My company is ~15 and hires (rather successfully) via LinkedIn
Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
91–100 of 148 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, assuming I can get Schengen Visa from another country, is the process easier? I want to immigrate and Norway, Sweden, Finland are my top 3 destination. The thing is, getting visa there is harder. But if getting a Schengen visa would help (probably from France), I'm interested about the process to follow, can we have a chat?
They're talking about changing it, but AFAIK, you can still get a pretty automatic visa for Sweden if an employer wants to hire you.
How is the view towards self taught in Sweden?
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#93Let me give some advice I’ve heard from candidates: post the compensation information! This alone will set you apart, and attract more applicants.
It's not always as easy as that though. The range might be literally £20-80K depending on experience so OK, that helps someone on £100K to know they are not likely (but not impossibly) going to get the same or more salary.
I can't say that is not the case. I have not looked at the data, but that seems wide. Can you really have that wide a spread for a single role? Does that imply something else is wrong?
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#94When I’ve recruited for niche roles, which these are a lot like, I would hyper target with good results. Meaning go after people on a particular team at a particular company, or recruit from people who graduated from a specific program or lab in a school. If you can narrow your search criteria down to a specific set of names, you can often just reach out directly and do a better job at it than a recruiter. Conferences used to be good for this, too, and sometimes meetups.
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#95If you've got time for the long game, consider building your network by mentoring STEM students.
Years ago at a previous job my boss donated a CAD workstation and some CNC time to the local public highschool's robotics team, then coordinated with their supervising teacher to have a couple employees (including me) mentor there one afternoon per week for the school year.
As a mentor, I helped students understand compiler errors, recommended writing a function instead of repeatedly typing the same code, and also gave more advanced advice, like explaining how PID loops could prevent gears from stripping. It was rewarding to see these students both grow and enjoy the learning process.
It also paid dividends for my boss when some of these students applied for summer internship at our company, which eventually led to several excellent full time hires after college, including referrals our interns had made to their fellow engineering students.
While it took a couple years to pay off, those few hours of community service introduced us to quality people that no jobs board could have.
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#96Never done any recruiting, but here something I have noticed in recruitment efforts. Figure out what you really need and how "good" is defined. Good is contextual. My past company spent a lot of time on system design interviewing. Here is the problem. We didn't build anything close to a complex system. We created demos to show off to clients as MVPs. So we left positions open for months until we found the perfect per…
'Figure out what you really need and how "good" is defined.' That would be ideal, but as a candidate, have you ever really met a company that knew what they wanted?
No, but that is part of the reason every company is having so much difficulty right now.
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#97Well… I can share how we get often get 1000+ applicants and end up with a few incredibly talented individuals joining us. I should note: The companies I’m hiring for are not (yet) household names. Most of our employees had never heard our company names before applying. We’re not offering crazy salaries — we just aim for market-rate. And we’re not using external recruiters to help. We have some recruitment costs, but…
That was a great read. Would you hire self-taught juniors? Someone from Africa, Madagascar especially? I'm in a process of switching career trying to get into software development. I'm literally following a course¹ teaching your tech stack, I'd really like to apply to your company when I'm done with it. Covid made remote work the norm, so might as well give it a shot.
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#98We ended up making use of hiring partners (basically consultancy companies) for this. They gave us access to a somewhat vetted candidate pool to interview from i.e. they could skip a tech test stage of an interview process.
Overall it has been a positive experience. It allowed us to scale up our engineering numbers relatively quickly. Potential cons to consider are the culture changes that come with it, the risk of outsourcing too much domain knowledge (direct vs. indirect hires) and potential time zone differences. It has also bought us time to focus on growing our direct hire count, which takes longer.
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you not hire remotely from the entirety of the European Union? Would you consider hiring a web developer with 4 years of experience, of which 2.5 is backend and 1.5 is full stack (HTML, CSS, JS within a CMS)? I am asking because that reflects my situation and I am having a difficult time interviewing with most people expecting 3+ year exclusively in frontend. I have been trying to make a switch from backend to fro…
-We're at the other end of the stack, I'm afraid - Siemens S7 PLCs for the most part; whenever I code I basically write assembly code like it's 1979 - and it will never, ever be exposed to the web if I've got any say in the matter.
No github then?
Re: Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
#100We ended up making use of hiring partners (basically consultancy companies) for this. They gave us access to a somewhat vetted candidate pool to interview from i.e. they could skip a tech test stage of an interview process. Overall it has been a positive experience. It allowed us to scale up our engineering numbers relatively quickly. Potential cons to consider are the culture changes that come with it, the risk of o…
Wouldn't this be vastly more expensive? (like, 2-3x?)