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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?

#271

Post by [deleted] »

FLGMwt wrote: post #85
AustinBGibbons wrote: post #71

I am a software engineer at Periscope Data ( https://www.periscopedata.com ), and discovered the company through a Who's Hiring thread, and we have hired at least two other software engineers through HN Who's Hiring since then as well. I was searching for "scala" and they had the word "scalable" :-)

Hah, I have the same problem, but the flip side. I'm searching the "who wants to be hired" posts on behalf of my company ( https://www.rallyhealth.com ). I search "scala" and get excited when I see 20 or so hits, but almost all of them are "scalable"

[deleted]

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

#272

Post by emilburzo »

AustinBGibbons wrote: post #71

I am a software engineer at Periscope Data ( https://www.periscopedata.com ), and discovered the company through a Who's Hiring thread, and we have hired at least two other software engineers through HN Who's Hiring since then as well. I was searching for "scala" and they had the word "scalable" :-)

Hmmm, that's some food for thought... maybe I should stop pushing my HN job search tool[1]

You wouldn't have found your current job if you used it.

[1] https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/

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

#273

Post by [deleted] »

bogomipz wrote: post #241
Mz wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that you probably should not post the names publicly. But it might be appropriate to email the forum moderator a link to your above story and a link to each of the three postings in question as an "FYI" and leave it up to them as to how they wish to handle it. They might well be interested in hearing that specific companies are abusing the privilege to post free job postings once a month.

Thats not a bad suggestion. Thanks. I wish there was an alternative to glassdoor where people could get this type f information out there, both good and bad. I am kind of put off by the whole look, feel and experience of glassdoor. Its a great idea though.

[deleted]

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

#274

Post by cloverich »

maxaf wrote: post #214
TheMog wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it works both ways. You might send out 20 resumes. As a hiring manager - especially when using a "no filter" approach like posting on here (keep in mind that IME people posting jobs on Hacker News are more likely doing "guerilla hiring" and circumvent their HR departments) - I easily get 100+ resumes, and I don't have days to spend trawling through them. I think it was rands of randsinrepose who mentioned befor…

You get 100+ resumes through a "Who's Hiring?" post?! I get two-three in a good month, but more often than not I get nothing at all. That said, I have hired one person through HN back in 2011, if memory serves me right, so this hasn't been all for naught.

Do you have a link to a recent job posting? If so I'm sure you can get some feedback on why that is.

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

#275

Post by cableshaft »

biztos wrote: post #215
cgore wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do the following: 1. look at resume 2. recruiter phone screen, just basic are you a human who knows how to answer the phone, usually 15-30 minutes 3. tech phone screen, 45 minutes 4. half-day in-person set of interviews, some tech and some not And then make a decision, although we'll filter out at each step.

This is interesting. Why not do another in-person half-day? It's been forever since I was involved in on-site interviewing but it used to be pretty standard to have more than one (but usually not more than two) rounds of in-person interactions. The point being: A) avoid "having a bad day" bias on both sides B) not decide too quickly on the "maybe" candidates C) get more senior people in to convince the outstanding on…

2 in-person interviews means twice that an employed developer has to either take a PTO day (for something that might not work out), or lie to their boss for why they need to take a really long lunch. Also a lot of companies fly candidates in to interview (i.e. Google), it'd be really expensive to fly the candidate out twice, plus the candidate is effectively investing at least 2 days for the round trip flight and interview.

Since it's a buyer's market for developers (supposedly, I haven't always seen evidence of that out here in the midwest), a developer that's already employed (and thus, signalling that they're good enough to keep their job, which makes them more desirable to other corporations) isn't going to want to take a bunch of time off for interviews with a single company (especially if they're actively looking for work with other companies too - going through the process with 4 or 5 companies could easily eat up most of my PTO time for the year).

I know I hate to take a PTO day for an interview, and if you made me take two you better be willing to pay me an ass load of money and be doing something I really want to do.

Besides, the interview process is exhausting enough. Since so many companies have intense coding exercises or quizzes you have to practice for (especially since they rarely warn you what you're going to be asked you pretty much have to refresh your entire computer science degree), I may have spent 20-30 hours in my spare time refreshing my knowledge ahead of the interview already. I had a five hour intense onsite interview at Google and I needed a couple days just to recover from the mental exhaustion of it. If I know you're going to do that to me twice, for maybe a 25% chance of getting the job (assuming a handful of other good candidates), I might just not bother altogether.

My girlfriend is going in for her second onsite interview in a couple days, but she's in corporate real estate, and all she had to do to prepare is get dressed and make sure she had her portfolio. The first interview they asked her a bunch of personality questions, some questions about her job history, and looked at her portfolio. If that was as intense as a developer interview was, it wouldn't be AS big of a deal to have two onsites.

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

#276

Post by biztos »

cableshaft wrote: post #275
biztos wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting. Why not do another in-person half-day? It's been forever since I was involved in on-site interviewing but it used to be pretty standard to have more than one (but usually not more than two) rounds of in-person interactions. The point being: A) avoid "having a bad day" bias on both sides B) not decide too quickly on the "maybe" candidates C) get more senior people in to convince the outstanding on…

2 in-person interviews means twice that an employed developer has to either take a PTO day (for something that might not work out), or lie to their boss for why they need to take a really long lunch. Also a lot of companies fly candidates in to interview (i.e. Google), it'd be really expensive to fly the candidate out twice, plus the candidate is effectively investing at least 2 days for the round trip flight and int…

I see your points.

Flying someone in twice probably only makes sense for higher-level positions, though you could always schedule two days of interviews on the same trip. Having already paid for the flight and expenses, you could make an argument for it that most flown-in candidates would I think accept.

(For local candidates, AFAICT the "doctor's appointment" or similar excuse seems pretty easy to manage.)

As to the exhausting Google-style interviews, I guess they're designed as a one-pass filter. Which seems unfortunate -- many people are more compelling on the second pass -- but apparently works pretty well for giant ad brokerages that also happen to do lots of computer-science-y stuff.

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

#277

Post by ryandrake »

emilburzo wrote: post #270
ryandrake wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually working on a fun project that sorts through months of "Who's Hiring?" posts looking for companies posting identical or nearly-identical postings month after month. It'll be called "Who's Not Hiring?" Look for it once I get some free time :-)

That sounds like fun. If you haven't done that part yet, I actually wrote a scraper[1] in Java for the "Who's Hiring?" threads when I built a job searcher[2]. Not the prettiest, but it's pretty fast. [1] https://github.com/hnjobs/parser [2] https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com/

The scraper was the easy part :)

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

#279

Post by Kalium »

imron wrote: post #247
Kalium wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that how much effort a candidate puts into demonstrating token emotional attachment to a job posting is not a great predictor of job performance.

You don't need to demonstrate emotional attachment. You do need to demonstrate that you can solve the problems of the potential employer. People advertising for a job have a business problem to solve. If you can demonstrate that not only can you solve that problem but that you have solved similar problems for other businesses before, then you stand a greater chance of making it through to an interview.

You're right! Cover letters are all about demonstrating value. Cover letters are great for copywriters, marketers, and others whose primary output is prose for humans. In such cases, cover letters demonstrate competence for the job at hand.

However, software engineering is not such a job. A cover letter showcasing a software engineer's ability to author vaguely reality-flavored prose and get past the HR drone doing the reading is not showcasing their ability to perform critical job functions to address business needs. Such an engineer is spending significant amounts of their time to tick a prediction-value-free box on someone else's ill-informed list.

I've literally never had a good experience with a company that wanted a cover letter. I've done it dozens of times. In every single case, with precisely zero exceptions, it's produced no value for me. I've been on the other end of hiring processes as well, and there I've similarly found precisely zero value in cover letters across dozens of cases. Fact-dense and fluff-light resumes are much more valuable.

Code samples? Great! Toy problems? Great! Prose? Not so great.

Do you need help solving the problem you appear to have where you may be misevaluating candidates by measuring them wrong? I have some ideas! It could be costing you the best candidates!

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

#280

Post by maxaf »

cloverich wrote: post #274
maxaf wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get 100+ resumes through a "Who's Hiring?" post?! I get two-three in a good month, but more often than not I get nothing at all. That said, I have hired one person through HN back in 2011, if memory serves me right, so this hasn't been all for naught.

Do you have a link to a recent job posting? If so I'm sure you can get some feedback on why that is.

Here it is! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12847191
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