Comment by ninetax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ninetax | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> ... the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it.

I think more effort could be made to sell before the candidate decides to interview. The best candidates have to be sold on the opportunity before they invest their time into an interview process because they have so many opportunities available.

Widen the funnel at the mouth.

Anecdotally I have had many experiences where the hiring manager didn't take the time to listen to what I was looking for before launching into their 10 minute spiel give everyone, and then they ask me for phone screen availability. Why is this the right opportunity for me?

EDIT: after reading TFA, I see this is exactly what they're advocating for. cool!

Yeah, companies that use TripleByte all do this. There's a phone pitch phase of the interviewing once you've been accepted to TripleByte where you take ~20 minute phone calls where the point of the call is for the company to figure out your goals/interests and pitch you. It's an extremely good way to filter out companies that will probably not be worth the time to go on-site with; by the end of the call you are usually extremely excited about the opportunity or have saved yourself a lot of time cutting off the process there.

...and saves the company the effort of interviewing someone who turns out not to be interested in the opportunity.

A good recruiter can sell the company properly. They are as rare as hen's teeth though.

An easy step to widen the mouth is to get rid of the web forms that make you retype your resume into your boxes.

No one who isn’t desperate is going to do that.

And you probably don’t want to work for a company that does that anyway

Only desperate people apply to big companies?

I agree hearing what sounds like a pre-prepared, generic spiel about the company isn't very effective. That's why I suggest hiring managers/recruiters ask the candidate what they're looking for first and then talk about how the company fits into that (or not).

Being able to tailor the pitch on the fly like that is what we've seen be the difference between average and great recruiters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com