will drive large numbers of workers to put in the
extra time to get the job.

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andrewjshults
It's interesting that HireHive (YC S10) did a similar thing with video
interviews during YC[1] but pivoted to Hack Recruiter[2] and now Hacker
School[3]. Will be interesting to see how HireArt tackles the challenges that
caused Nick and Dave to move away from making the interview process to
improving the candidate pool.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/good-on-video-is-the-new-
go...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/good-on-video-is-the-new-good-on-
paper-with-ycombinators-hirehive-and-ycommonapp/) [2]
<http://www.hackruiter.com/> [3] <http://www.hackerschool.com/>

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jcc80
Just went through the process. I'm glad that you can take a few cracks at the
video before you choose to upload it. Overall, people's opinions will be
colored by how employers use the process.

If a company wants a bunch of work done for free then maybe it's a signal to
move on. If the company uses the tool to respect the time of the applicants
and make hiring more efficient, it's good for everyone. Perhaps HireArt can
guide employers here on the best way to use the tool.

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mehuln
I think this is a great idea. Especially because it is so easy to submit a
resume, and it takes so much time to weed out good ones from the bad ones. In
addition, resumes tell me nothing about how passionate a given candidate is
about company/job. Passion is a big deal and someone who is passionate about
company/product/position WILL jump through the hoops necessary to get in the
door. A+ folks apply to great colleges and go through long applications for
start-up accelerators too. Why wouldn't they do it if they are passionate
about a company/job? I think onus is on company to make sure they write job
posting in a way that attracts passionate candidates who are willing to go
through this - and it's customizable, so you don't have to use predefined
template - you can just build one for yourself and go with it.

Resumes really are bullshit, and I am glad someone's trying to solve the
problem. Great idea guys - congrats!

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sgdesign
Seems like an interesting product, but please don't use Lobster for your logo…
You can honestly pick any one of MyFont's bestseller fonts
(<http://myfonts.us/td-AErAU5>) at random and it'll look more profesional than
using a free font that's over-used all over the web.

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sawyer
This was my first impression as well - the custom work on the 'A' in art is a
good start, but Lobster's way too common to be the backbone of a unique and
memorable logo.

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ig1
Interestingly a YC company with no tech co-founders, the team looks like one
Business Analyst from the real estate sector, one ex-quant from Goldman Sachs
and one ex-McKinsey consultant.

Does this reflect a shift in the type of applicants YC is accepting ? - It'd
be interesting to know how far along they were before they applied to YC.

As for the startup itself, I think they're making the mistake that other
startups in the same space are making (at least from my experience in hiring
at investment banks) in that they're presenting themselves as an alternative
to CVs.

Pre-recorded video interviews, etc. are way too time consuming compared to CVs
to be the first stage in candidate screening. I think the post-CV screening
and pre-interview stage is probably the most effective place for this type of
solution to live.

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nsedlet
Nick from HireArt here. I definitely agree with you that video interviews tend
to be very time-consuming. One of the services we offer to employers is the
grading of the interviews. We also keep the video portion very short (~2
1-minute clips per interview).

I'm the tech co-founder on our team. I do all of the development for our web
app.

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ig1
Isn't that going to be hard to scale ?

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nsedlet
The grading is not automatable, but I suspect it's scalable. We're finding
lots of quite talented people willing to work part-time as graders, and we
streamline their grading process as much as possible. We also try to provide
very very rigorous rubrics and use multiple graders for the same interview to
ensure standardization of the grades.

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didgeoridoo
How do you qualify the graders? Is it on a case-by-case basis, reviewing their
resumes & speaking with them? I could imagine that aspect of the process
requiring some creativity to scale without losing quality.

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nsedlet
We've been bootstrapping the process by using our own app to hire graders. We
administer work sample interviews on our site (i.e. we give the applicants
dummy interview responses to evaluate) and use our current graders to evaluate
them.

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sskates
Wow that's really cool. Using your own product to solve your business' problem
in true startup fashion.

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nsedlet
By the way, we're specifically focused on non-technical hires right now. There
are a few great tools out there for assessing coders (coding tests, Github),
the likes of which the non-technical hiring process mostly lacks.

So far, we've designed a bunch of questions in marketing, customer service,
sales, writing, etc., by getting input from people in those fields. But in the
long term, we'd love to measure the correlation of our questions with actual
job performance, and use that info to tune our interviews to be maximally
predictive.

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tomjen3
Hmm, that actually makes sense (I was about to complain that you were the
fifth start-up to do the same) but you should properly consider dropping the
video -- it is too easy to get sued for discrimination and it forces people
who don't look good but are great writers (as an example) to operate under a
disadvantage.

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roguecoder
People form early impressions based solely on looks. If this became common I'd
expect a companion industry to spring up styling candidates, and the only real
result would be even more homologous teams.

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esharef
that's true if candidates are just talking about themselves or answering easy
questions (which is what some video resume companies do). But if you're
answering really tough questions about a job (how to drive conversion, how to
craft an email marketing campaign) it's pretty clear very quickly whether you
know what you are talking about.

by the way, most candidates will eventually have to do an in-person job
interview, so if looks are driving hiring decisions, this doesn't really
change it.

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edw519
What are the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) ramifications of
employment screening via video?

Somehow I suspect that this is a non-trivial concern, just like pictures on
resumes, for U.S. compliant HR departments.

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nsedlet
See an EEOC opinion letter on video interviewing here:
[http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2004/titlevii_ada_reco...](http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2004/titlevii_ada_recordkeeping_video.html)

There are a few rules that need to be followed, but in short, the EEOC says
it's okay.

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sliverstorm
Unsurprising, considering you generally interview them face to face eventually
anyway.

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aerobson
What I'm digging about HireArt is that companies using it seem to be more
organized. They think more about the position they are hiring for at the
start, submit interview questions to HireArt, write better job descriptions…
If companies have a clearer idea of what they want, and they can communicate
that to applicants, less time will be wasted all around. Here's an article
from someone who has used HireArt, and makes this statement better than I:
<http://bit.ly/Abh6rj>

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navneetdalal
This is really helpful & efficient for the companies. We spend hours
interviewing candidates and checking their portfolio & prior work in order to
get to few great candidates. The current process for us is spread out. HireArt
brings it in one place and focuses on what really matters.

In our experience, the candidates who are really passionate about what they do
and like the company consistently shine out. HireArt process should help
filtering them easier.

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dw5ight
We used hireArt to screen writers and got a ton of really good responses. the
site still needs some work in automating the work sample process and I think
we need to societally normalize/figure out the trial process (how do you build
trust that I'm not looking for freebie work) but the premise is good - I'm
done hiring people on the faith that they wont turn in complete shit. ::cough
cough:: elance.

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kenrikm
Interesting, It's kind of like a FizzBuzz Test. One thing I noticed, you have
something on your front page that says "See sample interview" I wanted to
watch it but instead I get a "how it works/get more info" page. I felt like it
was a bait and switch.

I would like to see a sample interview in that space.

Anyway, good work guys I hope everything works out great for you!

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esharef
This is Elli, one of the co-founders. We also launched on TC:
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/resumes-are-bullshit-
hirear...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/resumes-are-bullshit-hireart-is-
better/)

I'd love to hear from any of you guys who are hiring non-technical people --
what are the biggest things you wish were different?

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Skirnir314
I like the basic goal. The resume system is so suboptimal, it's nuts.

It incentivizes potential employees to focus so much energy on signaling and
leads employers to unwittingly filter out otherwise great employees who just
can't play the game well.

No idea if this solution is the answer to the problem, but good luck to them.

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mayas
This is a fantastic idea! The resume has seen it's demise as this approach
will certainly pave the way for all future job hirings. Very impressive
website as well!

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raccoonone
This is a great idea! I've been working with a bunch of freelancers, for some
marketing work, and would like to hire someone full-time soon.

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ajju
We are trying HireArt right now and I really like it. If you are hiring anyone
who is non-technical, you should give it a shot.

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emotta
Great idea. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates (mainly technical) and
it's often easy to tell within a few minutes if a candidate's resume is
inflated or skills are exaggerated. A short video or test that helps filter
out candidates that would fail an interview or call within the first 10
minutes call seems like a huge timesaver.

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gotbrett
Great job. It's time for a revolution in the hiring process. Traditional
résumé: RIP!

