Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

Anecdotally, as someone with three kids I'd much rather do a take-home 4 hour assignment than the usual round of interviews since I can work the former into my schedule however I like.

If you're having this problem, your first step is to get the recruiter out of the process. Start screening all resumes yourself.

I've had some bad experiences with recruiters, both in-house and otherwise, and I feel they usually get screenings wrong. But there's an even more important reason for you to take over this process now: you don't know where your dropoff is.

You need to get familiar with what's going on. Are you not getting any good resumes? If so, then the problem is your outreach. Are you getting lots of great resumes but they drop off after the first call? Then the problem is your sales pitch on the call.

If it's your responsibility to fill this position, then it's time to get your hands dirty in the data and figure out where the problem is.

Without more data on where you have dropoff, these are my takes on your process:

- The other commenters in this thread are right: the 4-hour assignment is likely a huge issue. I'd be shocked if you didn't have a huge dropoff there. There's no incentive for senior engineers to do this type of thing, because so many companies want to hire them. It's better to take your chances on someone who seems good, and be prepared to fire them if it turns out you're wrong.

- You should put a salary range in the job posting. You said "benefits and salary are good", but literally the only reason to not list these things in a posting is if they're not actually that good. You may need to pay more for someone very senior. They may be expecting more -- even substantially more -- than the person who just retired.

anyway, it seems it takes 5 steps to get to the offer.

I am reminded of a thing I had an Accenture a couple years ago where they kept passing me along to people and the last one came with an offer and it was too late, I had just taken another offer.

I would try a 3 step process.

I did one of these after a long day spent deep in the guts of the web framework (Elixir/Phoenix) trying to optimize performance under DDOS on an ad-tech system.

They gave me a codebase with a "REST" API for their mobile client that had some problems and wanted me to spend "4 hours" adding features to it and fixing any problems that I saw.

I made the changes, then told them that the biggest problem was that their REST API was just ad-hoc JSON over HTTP, with ill-defined data and poor error handling. I recommended using GraphQL, which defines the over-the-wire format and error handling, reduces network round-trips, and is "self-serve", avoiding many meetings between front-end and back-end people and increasing dev velocity.

This was too much for them, as they were expecting some changes to put lipstick on the pig. I said that there were other REST-based frameworks that would add standard structure (e.g. JSON API) and support introspection with e.g. OpenAPI.

I got rejected because I "didn't have enough experience with the framework", and "it didn't seem like a good fit". Their "seniors" doing the interviewing were not able to build a system that worked before they ran out of money, and they are now out of business.

I had one take-home "4 hour" assignment that required me to install two different, poorly documented, third party packages on my computer before I could even begin to write the code. The Java-loaded piece of junk that I needed didn't work with my existing setup, and I wasn't going to rebuild my entire system just for some arbitrary assignment. It might have been "4 hours" if I already had an environment with all the extra cruft that they used, but if I had to fart with VMs or rebuild my machine? No, just no.

It's reasonable to expect someone have various languages on their personal boxen, and maybe git, but not repositories, specialized third party tools, etc. I don't run Puppet at home, for example.