Ask HN: How to fix recruitment ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to fix recruitment ?

8 pointsig16 comments

The three main ways of recruiting seem to be:

1) Job boards 2) Recruiters 3) Via network/contacts

They all have problems: Online job boards haven't evolved in the last decade, searching through them can often be a soulless painful experience.

Recruiters are nearly universally hated, expensive and often adding little value to the process (this isn't true about all recruiters; but seems to be true of the majority)

Network recruiting limits the scope of the search (both for candidates and employers) plus the additional risk of hiring someone because of who they know rather than talent (or rejecting them and damaging relationships).

So what are the alternatives, how can recruitment be improved (from both the candidate and employer viewpoint) ?

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If only I knew the answer to that question...

If one is looking for a specific narrow skillset, the best avenue is to go straight to where people hang out. For example, advertising a mainly perl job on jobs.perl.org. In general I have found that approach to be very high signal-to-noise.

The real problem I find is what to do with "soft" jobs like project management. The situation seems pretty dismal there.

I think this trend we are seeing of employers offering a referral bonus to any of their Engineers who refer a candidate is the /right way/ to solve the problem. Few recruiters are qualified to sort the good from the bad, and Engineers, in my experience, seem to be better at separating the 'I like this person personally' from 'I think this person is professionally skilled' than most, so I think it would be a win-win-win situation, if we could find a way to encourage that; companies would get better people, Engineers who bothered to read resumes and recommend people would get referral bonuses, and skilled people would get jobs.

Now, most larger companies have referral programs in place; the question remains, how do we encourage people to use those programs? how do we facilitate that?

Great question. I have no answers, but some thoughts.

It depends a lot on the job being offered. Soulless job boards are decent when you're looking for fairly fungible workers, but if you're looking for employee #7 at your startup, no way. So a first thought would be that you could do better by focusing on certain types of jobs. You would be able to tailor your recruiting method, and you would also benefit from a marketing perspective.

If it's programming, I think the online-application-form-including-a-difficult-programming-problem route is pretty good. It weeds out those who can't do what you want them to technically, and also those who aren't motivated by solving difficult problems. It's not the full solution, but it gets you a shortlist.

For job boards I've been thinking about one of the talks given at #launch48 a couple of weeks ago where they had a UX designer talking about how websites should be an experience.

The experience from current job sites is pretty awful, when in actuality it should be the exact opposite. Job boards should be pleasurable and fill you with excitement, they should be more like dating sites, full of potential opportunities that'd you'd love to take.

Although how you build a job site like that is a tricky problem, because you have to get the companies posting the jobs to stop being soulless.

One potential solution: a job board needs to focus on being a place where the potential employees show off. Recruiters (or other employees) can go /find/ people they like rather than waiting for people to come to them.

If I may self-promote: the application-form-compatible programming-problem bit is exactly what I'm trying to solve with http://codeboff.in/

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