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Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

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Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#131

Post by fraaancis »

kdamica wrote: post #24

The reality is that the vast majority of startup hires are referrals. For hiring managers, having someone you trust tell you that they've worked with a candidate and vouch for them is invaluable, especially when the company is at a stage that you don't have good performance oversight. The cost of a bad hire is immense. My advice: never do a cold application. Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.

Now that I think about it, I never once got a job from a cold application. It was always on either an employee recommendation or having met a family member.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#133

Post by XCSme »

scarface_74 wrote: post #129
XCSme wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator. In my experience, companies tend to avoid people that know or pretend to know too much about the company/vision. I'm not sure why that is, but likely because they want someone for a specific role, not a generalist. They want someone who will be happy doing their job, not have their focus spread across disciplines. In the (really incip…

> You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator. There are tens of thousands of “outstanding coders” and even if you are one of the best, how do you communicate that through a resume to stand out from the crowd? Honestly, most companies don’t need great coders. Historically I haven’t cared about the mission of the company except when I was working for a company that sent nurses to…

Yeah, that's true, it's very hard to stand out or know how good someone actually is through a short CV.

> not the actual business value of what I’m doing Assuming that you are not willingly going to work for a company that does harm (i.e. gambling, borderline scams, etc.), most businesses should actually provide some sort of value to some people (otherwise they wouldn't have revenue).

Yes, working for a medical company who tries to cure cancer is a meaningful mission, but so is for a company creating entertainment (games/movies), educational content or even for companies that simply aid other companies in achieving their goals, or slightly improving people's lives.

I think the least meaningful type of work is actually the one that has a meaningful but unachievable mission. Like "web3 decentralization". Yes, the idea sounds nice, but if it's impossible or impractical to reach the goal, it doesn't really do any good either, or can even turn it into a harmful process.

Meaning doesn't only come from the business goals themselves, but also from the people you work with. You can still find meaning in helping those around you.

I am not disagreeing with you, but I was raised and spent my life being a coder. If my sole goal in life was to help people (instead of enjoying the coding/creation process), I would have become a medic or something with a clear purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#134

Post by pyb »

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #36

I think we need to turn hiring on its head. I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. I'm running https://customizedresumes.com/ as my side project and it shows how applicants can now basically spam job applications. It's only going to get worse for hiring managers.

You described Linkedin?

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#135

Post by drillsteps5 »

heurist wrote: post #58
TheGamerUncle wrote: post #7

I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees. Most notable offend…

Not a YC startup, but jobs I've posted recently had over a thousand applicants in the first few weeks. I post multiple places, including HN. There's a huge culling process to find the 20-30 most applicable candidates, then to narrow down from there to the 1-2 that fit best. The best way to stand out (for me) is a real application not written with AI. Everyone uses AI now and it all sounds the same. Express your hones…

Just an FYI: every single career/job search coach I've worked with or read advises either to use a generic cover letter (basically referring the reader to the resume) or to skip it entirely.

RE: "the enthusiasm" part, you obviously decide who you hire as a hiring manager, but you might be overlooking a LOT of qualified candidates if you're looking for "enthusiasm" on the resume...

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#136

Post by drillsteps5 »

themanmaran wrote: post #42

As a YC company that is currently hiring, yes! And all of the YC companies I know are also struggling to find engineers. But the job listings (HN, WorkAtAStartup) practically never bring in good candidates. A few big problems: 1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated…

> 1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

This is what it takes to get through the filters/recruiter search. In majority of the organizations the first line of defense is the recruiter who has a limited knowledge of the job responsibilities, technologies involved, etc. They employ various search techniques in their ATS (lately enhanced by the various LLM tools) and whatever resumes come up in the keyword search will end up in the pile presented to the hiring manager. This is especially true now when volume of resumes is in hundreds, you can't just go through all of them manually. So the only way to get through the first stage is to create resumes to fit the LLM/keyword search...

EDIT: I've been seeing more and more of these disclaimers when I submit an application: "We use Machine Learning for an initial comparison of resumes against the education, experience, and skills requirements of the job description." Check here to out out of this analysis.

So candidates tweak resumes to match the requirements (likely) with the same LLM that will be checking the resume match to the same requirements. Why is this surprising?

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#137

Post by drillsteps5 »

ceroxylon wrote: post #9

It is a complicated scene right now. Bots are taking over on both ends, both in creating and interpreting resumes. Companies can have ulterior motives for posting job ads in many directions, including just scraping data. My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms fo…

> My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users.

Was this not the sole premise of LinkedIn? Then they were acquired by the M$ and investors demanded ROI, and it turned out being honest (ie, demanding users to be honest in job postings and job applications) is not a profitable business model.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#138

Post by fallingknife »

muzani wrote: post #130
heurist wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a mission driven organization so I pay more attention to that than other companies might. Regardless, a little authenticity and enthusiasm can go a long way. The bar is low.

Drop a link if it's still open. Mission driven orgs sound fun.

Be warned that "mission driven" often means above market workload for below market pay.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#139

Post by LittleTimothy »

scarface_74 wrote: post #85
LittleTimothy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes total sense for a startup to be highly selective. But being overly selective at the CV/application stage is dumb. If they really do have some really highly specialized requirement that should be on the advert. If they don't then being having a high rejection rate at the CV screen stage is going to be easy - it's easy to reject people, but you're overwhelmingly likely to screen out the few candidates that are…

If you are getting thousands of applications, you have to be selective at the application stage.

If you're getting so many applications that you have to apply such a harsh screen that you're likely losing most of your good candidates via false negatives then you shouldn't be soliciting more applicants to apply. This is what this thread is about - if you're saying these guys are getting so many applications they have to start just brutally cutting CVs almost arbitrarily then they definitely shouldn't be posting on HN about their vacancies. Not least because they're poisoning the well.

This is a real issue - I once got approached by a recruiter for a company, it was a good fit, I think I would've walked the interview and been a great hire - I'd heard of them before. The founder had acted like a dick head to one of my friends, I just immediately turned it down. There is a cost to very publicly treating people poorly. People don't seem to understand that these things that big companies might get away with due to scale, smaller companies cannot. People talk.

Re: Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

#140

Post by zachthewf »

jjice wrote: post #98
IshKebab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you got no viable candidates presumably you aren't offering enough money, or are offering "competitive salaries"?

I bet there were definitely some viable candidates in there, but I don’t think we had the resources to properly screen with the volume we got, so unfortunately, we didn’t get to sit down with them.

What company are you at? I've been working on a product to solve this problem.

If you're up for a chat my email is on my page here https://www.zachocean.com/contact/

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