And given that a while after that I went through the round (at least 12 interviews by 10 unique people) at AWS because of it (though I later turned that down - I wanted a combination of tech and customer focus, they wanted either one or the other and felt I was too strong technically to be used on a customer focused role)...
Yes.
It works.
If you are hiring you should think hard about how you present it. Corporate-speak is ill-advised, and less is definitely more. Plain developer-to-developer language is the best route.
It is not unusual for candidates to go back over old whoishiring posts, filter by city and then look... so if you can include a permalink to a "positions available" page on your site you will continue to reap the rewards of a good, short advert for quite a while. Make sure to include an email address too (in the advert) so that HN candidates reach you directly rather than get lost in the official HR process.
If you are going for a position, I would advise that you use the opportunity to strike up a conversation and learn about the position and company, rather than just spam them with your CV (how does that help either of you?).
And as mentioned above... look at the whoishiring posts for the last quarter or 6 months, a company in growth probably is still looking.
It works, so long as you realise that this platform connects individuals, rather than treating it as an agency/corp HR style thing.
seems like amazon and google have the same ideas when it comes to support.
They did say I was too technical, but what I think they really meant is that they were looking for someone with more business/customer-facing experience and a bit of tech... it was an AWS Solutions Architect position.
What they offered instead was a very compelling purely technical position, but I have this deep belief that technology is a set of tools that solves customer problems. I didn't feel comfortable accepting a position in which I could not directly hear from a customer.
I wish there was a rule that the "Who's Hiring" thread happened on the first Monday of every month, not the first day of the month. It's pretty silly to have that thread happen on a weekend.
I was very happy to see that post yesterday and applied to what I thought a great looking job. OTOH, I'm new here (HN).
Firstly different people read HN on different schedules, the weekend audience is different from the monday morning audience, it makes sense for it to rotate to maximize the different number of people aware of it. People also tend to look for new jobs mid-week so it's good for it to fall on tue/wed/thu as well.
Secondly there are likely to be people who'd rather not read/post on the hiring thread while they're at work, and the weekend posting gives them the freedom to interact with the thread.
And finally highly rated postings on the weekend tend to stay on the front page for longer than on weekdays when there's more competition. Hence they may actually get read by more people overall.
Especially for companies which are recruiting every month, there's much more value in getting to a wider audience than getting repeated exposure to the same audience.
That said, I have my doubts about the mechanism. It seems to me that it would be more efficient to have a job board, since even a primitive one would allow candidates to better search for the jobs they are interested in. A basic job board doesn't seem very hard to set up, and we'd be definitely be willing to pay a monthly fee, because the quality of developers here is so high.
There are potential solutions to this, for example only allowing users with a certain reputation point threshold to access it (I believe StackOverflow's job board employs a similar system). Just something to think about...
I guess for now this is reserved for YC startups, which is fair enough. HN job postings is one of the minor "unfair advantages" (that every startup needs to succeed), available to YC startups only.
A weekly thread is probably too fast a turn around.
TL;DR: I'm happy with the status quo.
sigh Why did we think it was wise to brag to HR & recruiters about how well this mechanism is/was :)
P.S. - For anyone thinking "oh wow, I could scale this type of thing with a website", think again. Tight communities > scale.
Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.
Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
I don't understand this. HN is an open website where anybody can sign up, and the Who's Hiring posts can be reached from a google search. What makes you so sure that applicants are all high-quality people?
And perhaps are the users who read the Who's hiring threads more restrictive with to whom they send application. That is, they only send CVs to openings that they think they can carry out.
The last part is just total speculation though but that is my own experience with Who's hiring, I've read many posts but have not applied for those I would be unqualified for. Unfortunately for me, that is almost all of them as I am no developer but it is quite interesting to see what kind of skills HN value highly.
They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.
Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.
Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.
Agreed, an application from an account created ten minutes ago tells you very little, but even that amount is an order of magnitude more revealing than a mailgun reply from a Monster ad.
If you need a job in London, talk to Squirrel. He's a great boss.
Which came first the nickname or the domain?
The same.
(And by the way, hi Martin!)
I'm just reading my comment above and thinking about how it's a bit elitist, but again I like it more for the personal touch / effort / show of good faith vs. "exclusive club" reasoning.
One minor gripe I have about WH submissions is that many still aren't abiding by the rules. I see a lot of them that leave crucial info out, especially those that don't say if the role can be remote or must be at their office.
What the new company didn't offer was an expenses paid on-site interview, relocation assistance, or an incentive structure. The software engineers work in a dark, boiler-room environment, and struggle mightily to maintain a sprawling, legacy code base. Turnover at the company is extremely high. I lasted 9 months; the last 6 of which were spent trying to 'change things' at the urging of a couple of friends I had made there. Several people from my group have left since, and nearly everyone I worked with has asked me to let them know about other opportunities I might come across.
The CTO making the postings to HN was hellbanned at some point, and stopped posting altogether once I pointed it out. I'm really not sure why that happened to him though. Is posting the same text every month grounds for removal? The environment wasn't right for me, but I'm sure there are a few HN readers who would be willing to put up with it to make a 6 figure salary as a programmer in Boulder. The right person might even be able to help turn things around.
I used it once and tracked responses. The best and worst* candidates came from HN.
Worst, as in scattergun "here's my CV" emails.
Best, as in the "I love what you're doing because X. Here's the kinds of things I could do for you... and here are the things I've done before. I notice you're using X, Y and Z... perhaps we could try using this instead? Because..."
I'd definitely post here in future, but only after posting somewhere else.
I also posted for a remote job which I think helped. I had 0 responses from California.
And in Prague, so it's not "SV only" either.
It was immensely useful to me in the many months before I picked up and moved to California because it gave me a great sense of what kind of companies were actively hiring, what sorts of skills were most in demand, and what kind of compensation was available. Now as an engineer helping out with recruiting I find it's a great way to get the attention of candidates with more unorthodox backgrounds. It's especially helpful for companies located outside of S[FV] since we don't have the same critical mass of local personal developer contacts to hire from.
I'd second that the thread should be the first Monday of the month.
I've yet to get a job from those threads (if that's what you're asking), but I have met some awesome teams and my pool of contacts has significantly increased.
Best way to handle such clients is to be available, adaptable and competent.
I moved to London 3 months ago and often checked the freelance and job threads on HN. Seeing the amount of jobs available for London gave me a boost of confidence.
(I'm yet to approach anyone via those threads - because I've already got too much freelance work.)
Although I'm trying to market myself as an iOS/ Objective-C developer.
Guess my karma can't be cashed in for a job. ;-)
Reasoning: the majority of the posters will be people saying they got a job, effectively ignoring the swathes of people who were looking for a job and didn't find one they liked on HN. Since finding a job on HN is obviously much more notable than not finding a job on HN.
HN does seem to select for a certain set of folks who care about the industry and their craft, and the "who's hiring / who's looking" posts let me take a passive approach and ping people directly when they sound like great fits for what we need.
I'm looking forward to working with them next week.
Most of the companies that I've dug into from the "Who's Hiring" thread seem to have non-tech jobs open once you get to their site and poke around but they don't seem to get posted on the thread.
ps: it was for London.