

Hiring advice for startups from Hackruiter (YC S10) - nicholasjbs
http://www.hackruiter.com/advice

======
tptacek
This is all totally sane. Virtually everything on our "careers" page (which is
far from perfect) came from feedback from people who passed on us. The single
most important factor we've identified so far is responsiveness.

It is _so easy_ to inadvertently go dark on a candidate.

These guys observe that employees are almost never as dedicated to the company
as the founders. A similar thing happens during recruiting, except it's the
employer who isn't as dedicated as the candidate. For most companies, the
simple truth is that your decision on your next hire is not as important to
the company as the decision is to the candidate. Your next hire is unlikely to
totally transform your company. But it will certainly be transformative for
the new hire!

As a result, you should assume time is moving 10x slower for candidates than
it is for you.

The only thing I'd add to this set of advice (ie, the only bit of advice I
have that I think ranks up there with theirs) is, debrief the people who pass
on you. Actually debrief everyone. Find out what people hate about your hiring
process, so you can start fixing it. I've found that nobody minds questions
like these, so go ahead and ask.

~~~
nicholasjbs
_...debrief the people who pass on you._

That's an excellent point. I'll add it. (It's a historical accident it's not
there already: We wrote this advice for the companies we work with, and since
we ask candidates for feedback on behalf of the companies, we didn't think to
tell our companies to do it, too.)

Also, I really like how transparent your jobs page is about how your process
works. That's something else we should add: Tell people what to expect, how
long it usually takes, etc.

Thanks for the suggestions and kind words!

~~~
reinhardt
_...debrief the people who pass on you._

Right, I'd be so thrilled to provide feedback because companies have the
courtesy to do the same to the candidates they pass on. Back when I was job
hunting for 6+ months I would consider myself lucky if I got an almost
automated "We're sorry to inform you that..." email, most don't bother even
with that.

Fuck them and the horse they rode in on, leave them in the dark.

~~~
irahul
> Right, I'd be so thrilled to provide feedback because companies have the
> courtesy to do the same to the candidates they pass on.

They don't, because anything they say is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

> Fuck them and the horse they rode in on, leave them in the dark.

That a personal perspective. Say some big company Google let me hanging for 2
months before sending me an automated "we are sorry" mail, I will be mighty
pissed, but I won't take it out on some other company which was responsive.

------
gvb
On a related topic, I've been thinking about the interviewing problem and had
an insight that is probably blindingly obvious to everybody else.

In engineering terms, interviewing is benchmarking. Making an effective
benchmark is somewhere between very hard and intractable.

A benchmark has to be...

* Difficult enough to clearly differentiate between good and bad yet be simple enough to "run" in 5-30 minutes.

* Repeatable, yet not beatable. Remember the compilers that recognized drystones and compiled them to the final answer? That is what google does to interview "trick" questions.

* Applicable: drystones are totally worthless if your algorithm is dominated by floating point calculations. Having said that, "comes up to speed quickly" is the most applicable metric for a candidate, but is awfully hard to benchmark in a limited interview.

Anecdote: I had lunch today with the engineer that hired me on my first "real
engineering" job (I was a freshman in college at the time). He commented that
I was "the smartest guy he knew, until he met my younger brother." My brother
is several years younger... Bob was working for a different company and my
brother applied for a summer job there. Bob's take, and the other folks at the
company's take, on my brother's resume' was "meh". Bob told them "never mind
his resume, _hire him_. Just do it! Do. It."

Moral of the anecdote: benchmarks are poor stand-ins for real life.
Unfortunately, I don't have a better way. :-/

~~~
mathattack
Good points. Your annecdote about your brother is captures the truism that
interviews and resumes are only a substitue for knowledge of someone's real
ability. This is why references from employees (smart engineers know others)
is much more effective.

------
shawndrost
"Don't write inflated and ridiculous job posts; they're a turn off to good
people."

I have noticed the following things about tasteless tactics: 1) they're often
horrifically effective; 2) people with taste will pronounce that they're
ineffective without providing any evidence.

~~~
nicholasjbs
You're right, we don't have real data. It's all anecdotal. But we speak to a
lot of hackers, and we've yet to meet a good one who's said he likes those
posts, and we've met plenty who hate them.

~~~
shawndrost
See, that's the thing about tasteless tactics -- the fact that nobody says
they like them cannot be taken as evidence that they're ineffective.

~~~
joelrunyon
Are they effective to the _right_ people though?

~~~
wnight
That's it. They end up hiring people who think they're ninjas and rock stars.
If all you need to do is fill a seat (traditional HR or recruiters) then this
ad is probably pay-dirt - after all, there are a lot of people who want to be
special.

In looking for a place I'd like to work I look for ads that say they
understand what I'd be doing.

Also, there are two ways of asking for everything under the sun. The first,
which rockstar/ninja companies ask for, is "7+ years Java, 3+ using ANT, 5+ in
etc". You can never satisfy the requirements of this kind so they only get
scammers or the truly naive who qualify but only because they once did all
that stuff 10+ years ago.

The second way, which hacker companies use, is to say "We use X, and do hard-
thing-Y in it. If this is your speed, join us. Bonus points for things we
don't know about." These are not only clear and precise to the people they
want but easily lend themselves to entrance interviews.

------
nandemo
> _We can't recruit for you, so please don't ask. We hope you find the advice
> below useful nevertheless._

Does this mean they're closed to new clients? I've never seen a recruiting
agency do that.

Edit: they are. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2979874>

------
angelbob
Interesting that they're full up already.

I guess that's either a good sign for their business or a bad sign for their
business model :-)

~~~
davidbalbert
Honestly, it's a little of both.

~~~
angelbob
I'd kinda suspected. I've spent a lot of stray moments thinking about the
whole "recruiting is obviously broken" thing (and congrats for taking it on).
And I have yet to come up with a genuinely good solution.

I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution
with making and answering questions about your workplace. But that _really_
won't work for startups since they don't have a bunch of existing employees to
recommend them. I'd also probably have to commit the cardinal sin of trying to
charge the job seeker -- not so good.

Similarly, there are a lot of places that will certify that you (as an
individual employee) aren't a bozo. Those don't scale terribly well, but
worse, they also charge the job seeker.

You can make money but not do the world much good by charging (probably bad)
employees a small fee to apply or charging bad companies a lot for dubious
access. But while that's probably where the money is, it does the least good
for the world of almost anything you could do in recruiting. Maybe a
"schlemiel match-up service" for mediocre-to-bad companies with exactly-
equally-bad employees? Don't know. I'll bet you guys wouldn't be passionate
about that one ;-)

And yet, how do you make enough money and still scale well on matching up the
best companies (who don't have to pay as much to hire) and the best candidates
(who should never, never be charged anything at all)?

It's a hard problem. Glad you're thinking on it.

~~~
nicholasjbs
_I put together something called "wantmyjob" that used the OKCupid solution
with making and answering questions about your workplace._

Funnily enough, the idea we applied to YC with was "OkCupid for jobs."

~~~
angelbob
It's a seductive-sounding model, isn't it? I couldn't find a way to make the
business model work. It sounds like you've departed from that model pretty
completely (not a bad idea, I say now that I've tried it out).

~~~
nicholasjbs
Yes, it is seductive-sounding. And yes, we switched to a very different idea
shortly after YC started.

I still think "OkCupid for jobs" has merit, but it has some serious problems,
too, not least of which are that it only gets really valuable after lots of
companies and people are using it (and we didn't have a good way to bootstrap,
at least from the job-seeker end).

Another issue is that matching isn't the really hard part of hiring -- the
hard part is finding good people.

