Ask HN: Interview as a Service – Any interest?

To be blunt, I feel quite strongly that this is a bad idea. You might find business in this service, but only in companies which don't know any better. And if you can sell a service like this to that type of company, everyone (you, your client, their candidates) would be far better off if instead you sold them consulting services which made them more competent. Give a man; teach a man... right?

To explain:

Remember, companies are just formalized groups of people. What's the single most impactful component on a company's success? The people which make up said company.

The best candidates know this rule intuitively. They've completely internalized it. When these candidates imagine an excellent place to work, they imagine it first in these terms. These candidates will read the use of a service like the one you propose as a company shirking responsibility in an incredibly key area.

Yes, yes... it's only a first round interview. You're just separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Maybe the company knows that you/your service is/are incredibly competent at this task. However as a candidate I sure don't, and my first impression is going to be that the company relies on a third party to determine whether or not it's even willing to talk to a candidate? I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. I don't have time to market myself to two separate entities just to work for the final one, especially when I'm already being recruited by two other companies which are competent enough to validate their own candidates.

I already hired engineers for several companies of very various sizes, and I can understand the value you're bringing. This said, if you're only going to be a technical filter, some companies will put your services against a combo of "recruiters + codility".

I personally went through codility myself for a company, and I found it decent, even though it has obvious disadvantages because of being online.

That said, if you feel like targeting bigger companies, I believe you should introduce yourself (or whatever company you're building) as a recruiter, but a strongly technical one, and then adapt your business model this way. It will scare companies less (newness equals risk), and it will make what you're bringing on the table more clear. Your value is in your technical skills.

I understand that the difference in your offering is that you're not offering companies to find candidates for them, but this is where you would become more useful than a method consisting of sending all the candidates to a service like codility.

All in all, I would use your services, but only if you solve a problem that my current tooling (recruiters I deal with, and online filtering services) can not solve, which does not look to be the case if I look at your current proposition.

I like your idea from a company's perspective. I've seen many teams struggling to get good developers - Part of the problem is the existing team (it sucks technically) - they can't ask the right questions and end up hiring the wrong kinda folks.

You should probably explain a bit more in detail (on a blogpost maybe) on the matrix that you will use for evaluation related to techs.

I agree with few of the comments below too.

1) I'll not be interested in talking to you if it seems to me that you are a recruiter. But then - its me and people like me who are humbly confident about their skills - that's mostly not the case with everybody. May be you could partner with an employee -mostly silent- during interviews.

2) You could be doing a great deal of misdeed towards developers. I judge my prospective employer/team based on the questions they asked, how they asked, etc, etc. I've been trapped into a situation where I thought that the team is "very good" based on the interviewer - which turned out to be a disaster - bcoz the interviewer was brought in from some other team (read: excellent team) - but that's not what I was hired for.

(with reference to automated_sysadmin_screen_test)

While your idea is good I hardly see it scaling as it is hard to consistently assure quality of evaluations when done by hired consultants (You)

I have been an employer and I took a different approach, of putting technology at work.

What does that mean? Well we all talk about TDD (Rspec Driven Tests for your code), I applied that to interviews Rspec+Puppet https://github.com/zalora/automated_sysadmin_screen_test

This has worked pretty well for me and it will work for similar scenarios.

I was planning to build this into a service someday and have some pending plans on this, Anybody interested in sweat equity?

1.) This can become a service that recruiters can offer 2.) It can be subscribed on monthly subscription or per candidate basis 3.) Github repository shows the basic idea, it can be applied to other niche too.

Get in-touch if this interests you: a[at]parolkar[dot]com

> I am saving lots of developers hours

I don't see how this is really true. You say an interview can use up 15-20 developer hours and in some percentage of the failure cases you are saving that (and hopefully not failing some percentage of the passing casses, btw.)

My point is that if a 1-hour screening by a single developer is effective, I can keep it in-house and save 14-19 developer hours where you'd be saving me 15-20.

I guess I am actually assuming you are only spending 1 hour with the candidate, you never say that above. But my point is, unless you are uniquely good at interviewing, the amount of time you are putting into interviewing the candidate is the amount of the you are saving me.