Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

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WhompingWindows

How do you determine who is a dedicated job applicant? First, everyone shoots their resume and maybe cover letter into your black hole. Are the dedicated ones the ones who actually included a cover letter? Or is it how enthused/personalized the cover letter seems? A qualified individual should do that, perhaps even better since they have experience and talent, if they're indeed qualified.

Next, they have to go through interviews. Are they expected to fully research the company and its methods before the initial round? Or how about coding questions: Would you take someone who spent 3X the time on leetcode but only got 50% as many coding answers as the qualified person? Do you purposefully choose those who you deemed "worked harder" or "wanted it more"? Are things like follow-up emails, thank you's, further reflections, are these things how you determine dedication? Or do you purposefully over-look those you think are well qualified, ruling them out in favor of those "trying harder"?

No, we don't do any of that.

We have a variety of low-commitment projects that we pay people to do. These projects add value to the company, of course, but they also allow us to get to know a variety of people who can become more involved with us. In other words, we've found ways to take risks on people, and get to know them, without hiring them outright. We hope to hire them, but they still do need to go through our filtering system first. It may not work in other fields, but it works well in the field we're in.

Of course, we also have a more traditional path, including resumes, interviews, etc. It's good to have multiple methods for finding employees, IMO.

Do your low commitment projects actually pay a reasonable amount?

They usually pay the standard rate that would be applied for the expected amount of hours of completion of that task, with a small plus. this way, even if you don't land the job you still don't get out of it feeling like you lost invaluable time of your life.

But in my own experience I have once worked for free on those tasks, hoping to get hired, and when it didn't pan out it made me a bit sour. Won't do that again.

I'm not sure what "the standard rate" is, nor how you determine the expected number of hours.

I think what you're really asking, is are we "dangling a carrot" of actual employment, in order to trick people into working for low pay. The answer is a definitive no.

We actually do not advertise, in any way, that our smaller projects could lead to much bigger projects, and long term employment.

That being said, the pay itself is usually more than is offered elsewhere for the same type of work, or at least at par. We're lucky to have a business model that can support this.

How can I find companies who do that?

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