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Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

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Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#41

Post by bradfa »

jon-wood wrote: post #32

Primarily I would say use recruiters, either external ones (you'll have very mixed results here, be prepared to sift through a ton of barely relevant CVs), or hire a recruiter as part of your core team. Either way as a small company you're going to get very few candidates who seek you out and decide to apply, the job of a recruiter is to go out and find good candidates for you and then sell them on applying for a job…

I second this, it's been my experience at smaller companies, too. If you can find a smaller recruiter company, generally they have seemed to perform better than the larger name-brand recruiter companies in my experience.

At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire).

No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit.

I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it.

But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#42

Post by nfriedly »

Nextgrid wrote: post #15
jakub_g wrote: post #11

Where are the places that developers show up? On HN and Twitter. Do something to spread awareness of your company. It will be a long journey, but if you don't have $$$ to throw at a problem, you need to find alternatives: - There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month. - Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It ta…

> No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?". This is the reason I don't even bother with permanent roles in startups anymore. Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income. Even worse when they approach me on a platform where they can see my profile & history and infer very well what I currently make and still proceed to pitch me their terrible rol…

Haha, seriously, although to be fair to the startups, it occasionally works. I was getting really burned out at my last job (wasn't a FAANG, but had FAANG-level pay), and ended up joining a startup at ~half my current pay, but way less stress. I am so much happier now.

Also, thanks mostly to equity appreciation, I'm almost up to what my previous jobs starting pay was :-)

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#43

Post by mehphp »

tomp wrote: post #10

> Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution Literally 90% job of a recruiter is browsing through LinkedIn and spamming potential candidates. Easy to do that job yourself, if you invest the time. Also, you'll be able to do the job much better, and will come across as much more genuine to candidates.

And I'm glad they do, I've received a ~40%, ~10% and then ~50% salary increase because of recruiters who've reached out to me.

If you have the skills, you pretty much have your pick of which ones to respond to.

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#44

Post by Varqu »

nfriedly wrote: post #39
Varqu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We run a few developer-dedicated job boards with mandatory salary information (and our own approach to the Joel-Test): - UK: https://devitjobs.uk - US: https://devitjobs.us - Germany: https://germantechjobs.de The audience is growing steadily and the US and UK sites are free to post (but you have to provide the salary)

Looks like there's a typo in your US link, I believe it should be https://devitjobs.us/

Thanks, fixed!

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#45

Post by puuush »

Hi, 5 ppl firm owner/developer here:

- I joined the major slack channels of developers/designers/whateveryoulookforspecialists in the area.

- joined the #workrequests, #jobs, #yougetthepoint channels

- actually read the guidelines of each slack channel and/or talked to the admin to have the right tone of voice, get their feedback, finetune it, etc

- posted the job

- after 1-2 years, specialists still come to us because of the posts

- maintain a spreadsheet so you don't lose track of good people

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#47

Post by Mc91 »

Omie6541 wrote: post #31

I'm not from UK but it seems the story is pretty much the same for small companies. From experience, there's no single place that will just work. Have to keep trying through multiple channels all the time. Here are some ways that we try. - LinkedIn Jobs, indeed etc like job boards - HN (whoishiring), angel.co - technology specific job boards (welovegolang, pycoders weekly etc) - references through current employees,…

> HN (whoishiring), angel.co

I have communicated with companies via both of these methods.

The other suggestions make sense too.

Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

#50

Post by ajb »

One startup I worked for hired good people organically, basically by having a realtively altruistic mission (educational products for young kids) and good PR.

You can be creative about it though. A story: when the startup was small, a maths student applied to work for us as a programmer. They were very smart and had a good personality, but were naive about their very limited programming experience. Most companies would have passed. Instead, the team lead said to them: I don't have time to mentor you, but if you can find another student with good programming experience who I like, and can mentor you, I will hire you both. And so they did. So, a 'pass' was turned into two hires for the price of one.

Of course, this probably only works if you can use new grads, who are all looking for jobs at the same time.

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