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Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

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Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#61

Thank you for asking this! I was thinking about what's the best way to ask something like this - I was too negative about the $subject to ask anything without offending people. I have been watching these for months now - for a long time just out of curiosity and recently because I'm starting to look for a new job. My own experience is that a single digit percentage of these jobs actually sound like there might be peo…

At GitLab, we have this line at the bottom of our job postings: Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply. We believe that while it would be nice to have someone that exactly checks all the boxes, we are willing to look at candidates that might not feel they are all the way there.

I'm impressed. This shows a lot of self-awareness. Makes me think that there's a big disconnect in hiring at companies where they're actually looking for people who check all the boxes and then complain about not filling positions.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 rounds?? Does that mean you go in on 7 seperate occasions?

Seems like the standard 2 phone screens + 5 onsite interviews.

Doesn't that make it impossible to apply while already employed? If I had to do more than 1 phone interview and 1 onsite I don't think I'd bother.

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#63
I've gotten two solid leads leading to interviews through "Who's Hiring" posts, but didn't end up taking either job.

Company 1 wanted me for a remote position, but wanted to pay me about half my market rate. This is a casualty of the salary dance -- everyone is so busy hiding their numbers that sometimes you get too far into the process before you realize there's no way to make the numbers line up. If they'd listed a salary range on the original post, or I'd given a salary range in the initial contact, it would have saved everyone time.

Company 2 brought me in for an interview, then went silent for a month, then re-contacted me to resume the process after I'd already taken another job. They're a small security startup, and were really busy due to a security emergency that flared up while I was interviewing, and I slipped through the cracks. Understandable in that case, I guess, but good engineers are rarely on the job market for long, and if you're not able to focus, you will have a hard time hiring them. (Unforgivable in a larger company that has full-time recruiters and HR people, which doesn't mean it doesn't happen all the time.)

Re: Ask HN: Ever been hired through a “who's hiring” post?

#68
post #6

I was actually very surprised at the amount of folks that simply didn't respond _at all_ -- meaning not even an _acknowledgement_. The folks that I did hear back from were great, though. Nothing ever actually worked out in my case, though.

That seems to happen everywhere these days - I've sent out several applications recently (non-HN) and had absolutely nothing back, not even an acknowledgement. It says a lot for the professionalism of a company when they can't even auto-respond a receipt, although a personal rejection would always be nice - if you can't be bothered to say you're not interested, why should I be bothered to apply ?

Founder here. I used to reply to every applicant individually because I couldn't believe someone wanted to work for my startup. But then that got to be burdensome so I set up a reply template, but even then people would reply to the template and continue the conversation. Then my co-founder pointed out that spending lots of time replying to everyone wasn't a good use of my time.

Point is it's nothing personal. If you're not getting replies, try to stand out more. Don't just send a resume, send a GitHub link to a project that's relevant to the company.

I get a dozen resumes a day (not joking), so give me a reason to not hit "Archive" immediately.

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