
Ask HN: Do you get good applications from “Who is hiring?”? - fjahr
I am curious what others success with posts on &quot;Who is hiring?&quot; has been. I have been posting a couple of positions for two different companies over the past two years and only got a hand full of applications from medium to lower quality candidates (not good matches for the respective positions). I don&#x27;t think location should be the issue (Berlin) and Visa was also always available. Stacks not absolute cutting edge but modern and interesting products. And of course I tried to optimize the content for the audience looking at other posts in the past threads. Anything I might be missing?
======
tom_mellior
I looked at your comments to find your position posted at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149582).
I'm not your target group, but still...

Here's the introductory sentence: "Service Partner ONE is the technology
partner for modern office management in Europe." OK, sounds fine. I don't know
what office management is, but there are a few more sentences coming up that
will surely explain. Next: "Our platform supports customers across all
industries in all processes outside of their core business, pursuing the
digital revolution of office management." This _looks_ impressive, but all it
_says_ is "Our platform runs on computers and people in offices use it." Next:
"By connecting customers with the right service providers and streamlining
their interactions we improve the working situation in every office we operate
in." So, um, people in offices use your stuff to connect, which I guess means
communicate. Maybe you are talking about email? "Someone called us the WeWork
without walls." OK, but I don't know what WeWork is, and "without walls"
sounds weird.

In summary, it sounds muddled and boring. Sorry if this comes across as harsh,
but it's simply not as gripping as many other Who is hiring posts.

Your other post at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663077),
specifically the part "We analyze this data and utilize advanced statistical
methods to take our client’s guest communication and marketing efforts to a
new level." sounds like you're a spam company. _Nobody wants hotels to
"market" to them._

Edit: Oh, forgot to say that you didn't post salary ranges. Post salary ranges
please. Even if you don't believe that it's a good idea (although it is), it
would make you stick out a bit. Also, it might even be required by German law?
It is in Austria, though sadly not enforced.

~~~
fjahr
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I have mostly improved on marketing material
that was already there but I can see now it should probably be rewritten
completely for this purpose.

And I will try to convince them to include salary ranges. I have tried before
but did not get permission. It is not required by German law to post the
salary and instead sharing these numbers is even less common than what I have
seen from US startups, even if their salary levels are actually very good.

~~~
Kagerjay
Its lacking a mission statement honestly.

"Someone called us wework without walls?". Were you thinking of something like
"engineers without borders", when this statement was written?

I looked into your company. Its not wework, wework is realestate, your company
doesn't seem like one. Its a german Cintas, but you outsource things instead
of using inhouse resources. [https://www.cintas.com/](https://www.cintas.com/)

Checkout cintas's statement

"Cintas leads the industry in supplying corporate identity uniform programs,
providing entrance and logo mats, restroom supplies, promotional products,
first aid, safety, fire protection products and services, and industrial
carpet and tile cleaning. We operate more than 400 facilities in North
America—including six manufacturing plants and eight distribution centers."

~~~
fjahr
I am not with the company anymore but I think the quote originated from a VC
who made this analogy during a pitch and the founder liked it so much that it
was used it most of the pitches from that point on. Of all the places I would
have never thought I would get much critique on it on HN but I absolutely
agree that it is lacking clarity.

------
pleasecalllater
I'm looking for remote work only (family issues). I'd love to work in European
hours. However, US companies pay 30-50% more. This way I don't even send any
applications to the European ones.

I'm not sure if you would consider me above medium (however during the last 16
years I learned a lot). The people I know who are much above medium have jobs.
They don't look too much for them and are old enough to forget about traveling
for work (house, dogs, kids, school).

I noticed that you only post about on-site positions. I'm too old for ad-hoc
moving to another country. I don't speak German enough to do shopping. I could
work for you but only remotely.

If you would consider remote employees, I'm sure you would get much more
interesting applications. But then there is the problem from the first
paragraph: if someone is looking for a remote position and some companies pay
more, it's rather obvious that they will get most of the most interesting
applications. The rest will go to those paying less.

~~~
TrueGeek
Agreed. Looking at the postings I work in the tech stacks (React) and the jobs
look interesting to me. But I’d need to work remote as well.

------
4dahalibut
You link to the German versions of your website. I don't know German. You
don't talk about your development practices or team experience. Your industry
isn't shiny. You don't list salary. Incidentally, I was just talking to the
guy who posts for a Boston manufacturing startup who says they have hired many
solid engineers from here

~~~
fjahr
Thanks, for the feedback. I will improve this and link to the english version
next time as well as include info on team and salary.

------
Etheryte
Chiming in from the other end of the line, I occasionally check the hiring
threads to see if there are any interesting offers up. There's a lot of
content and most of the time, the descriptions are pretty poor (namely
buzzwords and fluff) or the offer is not easily findable. To stand out, make
sure your post is clearly titled, straight to the point and findable by common
keywords.

I think optimizing the content by looking at other posts isn't a good strategy
— in my (personal and biased) opinion, most of the offers are badly written.

------
stult
My company had the same trouble. The demographics here trend too hard toward
the Bay Area (we are located in a different, large, and tech heavy US city).
Overall candidates tend to be younger and less experienced, oftentimes with
boot camp backgrounds. Posts here also apparently tend to attract applicants
who specialize in trendy, fad of the moment stacks or more "light" languages
and frameworks, when we are looking more for embedded people. In any case, the
candidates here are the type we don't have trouble finding through more
traditional and better targeted channels. Our recruiting pain points are at
the senior and up levels, in enterprise and embedded stacks.

~~~
anoncoward111
I think your recruiting pains in finding senior/enterprise positions can
probably be explained by the following:

1) out of the 325 million US citizens, maybe 10,000 people at most meet your
qualifications

2) most of them are already employed

3) most of them probably don't read that thread if they even post here at all

4) it might be wiser to hire them as a consultant and have them train a
proficient and loyal dev to implement their recommendations

~~~
BigJono
It could also be that you're committing some common flaws that make your job
listings much less actionable than your competitors.

I'm not overly specialised or senior, but even at my level I find that when
I'm actively looking, I get _way_ more interest than I can possibly follow up
on with the time I have available. So any mistakes you make will end up with
your listing being filtered out.

If you're targetting people that receive 50 recruiter e-mails a day, things
like not listing salary, overly long JDs, spewing a bunch of marketing
bullshit in the JD, etc, will pretty much result in an instant pass. Other
comments here have called OP out for those exact things, maybe GP is making
the same mistakes?

~~~
anoncoward111
Definitely. It's a labor sellers market in that space. Ironically, for lower
skill labor, candidates have to jump through hoops :)

------
mabbo
Years back I posted saying my local team was hiring (at Amazon) and mentioned
we hire interns. Got 20 resumes from students looking for internships, 6 of
whom got hired.

When I submitted them to the recruiting, I made it clear these weren't
personal references, nobody I knew. But the recruiter filed them that way
anyways, so I got like $500 bonus per intern hire. A nice $3,000 bonus for a
HN post and funneling some resumes over to a recruiter.

None of the full time resumes went anywhere, sadly- they're worth considerably
higher bonuses.

~~~
kakaorka
Are you guys hiring now? I would love to do an internship or apply for a full
time role at amazon.

~~~
mabbo
Intermships are for students only. If you're done your education, you apply as
a full-time SDE. But there's lots of hiring of those going on too.

Ping me at <my hackernews alias>@ <the company we're talking about>. Happy to
help you find a role that's hiring. So many offices in so many cities doing so
many things O_O

~~~
abhishekjha
Is it US only?

~~~
mabbo
Amazon's got offices everywhere. [http://amazon.jobs](http://amazon.jobs)
lists everything hiring- 9000 roles under "software development" and you can
filter by city.

~~~
abhishekjha
Somehow I haven't got response to a single application I have applied to in
past few months. The official portal seems to receive a lot of attention thus
signal getting lost in the noise. Or maybe I am not upto the task for which
they should mark my application not suitable. is it possible to send resumes
to recruiters directly in a given zone?

------
piercebot
As a senior software engineer who has successfully contributed to startups
that were subsequently acquired, and with over 9 years of experience across a
variety of technologies, "Who's hiring" is probably not the first place I
would go to look for job if I needed a change of scenery.

I love it for keeping an eye on the market, to see where trends are going, and
for looking at what's local. If something REALLY interested me, I might
establish a dialog, but the chances of something being interesting and local
(or willing to hire remote at the salary requirements of the metro area I live
in) are very slim.

The first place I would look for a job is my professional network: people I
have enjoyed working with in the past. If you can't lure top talent with talk
of tech, maybe also spend some time describing the team and what the work
environment is like? Senior devs know that you don't work with the tech stack,
you work with people, and the stack is just another tool in the toolbelt for
solving problems.

~~~
arandr0x
I agree with this, and I'm somebody who's actually relocated for jobs before.
Also, I am European, and the HN culture is very different from engineering
culture in Europe (not always a bad thing). So the candidates that are in your
country, or may easily relocate, probably aren't on HN every month, even if
they're fluent in English. If you're looking for less junior people, hire a
headhunter or send a not-too-desperate email to the 15 smartest people in your
college class begging them to pitch your job to their own contacts.

I definitely use who's hiring for broader market trends. The clarity of
writing in the job postings is much better than the sanitized generic HR stuff
from Indeed and Linkedin and the location and remote/visa status (salary when
listed) gives a hint as to how hungry companies in various markets are for
people.

------
olavgg
I'm a senior full stack developer with data science experience living in
EU(Norway). I have not applied for a position that has been advertised in 6
years. All the offers I consider these days comes from cold calls from
recruiters or the companies them self. They have to sell them self, as I am
the interviewer.

Where I work now, we really struggled last year with recruiting developers, so
we changed the recruitment process by searching LinkedIn for profiles that
could be a good fit and called them with a sales pitch about why we are better
place to work at than your current company. That worked much better, but
surprisingly we also learned that many is very happy with their current
position and is not looking for a change. You know, there is risk involved
with changing work, especially if you are happy where you are. The saying,
don't fix it if it ain't broken applies to recruitment too.

And I would like to add, some of our best hires we got from Berlin ;-)

~~~
stadeschuldt
When did Norway become part of the European Union?

~~~
olavgg
Norway is a part of the EAA
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area))
and is a EFTA member
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTA))
Basically a member of EU, with a few exceptions.

------
weliketocode
Not going to add too much, but I love how well HN tackles this important yet
so often skewed discussion.

In my opinion, companies that struggle to find great candidates almost always
aren't competing for talent:

\- paying well

\- offering great benefits

\- taking time to write great job descriptions

\- recruiting through a variety of channels

\- putting thoughtful effort into every step of the recruiting process

A lot of the top comments point to OP missing the mark on some of the above
points.

From there, the discussion delves into some of the finer points I hadn't fully
considered:

\- EU vs US differences for comp and readership

\- Seniority/stack expertise on HN vs elsewhere

\- Hiring for non-technical roles on HN

------
ivyirwin
I have had really good experiences with "Who is hiring" – from meeting
interesting independent contractors that have heavily influenced projects to
making my best technical hire ever.

When hiring I've used a mix of approaches – job boards, recruiters, HN. HN
doesn't produce a lot of volume, but anecdotally, the candidates often get
through initial screenings because they are generally both technically
proficient and well rounded (from a stack standpoint). With other channels I
find a lot of spam and/or mismatches on stacks.

------
donohoe
Complete speculation, but may be that in general EU salaries are lower than US
so not many ppl want to take that kind of cut despite differences in cost of
living?

Thats been a blocker for me in the past in moving back to the EU.

~~~
bausshf
I second this.

Not only is the salary lower, but food etc. is way more expensive in general.

------
lwhalen
As others have said, it's a pretty generic JD. Definitely consider hiring
remote (your candidate pool goes WAY up), but also consider putting the salary
_range_ in place to help weed out folks who will waste your time with
requirements outside your budget.

Keep in mind that you may be pricing yourself too low for your market. If
after the above, you still aren't at least interviewing quality candidates,
bump your budget in $20k (or whatever local currency makes sense for you)
increments until the market wants to come to you.

tl; dr - unhappy with the quality of your talent pool? Hiring remote and
raising your budget is the fastest way to buy yourself out of the problem.

stl; dr? - 'Fast, cheap, and good - pick any two'

------
cwe
I got my current job from a 'Who is Hiring' post, so clearly it worked for
someone! It's not a replacement for a solid recruiting team/funnel, but having
been on both sides of the process I found it a useful resource. FWIW.

------
bufferoverflow
Let me guess, no remote and no or low salary listed?

------
erichurkman
Yes, but a tiny percentage. A lot of spam. (_A lot of spam._) Tons of
recruiting services. 80% of people obviously didn't read the post.

That said, I have hired a few amazing people, including some great technical
leaders, that would have cost 15-20% salary to use a recruiter to find & snipe
(this was before I had internal recruiters to help).

I use a separate email alias for it, and have a few canned responses (1/ you
didn't read the job post 2/ I said we cannot do visas or major relocations,
but you're in Greenland 3/ too junior, but please keep an eye on future posts)
to keep things efficient.

------
DrNuke
HN demographics plays a role, of course. More discrete and tailored manners
through headhunters or, at the other end of the spectrum, cold calls to
engineers working at direct competitors in your niche should give better
outcome.

------
aidos
We're in London. Mostly applicants are based in other countries (like the US)
when we explicitly say that's not an option, so they're ruled out immediately.

Over the last couple of years we haven't had many applicants via it at all -
but we did hire a really great developer through it, so it's still worth it.

The one thing I would say is that it's worth setting up a hiring page
generally. Then you can have an application form on there which most the lower
grade candidates just bounce on anyway.

------
emidln
I never had a lot of hits for Clojure in Chicago, but the candidates were
above average. I've made 2 hires over 5 years and a small handful of posts.

------
skrap
I've not received one single usable resume. Lots of headhunters regularly send
me email now, though, so the admonishment to not use the contact info provided
for commercial purposes is not being heeded. I've given up posting.

------
crankylinuxuser
I've applied to a few jobs...

1\. place said a small test would be required. "small" was on range from 8-12
hours of work. Their words. I told them my rates.

2\. Another place liked me. Their stack was kubernetes. I didn't have that
experience since I chose mesos. Thats cool. 2 more interviews later, and they
said 'you didn't show up to interview' ?! Oh yeah, i was really disqualified
because I didnt have kube experience. wtf?

3\. another place said they did remote. when going through interview, flipped
scripts to a SV job that paid $100k /yr. eff that. thats poverty wages in the
valley.

Local places have been significantly better than who's hiring. So far, what
Ive seen has been a shitshow. Pity that.

------
linker3000
I've just received a few speculative emails from recruiters and some from
freelancers on different continents wanting to take on office-based roles from
their location.

------
puranjay
Slightly off topic, but can anyone chime in on their experience hiring for non
coding roles from HN threads? Especially marketing and biz dev?

~~~
maxxxx
We tried to do that, but we the people on HN are normally not the right type
of people for such positions

------
tmaly
I have posted a position a few times, but I have no way to tell how candidates
are applying on ICIMS platform

------
mightybyte
Yes, some. I've gotten at least one good hire (and referral bonus) from one of
my HN hiring posts.

------
qaq
If you point to the particular postings might be easier for people to give
helpful feedback.

~~~
detaro
They haven't posted much else than job postings:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fjahr](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fjahr)

~~~
pknerd
I was not wrong.

------
pknerd
There is another section _Who Wants to be Hired_ which should work for many I
guess

------
a_imho
It is a money problem obviously.

------
pknerd
Most of the people prefer remote these days.

~~~
dewey
Citation needed, that sounds like a very biased view of things.

~~~
Outpox
I would say that a job available on site OR remotely will attract more
candidates than an on site only. To share my own experience, I've just bought
an apartment and I've been thinking of working in a new company. I will
automatically exclude non-remote positions (also the reason why I might leave
my current company as the managers can work remotely no question asked but the
devs can't...)

~~~
fabricexpert
The most annoying ones are:

\- REMOTE (US West Coast Only)

\- ONSITE or REMOTE (onsite preferred)

~~~
mstaoru
There are also REMOTE (...possible after 6-9 months onsite) and REMOTE (1-2
days per week upon confirmation).

------
binmanthrowaway
I wouldn't move to Berlin, so that's an issue. For such locations only option
is to have occasional travel like once a month or two and work remotely.

