Job Site Hired, Once Valued at $500M, Discusses Winding Down | Hacker News Reader

Job Site Hired, Once Valued at $500M, Discusses Winding Down

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50 pointsraiyu20 comments

HIRED has never ever ever fulfilled its differentiating factor, never refined them, and periodically gutted all of them due to inability or disinterest in enforcing it. Or the reality just being that it didn't have product market fit with employers.

Specifically:

- 48 hour response time (not enforced)

- bidding transparently on candidates (90% of the companies revealed a low ball offer in person after the fact, a mystery that is no different than not using Hired)

They should have just stuck with Dom Periognon redistribution.

It is probably a sustainable business and brand just as a tech recruiter and shedding all of its dead weight - like the massive valuation and creditors.

I remember using Hired, once upon a time. The vast majority of what I got through it was companies looking to stretch a budget of three peanuts to build some product on blockchain digital art collectible cards or similar.

It was generally not a positive experience. My handlers went out of the way to be nice, but it didn't make up for an endless series of lowball offers from companies I didn't want to work for.

Same experience for me, the interviews I got through hired.com were a complete waste of time both in terms of salary offered and of intersection with my interests.

"CEO Douglas Feirstein, reached by phone on Thursday, said the company was in the process of being acquired but denied that it was shutting down. He said he was not at liberty to disclose the name of the buyer.

The San Francisco–based startup, founded in 2012 and recently valued privately at more than $500 million, came to prominence amid a tech hiring boom by helping companies such as Twitter, Airbnb and Lyft recruit workers. It raised more than $150 million from investors including Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Investment Management Corporation of Ontario and Lumia Capital.

Equity investors are not likely to get much, if any, of their investment back. Schaffer, the CFO, told shareholders that the board had verbally agreed to sell the company’s assets via an assignment for the benefit of creditors sale and that the special entity established for the process had already received a number of proposals for the assets. Hired does not expect to distribute any cash to shareholders after paying off creditors, he said.

“It is unlikely the sale will generate sufficient funds to pay all unsecured creditors in full,” the email read. “After the ABC sale transaction, Hired Inc. (which will own no assets) would be wound down and dissolved.”

Hired had been having trouble with its premium recruitment model even before the coronavirus pandemic roiled the job market. In 2019 it missed its revenue goals by more than 50%, according to people close to the company. Feirstein said he could not comment on its financial performance in that period. It now employs fewer than 80, down from about 250 at its peak, according to people familiar with the company."

I'd be interested in understanding why recruiting as an industry hasn't switched over to an hourly model. It's basically semi-skilled (at best) professional services- why don't companies just pay external recruiters per hour to find candidates, the same way you pay your accountant, attorney, etc.? (Though at a much lower rate, of course- $50 to an absolute max of $100 an hour).

It would likely be cheaper for the hiring companies, and ultimately aid both the company's brand (no push recruiters on commission) and improve the industry overall (same). I understand that's not a VC-backed model type of business, but does seem like a logical transition for the recruiting industry overall

A recruiter is the first person a candidate interacts with, so you want someone who actually knows how things work at the company/etc. A rotating group of contractors would probably result in a bad impression.

In my experience, when you pay recruiters by the hour you very often end up with recruiters that achieve nothing. When you pay recruiters for each hire you get better recruiters and better candidates.

I agree there'd be a winnowing out of the lower quality folks, and a flight to established brand quality. But in theory you could say your accountant or attorney doesn't achieve anything for their billable hours- doesn't kill the professional services model.

Also, 20 hours of a recruiter's time at $50 an hour is not a major expense for a company. If they underperform, just don't use them next time

Why doesn't everyone pay sales this way? If you can easily incentivize the thing you care about, you do it.

Recruiting is sales, and closing a hire is like closing a sale. It takes a lot to find the right candidate and even more to close the deal. This is why they make their money with commission - it’s “eat what you kill”. As a hiring manager I simply refuse to hire someone that isn’t a good match, so the incentives line up perfectly for recruiters to waste minimal time and only bring the best to the table.

We used Hired to great success 4-5 years ago in Austin but overtime the quality of candidate went down. At a dinner with our account rep early on he said they spent $20k to acquire each candidate. Their pricing structure at the time was more like $25k/yr for 20 introductions/mo. My best guess is that over time they blew through all of their cash and had to spend a lot less on acquiring and vetting talent. At some point in the last two years they priced their product similarly to what a retained recruiter would (I don’t remember exactly but it was either 20k per hired candidate or 20% or first years salary), and they weren’t competitive

Why does Triplebyte seem to be doing great, while Hired is shutting down? They seem pretty similar in concept.

What’s the key difference?

Probably just capital structure. Seems like HIRED has creditors to be paid.

There are many viable ideas that are more sustainable as a bootstrapped idea without preferred investors and senior debt holders.

Triplebyte tests candidates with the types of questions they'd get at Software Developer interviews.

Hired does not.

Thus, candidates on Hired that are attractive to recruiters are due to their resume, so they already get solicitations on LinkedIn, and easy access to interviews.

On the other hand, someone with a less "glamorous" resume could pass the Triplebyte screening process, and that gives signal to recruiters that the candidate is more likely to pass their company's interview process.

FWIW, I've only gotten low quality interviews through Hired.

I got one really good one, a couple years ago. Since then, yeah, all very low quality. You could hear the recruiters filling in checklists for the body shops they were hiring for.

There was so much promise around this site and others, it turns out all the hype was just a marketing funnel into a standard recruitment consultancy.

There’s many others out there like this, unfortunately you can’t really change the shape of hiring with a tech solution from a startup, they all will regress back to hard hitting recruitment once they have a sales team with targets.

A pity. I still remember receiving a bottle of Dom Perignon from them after signing on to a new job. They gave me $2000 as well, but the high-quality champagne was much more memorable.

Shame - I recently landed a nice new job through them, starting in a few weeks and it was a pretty smooth and pleasant process.

I heard someone say “Hired is going to wipe out all the recruiters when it come to your city”.

Yeah right.

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