Ask HN: How is the startup employee hiring market doing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is the startup employee hiring market doing?

10 pointsgenieyclo4 comments

Hello HN, I'd like to commit a very unscientific study here asking how busy and active the startup hiring market is. I'd really appreciate it if current YC-funded (and non-YC as well) startups could input with their experience when posting jobs.

How many replies do they get to job postings? 5 replies? 15? 30?

Are most of the replies genuine and related to the position/posting at hand or just enquiries into meta things related to it?

Do certain types of postings get more attention than others?

How many hits do the engineering/dev postings get compared to postings for designers and how is the response different between them?

What platform or service do you use to handle the process? Email? The Resumator? Jobvite? Something else?

What job boards do you all post jobs typically to? 37Signals? StackOverflow's? Others?

Do you notice any trends not asked here that you can share? For example, where do the best employees tend to come from, word-of-mouth/network referrals? Company site postings? Competitions/hackathons?

How prevalent is the use of Github/Bitbucket/Launchpad and general open source contributions to gauge employees?

I really appreciate your time in responding, I'm really curious about the startup space and how hiring is going currently and would like to see how competitive it is right now.

I think it's fine if some/most of the postings are anonymous/throwaways, maybe you can share more in privacy that way.

Some of the more mature, older YC startups are posting pretty regularly to the /jobs board on HN so it'd be especially neat to hear from them. Can't wait until the new batches start growing and needing to post hirings there.

I'll answer this from the perspective of an engineer SeatGeek where possible:

I cannot speak for hiring outside of engineering positions, but we created a developer "challenge" as described here: http://seatgeek.com/blog/hiring/henceforth-all-job-applicant...

We posted the results here: http://seatgeek.com/blog/seatgeek-news/open-the-beers-and-wa...

As far as handling the applications, I believe we handled most of the initial contact through email, and then gradually to an actual interview/job offer.

GitHub/BitBucket etc. accounts are good indicators of developer quality, but certainly not the only one and shouldn't be the deciding factor. If this were true, I'd easily be one of the best developers in all of NYC - by sheer number of repositories, forks/contributions, repo collaborators and watchers - yet I graciously bow down before the other engineers at SeatGeek - and sometimes even the cofounders!

Social coding accounts are a great way to find out if programming is just a day job for a developer, to see if they have an interest/knowledge of the area in which you'll work, or to perhaps verify things on their resumes.

My company posted 3 job listings 3 weeks ago -- you can look at my posting history to see the jobs I posted here on HN. So far we've gotten about 120 responses in total. The majority were for the Software Engineer and VP/Engineering positions; very few responses for the Operations Engineer job. Most of the software and ops candidates were so-so, though the VP candidates were quite a bit higher caliber.

Most of our candidates came from Craigslist; we advertised in 3 cities and got quite a few candidates from all 3 cities. We also got a few good candidates from the monthly HN thread. We posted to a few inexpensive job boards like Startuply and Startups Hiring but we didn't get many responses. We haven't tried any of the more expensive job boards like GitHub and Stack Overflow because the ROI isn't very clear. Those sites are pretty expensive, especially with 3 positions open. I'd love to hear more from others about whether those are actually worth the money.

@genieyclo I would love to know the results that you compile. We run a startup: recruiterbox that helps startups manage their hiring process. Please let me know. Thanks! Raj

Not much to share at the moment :D

I think I timed and titled this post a little badly, maybe that's why it doesn't have that strong of a reception. Perhaps I'll resubmit later or do it as a poll or survey on Wufoo.

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