If this doesn't let you skip the whiteboard interview, it sounds like just one more step in the terrible process of interviewing for engineering jobs.
Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
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Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#42cronyism institutionalized?
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#43Usually when someone asks me for a recommendation, I ask them what kind of skills they are looking for and their preferred contact info, and then if I have a friend who might be interested I send my friend the contact info of the person hiring. So maybe you might want to consider flipping your process. Make it so I can see what skills the companies are looking for and then make it easy to send a message to my friend…
Interesting. So instead of recommending your friends, you would be recommending best-suited companies to your friends? I have seen a few of my friends do that when they are helping someone with a job switch.
Exactly. Then I don't have to give up my friend's contact info without permission.
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#44If this doesn't let you skip the whiteboard interview, it sounds like just one more step in the terrible process of interviewing for engineering jobs.
Thanks for that feedback. Yeah, that's one of the major aspects we are focusing on (we are not 100% there). Especially since we work with early-age startups and founders directly in most cases we theoretically can do that. It might take sometime to build that trust though
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. So instead of recommending your friends, you would be recommending best-suited companies to your friends? I have seen a few of my friends do that when they are helping someone with a job switch.
Exactly. Then I don't have to give up my friend's contact info without permission.
Thats good point.. what was the name of that company that shared the candidate assessment data with companies without their permission?
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#46Is there no danger of collusion among reviewers? Can negative reviews come back to haunt the reviewer? Or are users only asked for positive reviews (i.e. silence being the most negative review possible)?
Yes, there is that danger but we have not seen that happening as of yet. Users are only asked for positive reviews
If you are successful, then next I suggest you will be following in the steps of vendors offering online reference checks, e.g xref, checkster.
You will need all sorts of fraud detection, e.g multiple reviewers all coming from the same ip, and your customers will pay for that security.
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#47[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#48As much as I'd like to give this a go, my findings so far is that recommendations from anyone you don't fully trust already are as broken and prone to gaming as any other indicator in the job market. As (almost) always, it's so ubiquitous that the German language even invented a word for that fact: "wegloben". Loosely translated as: praising someone away. Why is it broken? Because while it's certainly possible that s…
It is an excellent point and very similar to the experience we had seen when we first started with this approach. We have seen that once financial incentives and limits on no of people whom you can recommend, were introduced, people were not just praising anybody and everybody. Another interesting phenomenon we see is that people don't generally recommend people from their current emplpoyer, they generally do from pr…
Let's say that you think highly of Ivan, who works at FooCo as a C++ developer.
When Ivan starts recommending Paula for her C++ skills, and Paula used to work at Bar, LLC where Ivan used to work, you can trust that to a certain extent.
When Ivan recommends Istvan for his Haskell skills, and they've never worked together, Ivan's recommendation might be worth less (he's doing a favor for a friend) or worth more (Ivan is recommending the leader of a local Haskell User Group.)
When Ivan recommend Maura for C++ skills, and Maura works at FooCo, that could mean:
Ivan sees Maura as a threat or an irritation and would like her to go elsewhere - low value
Ivan is getting ready to leave FooCo and is pre-emptively arranging exits for people he likes - medium value
Ivan is getting ready to leave FooCo and is trying to do as much damage as possible on the way out - high value
Ivan sees that FooCo doesn't have a place for Maura to grow and wants her to thrive - high value
People are complex.
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#49When I "vouch" for a friend, what happens on the friend's side? Am I opting them in to getting email(s) from weekday? If so, that seems slightly odd that I'm going through my top 10 friends on linked-in, vouching for them so that they are now going to get some a cold email(s), but I have no insight if those 10 people are looking for jobs and want this email at all. I'm pretty much saying to my friends "Hey, I just ga…
The recruitment industry has always had parallels to dating.
We have two parties who don't want their time wasted, but want to get together as quickly as possible if it's a good match, while maintaining their dignity and their privacy.
The industry is permanently grappling with ways to make this process scalable. The road is littered with the dead hulks of companies that felt like they had cracked the code. Yet still a huge chunk of the industry belongs to plain old middlemen - recruiters - or even to word of mouth and other age old human behaviours. That reflects the fact that so far, no-one has really cracked the code, and there is often still benefit to both parties in having someone in the middle.
All of the questions that you ask are totally valid and can be viewed as just part of the dance of bringing job and talent together.
My personal belief is that the solution is out there, it's just quite complex (human are complex). It probably involves:
- karma of some kind (randos can't arrive and start pushing their friends/colleagues in front of employers without restriction)
- rate limits (if you've put forward 20 people, maybe you need to slow down until some of them have been "processed")
- candidate care limits (employers probably can't access more "candidates" until they have courteously dispatched any existing ones by hiring them or providing a formal rejection, ideally with feedback).
- saving face (graceful ways for candidates to be told their salary is out of whack, for them to push back on referrers who are spamming them out too widely, for employers to make candidate feel they were a good second place, as opposed to a failure, etc. etc., all the social lubrication that makes the world go around.
In short, the whole area of recruitment will always be fraught and fought over because there's no much damn money to be made.
But no one IMO will meaningfully "win" in this area until they deliver a platform that has deep, rich set of human-oriented behaviours and functionality that really dig in deep to what it means to be a candidate, an employer, a referrer, and treat everyone with courtesy and (yes) financial reward as required.
Just as StackOverflow became successful because it catered to the exact question and answer communication patterns that are suited to programmers seeking help, some recruitment platform will succeed because it caters to the communication patterns that are associated with gigs finding talent and talent finding gigs.
Source: many years spent building corporate recruitment systems.
Re: Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) – Hire engineers vouched for by other engineers
#50When I "vouch" for a friend, what happens on the friend's side? Am I opting them in to getting email(s) from weekday? If so, that seems slightly odd that I'm going through my top 10 friends on linked-in, vouching for them so that they are now going to get some a cold email(s), but I have no insight if those 10 people are looking for jobs and want this email at all. I'm pretty much saying to my friends "Hey, I just ga…
The recruitment industry has always had parallels to dating. We have two parties who don't want their time wasted, but want to get together as quickly as possible if it's a good match, while maintaining their dignity and their privacy. The industry is permanently grappling with ways to make this process scalable. The road is littered with the dead hulks of companies that felt like they had cracked the code. Yet still…
> My personal belief is that the solution is out there, it's just quite complex (human are complex). It probably involves: [...]
I'd say, anything that helps connect people in genuine relationships without getting in the way.
... which is not easy, since relationships aren't easy. Many of the features you mention (karma, rate limits, care limits) seem to be trying to limit the downsides of failing to cultivate genuine relationships.