

Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry - durga
http://fitfrnd.com/blog/2014/11/23/silicon-valleys-best-kept-secret-angel-list-slowly-disrupting-hiring-industry/

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falsestprophet
"Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring
industry", or "AngelList is useful for hiring people (as just about everyone
already knows)"

Is AngelList Jobs unknown (never mind a secret!) amongst start up founders
(who generally have AngelList profile for both themselves and their
companies)?

Is this _job board_ "disrupting" the hiring industry which is composed of
other job boards and recruiters that post to other job boards?

~~~
durga
Very much so. Getting so many high quality applications in such a short time
is not disruptive to the recruiting industry. Then what is?

If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and
response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of
disruptive.

~~~
freshhawk
Then what is it? It's every job board at this stage of the hype curve. It's
got critical mass among it's niche _and_ it's not yet hit the big numbers and
experienced the inevitable regression to the mean.

~~~
durga
Just curious: what are some historical examples similar to this?

~~~
freshhawk
Hmm, honestly someone else has probably done more hiring than I and remembers
the names, I can only remember the embarassingly famous ones.

I remember when Craigslist was the place to hire people who were ahead of
their peers, when it was mostly unknown and considered too sketchy to be
associated with any corporation concerned about their image that did have
someone in the loop enough to have heard of it.

Stackoverflow was never like that, but it was more like that at the beginning
than it is now.

The best examples are all sites that I've completely forgotten the names of
because they pivoted or went out of business a long time ago. But they were
cool for a time among subcultures that have good programmers so that's where
you went to look. Plus by both being part of the same little unknown thing
there was more trust at the beginning as well and it made the whole process
easier.

A lot of IRC channels and mailing lists and forums are still like that and
manage to stay like that because they are so anti-corporate/anti-recruiter.
AngelList is the opposite, no one trying to make money tries to keep the
majority of potential customers out like communities do. Doing so is a
failure. And it makes a lot of sense to have both fundraising and recruitment
on AngelList, so it will get popular and therefore worse at being a small
community with a talent bias.

------
Iftheshoefits
The last time I looked at them, the salaries and equity shares advertised on
many of their job listings were mostly chuckle-worthy at best. Some were
appallingly lowball. If they're truly "disrupting" the hiring industry, it
certainly isn't to the benefit of the labor pool.

~~~
DTrejo
When they aren't lowball, they are fake high-ball in order to get more buzz
from investors and more applicants coming in from AngelList. When the offer is
handed over for real, they low-ball. Of course not all startups do this.

~~~
jurassic
I experienced this first hand. After interviewing with a company I met on
Angelist they said their best offer was 80% of the bottom of their advertised
range. It was a tremendous waste of time for everyone involved, and I'm not
sure who thought that was a good idea. Even if I'd accepted, they would have
landed a candidate who felt misled/disgruntled on Day 1. Not a great way to
build a company, in my opinion.

~~~
durga
That's a really bad hiring strategy. What the company doesn't realize is that
they are still paying 80%. If the company flipped their position and added an
extra 10% to the 100%, it's conceivable that the motivation could actually
make the employee 30% more productive and engaged with making the company
successful.

Great companies are not built this way. And sorry to hear you went through
this - though you are probably better off not working there.

------
mc32
I imagine if it become mainstream, it'll not have the same level of talent and
it'd become just another board. It will remain special so long as it does not
broaden.

So long as it focuses on the creme, then it'll disrupt that 'market' but it
cannot disrupt the 'hiring industry' because at that point, it would become
diluted and another 'disruptor' would cater to the 'cream'.

~~~
durga
You could say that about discussion forums too. But reddit and HN would
disagree. Quality has to be managed and maintained. It's plausible to me that
by designing the right mechanisms you could scale AL and maintain quality.

~~~
mc32
HN is very industry specific. It would be like saying HN is disrupting forums.
It's not. It has a very specific audience. Reddit has lots of above average
and also has below average forums too. So, yes, the AL jobs board could become
the board for all jobs, but then, it'd hardly be better than job boards now.

Seen another way, let's say the top talent is 10,000 individuals. There are
way more positions and candidates than that out there. So if they became the
Reddit of job boards, they'd have tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of
applicants in search of tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of jobs.
Neither the applicants nor jobs are going to become "great" just because they
are on the Angellist board.

~~~
durga
Yelp is an example of a system where it'd have been easy to be cynical about
their system scaling up. It's nowhere near being a perfect system, but I use
it frequently and I'm able to repeatedly find great restaurants there. It does
work reasonably well at scale for me.

And the whole site is based on people actually spending tens of minutes
crafting reviews. Who'd have thought it'd work out as well as it does?

------
ericdykstra
It's great on the applicant side, too. I got my last job from AngelList, and
they have gotten me the best-quality leads (apart from referrals from friends)
this time around as well. The profile has most of the relevant information for
job-seekers that you would never get from an intro from a recruiter
(investors, total investment, etc).

Salaries are always negotiable, but seeing them up-front gives you a good idea
of what the company is looking at paying.

~~~
johan_larson
It would be nice to have a bit more transparency on salaries. Yes, they are
negotiable, but only within narrow bands. And if you ask for anything outside
of those bands, the result is often not a counteroffer, but dropping the
discussion entirely. That makes it time-consuming to determine what the market
rate for your skill-set actually is, particularly since the "no"s don't
typically come with reasons attached.

------
amorphid
AngelList is acting as a niche job board. It's definitely cool, but I wouldn't
call it disruptive or revolutionary. As soon as people figure out how to use
it as an efficient hiring channel, AngelList will become saturated with
companies hiring & candidates looking, just like every other formerly
disruptive hiring channel.

------
Animats
I dunno. I tried advertising on AngelList for someone to make big-ticket sales
to big companies. I keep getting responses from people who claim to be able to
grow website traffic.

~~~
durga
Having worked in enterprise companies, I'd conjecture that enterprise sales
guys are not using AL much yet. Just a matter of time though..

------
OpenDrapery
This is my favorite bit:

"I emailed everyone I knew, posted the job on LinkedIn, got it posted to the
jobs list at several universities, and also posted on some paid sites. End
result: nothing very good to show for all the effort."

Exactly how much effort was 'all the effort'? Did it take you all of 2 hours
to post the job on several sites?

------
sundvor
If anyone else finds the poor contrast / thin fonts hard to read, ctrl+a to
select all text is as always a neat trick.

~~~
durga
Didn't realize that. What machine are you reading it on? Looked ok on my Mac.

~~~
raquo
It's too light for me too. Mac, Firefox. It's probably readable in perfect
conditions (indoors, low ambient light), but if you're tired or it's sunny it
becomes uncomfortable.

~~~
durga
We tested on chrome. That's a lesson.

~~~
durga
Fixed.

------
shaunrussell
We've had great success hiring from AngelList. More than half of our team at
this point.

~~~
durga
Congratulations. Can you share some insights into what works well for
attractive engineers, esp on AL?

------
CalRobert
I propose we change every occurrence of "disrupt" to "perturb". Or better yet:
"Angellist is promoting perturbations" Seems more appropriate, and I'm sick of
seeing "disrupt" everywhere.

------
simi_
I got my current job in Germany via AngelList, although I was living in UK at
the time. I got several other interesting options in Europe too. It's
definitely a great tool in my book.

~~~
durga
Congrats

