
Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10) - davidbalbert
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/hackruiter/
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nostrademons
I'm curious how this works out. My perception is that hiring is intrinsically
hard, and whether you have engineers or HR doing the recruiting, it will
remain hard. I would absolutely, totally love to be proven wrong on this
though.

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nicholasjbs
We fully acknowledge it's an open question. Hiring _is_ intrinsically hard,
but think of it this way: What are the odds that the status quo is the best we
can do? That seems highly unlikely to us.

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nostrademons
Your competition isn't really other recruiters, it's personal referrals from
inside the company. Everybody knows that recruiters suck; that's why whenever
possible, people try to find friends or former coworkers of their existing
employees and bring them on-board.

Now, if you could devise a system that's as effective as having worked with a
person for years and being able to convince them to join you, yet didn't
require a personal connection that takes years to build up, that would be
golden.

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nicholasjbs
Yes, the gold standard is employee referrals. Pretty much every company we've
spoken to has told us they're the best source of people, but they don't get
enough of them.

Part of what makes them so good is that the person making the recommendation
(i.e., the employee) knows both parties well. I think we have a good start to
solving half this problem, since we're developing real relationships with the
companies and being selective about whom we work with. The other half --
actually getting to know the people applying -- is probably the biggest
challenge we face (next to meeting/finding people in the first place).

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incently
Best of luck. I have a feeling the incentives for hiring are out of whack and
need a correction.

What is your fee structure like? Do you take 25% of what an engineer would
make their first year like other recruiters? How will you avoid becoming
corrupt like most other recruiters?

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nicholasjbs
We have a flat fee structure that's less than the 20-30% that regular
recruiters take.

We're trying to avoid being corrupted by 1) only working with companies we
know, like, and respect (so we're not tempted to encourage people to work at
bad ones), and 2) the fact that our advantage over regular recruiters is that
we're _not_ like them. Good hackers know one and other. If we started doing
the crap many recruiters do, people would (and should) call us out, and good
people wouldn't want to work with us.

[EDIT: Fix typos from writing in haste]

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shazow
You'd probably want to avoid working with companies you don't
know/like/respect to keep your filter in place.

On the other hand, I've made referrals to companies I wouldn't want to work at
but the fit was simply perfect for the person in question. They're very happy
there.

Rough balance.

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nicholasjbs
It depends on why it is you didn't want to work there. The set of companies we
know/like/respect is a superset of the companies we'd personally want to work
at.

A trivial example is a company in the bay area: It could be an absolutely
fantastic place to work, but my strong personal preference to live in a city
means it'd be a poor fit for me. That doesn't mean it's a bad place to work,
it just means it's a bad place for someone who wants to live in NYC :)

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joepestro
The hints on the bottom bar are a nice touch. I kept refreshing the page to
see them all. Also found out about the keyboard shortcuts that way! (Hint:
Press ?)

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jhuckestein
I understand the problem. Recruiting engineers is hard, but is engineers
recruiting engineers sustainable? Do they hire more engineers to do
recruiting?

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nicholasjbs
That's an open question. Right now, our time doing the legwork with this isn't
our bottleneck. We're focused on being 10x better than the status quo.

Once we hit our capacity, we'll scale with some linear combination of software
and people.

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jhuckestein
Here's something I could think of:

Engineers might one day have agents to haggle with businesses. Those agents
need to know a lot about engineering in the same way that many sports agents
are former players.

Is there reason to believe that such a time is coming?

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nicholasjbs
That's an interesting thought. It's certainly possible. We see ourselves as a
market correction -- engineers are in tremendous demand, but the market hasn't
fully adjusted yet. Salaries haven't shifted dramatically and it's still a
pain to find a new job, even for great engineers.

My bet is that the scale will continue to shift in engineers' favor until we
hit an equilibrium.

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pnathan
Do you have plans to expand beyond New York or the San Francisco Bay Area?

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dongle
The site looks fantastic, and those are all A+ companies to apply to. I
especially like that their roadmap involves developing intelligent ways to
search for new jobs (like by languages in use – why has it taken this long for
such an obvious filter?).

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unov
Good luck, this is a good idea. The problem is not just compensation:

I believe there are tons of talented developers "locked up" in large
corporations due to health insurance / health benefits, especially those with
kids. Universal health insurance would help start-ups and small business
compete with the Facebook's and Google's and also Bank of America's as health
care would become an "even playing field".

Currently most small business and start-ups cannot compete with the health
care and other benefit cost structures large American firms can achieve.

In fact, lots of corporate roll-ups exist only to reduce benefit costs - think
of them as large health insurance providers.

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starpilot
I hope this goes beyond the software engineering field eventually.

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mkramlich
What I like about this is that it's trying to help solve the number one
problem in the software field. Which is not some esoteric or fancy computing
problem, and is not a hardware issue, etc. It's the fact that the demand for
folks who can do software, and well, far exceeds the supply of such folks.
Especially ones who are available, interested and affordable. Trying to take
even a tiny bite, percentage-wise, out of a very large pie is always
promising.

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spoiledtechie
the hiring business of engineers is big money. This isn't anything new and its
sad to such good engineers chase theall mighty dollar instead of building
something of real value.

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fleitz
Please explain the difference between 'real value' and that which someone is
willing to pay money for? In my world 'real value' is when people pay you.

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spoiledtechie
Something that has the ability to change the World/Country/State....

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fleitz
I think Microsoft / Facebook / Apple have had far more impact on the world
than Green Peace and all the other NGOs combined.

