Do you prefer Angelist over LinkedIn for hiring? | Hacker News Reader

Do you prefer Angelist over LinkedIn for hiring?

30 pointsPrakashBhatta16 comments

I have the complete opposite experience with both. I live in Montreal. On LinkedIn, recruiters are spamming me weekly, so when I was looking for a job I just picked the one with the most human sounding message. I had the first job offer one week later.

On AngelList I was applying to companies myself and did two interviews with locally based startups. One of which was basically hipster central and turned me down after the interview because their highest developer pay was lower than my previous salary. The second one I interviewed at was Hopper, which I abandoned because their interview process is too long and drawn out for a startup. If I wanted this experience of probable rejection after months of interviewing, I would just apply to Google.

The only impression I got was that LinkedIn lead me to real businesses who have an immediate need for devs. AngelList has startups with an inflated sense of self-importance who wish they were in San Francisco.

I agree totally, one thing I've noticed lately from AngelList is that your request gets accepted and emails are shared but you never hear from them again or hear things like "I thought you're in the US".

I'm having a feeling this might be another way of collecting emails

Mixed feelings - LinkedIn has great searching features for when you need something specific, but when you post ads, you get a ton of crap.

AngelList isn't as great for specific filtering, but you get alot more targeted incomming requests when you post a job

I really don't like either.

I don't like LinkedIn because I got a bunch of spam candidates. I also dislike that it doesn't force job posters to disclose salary expectations before hand -- this is inefficient. (From an applicant perspective, I do like how easy LinkedIn makes snapping in a resume and submitting an application... but I have to wonder if making it fast to apply is really the best metric.)

I dislike Angel List because I have to accept just applicants profiles from Angel List as their application and I like to hit them up with a few basic questions first to save time. (As far as I'm concerned, we don't need another Facebook-for-work type site on top of LinkedIn -- and LinkedIn has already won this battle.)

I like JazzHR quite a bit.

You can set up questions in AngelList I believe, so that applicants have to answer them instead of just saying "I'm interested."

As an applicant I don't give my salary expectations until the last moment. It would be foolish to.

its foolish to believe that applicants should have the right to hide their expectations indefinitely but expect employers to broadcast them to the world.

if you dont want asymmetry in the negotiation process, be a good sport.

Ideally, neither party would offer meaningless pre-interview/discovery numbers and both would be willing to accept nearly any number that made sense after agreeing on the likely quality of the applicant-candidate fit. In practice, neither of those things are true and an early number from a candidate is treated like a late-stage number should be. It's much easier to leave the number out than to try to fix that.

And as an employer, I'm certainly not required to give a number. "Market rate" is sufficient to start a conversation with a serious applicant.

I assume market rate seafood is going to be overly priced, I assume market rate salaries are going to be middling and uninspiring. I wonder why I assume the phrase "market rate" is a ticket to frown town?

First you must fix the asymmetry caused by how employers have a much better data for "what the market will bear."

That's the real reason why employers "should" be expected to name the first figure. It makes the relationship less exploitative.

" I also dislike that it doesn't force job posters to disclose salary expectations before hand -- this is inefficient."

No, it's fair. I'm a fairly talented programmer and if I sense any bullshit tactics based on information assymetry I'm not interested on your offer.

This is the first advice professionals who have no experience of salary negotiations get: don't say the first price, unless you know what you are doing.

That you explicitly expect them to brake this rule does not speak well of your approach to the process.

Of course, there can be some local customs and practices I'm not familiar with.

Job posters, not job seekers

Ah, my bad, my apologies. Sadly I can't delete my earlier comment so I'll leave it there for posterity to document my inability in reading comprehension.

You made a good point re. job seekers though :)

We hired 50% of a 10 person startup team from Angel List, rest from referals, no luck hiring from LinkedIn.

For startups AngelList makes a lot of sense and solves for problems like a wide variance in salary, non existent recruitment pipelines and general match making. Although the candidate pool is much smaller I think it helps keep the search focused. My personal experience with LinkedIn was a lot more spray and pray. LinkedIn does have much better candidate filtering if your looking for something very specific.

It's all about where people hang out. From experience dealing with both I'd say you'll mostly find candidates with lots of experience on linkedin versus angel list.

AngelList = ideal for early stage startups (1 to 20 people)

Linkedin = Larger startups/companies(200 to +10000)

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