I should mention that I and other hiring managers I've talked with are moving away from posting on the "Who is hiring?" post.
It was pretty useful ~6 months ago. But, the amount of spam generated from recruiting and sourcing firms, various startups trying to push their revolutionary new online coding tools, etc. is pretty ridiculous and many of them, especially the SV-area startups, have been quite aggressive (e.g., phone calls and switching to my personal e-mail address after I told them I was not interested).
Posting jobs on twitter has been a far more effective sourcing tool than HN "Who is hiring" has become recently, at least in the free space.
I've had some ok luck with the Who's hiring threads, but, what really bothered me was some of the practices from these companies.
One company, allowing remote work, sent me to do a personality inventory without even talking to me first -- which really bothered me. (They're still posting looking for DevOps and Developers in Indianapolis.)
One company scheduled an introduction phone call on the 25th of the month, and then didn't show up on time and attempted to reschedule on the 15th of the following month. (Apparently, they didn't understand "Hire fast, fire faster.")
Finally, one company wasn't up-front or honest about their salary expectations until after I had spent almost a month in their system -- even taking a week off of work to do one of their "trial weeks" only to discover that they were going to offer me approximately 50% less than what I was making now and that they had a standard 'formula' for salaries...things that if I would have known, I wouldn't have wasted their time (nor mine) going forward.
Don't get me wrong -- HN has brought me a lot of great things: context, opportunities, viewpoints, and friends. Unfortunately, the "Who is Hiring" has morphed into traditional HR -- where you send a resume and don't hear back anything from anyone, versus the near-immediate feedback that you would once get in 2012.
Maybe have a special tag that you can add to the text for info that you only want karma users of a certain level or higher to be able to see -- ex. (karma>300)[Contact me at my@email.com], or instead of direct numbers, target people that are able to downvote, or have a moderate level of karma. People would post a link to the recruitment page/job description page on their website for all other users, which would hopefully work at deterring spammers from contacting them personally.
I think something like this would help you focus your recruitment efforts on those who have at least contributed to the community in some way, which should filter out people spamming every single email in the thread.
Another idea is to mask emails with a craigslist-like mailing address, which would give the end-user the ability to report an email as spam, and therefore tie that email to the offending party's hacker news account.
Edit: What I mean is that each hacker news account would see the email address as a different one, so when they emailed that account it uniquely identifies the account that originally viewed that email address. So, Spammer A sees Poster B's email address as hn-49384932842@ycombinator.com, and Legitimate Candidate C sees Poster B's address as hn-4494838943842@ycombinator.com. When either one emails that address, if Poster B reports the email as spam, and if enough reports accumulate, the HN account sending the spam can be docked karma and lower them below the threshold allowed to view further posts.
Nothing. HN is not a job board. Whatever you do to squelch recruiter spam on "Who's Hiring" threads is bound to have unintended consequences. Meanwhile: if the big problem is that recruiters use job posts as spam targets, everyone who posts an ad can come up with their own solution (if it's karma-locked, it can just be "mail your HN username here") and the best one will spread.
I'm open to that in this case, though in general people tend to object to karma requirements.
The Who Is Hiring threads belong to this community. If something needs to be done to protect them for the community, we'll do it. But we'd ideally like to see a consensus emerge.
We should probably discuss this in a separate thread (and probably not today, as I'm about to be traveling). And I feel bad for taking a Show HN further off-topic, so will mark this subthread as such (which lowers it), even though it's obviously an important question.
There is little correlation between the domain of a submission and the amount of points it receives on average. (The exception is the more niche posts by more renowned programmers)
The stories don't have to be popular to generate karma, as long as the domains are some articles will get karma from other people submitting the same links and manual upvotes too. Yesterday someone autosubmitted everything a dozen big tech sites published and got 100 - 200 karma without hitting the front page.
Won't they find you on Twitter as well? Even LinkedIn has the same problem from what I hear from hiring managers, becoming increasingly frustrated by the number of recruiters that contact them when they post a job there.
It was pretty useful ~6 months ago. But, the amount of spam generated from recruiting and sourcing firms, various startups trying to push their revolutionary new online coding tools, etc. is pretty ridiculous and many of them, especially the SV-area startups, have been quite aggressive (e.g., phone calls and switching to my personal e-mail address after I told them I was not interested).
Posting jobs on twitter has been a far more effective sourcing tool than HN "Who is hiring" has become recently, at least in the free space.