

Ask HN: Crowdsourced headhunting? - alamgir_mand

As a person growing a company: Would you value a service that has resumes rated by industry professionals over a headhunter? (i.e. a bunch of ranked resumes with feedback by other people in the same industry vs. a headhunting agency that has deemed qualified candidates and forwards them)
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neilsharma
As a person growing a company, what I look for in an employee might be
different than what an industry professional working at a larger firm looks
for. Depending on how early stage my company is, I might favor someone who has
more startup experience, is more passionate about our goal, is capable of
doing more than just the job description, has the proper culture fit, and is
willing to work more than 9-5. I'd be looking for employee #1 or 2, which is
very different than employee #50. Headhunters, although I've never tried them
either, might not be a whole lot better/worse.

You also run the risk of misaligned incentives. Ideally, you'd want to have
industry professionals who know your industry and can evaluate employees
properly, but aren't your competitors. Otherwise, they might try to poach your
best candidates or recommend subpar ones.

There's also the misaligned financial incentive for headhunters in general. If
they get paid every time you hire someone they recommend, it's in their best
interest that you hire sooner rather than later to maximize their revenue/time
spent.

How you brand or productize this service can bypass some of these risks. Just
some concerns to think about.

An interesting thought: If you have a marketplace with resumes and ratings,
the top-rated candidates will be approached much more frequently. This'll make
them harder to hire and give them the power to negotiate better terms. Not a
whole lot different than the rockstars who get job offers everywhere they
apply, but a little more transparent.

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alamgir_mand
The misaligned incentives are the hardest problems to solve in this case. An
example use case could be a weekly email sent to you with 5 anonymous
resumes/bios, of which you pick the best two. You would probably be able to
passively collect income as the service could pay ~$100 for each "review" and
then pay a bonus if one of your reviewed bios gets hired. Still, there's the
incentive to sign off on two random resumes and collect $100. At that point,
the question is whether it is worth your time as an industry professional to
spend a bit of time and earn side cash. This is completely meant to disrupt
recruiting agencies by the way, not to source co-founder level team members.

