Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?

> They pay 40% above market rate.

In many cases, that is a severe underestimate.

1. Get recommendations to good recruiters. Call people you know who have hired engs and ask them if they can recommend a good recruiter. When I was recruiting a large percentage of my business came from referrals and those relationships tended to me much stronger than random companies we picked up.

2. Recruit yourself. You cant just post a job online and hope for the best. It's like dating. If you make yourself look all nice and go out to the bar but dont talk to anyone you are not all that likely to be approached, assuming you're a male. But if you go and talk to people your chances of having a good conversation go way up.

Recruiting is the same thing. Send messages on linkedin. Send emails to candidates. Recruiting isnt easy but the reason recruiters get paid is because this type of monotonous "sourcing" work is boring and its somewhat difficult to find relevant people. If you don't want to pay someone else to do it then you need to do it yourself.

Those are the big ones. Other optimizations can come from making sure you have a good pitch, email and verbal, about your company and the role. Making sure your website is attractive to folks. Basically look at everything you are presenting to the world and think, "If I knew nothing about our company would I respond to this email?".

Hope that helps.

Finding a good recruiter is probably your best bet if you have multiple reqs open. This is hard. But, while expensive, a good recruiter is worth it in my experience (10s of engineering hires). Pre-pandemic metrics: if you are not getting a hire you are thrilled with in 10 top-of-funnel first interviews something is wrong, but since the market is tighter now your hit rate might go down. You only pay a recruiter if you hire, so make sure your interview process is thorough. This is hard.

If you are requiring in UK, consider remote within a couple time zones.

Digging deep into your company’s network is also important in the early days. I set up a referral bonus to incentivize folks to spend energy outside work hours to cultivate good referrals. $5-10k sounds steep but it’s cheaper than a recruiter so you can be generous here.

I don’t think job postings are useful for a small company. Filtering out cold outreach is very time consuming. Pay a recruiter to do this.

The reason to use recruiters, specially as a small company, is that they do the hard work of spamming everyone with an online profile all the time and have build a database of people who you are looking for. Even for the best candidates, it's much easier for them to reply to one of the many messages recruiters are spamming them instead of trying to constantly search themselves, specially when they are not really actively looking but would switch if an interesting opportunity presents itself.

Of course, you only get the candidates from the recruiters, even from firms which claim to do some screening for you. Recruiting firms usually work on keyword-based matches and decide whether the candidate is good based on a couple of calls with them or maybe they'll throw in a generic persoanlity test or a coding challange. You still have to make your hiring plan, your own screening criteria and interview for it, test them for your requirements and all the rest of the work involved and you have to pay a handsome amount to the recruiter... which is not fair... but unfortunately, that is how it is given the market.

The best way is to find a recruiter who works on success-based business model i.e. they only get paid if the employee ends up working for 6 months, a year etc... so at least you avoid those who will get you the devs, get their commission and immediately start spamming them other opportunities.

Good luck!

My employer (~100 people) uses a combination of job fairs (organized e.g. by local universities), recruiters, LinkedIn, employee network incentives and (social) media advertisements.

Your home page is just one point where you should post job openings. StackOverflow has a jobs board, for example, as do many industry-specific magazines.

Another option is to poach people from advertising and consulting agencies. Many people use them to get a foot in the door of the employment world after university/vocational training and then, once they're sick of having to balance ten projects a day, shift towards one stable employer.