Google launches Hire, a new service for helping businesses recruit
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It was developed by Bebop, a company Google acquired last year for $380 Million that was founded by Diane Greene (Founder of VMWare). When Google decided to bring Diane Greene on full time to run Google Cloud, they had to purchase her company in order to facilitate that. Bebop originally had aspirations to shake up the enterprise software space by building a suite of applications, and the 'Hire' app was the first one they produced. Bebop employees have been working on it since then and had a long beta period before the launch today. As noted in the TechCrunch article, the 'Hired' platform also runs the Google for Jobs website that launched earlier this year.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/04/google-paid-380-million-for-di...
> When Google decided to bring Diane Greene on full time to run Google Cloud, they had to purchase her company in order to facilitate that
Well, that's an expensive hire.
Edit - I am impressed with Diane Greene. She donated all of her take from acquisition of her company - http://www.businessinsider.com/diane-green-donates-150m-to-c...
And now considering the competition from Amazon Prime, I doubt it will move there in the future.
The transition to AWS was completed a little over a year ago and took several years to do.[0]
[0]: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...
Maybe you meant Spotify?
Source: I worked with Snap when I was on the Google Cloud Platform team in 2012/2013.
How do you do that? I figure a mix of bandwidth, storage, and personal targeting ad-tech. Most folks using cloud vendors are upset at the outbound traffic cost, so that probably costs a pretty penny. Especially when CDN and caching layers are pointless.
There must be something I'm missing here. I've seen these kinds of schemes discussed before, but don't understand how they would work.
Can you imagine the optics of an active board member, of a multi-billion dollar company, profiting from said company -- she's on the board of -- buying the company she runs? Good grief that reeks.
She understood she couldn't take that money in good conscience. So, she got out in front of the optics for a small fee by "donating to charity." (I mean look at the comments here applauding her for donating her shares.)
When you donate $150MM in stock, not only do you dodge the $30MM capital-gains tax (at a 20% tax rate), you receive a tax write-off for the full market value of the stock when you donated: $150MM in this case. Which means, in any year, she can take $150MM in income taxed at say 55%, and pay $0 in taxes on it. Much better than the $82.5MM she'd originally owe. And it makes tax planning a lot easier -- you don't have to worry about timing.
All in all: $120MM net - $82.5MM write-off = $37.5MM total cost to her for shares she didn't even want -- for good reason.
Understand that I don't care. But I would've been more impressed if she had donated those shares to her employees...
Effectively she donated a bunch of money to a charity instead of the federal tax fund. Hopefully the charity is more efficient!
55% is greater than the maximum combined federal and state marginal income tax rate on normal income, and no one making that much does it as normal (mainly, labor) rather than long-term capital gains (which pays lower rates) income in the first place, because no one pays that kind of money for labor, you only make it by capital returns, so, no, she can't even in principal, and even if the tax rates were such that she could in principal, she still wouldn't be likely to be able to in practice.
Secondly, you understand that RSUs (restricted stock units) are taxed as normal W-2 income at the time of vesting, right! You pay capital-gains tax on any appreciation in value after said vesting -- should you choose to sell the stock.
You should probably stop spreading misinformation on topics you don't have experience in.
But it is, AFAICT, greater than the maximum marginal income tax rate [0]; since the deduction affects only income taxes and not other taxes on income, it is the maximum marginal income tax rate, not the maximum marginal rate of taxation on income, that is relevant.
> Secondly, you understand that RSUs (restricted stock units) are taxed as normal W-2 income at the time of vesting
Yes, I do. That doesn't change anything I said. People that are making hundreds of millions of dollars of income in a year aren't making it from RSU vesting, or any other source of income subject to regular income taxes.
[0] just barely; the maximum marginal income tax rate in any US jurisdiction seems to be 39.6% federal + 13.3% CA state + 1.5% SF local, or 54.4%.
And sure, use 54.4% instead of 55%. Don't miss the forest for the trees though.
[1]: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/28/google-ceo-sundar-pichais-com...
[2]: http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/14/technology/twitter-omid-kord...
[3]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/googles-sundar-pichai-is-li...
[4]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000130817913...
[5]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000130817916...
A simplified example, assuming one year of income from the shares, and one year of $150mm income from Google.
### Keep the shares:
Year1 = $150 - ($150 * 0.2) => $120
Year2 = $150 - ($150 * 0.55) => $67.5
Year1 + Year2 => $187.5
### Donate the shares:
Year1 = $150 - $150 - $0 => $0
Year2 = $150 - $0 => $150
Year1 + Year2 => $150
The first law of tax is that it is always better to have more money than less money. I could be wrong here, but I can't seem to find a way that you come out with more money by giving it away (ignoring donations to your own dodgy charity). I'm a big proponent of charity giving, but I don't see a way to make it turn a profit.
- https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-09/deutsche-... - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-06-27/texas-bil...
The point was never for her to come out ahead, just less behind.
Why does this matter?
I was simply pointing out that she achieved exactly what she wanted. Better optics. :)
People commending her and commenting how amazing, how selfless, how fantastic it is that she donated all her proceeds to charity.
Understand that her primary motivation in donating was the write-off, not charity.
Otherwise, if she was feeling so chummy, why didn't she instead divide her almost 50% share among the employees that helped build her company? Hint: there's no write-off for that.
Note: She was an active Google board member when they bought her company. That's not how boards are supposed to work generally.
and you consider it bad because she could have chosen paying those 30m taxes and keeping the rest (instead of donating it) ?
The net "loss" to her was $37.5MM for shares she couldn't even use in good conscience in the first place (think team morale, public optics, etc.)
She was an active Google board member when they bought her company. That doesn't exactly look good to the public or to the team.
I saw an interview with Bill Gates where he said much the same thing to a comment about his generosity. He pointed out he doesn't sacrifice a single item/experience he wants in life giving away what he does. And a ordinary person that gives a few hundred gives up more than him in terms of what it costs them.
Its a valid point as long as it doesn't take away from the fact the other is also generous.
Few people giving to charity actually sacrifice their own life experiences to do so. As a result, it seems silly to dismiss philanthropic billionaires. We want more of those, not fewer.
How the world changes, eh?
Particularly because the major players other than LinkedIn basically rely entirely on Google. All Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder do is buy Google Ads and then essentially resells the marketing. This is similar to the situation TripAdvisor is in but generally worse.
The current job boards / job aggregators (the companies above) are terribly unimaginative, generally not helpful and often price gouge companies (if you wondering the what the difference is between aggregator and job board... there really isn't much but one pulls the jobs aka crawls the web for them).
Now the boards/aggregators are trying to become more service based and offer higher value offerings for long term strategic reasons. Indeed is rolling out "Indeed Prime" and I believe Career Builder is offering something similar as well.
So as creepy as it is that Google is in the recruiting space I am optimistic that will finally provide some spark of innovation that is much needed in a very high touch industry devoid of it.
Despite having tons of stores of all sorts (app stores by microsoft apple and google, movies streaming stores like netflix, game stores like steam, ...) no one has truly found a way to solve the discoverability problem that feels really satisfying.
Some are decent, but that's mostly by sending you so many stuff at once that a few are bound to be acceptable, but that doesn't mean they were the best choices for you (eg you buy that game or look that movie, but there are other stuff you would have taken over it if the store had been able to identify them).
Job/recruiting is even harder in that it's a two way attraction, the employee need to convince you but you need to convince them back. Result being, we self impose the same "spam" of propositions by seeing tons of candidate / interviewing in tons of companies, wasting a lot of people time (let's face it, in a big share of interviews either if not both of the parties knows it won't fit after just a couple of minutes).
I have no doubt that companies who are not merely looking for marketing / reselling gimmick have a share of that space to own, Google or not.
I completely agree! After all I'm basically admitting that what my company does (albeit we make company job portals and job marketing tools) is devoid of imagination :) .
But this in part because it is so high touch and is actually a really really hard problem.
> All Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder do
> is buy Google Ads and then essentially
> resells the marketing
> if you wondering the what the difference
> is between aggregator and job board
Actually they all sell additional HR software (I know this intimately well but unfortunately I can't legally go into the details) but just like Google they make most of their money by selling advertising space.
> Generally one pays for the latter and not the former, in fact.
Originally aggregators were like that but Indeed changed that later on. Actually the major difference (and I didn't want to go into it before) is the pricing model. Aggregators charge similar to how Google does.
They have promoted search results and charge based on impressions/clicks.
Job Boards charge like traditional advertising. A flat fee for placement for a certain amount of time.
One thing is for sure none of them provide things for free. The free job postings on Indeed is on the way out (I mean it will always be there but its not how they make money nor does it work that well).
(as a friendly note I recall people do not like when you use the code feature (ie space indentation) for quoting comments.. I don't mind though)
I think it's dangerous, in all honesty. The same goes for Apple/Facebook/Amazon. If they build an ecosystem they shouldn't be able to take advantage of it to build and deploy products.
But where do you draw the line? It's fine when all the available solutions aren't that great?
Personally I don't care if a company built atop of Google fails.
The only thing I care about is consumer welfare, and good quality products + lower prices.
This kind of development is a vertical leap? I don't see it like such... just like I don't see it when Amazon brings their branded products to category's that are doing well.
I don't say Google, Amazon, don't invest in proper tech development - but this kind of development is just to establish themselves deeply at the cost of their user base.
I feel split in this subject honestly - on one side, why can't they leverage something of their own? On the other hand, that's when things start to get shady.
This is because most if not all the jobs come from the companies website. They are a search middleman similar to how Google is for almost everything else. They don't provide an ecosystem like say HN, Stackoverflow, Yelp, etc. In some ways they steal the content.
Sites like Indeed are basically doing the same thing that Google really should have been doing.
Now the boards/aggregators tried to provide "ecosystems" but they could never get it right because when people are looking for the job they are desperate and just don't give a... (or at least that is my theory. its also why linkedin works because its is passive).
I have noticed through our metrics (and I'm biased because we make job web sites for companies that hire) that the best candidates (despite what Indeed says) come from going directly to your website or come from LinkedIn (assuming non referral based).
If you are wondering how then Indeed/Career Builder et al do so well its that its hard to measure actual success (ie source to hire). It should be easy but sadly its not (don't have time for the details).
So what these guys provide is ton of traffic with lots of noise. Traffic that google could have easily provided.
So honestly I think it is sort of good they fail.
There is added value. Indeed, and plenty of other job sites, have done things like quick apply which bypasses the horrific process of legacy ATSs like Oracle's Taleo.
People, in the most general sense, should be extremely concerned if Google -- or any specific company -- gains a market hold on job search / recruiting.
If, say Google and Facebook, or Google and LinkedIn had control of 90% of the hiring vertical they could, in effect, take a large chunk of an employee earnings. How? Employers would have to spend a lot of money just for the employee to know some opportunity exists for them. Big, high margin, corporations would be just fine. Small businesses would be disadvantaged.
This is what has happened with the travel aggregators. Two companies dominate (and own all of the other travel search engines you think are independent.) The big hotel chains can negotiate slightly better deals, the small ones pay full price for visibility.
In a more narrow definition we can see this with on demand work start ups. Uber, Postmates, and others have spend massive amounts of money to recruit workers. Of course as start ups they have time constraints and geography constraints. They need to grow really fast so they pay tens of millions of dollars on buying search ads, display ads, and so on. Perhaps they could grow organically but it would be hard.
A good job search / recommendation would just show users the best economic opportunities for them at this moment. Yes, it would be hard to rank and filter out stuff that looks good but is crap (Maybe Uber falls in the crap category?) However, if someone wants to work, certainly they shouldn't be sitting at home idle because a potential employer didn't spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign. (Those "reach" dollars should be going to workers, not platforms.)
Both from the outside looking in, and from discussions with people who have worked in Google, the overwhelming impression I get is that anywhere outside of a few key areas, it's mostly a bunch of geeks playing with something until they get bored.
Come to think of it I wonder if LinkedIn etc swoop in on the engaging talent as well before the recruiting companies catch wind of them.
I personally have switched to DuckDuckGo, Fastmail, FireFox (the mobile browser is awesome btw), and will replace Android as soon as a viable alternative is presented. Smooth sailing.
The problem with Google, is they are building a repository for themselves, but also for government. Couple that with their willingness to kill products, and you'd have to be insane to trust their services.
That's because, short of sending you a new device, there isn't any way to bypass the theft prevention. Do you have the same complaint about, as another user mentioned, not being able to recover your data when you forget the password to an encrypted drive?
This is a pretty disingenuous analogy. GP did not ask about recovering data from the device. GP asked about starting over from scratch. Most people do have the expectation that an old encrypted drive can be reformatted and repurposed without knowing the key.
The whole point of that is as an anti-theft measure (a stolen device [with a locked bootloader] cannot be factory reset without the original owner's permission). It would be kind of silly if you could bypass that by saying "no look, its mine I just forgot the password.".
Now admittedly, I'm unsure if you need to know the original password, or if you can change the password online and then reset it, but I think the second would work.
As an aside, this I think fits into a trope I see repeatedly (and pretty much only on HN). I'm not making any judgement about whether being privacy conscious is good or bad. But I find it amusing when people state something like "This product is awful because I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX> and then <some product was not useful, and my experience was notably less good than other people>."
Presumably the permission should come _before_ the reset? After the reset, all the data is gone anyway, and asking the password at that point seems pointless since
> I <did something that is incredibly privacy conscious and actively inhibits the ability of the prodcut to track things about me that contribute to a positive UX>
I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
The point, in this case, is not to keep the data secure, but to disincentivise theft of the device. You cannot resell a phone that prevents someone from using the device.
>I read it as - "I did a completely normal thing like performing a factory reset of a consumer device (something that people have been doing for over a decade)"
To be clear, doing a factory reset wasn't the privacy-conscious thing. Using a throwaway google account to set up the device was. The flow in this case is that the phone will say something like "please enter the username and password of the old account on this device before logging in with a new user account." If they knew the password to their old account, there wouldn't be any issue.
I factory reset devices fairly often and so I run into this a lot, and its not an issue because I know the password to the google account that I use.
It doesn't sound like that would have made any difference here (ie. instead of "I have a phone I can't use" the complain would be "I can't remove this old google account from my phone")
And actually, as an anti-theft tool, you don't want that, since you want to be able to remotely factory reset your device in case it is stolen (ie. the find my phone features).
Someone at LG or Qualcomm can definitely fix this easily and it takes about 30 seconds to do so. All it takes is to do a "chip erase" which will clear the QSEE sector and allow a complete factory reset.
Regarding ad-blocking VPNs, I can see why one might be sad to lose these and disagree with Apple's move here. But it's not a privacy decision - it's an ad-blocking decision. VPNs actually focused on privacy, like privateinternetaccess, aren't being removed from the App Store.
Now that Google has the building blocks for businesses - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Video Conferencing etc. - it makes sense for them to get into common enterprise services. This ways they can extract more rent and also provide an integrated/more valuable experience to their customers.
You can easily use Google Suite, but also use Workday (which provides a similar service to Hire).
Use an addon like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-ua-on-...
And you find out that Firefox has no problem rendering the full featured chrome version.
I assume the only reason they do it is so that Firefox for Android users feel slightly inconvenienced enough to remain Chrome users.
And for image search, it does the old page-by-page view versus infinite scrolling which isn't too bad. But the image quality is really low.
Just applying Hanlon's razor here.
Firefox's engine is different and makes many different decisions with regards to implementation detail. Since the web standards rarely constrain things like, say, time to complete a reflow step in mutating a page when a DOM element has its visibility property changed, standards-compliant browsers can make different decisions on these bits of detail that lead to practically very different experiences.
In general, if it works on Chrome it'll probably work on Safari, and it is not guaranteed to work on Firefox, IE, or Edge without further testing.
Obvious problems goes unnoticed: search results page kept burning cpu if I keet it open in desktop Firefox. (Installed an extension to fix it and haven't tested lately.)
It's hard to belive this can happen without anyone caring at such a big place.
At a company that seems to be attracting the best and brightest it is really hard to belive this isn't intentional.
Then again I've been equally wrong before.
Sounds like, based on the descriptions here, they're doing the latter, right? Infinite scrolling on Chrome vs. paged viewing on Firefox, for instance.
Maybe FF just isn't a very good browser? You can be standards-compliant while implementing the standards with performance problems and ugly corner-cases.
This is the same story as when Google made Inbox a "Chrome-Exclusive" that also didn’t run in Safari, Opera, or even fucking Chromium.
It’s just anticompetitiveness.
I find it interesting how a word's proper usage is in a case that it's opposite would work better!
Anticompetitive is the right word in your sentence, of course, but google isn't anti-competitive in this case with firefox. It is ultra-competitive!
Fix it, just like any other website out there.
I say they are applying an Microsoft vs Opera here and I wish EU will take a closer look at them soon.
IMO basic cross-browser compability is something that everyone but the most cash-strapped or pre-beta software should apply for as long as it is publicly available at least.
And for google who earns more than they know what do do with I'd say it is an embarrassingly easy-to-see-through anti-competitive behaviour.
That stripped down version of Google search is why I mainly use Firefox on Android :) You can also avoid AMP results this way last time I tried.
This is most relevant snippet I could find about DDG's founder.
[0] - https://www.eyerys.com/articles/people/search-engine-and-pri...
One alternative that's been around for a while you might like if you want to continue using smart mobile devices is an operating system made by Apple (not Google), called iOS (used to be called iPhone OS but it can now be used on tablets too even some music players like iPods have it).
Just throwing that out there, they have a lot of similar features, but with iOS you don't need to get involved with Google. Check it out, it's definitely a viable alternative.
That is kind of a matter of individual taste. Many people are on the other side, and by the look of it, OP too. He/She is on android.
Indeed, saying something like "much better" is indeed subjective as we don't all agree to it and it's not based on objective facts.
But at the same time it seems so many websites, apps, companies, ISPs, etc. are hoping to track their users much more than before. Perhaps even sell profiles on their users to advertisers or other tech companies.
Apple also seems to be a fairly secretive company. Their products have historically felt more "closed" than Android. Isn't Apple violating user privacy in iOS just like Android? And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
iOS, despite being a very closed ecosystem, is much more privacy-conscious. In addition to being much more resistant to law enforcement and criminal adversaries, it submits far less information about the user to Apple by default.
To be fair to the Android team, almost all of the user tracking and advertisement targeting can be disabled in the system and account preferences. Sure, Google could disregard the user preferences, but that might open up liability for fraud.
Doesn't seem that way. Consider the flak Apple took for standing up for users' rights with the whole Bernardino incident.
And here's a specific example I read about a while ago. When you're using Google Maps, your device is directly identifiable in Google's servers all the time by a unique identification token. When using Apple Maps, your iPhone generates a new token every ~15 minutes and uses that to report position. There is no connection between any two tokens other than location proximity, making it much more difficult to track users directly from Apple's end. (I'd give a source but I'm on mobile, but I think I read about it on Apple's website around a year ago.)
> And if they aren't, shouldn't they be, from a business perspective?
Well, if their business was selling customer data then yeah. But their business is selling cool devices with cool software. Yes, collecting all that data would make some things a lot easier — ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people? — but Apple appears to care about privacy and security enough that they don't engage in these tactics. And... they seem to be doing okay despite it, so I don't think they mind the hit to their piggy banks.
You have some valid points on your post, but praising the inferiority of software based on perceived limitations of increased security focus seems like Apple cult-of-personality type stuff.
Ah, so they're the privacy option because they only collect a lot of data, not gobs and gobs of data?
You can disable Siri if you want.
You don't need to use location-based software.
Basically everything on an iPhone that collects data doesn't need to be used, and when it does collect data it's because it is usually needed.
>We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.
It's entirely possible that, in the near future, a competitor will show up that won't make you choose between the two. However, that time is not now.
Sure, I could text, check email, use open source maps, check my account balances, and play some simple games.
But I've learned both from my BlackBerry which had Android emulation and Kindle Tablet, both of which can't use apps that depend on Google's APIs, a lot of pretty important apps won't work: any maps that show traffic or turn by turn directions, Uber / Lyft, almost all popular social apps like Twitter, Facebook, most popular games, payment apps, dating apps, streaming music, etc.
That's a big loss. Not sure I want to go back to the days of my old Nokia smart phone with Symbian apps or even BlackBerry QNX which had a decent browser.
They seem to have pretty good design chops as well ;)
I just tried to install Firefox on my phone, because the builtin browser regularly crashes.
I browsed one page. It felt like my phone was about to melt. So I'm still using the builtin browser that crashes after fully loading a page.
The regular FF is terrible, but the beta one works OK for me
I realize that they are really big, and with more products, they get more data, but imagine for one second that your goal truly was to help customers and provide them with as many useful tools as possible, what options would you have?
You either make more products that helps people (and end up getting more data), or you don't, stay stale, and end up going down like Yahoo or many other company who don't evolve do.
I don't expect corporations to stop growing by themselves. But consumers can use alternative products, and tech workers can prefer to work at other companies. We can limit the danger that way.
I am a gmail/drive/cal user primarily. I find their services fast, reliable, secure and integrated to a lot of other services.
Sure, they collect and sell my browsing data. But so what? It costs me nothing, doesn't impact my experience (outside of the occasionally annoying ad), and provides them revenue to keep innovating.
I don't really understand the anti-google sentiment that's been brewing lately. Why not the same aversion to apple, microsoft, and amazon? Or is it just flavor of the month?
Personally I'd much rather use Hire over LinkedIn. But I guess it's just one devil for another.
Yes.
I want an economy where we have millions of tiny companies, each doing one thing, and doing that well. Like the German Mittelstand.
One entity would run the marketplace, another entity would do the Amazon Basics products, and AWS would be a third entity.
A single entity controlling the market place, products, distribution platform, and infrastructure just screams of antitrust.
Generally, no company should be allowed to both run a marketplace, and offer products on it.
It isn't easy, but as long as nation states are plausibly more powerful than Google, we—humanity—can hope.
Use antitrust to inhibit moves like the one under discussion.
Use privacy legislation to plug the Google data vacuum nozzle.
Suspend net neutrality in ways calculated to allow ISPs to suck Google dry, while not hurting anybody else too much.
A prime example is the way they now channel so much of Android's data through Google Play Services. The updated permissions model is great if you want to stop third parties creeping on you, but with everything going through Google Play Services, your phone can only give you data if that data first goes to Google. If you don't permit Google Play Services to access your location, not only does Maps pettily default you to the wrong continent but even the Gmail app scolds you for having location data turned off.
Don't conflate 'deliberately invasive' with 'big'.
Maybe the bot could also post an "If you provide a free service, how are you obligated to provide it forever?" response, to save me having to.
Considering this, I switched to Fastmail and removed my Google account from all my browsers. I created a dummy Google account that I only use to set my home address (again, too handy) and to be able to set preferences and have a Chrome profile.
To me, this is the best of both worlds right now.
Google Hire: https://hire.google.com
Google Blog Introducing Hire: https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/google-introduces-h...
If you've quit your job, sold your house / given up your apartment, moved all your stuff to a new city, then on your first day at your new job they hand you a stack of documents to sign including some (like non-compete agreements) that would have significantly influenced your decision to accept the job offer, then the employer has a great deal of leverage to get you to sign those documents.
It would be nice if this kind of information were more readily available in advance to people considering job offers.
So the trick with that idea, and I think it's a valuable one, is how to monetize it. Companies that do recruiting are paid by the companies. Who would pay the companies that work for the developer / contractor?
1: One small company that threw one of these at me three months into my employment nearly caused me to quit. Its NDA forbade me from working for 1 year for any employer that engaged in any metrics-related work - I will let you savor the broad toxicity of that statement. I objected strenuously and was able to get an adjustment to the terms.
Ever since then, I've told companies that in order to consider their offer, I also need details about their benefits and copies of anything that I would need to sign as a condition of my employment.
I haven't had that many jobs, but so far no one has said no.
Would love to hear experiences from someone who has for example tried both Workable and Lever.
It's a slick web application along the lines of the fanciness of Asana's interface.
What it isn't is a sane applicant tracking system. It doesn't reliably notify you when candidates apply. It supports virtually zero job board integrations. It very much wants you to adapt to it, with very little support for the other way around. The interface is over-complicated to the point of being unusable for anyone who isn't committed to spending hours a week in it.
I have never used an ATS that I actually liked, but the failings of Lever make it pretty special in terms of ATS hatred.
It isn't particularly expensive though, despite their opaque pricing. Most ATSes seem to price ~10 open reqs around $300/mo or so. Where the real expense comes in is usually the job board listing fees -- but since Lever barely supports any job boards, you don't have to worry about that!
And to be honest I have always been very turned off by their boastful "We only hire 50/50 Male/Female developer team." It's so in your face, it's like "why not hire the best person for the job?" Or when I see their internal job ads here, its like "Gee, I wonder if this is for a Male engineering role or a Female engineering role," or "Hope they didn't hire a bunch of dudes last week."
So for a variety of reasons I am an anti-advocate for Lever; I will never have business with them and I have successfully pointed several companies to better ATS.
Here is the job board integration from Lever [1], taken directly from my Lever account.
Here is the job board integration from JobScore [2][3][4], taken directly from my JobScore account. I wouldn't say that JobScore is necessarily all that great either, but it does certain basic things that Lever has punted on.
And yes, that's right. It took me 3 screenshots to fit all of the JobScore integrations in.
Granted, Lever does have a lot more sourcing firm integrations, but that isn't my use case and it doesn't provide value to me.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/cf8njn0v0m0hm7e/Screenshot%202017-...
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ad31qzmj5gxnp1/Screenshot%202017-...
[3] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfk6kx18666pqzv/Screenshot%202017-...
[4] https://www.dropbox.com/s/f429p5r8c2z4uui/Screenshot%202017-...
I actually disagree with most of what you're writing and I've been on it nearly full-time for the past few months. Lever has been awesome, coming from Greenhouse. It's also a much newer product, so as another commenter pointed out, it sounds like you missed some of the features that might have been more recently added.
This has been a recurring, long term problem with Lever -- and my company has used it for 3+ years (and still does, although we are finally transitioning off). It's to the point where it's someone's job to log into Lever every 2-3 days and nag hiring managers to respond to applicants -- and the hiring managers almost never know that they have applicants based solely on Lever.
Lever's preferred use case is also to have full access to Google Apps e-mail accounts, to provide end-to-end e-mail capture for when you talk to candidates. In theory maybe I want that behavior, but I really don't want to grant that control.
I'm glad that Lever works for you, but it really doesn't work for me. Using it is honestly one of the biggest mistakes we made as a company, and it's irrational that we stuck with it for so long (out of a sense that all ATSes suck so what's the point). It's never worked well for us, and it is fundamentally not the right product fit for us. I'm surprised to hear that it is the right fit for anyone, but it sounds like you have had a very different experience with it.
For my company, I can say with certainty that we have missed out on candidates, had an overall harder time in the hiring process, and had a MUCH harder time sourcing candidates due to its poor job board integration. That said, if you like Lever, don't let me stop you from continuing to like and use it.
The web UI is a bit old fashioned, and there's less functionality in some respects, but I find it easier to accomplish the basic tasks in. Really the only thing that I miss from Lever is the ability to go directly from one candidate to the next.
I haven't heard any complaints from the recruiting team either, so it seems to work at least reasonably well for them too.
They might not have integrations with other job boards, but as someone interviewing, I prefer that since Lever had the best application interfaces of any job application site.
Recruiterbox is good and has upfront pricing. Jazz is decent as well. We use Jobvite ourselves and like it.
I wouldn't say Greenhouse is great software, but it is certainly preferable to Lever, in my view.
Appreciate your feedback! As you've discovered, many B2B companies that primarily sell via inside or field sales do not post their pricing directly. Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful, because these products do have very different capabilities. We provide a consultative sales approach, listening carefully to what a prospect is looking to achieve with their talent acquisition strategy.
Lever's products are different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with referrals, sourcing, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.
We recently posted a piece describing how the Shopify team has used Lever to grow from a a few hundred to over 1900 employees. Sourcing was a key part of their strategy. https://www.lever.co/blog/how-shopify-revolutionized-proacti...
It is helpful and advantageous for the vendor only, which is why customers are so turned off by it.
Which you can easily list, with the prices next to them.
Look, I have never, ever, ever found it more helpful to talk to a sales person than to see an actual price sheet. Never. If I don't like the price, but it's just outside my budget, I can call you and see what you can do. If it's so far outside of my budget, then talking to you is a waste of both your time and mine.
You know far more about your needs and are able to evaluate how well software would solve them, and the salespeople you've talked to haven't been worth the time....and that's not normal.
You'd be shocked how bad most people are at evaluating software, especially when it's highly technical. Most people don't even know what a reasonable budget is, what their biggest problems are, what would fix them, and what software is actually doing -- so they rely on cheap self-service products or just take marketing speak at face-value and hope for the best.
And a good salesperson is worth their weight in gold. If you're one of those buyers, salespeople should be much closer to an interviewer or consultant for them: approaching sales calls like research to uncover needs you didn't know you had, introducing you to best practices, and tailoring advice to your specific situation. Their goal is to find a mutual fit and stand by the quality of their solution (and should recommend competitors' products if you wouldn't be happy with it)
Yes, they absolutely are, for both the client and the company. But you have no way of knowing if $randomNewSaas you're looking at has good sales staff or not. A bad sales guy can screw both. Recently we've had an experience with one Name Brand Vendor where the sales guy is promising things that the company doesn't really deliver; for example, we purchased an old bundle at his suggestion and then get sent automated demands to reduce our capacity because we're in excess of what we pay for (even though it's within the capacity of the old bundle).
Good sales staff are excellent value-adders, but far from all sales staff are good.
https://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/google-paid-380m-to-buy-b...
And while I generally have a good opinion on them, a product like this just seems like a step too far and risks threatening the trust users have in them.
It would probably be illegal for an employee to do this though without Google's consent; wasn't there a case of a few Chase(?) employees trading on credit card data and being fired and prosecuted?
If a company used Google Apps for their business email and someone at Google found out about a merger by reading about it in an email that they got from the CEO's email, that would be insider trading because the CEO is an insider and would have had a reasonable expectation that Google would keep their email confidential.
On the other hand, if the CEO by mistake sent an email about the merger to someone who used Gmail who was not an insider, that would not be insider trading because the person who had the expectation of confidentiality was not an insider.
> How we use information we collect
> We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads.
[...]
> We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.
I don't think trading for profit on information a user would reasonably expect to be private (search history, browsing history, email) could reasonably be construed to fall into any of those categories, however the definition of "services" in "develop new [services]" is a bit of a joker. Google Hedge Fund anyone?
In the G Suite contract, do customers indemnify Google from damages above a certain amount for privacy breaches? I haven't seen the T&Cs, just the privacy policy.
> In the G Suite contract, do customers indemnify Google from damages above a certain amount for privacy breaches?
I don't see how they wouldn't.
As such, they do not have "enormous troves of trojan horse data" as they are not allowed (by their own terms) to use it for anything unrelated to the company itself.
Google knows more about worker habits than employers. They know more about your city than your municipality. Etc. Etc.
Do the principles and policies you know of have some kind of ethics angle, or is it just about the (quite real) risk of bad PR that could harm the magic cookies driving the ad business?
What has worked is to do everything in GitHub.
We wrote about it a few years ago [1] and should probably write an updated version of our approach, but in a nutshell;
- When candidates apply through our online form on our website or via email, we create a GitHub issue and assign it to the right person on our team.
- Everybody on the team gets to see who's applying and can easily take part into the discussion.
- We wrote a few small Chrome extensions that act as helpers for managing applications. For example Gdocs Preview [2], which allows us to display the preview of attachments (i.e. resumes) in the GitHub issue directly.
- We've added some automation with Zapier [3] (and some Python) to do things like;
- Automatically close an issue and email the candidate if we label the issue as "To reject",
- Automatically pull email answers from the applicants in the issue thread,
- Automatically send an email asking people to book an interview time with Calendly [4]
- ...
The main benefit is that there is virtually no friction for team members to help out with recruitment and share their opinion.
It's also part of our on-boarding to point new employees at their recruitment issue; they get to see what we discussed and how we perceived them through the process.
[1]: https://wiredcraft.com/blog/github-as-your-recruitment-platf...
[2]: https://github.com/Wiredcraft/gdocs-preview
[3]: https://zapier.com
[4]: https://calendly.com
Why did they not stick? What were they doing wrong?
Fun times ahead.
Facebook ads allow incredibly narrow targeting, including race, age, gender, and interests across hundreds of dimensions.
I've never looked at a Google Ads console, though. Maybe they allow similarly narrow criteria.
Given this, "Hire" is (or could become) a trojan horse into replacing the network effect that LinkedIn has created.
LinkedIn definitely has very rich resume data.
Most of the time people don't want to post this on LinkedIn as its too public of a space to go about bragging of your achievements at employer X. With this system, Google basically has a window into this more specific information.
In non-technical fields, taking candidates through a face-to-face interview tends to be the best way of gauging grit, creativity, motivation, fit/compatibility, etc. That's especially true if the job specs are still fluid. In that case, a face-to-face interview lets both sides play around with the job description a bit.
Google is supremely good at coming up with engineering solution to engineering problems, and its decision to build an applicant tracking system is encouraging. But Google also is a bit prone to taking the same approach, no matter what. If we're talking about the full sweep of candidate assessment, that isn't an engineering problem.
If all of the important information doesn't fit on one page, in a way that is nicely organized and looks good, then it is not a resume.
Nobody should ever print out their linkedin profile and then hand it to a recruiter.
Seems to work for a lot of people.
Yes, you CAN do it, and some people indeed do, but my opinion is that this is a poor idea because the service isn't optimized for it.
I won't be using Hire to host my resume that's for sure.
Why is this ok?
"Based on your profile in Google Hire and your interest in SpaceX launches, you may be interested to know that a job opportunity is available:
> NASA
> Monte Carlo IV&V Analysis
> Colcord, WV, [9] miles from your home, [15 minute] average commute time.
(... the user has received this message because NASA has put out a job ad using hire and has specified that among the skillsets they're seeking is mathematics and engineering and among the interests that might be related are SpaceX, Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance, etc.)
My Mate laughed it off and mentioned maybe if they didn't pay poverty wages.
Can we stop sharing unsubstantiated claims please?
"No, Google Hire Won’t Share Your Search History With Employers"
http://gizmodo.com/no-google-hire-won-t-share-your-search-hi...
Anyone have an idea of cost?
I wonder if you can skip the "Background Check" as an Applicant just by letting Google run a report for them on your GMail account profile haha.
All voluntary of course, if you can afford to decline. This isn't far fetched. Employers have asked to access Facebook accounts before, which is extreme and will never catch on (I think).
But allowing Google to rank and match applicants to particular roles may seem harmless enough to many, and then it will become very difficult for anyone to say no.
For example a % score with something like this: "Trustworthiness", "Political activism", "Obedience", "Addictions", "Laziness", "Morality", "Extroversion" etc.
It will be opaque and derived from their "secret sauce" by scouring GMail, DNS queries from your IP, phone calls you made on your Android phone, stuff you bought and search for in Chrome and so on.
Some companies and even landlords check credit scores when you apply. Criminal records. Border patrol checks social account postings. Imagine having access to all non-public stuff Google and Facebook has.
I wonder if that some point they'd know people better than people know themselves at. I kinda experienced that with Netflix when I was a subscriber. It suggested movies that at first glance I wouldn't think I'd enjoy but the algorithm had figured me out enough that if I took the suggestion, it usually was right and I ended up liking the movie. It was a pleasant and creepy surprise at the same time.
If they put this thing front and forward they're going to drive a ton of people out of business just by their sheer visibility, as the Internet's front page.
"Millions of job seekers start their search on Google every day. And with Hire, you get a career site that’s optimized for Google Search."
I.e. You will get a site that will no doubt be right at the top of google jobs. The aggregation value of the job boards seems pretty minimal then if most candidates start on google anyway
Right, because there's no other software that exists to track applicants: http://www.softwareadvice.com/hr/applicant-tracking-software...
E-mail is a technical problem. Replacing Outlook with GMail is doable.
Recruiting is a complex business process. Enterprise recruiting has significant regulatory hurdles as well as business specific requirements. There is a huge implemementation and service component to an enterprise ATS implementation, there is no "plug and play" here.
I don't even see Google wanting to play that game.
When you hear about some new entrant to the space that you are creating a new product for, there is the inevitable "gulp" as you urgently scan their features to see how similar it is to your new thing, especially when the product is from a giant company like Google.
Fortunately in this case Google Hire just looks like another "me too" similar to all the other products. I'm hoping what I have built is actually some fresh thinking. Now if can just grind through the remaining tasks in that never ending task list....
Obligatory plug: I'm the cofounder of RecruitDoor [1], an applicant tracking system for recruitment agencies. We've been running in South Africa for a few months now, and we'll be branching internationally next month. (Comments and critique welcome, by the way; we're currently still a startup).
Our goal is to align our services per the specfications of specific ats companies.
Don't you want to be conveniently tracked, compared, analyzed and disposed of with a couple of clicks ? Don't you want your professional profile to be sold to the highest bidder some time in the future ?
I mean, I'm sure the software brings order and ease to the hiring process, but somehow this doesn't make me feel good. It makes me nauseous ... from how insignificant and mechanical this makes us.. people treating people like data...
This seems odd coming from Google, as they're notoriously inconsistent (and/or manipulative) with communication during the application-interview-hiring process.
>>>While Hire itself is interesting in its own right, it’s also interesting to see that Google is now looking to use the G Suite tools and back-end services it has developed over the last few years to solve problems in very specific verticals.
Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread who might find this relevant.
Kind of similar to Apple's hardware products that are strongly connected.
Too bad though that google is killing another industry on the way...
Is there an ATS at the ~10$ price range ?
When setting pricing for our ATS, our research showed that most systems with any level of sophistication was around $8 per employee per month, which is incidentally what our pricing is.
So a small company with 10 employees can use it for $80/mo, but a larger one will go up commensurately.
When you consider though, that this pricing is less than 0.1% of your total monthly wage bill, then it sort of puts things in perspective.
P.S. prepend "shameless plug" to your shameless plug. But do show us your stuff. All the early startups got their customers on HN ;)
ATS is a brand new module we just released in the past month or so, and is getting good traction to date. There are a lot of standalone ATS systems out there, but our customers (and potential customers) were wanting an all in one integrated solution, so we built it.
Feel free to ping me directly if you have any questions - devan (at) hrpartner.io
It's a shame they can't just stand back and let people use websites like Indeed, Monster, JobSite among others and let them get on with it and just make money from the ads.
Do they not make enough already?
If someone writes a script that destroys a business then the business couldn't have been adding much value to whatever it was selling. In this case Hire will likely sink some of the recruiters out there who match words on resumes to words on job descriptions for a 25%-of-the-candidates-salary fee, but that's not really a bad thing. Those people aren't adding value. Recruiters who actually work for their money by finding and coaching candidates, understanding the needs of their clients, actually knowing what those keywords are so they can do a 'fuzzy' match to find good candidates who might not be immediately apparent will still have a solid business offering that's worth paying for.
The last employer I worked for did recruitment software for the Fortune 500s. We offered career sites (pulling jobs from their ATS) and tools for recruiters to push their jobs to the various boards. From what I can tell having your career site be highly visible / SEO friendly on Google was the most important feature we offered. I agree that it's unfortunate watching giants like Google smash the competition, but it will be interesting to maybe finally see a truly modern job seeker facing job search.
Now if only we can get these horrific ATS-es to join the 21st century with their application process...
If Google can make a better recruiting experience, then they deserve my money, not other companies who suck.
That's the free market!
I suspect job ads might go the way of price comparison sites where its now pay to play - its why relex (Elsevier) sold all its job businesses a few years back