https://weeve.co - they're doing video screening for the application process
Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#42Being employed is ultimately a human relationship, and hiring is about starting that relationship and ensuring it works for both parties. That means listening to and understanding the needs of both; and in the IT world, some of these needs are very much about tech. As obvious as it may sound, many recruitment agencies don't understand it. I'd even go so far as to say that recruiters who don't know shit about the tech that is fundamental to the jobs they recruit for are a sad norm.
Disclaimer: I work at works-hub.com. I don't want to make a sales pitch, but I'll just say I think we're an exception to that norm.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#43The current issue is that most of the effort is done by humans right at the beginning of the process: CV screening & first calls.
If you're a recruiter, by the time you actually get to talk to a candidate, you're tired of screening and most of the time you do a half-assed call.
Plus it boggles my mind how very very few companies train the recruiters in understanding the technologies they have in their stack.
There are a lot of factors that add an incredible amount of friction and make it a very asymmetric process (as other have said above):
• plain human error • job specifications with boilerplate text not being clear on what the role actually does • often times the people doing the first screening don’t have a technical background • resumes come in all shapes and formats, so it’s difficult to efficiently read them
And because of that asymmetry and supply-demand ratio, it’s actually quite hard to hire software developers that are suited to a company, tech environment & business needs.
(disclaimer, I work at WorksHub)
The way we're trying to solve the issue at WorksHub is by trying to get companies to open-source same part of their code-base so that a developer could submit a few PRs during the interviewing process.
This solves the issue of irrelevant technical interviews, gives an idea of how your coding environment will be right off the bat.
Basically the thing is to do as much of the process as possible using only tech and then leave the last part for the actual human interaction.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#44I'll reiterate a desire for someone to actually make an OkCupid for Hiring. Both sides answer questions and get matched. (If this exists please let me know)
We tried at Intern Avenue, hammered it for 5 years. IA was a startup which created a self-service platform to find an ideal early-stage talents (interns and graduates) for businesses, using machine-learning. We had a good success and high retention rate at smaller size businesses, especially in non-STEM sectors, such as marketeers or journalists.
We made many mistakes, but the biggest one was to assume that the recruitment decision makers in medium-size businesses are interested in the hiring process. That's not the case. We had to realise, for these internal recruiters hiring is a pain, an extra mile above their day-to-day responsibilities. Hence they hire recruiters. You can't apply ML on the behaviour and preference of the recruiter and expect an optimal output for someone else.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What specific information do employees not have? I'm co-founder of https://www.Levels.fyi / https://www.Comp.fyi which we built specifically to tackle information asymmetry in the job-seeking process. Would love to get feedback on how we can expand information we collect: hello levels fyi
Personally, I never really trust any of these sites because the all claim to have good data, and yet they all report pretty wildly different salary ranges for similar jobs. I have absolutely no idea if I'm actually being paid a reasonable salary, but honestly it's something that's important to me at my current stage in my career.
The reason you're seeing wildly different ranges is because salary varies wildly.
Speaking as a manager, I've seen 2x differences in comp for the same position and relative experience, at the same company.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#46For the past few years, I've mostly been on the employer side of this, recruiting engineers in my teams with a brief period where I had to find a job. It plain sucks. As the hiring manager, I wish I didn't have to deal with recruiters and their 20% fee. But sourcing candidates and reaching out to them is painful too. OTOH there is too much noise in applications that come through your job board/career page links. Usin…
I know this is probably more specific to devs, but what if you could work on an open source issue, get paid for it, and that also counts as an application to that company?
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#47Related,
But I've had to do a lot of hiring over the years for low skill labor work (think warehouse type jobs) using indeed.com, which constitutes a large majority of out-of-house hiring (about ~50% global average). I've been doing UX/UI case/workflow studies for years as the employer. At my current job, I've funneled and optimized the entire process using copy-paste templates and calendly links. What took me several hours takes a few minutes now.
On the other end I started to slowly transition into full time development. I've been running an experiment with linkedin on lead generation. My hypothesis is that linkedin's algorithm for showing which candidates show up on recruiter's pages is exactly the same as SEO. If anyone is interested I can provide more information.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#48Most companies who are trying to 'improve' recruitment are coming from outside the industry and are tackling it with an engineering mindset. It's an easy trap to fall into, as it seems like a simple two sided marketplace, however that is not the case.
It needs to be approached more like legal tech, with experienced recruitment professionals working alongside engineers. The complexities, nuances and psychological factors need to be understood. There's a reason recruiters are so expensive after all.
All the companies you have mentioned above just quickly built a simple marketplace and then advertised them like crazy to gain users, they never actually solved the inherent problems within recruiting.
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#49I've tried all manner of things, on both sides of the equation. In the end I don't think a big company can do it, and I don't think a small company can scale it. It's a classic market for lemons problem on both sides. And to make matters worse you now have massive cargo culting of Google's hiring practice across the board, leading to job interviews turning into a hugely expensive, time sucking endeavour and the signa…
"market for lemons" is a great term, just in case people aren't aware of it.
I was introduced to it by this good piece on Medium: https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-all... (I'd appreciate if anyone posted links they like better).
I'm not sure I understand it applying in this case. Bad candidates are always looking for a job, but good candidates rarely need to look for a job. (So, job applicants are largely lemons). Good companies have lower turnover, so rarely need the positions filled?
Re: Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting?
#50I've tried all manner of things, on both sides of the equation. In the end I don't think a big company can do it, and I don't think a small company can scale it. It's a classic market for lemons problem on both sides. And to make matters worse you now have massive cargo culting of Google's hiring practice across the board, leading to job interviews turning into a hugely expensive, time sucking endeavour and the signa…
"market for lemons" is a great term, just in case people aren't aware of it. I was introduced to it by this good piece on Medium: https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-all... (I'd appreciate if anyone posted links they like better). I'm not sure I understand it applying in this case. Bad candidates are always looking for a job, but good candidates rarely need to look for a job. (So, job applicants…
I think it dates back to Joel, here's another good take on it: https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/