

Ask HN: What is the greatest pain point you feel when hiring someone? - shepbook

I'm interested in what the worst part of the hiring process is, from the employer's side. What's something you wish could be changed?<p>I've recently heard about how finding talent is one of the most important, yet difficult things a startup has to face. I'd like to investigate how technology might be leveraged to help this. So...<p>What pain points do you need alleviated  to make your hiring life easier?
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staunch
The most fundamental problem is the risk involved in making a decision. When
you hire the wrong person it hurts badly. It's painful, stressful, and
expensive -- usually for both parties.

One way I've found to mitigate this is by having potential employees work on a
contract job first.

The trend right now is for job sites to employ programming tests and the like,
but I don't think these answer most of the hard questions you have about a
potential employee.

A hybrid Elance/Monster might be just the ticket though. Employers post _real_
jobs, like "Port our Oracle stored procedures to Postgres" or "Rewrite this
Ruby server daemon to support XYZ", then they _work together_ with candidates
on the project, while paying them. Employers would make full-time offers to
people who do well.

Employers might pay three candidates to do the same job and then pick which
one did the best. Still far cheaper than a recruiter.

Candidates that don't look good on paper might even _volunteer_ to do work for
free/cheap just to prove they have what it takes. I know I would have before I
had job experience.

~~~
mchannon
I think they already have a hybrid Elance/Monster site to perform this-
Elance. Once you have a rapport established with a contractor, there's nothing
keeping you from sending them a job offer.

~~~
staunch
The vast majority of employers want to hire employees to work in their office.
Elance is generally not designed around this goal.

I think a site like I'm imagining might restrict candidates to your local area
and require that they be willing to work full-time and on-site. Maybe those
would be optional, but that's the idea.

~~~
mchannon
Elance does divulge where these people live- you can restrict your
hiring/contracting patterns accordingly.

Similarly, if you are up for reloing candidates, you're not restricted to a
local hiring area.

Also, you can make your wants and needs transparent up front. If a freelancer
doesn't like the idea of working in your office for a salary, they're free to
be honest about it before you hire them for the contract.

I think it's kinda silly to imagine a site that's a crippled version of what's
already out there when the existing solutions are more than capable of
sufficing in this limited case.

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romain_dardour
Unless you're google, hiring someone means not hiring someone else.

At any given time we would love to hire 3 people that are all as amazing as we
can think, but the budgets never are that large.

Making a choice between 2 amazing guys is even harder than searching for one.

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hoodwink
Logistics. More time is spent making posts, culling resumes / cover letters,
scheduling phone interviews, coordinating in-office meetings with the team,
and following up than actual searching. Even with an admin assistant, it's a
huge burden on me.

