Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10)

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114 pointsdavidbalbert42 comments

I'm curious how this works out. My perception is that hiring is intrinsically hard, and whether you have engineers or HR doing the recruiting, it will remain hard. I would absolutely, totally love to be proven wrong on this though.

We fully acknowledge it's an open question. Hiring is intrinsically hard, but think of it this way: What are the odds that the status quo is the best we can do? That seems highly unlikely to us.

Your competition isn't really other recruiters, it's personal referrals from inside the company. Everybody knows that recruiters suck; that's why whenever possible, people try to find friends or former coworkers of their existing employees and bring them on-board.

Now, if you could devise a system that's as effective as having worked with a person for years and being able to convince them to join you, yet didn't require a personal connection that takes years to build up, that would be golden.

Yes, the gold standard is employee referrals. Pretty much every company we've spoken to has told us they're the best source of people, but they don't get enough of them.

Part of what makes them so good is that the person making the recommendation (i.e., the employee) knows both parties well. I think we have a good start to solving half this problem, since we're developing real relationships with the companies and being selective about whom we work with. The other half -- actually getting to know the people applying -- is probably the biggest challenge we face (next to meeting/finding people in the first place).

If my HR folks could parse github repos, I would have much less noise to weed out.

Best of luck. I have a feeling the incentives for hiring are out of whack and need a correction.

What is your fee structure like? Do you take 25% of what an engineer would make their first year like other recruiters? How will you avoid becoming corrupt like most other recruiters?

We have a flat fee structure that's less than the 20-30% that regular recruiters take.

We're trying to avoid being corrupted by 1) only working with companies we know, like, and respect (so we're not tempted to encourage people to work at bad ones), and 2) the fact that our advantage over regular recruiters is that we're not like them. Good hackers know one and other. If we started doing the crap many recruiters do, people would (and should) call us out, and good people wouldn't want to work with us.

[EDIT: Fix typos from writing in haste]

You'd probably want to avoid working with companies you don't know/like/respect to keep your filter in place.

On the other hand, I've made referrals to companies I wouldn't want to work at but the fit was simply perfect for the person in question. They're very happy there.

Rough balance.

It depends on why it is you didn't want to work there. The set of companies we know/like/respect is a superset of the companies we'd personally want to work at.

A trivial example is a company in the bay area: It could be an absolutely fantastic place to work, but my strong personal preference to live in a city means it'd be a poor fit for me. That doesn't mean it's a bad place to work, it just means it's a bad place for someone who wants to live in NYC :)

The hints on the bottom bar are a nice touch. I kept refreshing the page to see them all. Also found out about the keyboard shortcuts that way! (Hint: Press ?)

I understand the problem. Recruiting engineers is hard, but is engineers recruiting engineers sustainable? Do they hire more engineers to do recruiting?

That's an open question. Right now, our time doing the legwork with this isn't our bottleneck. We're focused on being 10x better than the status quo.

Once we hit our capacity, we'll scale with some linear combination of software and people.

Here's something I could think of:

Engineers might one day have agents to haggle with businesses. Those agents need to know a lot about engineering in the same way that many sports agents are former players.

Is there reason to believe that such a time is coming?

That's an interesting thought. It's certainly possible. We see ourselves as a market correction -- engineers are in tremendous demand, but the market hasn't fully adjusted yet. Salaries haven't shifted dramatically and it's still a pain to find a new job, even for great engineers.

My bet is that the scale will continue to shift in engineers' favor until we hit an equilibrium.

Yep, totally. And something like this also helps the other side.

Case in point: have a couple friends who quit their high-paying engineering positions, and ended up consulting for companies as the first technical interviewer a candidate meets. Companies will pay a lot just to have that first filter. Interviewing is so time consuming!

I think PG is already the agent that hacker-preneurs want representing them. His role reminds me a lot of Scott Boras in baseball.

Hah, that would be awesome. I would love an agent.

"many sports agents are former players"???

In some sports I can see this...

Good luck! You are trying to solve one of the biggest challenges we face right now.

We have a good product, happy users, catchy domain name (har) but are having a hell of a time hiring because nobody knows of us.

I've generally found that competitive compensation packages overcome these issues. Especially if you post the numbers in the job description. (This isn't meant personally just a reflection of what I've seen in the industry)

Also, if you're hiring put it in your profile. I see lots of jobs on catch.com but nothing in your HN profile.

As well... http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=catch.com&s...

It's free so why not put post an ad? Or is SF the place where they charge for that? (I'm in Vancouver so it's free to post a job ad in CL here)

We can't compete with the likes of Facebook when it comes to compensation. There are some crazy stories out there of what they areoffering people.

Isn't a more interesting pitch telling folks that they can reach millions of users with a team that is solving interesting technical problems using pretty bad ass technology?

Isn't Facebook also using some pretty bad ass technology (they did invent a PHP to C++ compiler after all)?

I come from a background in writing financial software so I'd personally rather reach a few users willing to pay for some bad ass software than to reach millions who receive (or perceive) such a marginal benefit from the software that they aren't willing to pay for it.

I got to play with some pretty cool tech (http://bit.ly/FredPatent) and get a decent cheque at the end of the month (to be fair I was probably paid more in line your pay scale than facebook's)

I'm sort of solidly in the DHH school of startups where you should be charging for your software. If your software provides value to people they should be willing to pay for it, or you should be attracting a valuable audience that you can sell to advertisers.

It sounds like catch.com is making money (decent size team, lots of press) so kudos to you guys building a great product.

edit: I saw on your twitter feed that catch raised $7mm. definite congrats on that one!

More interesting than reaching 500 million users with a team solving interesting technical problems using bad ass technology, and making loads of money? Probably not.

Then the question is where can you make more of an impact?

FB has two orders of magnitude more users than us, but also two orders of magnitude more engineers.

I'd rather be engineer number 11 with us, than number 1001 at FB.

Good point, just updated my profile.

We put an ad on CL (they charge in SF) for a JavaScript developer and didn't get any promising resumes.

Everybody is looking for awesome JS folk.

It probably doesn't help that we are using fairly advanced framework like Google Closure for our webapp. Maybe that is intimidating for some people?

It might be, but it actually intrigued me. Whatever your tech is the site is snappy which is what really matters.

Thanks!

MongoDB and Python coolness, mixed with some Google Closure. =)

Thanks!

Awareness is a big part of the problem. Most every engineer knows about Google and Facebook, but many don't know about all the smaller companies that are wonderful places to work but don't (yet) have the mindshare of the big cos. We hope to provide an enjoyable and efficient way to correct that.

I am not affiliated w/ the company, but it sounds like it could work out. Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like recruiting?

Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like recruiting?

that sounds a bit over-confident, eh? i read that as, "Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like X?" where X has nothing to do with their training or specialty.

I don't see an engineer as someone who has a training or a specialty. I see an engineer as someone who will learn whatever is needed, acquire whatever skill is required, to solve a problem he/she has set their mind to.

Do you have plans to expand beyond New York or the San Francisco Bay Area?

The site looks fantastic, and those are all A+ companies to apply to. I especially like that their roadmap involves developing intelligent ways to search for new jobs (like by languages in use – why has it taken this long for such an obvious filter?).

Good luck, this is a good idea. The problem is not just compensation:

I believe there are tons of talented developers "locked up" in large corporations due to health insurance / health benefits, especially those with kids. Universal health insurance would help start-ups and small business compete with the Facebook's and Google's and also Bank of America's as health care would become an "even playing field".

Currently most small business and start-ups cannot compete with the health care and other benefit cost structures large American firms can achieve.

In fact, lots of corporate roll-ups exist only to reduce benefit costs - think of them as large health insurance providers.

I hope this goes beyond the software engineering field eventually.

What I like about this is that it's trying to help solve the number one problem in the software field. Which is not some esoteric or fancy computing problem, and is not a hardware issue, etc. It's the fact that the demand for folks who can do software, and well, far exceeds the supply of such folks. Especially ones who are available, interested and affordable. Trying to take even a tiny bite, percentage-wise, out of a very large pie is always promising.

the hiring business of engineers is big money. This isn't anything new and its sad to such good engineers chase theall mighty dollar instead of building something of real value.

Getting people into the right positions is building something of real value.

Think of how much better our software would be if people were excited about their jobs and genuinely enjoyed the work they're doing, instead of just putting in their 40 hours in a cube farm.

People should be be happy with their jobs. In our experience, this is frequently not the case, even for great engineers. We want to change that.

We're specifically being selective about the companies we work with. This keeps us honest, since we'll never be in a position where it's in our best (short-term) interest to recommend that someone takes a lousy job.

And, of course, we would like to someday stop living off our savings.

Please explain the difference between 'real value' and that which someone is willing to pay money for? In my world 'real value' is when people pay you.

Something that has the ability to change the World/Country/State....

I think Microsoft / Facebook / Apple have had far more impact on the world than Green Peace and all the other NGOs combined.

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