Ask HN: Older developer hiring platform? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Older developer hiring platform?

13 pointstwunde12 comments

A while back, someone built and posted a hiring board for older developers. Does anyone remember the name or have a link for it? EDIT: retitle to be a Ask HN

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Why do we (or anyone) need a platform segregating people by the age (or gender or color or whatever)?

This is plain stupid idea.

Hire people based on their abilities and skills to help you to build (or execute) what you need.

Who cares about the age of a person who can help you?

I'm going to take a nuanced response to this because frankly that anyone would want or need a segregated platform is stupid, but yet that need/want does exist.

If you have a team all from the same background (say a prototypical startup, everyone white, upper middle class and went to Stanford), that team will suffer from groupthink and will miss opportunities and/or challenges to different groups. These can be minor issues or can be big PR blowups like when facial recognition systems can't recognize the difference between people with dark skin or just missed opportunities. In general, the solution is to try and build teams with a diversity of backgrounds.

How do we do that? If you have applicants come in from different backgrounds. But what happens if you're never seeing any diverse applicants apply? Are your recruiters/hiring platforms redlining (intentionally or unintentionally) and preventing candidates from applying? At that point you go out of your way to reach out to diverse candidates. They still have to go through the same interview process, but you're adding them to the funnel. If you're more familiar with marketing, then you know that digital advertising, direct mail, billboard ads, radio ads, tv ads etc will hit different parts of the population (with some overlap). You can't just go through one marketing channel because you'll miss a large customer population. This is essentially the point of these targeted hiring platforms. The ideal is to use these platforms to combat unconscious and conscious bias. This works as long as they're used in ADDITION to other more generic platforms.

Agree with diversity approach.

It's like in a military service where tank crew consists of soldiers from maximally opposite backgrounds to minimize cultivation of bias/conspiracy/hidden agendas from crew members.

I didn't know that but that's a great tidbit and example

It was oldgeekjobs.com, but he website doesn’t work anymore it probably shutdown.

Oh man, I'm totally bummed. Thanks for letting me know!

I am working on one and am wondering if you (OP and not) would consider telling me about what would make such a service productive and attractive to you?

Really it comes down to whether we can find qualified candidates from the website. I'm looking to increase the diversity in engineering so that it's not all 30ish white guys. My last job I worked with engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. I'd like to recreate some of that experience

From implementation standpoint it wouldn’t be ideal to expose the age of the candidates as there are anti discrimination laws.

I am wondering what other criteria could hint to to you that someone is a match?

Maybe experience? Measured in certain ways?

As a candidate: attractive because I'd have confidence that employers there are going to value my experience (in contrast to those who slap "senior software engineer" labels on positions where they're looking for 3 years in the workforce).

As a hiring manager: being able to find engineers with lots of experience instead of having my "senior software engineer" opening spammed with resumes from kids just out of school.

Thank you.

Would you be interested in hearing about the service in beta?

Sure

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