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Ask HN: Get paid to interview/vet candidates

20 pointscasper34513 comments

I have a company and trying to interview candidates (Graphic designer role and a sales role) who have been referred to me but these are new roles for our company (no one knows what to ask)? Is there a place I can pay professional people to vet my personal candidates?

Also I have looked into Recruitment agencies but they give me a list of candidates through their own filter that I do not like and they generally cost way too much.

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This is a pretty difficult problem. If you can't vet the candidates, you probably can't vet the person you want to vet the candidate.

It's a common problem for non-technical founders trying to hire their first engineer and has been written about quite extensively. One good resource that was on YC blog recently is this post [0] by TripleByte (it's basically marketing but also has good content).

Even if you're early stage, try not to think about it as a yes/no for the two candidates you have, but rather try build some kind of pool of potential candidates (even ones that seem very likely unsuitable). The questions you ask in each interview and the questions that other candidates ask you will be very helpful to get some kind of feel for what you're looking for, red flags, etc.

[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-hire-your-first-engineer...

> If you can't vet the candidates, you probably can't vet the person you want to vet the candidate.

Totally. There may exist platforms or people that claim to do this for you, but between false positives, cronyism, and bad actors gaming the qualifiers those people and organizations use to vet them, none of those avenues make sense to me.

As I said in my other reply, having someone you trust that is in the same field of work talk to them, or strong referrals from people like yourself who can vouch for the outputs of the new candidate's work sound the best. Or give them a trial yourself if the candidates are game, although as some pointed out it's not always reasonable to expect they will be.

1. Try your network. You probably know someone who works in these areas. You could ask them to speak with them.

2. Ask for their portfolio/employment history. Then ask for references for those projects/jobs. This will whittle down 90% of candidates as many don't have prior experience they can show, or any references.

3. Contract to hire. Give them a 2 week to 1 month shot at delivering results you like, and then hire them. Assumedly are not a huge company (sounds like you have no other similar role holders to interview the new recruits) so you don't need to take the responsibility of hiring people with the huge risk that comes with that. Give them a paid trial. Or depending on your state and risk tolerance, hire fast and fire fast.

Why would anybody who’s any good do a 1 month contract to hire?

I'm a huge fan of doing a small relevant project at a reduced price. It's a win-win. I, the freelancer, don't waste my time with silly coding exercises, instead, I get paid to do actual work, and you, the employer, get real impression how it is to work with me under realistic condition plus on top of it a result that you can (hopefully) use, so you haven't wasted your time and money either. Even better, should we continue working with each other, I have already had an introduction to your project and can proceed from there.

That sounds great if you're hiring a long term contractor. But, if you're hiring an employee, either already working (which usually presents issues with existing employment agreements), or they're giving up a week's worth of a job search to do this (which risks wasting a lot of a candidate's time). When I can get a job with a recruiter chat, 1 phone screen, and an onsite, and spend a total of 1 day on a company to get a job, why should I spend an entire week?

> so you don't need to take the responsibility of hiring people with the huge risk that comes with that.

There's plenty of people who won't do it -- they can go to FAANG and established companies all over the world. Good for them. There's a good amount of great people, often the hustlers you need for a smaller business, who would be interested in doing it. It's only one possibility. As I said, the other option is showing portfolio/past experience with references, which if checked well is a good indicator.

Also I said this because the OP said one of the positions was sales, which usually has compensation highly attached to results, so those guys are used to it. Might even say completely attached to results, as they are shown the door if they aren't giving results.

Not even FAANG. I would say a majority of companies do the pattern of recruiter call, 1-2 phone screens, and 1/2-1 day onsite. For the candidate, it's a no brainer: invest a week or invest a day. The end result is approximately the same either way, unless your company is super special in some manner.

Yeah, I hear ya. But he said sales and graphic designer. I think that's a bit different than developer or management.

Depending on the complexity of the ecosystem and the experience of the developer 2 weeks to 1 month might not be enough time. You'd also want to be worried about the code slinger that just starts throwing code at a problem and looks like a rockstar in the first couple months, but by month 6 has ground to a halt because they can't change the code they wrote a few months ago.

I find it interesting that everyone here has provided answers on to how to hire a technical person if you are non-technical, but nobody answered the question asked (how to hire non-technical people when you are technical person).

With graphic design it is easier as you can judge the person's portfolio and even give them a small project to do as part of the interview process. Choose the person who's work you like the best.

Sales is harder as bad sales people are very, very good at selling themselves. Good sales people don't want to work for a small startup, they want to work for a organisation where all the sales processes have been worked out and all they have to do is churn out the KPI's. On top of this you can't rely on sales people's past as people who are good at sales at one company can totally fail at another (and vice versa).

With sales roles you have two choices:

1. Hire and fire until you find those that can sell your product. You have to be ruthless with this approach - sell now or you are out the door.

2. Hire for aptitude and train. A person with charm and motivation can be turned into an effective sales person with training.

Having used both approaches I prefer the second approach, but it depends a bit on the technical complexity of your product.

I'm running such a service targeting software engineering roles, but I'm expanding to other roles as well as I have the network. You can leave your requirement here (https://interviewguru.net/) and my team will reach out to you.

I've actually thought about doing this as a service, somewhat like triplebyte, but you bring me the candidates you want. The idea was more for just doing the phone screens and finding the people you'd want to interview onsite (where you want to get that hands on / personal interviewing experience).

(Note, I wouldn't know how to interview a graphic designer anyway, but the idea was that if you didn't know DevOps, backend, data analysis, etc. and hiring the first person that will hire those other people, it could be useful to contract with someone with those skills).

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