HireArt (YC W12) Helps employers screen job applicants through work samples | Hacker News Reader

HireArt (YC W12) Helps employers screen job applicants through work samples

hireart.com

73 pointsnsedlet43 comments

I've gone through a few hireart applications and I find them rather irritating. They allow the hirer to ask an ENORMOUS amount of work for an application. The last one I did took over 3 hours to complete, 7 essays and two videos, one a rather long screencast.

I think hire art gets in the way of finding talent, but a lot of people looking to make a good connection dont have hours to complete a long list of questions created at the whim of a founder or HR rep.

Seems like a good thing. If you can fire off 100 resumes at no cost, while a company has to spend time reading each one and filtering out the junk, doesn't that seem asymmetrical? Large companies often have screening tests, or let hr people phone-screen candidates before moving on, but smaller companies don't have the resources.

If you want the job, you'll put in the time. In the process you'll also learn about he skills and culture the company expects, and they'll also be trying to present themselves as an interesting place to work.

It's the same dance, but now you need to be involved from the start.

Yes, but what if you still have to fire off 100 applications at 3hrs apiece? Effectively equivalent to 2.5 months of working full-time, and you may not even get an interview.

It makes sense for the company to invest more in finding the employee than the employee invests to find the company; the company has more to gain.

How much time did you spend on your college applications? Why should applying for a good job be easier?

Say it takes 3 hrs to do the application (probably not, but I haven't done one). The resulting candidate pool will be smaller, and consist of more dedicated applicants, who aren't just firing off blanks. I think both the employer and the applicant might get a higher "hit ratio".

If a recruiter has to sift through thousands of resumes, then good talent gets missed, bad talent gets interviews, and 2.5 months later you'll still be unemployed.

Maybe companies could still accept resumes and "regular applications" in addition to the HireArt channel. I think applicants going the HireArt route would be more likely to get consideration/interviews.

Yes, that's the counter-argument; that the 3hr application process will in itself filter the pool, and improve match rates, thus keeping effort-to-match rates reasonable. It will have to be seen if it pays off.

One big problem you might face- this would make it even harder for HR to do a passable job, requiring even more time from managers within the company.

I think you're right, the hire art method may filter out people who are just fishing and help a person looking to hire someone to find people who are focused on doing the work to make it.

This is far more fair for workers in a non-recession than in a recession though -- where desperation will drive large numbers of workers to put in the extra time to get the job.

It's interesting that HireHive (YC S10) did a similar thing with video interviews during YC[1] but pivoted to Hack Recruiter[2] and now Hacker School[3]. Will be interesting to see how HireArt tackles the challenges that caused Nick and Dave to move away from making the interview process to improving the candidate pool.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/02/good-on-video-is-the-new-go... [2] http://www.hackruiter.com/ [3] http://www.hackerschool.com/

Just went through the process. I'm glad that you can take a few cracks at the video before you choose to upload it. Overall, people's opinions will be colored by how employers use the process.

If a company wants a bunch of work done for free then maybe it's a signal to move on. If the company uses the tool to respect the time of the applicants and make hiring more efficient, it's good for everyone. Perhaps HireArt can guide employers here on the best way to use the tool.

I think this is a great idea. Especially because it is so easy to submit a resume, and it takes so much time to weed out good ones from the bad ones. In addition, resumes tell me nothing about how passionate a given candidate is about company/job. Passion is a big deal and someone who is passionate about company/product/position WILL jump through the hoops necessary to get in the door. A+ folks apply to great colleges and go through long applications for start-up accelerators too. Why wouldn't they do it if they are passionate about a company/job? I think onus is on company to make sure they write job posting in a way that attracts passionate candidates who are willing to go through this - and it's customizable, so you don't have to use predefined template - you can just build one for yourself and go with it.

Resumes really are bullshit, and I am glad someone's trying to solve the problem. Great idea guys - congrats!

Seems like an interesting product, but please don't use Lobster for your logo… You can honestly pick any one of MyFont's bestseller fonts (http://myfonts.us/td-AErAU5) at random and it'll look more profesional than using a free font that's over-used all over the web.

The spacing is off too. Looks like two words in the logo, and one word in the post and "Why Employers Use HirArt". Tiny things; just trying to provide helpful feedback.

That's where kerning comes in. It's a designer's job to manage the spacing manually.

This was my first impression as well - the custom work on the 'A' in art is a good start, but Lobster's way too common to be the backbone of a unique and memorable logo.

It's funny, that's the first thing that hit me (Lobster). If you're dealing with Graphic Designers/Art Directors they will notice right away.

The logo is virtually irrelevant, pour your time into the product instead. Speaking as a potential customer, nobody will notice or care what font you used to create your logo. Of all the things that factor into the decision process of me using (or purchasing) your product, logo font choice is nowhere to be seen.

Interestingly a YC company with no tech co-founders, the team looks like one Business Analyst from the real estate sector, one ex-quant from Goldman Sachs and one ex-McKinsey consultant.

Does this reflect a shift in the type of applicants YC is accepting ? - It'd be interesting to know how far along they were before they applied to YC.

As for the startup itself, I think they're making the mistake that other startups in the same space are making (at least from my experience in hiring at investment banks) in that they're presenting themselves as an alternative to CVs.

Pre-recorded video interviews, etc. are way too time consuming compared to CVs to be the first stage in candidate screening. I think the post-CV screening and pre-interview stage is probably the most effective place for this type of solution to live.

Nick from HireArt here. I definitely agree with you that video interviews tend to be very time-consuming. One of the services we offer to employers is the grading of the interviews. We also keep the video portion very short (~2 1-minute clips per interview).

I'm the tech co-founder on our team. I do all of the development for our web app.

Isn't that going to be hard to scale ?

The grading is not automatable, but I suspect it's scalable. We're finding lots of quite talented people willing to work part-time as graders, and we streamline their grading process as much as possible. We also try to provide very very rigorous rubrics and use multiple graders for the same interview to ensure standardization of the grades.

How do you qualify the graders? Is it on a case-by-case basis, reviewing their resumes & speaking with them? I could imagine that aspect of the process requiring some creativity to scale without losing quality.

We've been bootstrapping the process by using our own app to hire graders. We administer work sample interviews on our site (i.e. we give the applicants dummy interview responses to evaluate) and use our current graders to evaluate them.

Wow that's really cool. Using your own product to solve your business' problem in true startup fashion.

Nick's a smart guy, if one were to rate ability to learn technical, he's at least a 2 on the 0-3 scale (with 3 being the best). That is all.

Quants tend to be highly technical, although they are not exactly web programmers.

By the way, we're specifically focused on non-technical hires right now. There are a few great tools out there for assessing coders (coding tests, Github), the likes of which the non-technical hiring process mostly lacks.

So far, we've designed a bunch of questions in marketing, customer service, sales, writing, etc., by getting input from people in those fields. But in the long term, we'd love to measure the correlation of our questions with actual job performance, and use that info to tune our interviews to be maximally predictive.

Hmm, that actually makes sense (I was about to complain that you were the fifth start-up to do the same) but you should properly consider dropping the video -- it is too easy to get sued for discrimination and it forces people who don't look good but are great writers (as an example) to operate under a disadvantage.

People form early impressions based solely on looks. If this became common I'd expect a companion industry to spring up styling candidates, and the only real result would be even more homologous teams.

that's true if candidates are just talking about themselves or answering easy questions (which is what some video resume companies do). But if you're answering really tough questions about a job (how to drive conversion, how to craft an email marketing campaign) it's pretty clear very quickly whether you know what you are talking about.

by the way, most candidates will eventually have to do an in-person job interview, so if looks are driving hiring decisions, this doesn't really change it.

What are the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) ramifications of employment screening via video?

Somehow I suspect that this is a non-trivial concern, just like pictures on resumes, for U.S. compliant HR departments.

Well, since the user is uploading the video I think they are more or less ok disclosing their race correct? I don't see how it's different from the optional checkbox on application forms.

See an EEOC opinion letter on video interviewing here: http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/foia/letters/2004/titlevii_ada_reco...

There are a few rules that need to be followed, but in short, the EEOC says it's okay.

Unsurprising, considering you generally interview them face to face eventually anyway.

What I'm digging about HireArt is that companies using it seem to be more organized. They think more about the position they are hiring for at the start, submit interview questions to HireArt, write better job descriptions… If companies have a clearer idea of what they want, and they can communicate that to applicants, less time will be wasted all around. Here's an article from someone who has used HireArt, and makes this statement better than I: http://bit.ly/Abh6rj

This is really helpful & efficient for the companies. We spend hours interviewing candidates and checking their portfolio & prior work in order to get to few great candidates. The current process for us is spread out. HireArt brings it in one place and focuses on what really matters.

In our experience, the candidates who are really passionate about what they do and like the company consistently shine out. HireArt process should help filtering them easier.

We used hireArt to screen writers and got a ton of really good responses. the site still needs some work in automating the work sample process and I think we need to societally normalize/figure out the trial process (how do you build trust that I'm not looking for freebie work) but the premise is good - I'm done hiring people on the faith that they wont turn in complete shit. ::cough cough:: elance.

Interesting, It's kind of like a FizzBuzz Test. One thing I noticed, you have something on your front page that says "See sample interview" I wanted to watch it but instead I get a "how it works/get more info" page. I felt like it was a bait and switch.

I would like to see a sample interview in that space.

Anyway, good work guys I hope everything works out great for you!

This is Elli, one of the co-founders. We also launched on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/09/resumes-are-bullshit-hirear...

I'd love to hear from any of you guys who are hiring non-technical people -- what are the biggest things you wish were different?

I like the basic goal. The resume system is so suboptimal, it's nuts.

It incentivizes potential employees to focus so much energy on signaling and leads employers to unwittingly filter out otherwise great employees who just can't play the game well.

No idea if this solution is the answer to the problem, but good luck to them.

This is a fantastic idea! The resume has seen it's demise as this approach will certainly pave the way for all future job hirings. Very impressive website as well!

This is a great idea! I've been working with a bunch of freelancers, for some marketing work, and would like to hire someone full-time soon.

We are trying HireArt right now and I really like it. If you are hiring anyone who is non-technical, you should give it a shot.

Great idea. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates (mainly technical) and it's often easy to tell within a few minutes if a candidate's resume is inflated or skills are exaggerated. A short video or test that helps filter out candidates that would fail an interview or call within the first 10 minutes call seems like a huge timesaver.

Great job. It's time for a revolution in the hiring process. Traditional résumé: RIP!

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