Ask HN: Interview as a Service – Any interest? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Interview as a Service – Any interest?

43 pointsshail49 comments

Hello Everyone,

TL;DR

I am offering interview as a service (taking first round on your behalf) for technical roles (0-8 yrs exp) for $150 each. Would you be interested?

Generally (assumption) even after the resume has been filtered by HR folks (who are mostly non-tech), you end up with 1 out of 5 candidate cleared after the telephonic rounds. This is definitely time consuming as developers are getting involved here and their hours are getting wasted.

If you do the calculation (assumption here), so to hire 1 candidate, you end up wasting 15-20 hours (at least) of developers time on unsuccessful interviews.

My proposal:

I will study your company, team and requirements beforehand.

Once you have identified a candidate, you can let me know and I will conduct the first round and give you a feedback.

My assumption again, this will improve the ratio to 1 out of 2. My confidence is that it will be far better than 0.5

Who can I interview: Technical (hands on) roles for software development (for startups and bigger corporations). Experience 0-8 yrs.

What can I interview: CS fundamentals (OS, systems, networking, DB, Algorithms, Data Structures etc.), Technologies: C/C++, Ruby, RoR, HTML, Javascript.

I believe that cs fundamentals are the key though.

Pricing: $150 per interview (payable by paypal or direct account transfer to bank of america)

I think this proposal suits small to medium sized startups.

About me: I have BS (IIT G) and MS (USC) in computer science with more than 8 years of work experience. 2-3 years on RoR.

I have given tons of interview and taken tons of them too during my career.

You can checkout more about me at: http://shail2.co Contact me at: shail2@live.com, if interested.

If I were hiring somebody to do tech interviews for me I'd want them to have broader skills than "what I learned in school + Ruby". But frankly, the idea of hiring somebody to do interviews for me sounds a bit like hiring somebody to sleep with my lover...it's a job that really should be done personally.

> it's a job that really should be done personally.

He's not proposing to hire the person for you, just to be an objective, presumably talented and qualified interviewer.

To use your analogy, he's the friend that vets the suitor, or offers a (solicited) opinion on your paramour. Nice line tho.

Sorry if I miscommunicated. I think you should go through my resume.

This is probably something you should pitch to recruiters instead.

I've talked to some tech recruiters in my area, offering to do training for them. I may need to talk to higher-ups, but the low-level people seem to actively not want that knowledge. I certainly don't propose they understand OS design, assembler and mobile app dev down cold, but they need to know the difference between Java and JavaScript, for example.

One chap I spoke with recently - he called me for help wording something - didn't know what "JVM" was, yet was actively recruiting for Fortune 500 companies. Again, they don't need to be tech gods, but ... learn the language of what industry you're in.

Another was telling me they don't need to know much tech, because the clients were more primarily concerned about social fit in with their hires, and they could work out the tech details. While I agree social fit is a factor, too many of us have met those who can't FizzBuzz in an interview, wasting everyone's time (or worse yet, get hired and leave years of crappy legacy tech debt to deal with).

Thanks a lot for this insight. This gives me another thing to try. Yep, if someone can put technology in lay man terms to recruiter they will be able to pick it up and be much better at their work. That will be win for everyone. Great idea.

It's a big IF. I've talked to a handful of recruiting companies and imo it's a perfect fit, but none of them have been interested - certainly not as a paid service. I think the turnover in tech recruiting may be too high for companies to consider paying for this, but... I may be wrong.

EDIT: Not IF as in - can you do it - but IF they'll buy it.

I think you are right. The turnover is high and hence little incentive to change the status quo. But if a recruiting company takes this approach, it will definitely have an edge. About the big IF, yes it is and I do not like to boast but I think I can do this very very well if not excellent.

To be blunt, I feel quite strongly that this is a bad idea. You might find business in this service, but only in companies which don't know any better. And if you can sell a service like this to that type of company, everyone (you, your client, their candidates) would be far better off if instead you sold them consulting services which made them more competent. Give a man; teach a man... right?

To explain:

Remember, companies are just formalized groups of people. What's the single most impactful component on a company's success? The people which make up said company.

The best candidates know this rule intuitively. They've completely internalized it. When these candidates imagine an excellent place to work, they imagine it first in these terms. These candidates will read the use of a service like the one you propose as a company shirking responsibility in an incredibly key area.

Yes, yes... it's only a first round interview. You're just separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Maybe the company knows that you/your service is/are incredibly competent at this task. However as a candidate I sure don't, and my first impression is going to be that the company relies on a third party to determine whether or not it's even willing to talk to a candidate? I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. I don't have time to market myself to two separate entities just to work for the final one, especially when I'm already being recruited by two other companies which are competent enough to validate their own candidates.

Companies already do that through external recruiters. Just that they are not technical hence you do not get any tech questions from them. They only do filtering by grepping for technologies and experience in your resume. I would do a little bit more than that. Go into tech questions. I don't think it's very much different than that.

Correct me if I am missing something. Sorry it's a 3 day old thread but somehow every time I think about any downsides for the candidate I am still trying to find one really good one. It's not that I am trying to run this idea and hence I am biased. I am thinking in unbiased terms if you believe me.

I haven't done that many interviews, so take this FWIW, but I'd be reluctant to be interviewed by a 3rd party. I'd have no way of getting a feel for company culture, plus you probably wouldn't be able to answer MY questions about the company.

If you're focusing on the tech only, it's still another layer that adds more time and money, plus if it's specialized enough they'd probably do an internal review of code samples anyway.

Valid points for sure. This is one of the downsides. But if you clear this round you are definitely going to talk to them. Its just that instead of answering those initial filtering questions to them, you would answer to me and I will convey that to them.

But I see your point and its a good point to consider before considering my idea.

Right, so the candidate has everything to lose and nothing to gain. The only beneficiary is the employer - which in the current supply/demand climate for engineers, makes the viability of this idea suspect.

Agreed. If I were the job candidate, I'd be less than thrilled to find out that the company that was trying to recruit me was "too busy" to interview me themselves. With companies complaining about how hard it is to get qualified candidates, they shouldn't be adding extra layers of bureaucracy between the candidate and the company.

Yes, its a service offered to employers right now so beneficiary is the employer. But I do not completely agree that candidate is at a loss. If the candidate is good enough, he will meet the employer eventually.

> "But I do not completely agree that candidate is at a loss."

How is the candidate not at a loss?

Under the current system, a candidate can ask any number of questions about the company, their culture, their technology, and other things that are of extreme importance to the candidate in deciding which opportunities to pursue.

Under your system, none of this can be meaningfully answered except the "brochure" facts that are trivial to discover anyways.

Under the current system, a candidate immediately meets with a member of the company.

Under your system, he/she will meet the employer "eventually".

Everything about this system is a net negative compared to the status quo, for the candidate.

In the current employment climate for (good) software engineers, where demand massively outstrips supply, I simply do not see a system that penalizes candidates going anywhere. I really hate whipping this card out, but the last two times I've been actively seeking a job I've had no less than a dozen companies respond positively within a single day. I would be severely disinclined to do anything through an intermediary.

This goes double if I'm only passively looking. I'm not looking to jump ship, so I have zero desire to spin my wheels on opportunities without any information on whether this is interesting to me or not.

The climate favors the candidate, not the employer, unless the employer is exceptional. IMO your idea can only be viable if it brings something to the table for both sides.

As someone who is responsible for hiring engineers at a small fashion company (~10 people), I can say that I would not use this service. It would be difficult to justify the cost.

Also, there is one caveat you are missing: the very last question, "Do you have any questions for me?" Interviews ought to be a two-way street, and a qualified candidate, in this model, wouldn't have the chance to ask me questions about our company. How might you address that?

Recruiting is hard, as we all know, because it is difficult not just to find good candidates, but to find people period. At least, this is the case if you are a small business.

Job postings typically cost ~$350 - $500 to post on the well-known job boards. And I have yet to find a promising candidate via that venue.

So you are talking about a cost of 50% of what it cost me to post the job in the first place. And in all likelyhood, that candidate will be a no-go, and now we're out the money for this interview, on top of what is already an expensive proposition.

And if you've decided not to use job boards to hire (because they don't work), then you're already paying tens of thousands of dollars to companies who make money by placing candidates. By that point, I might as well interview the individual myself.

If you can find quality engineering candidates - and vet their interest, and their technical ability - then I would be interested. But as other commenters have said, maybe your services would be better marketed towards recruiting agencies themselves.

As an aside: recruiting is disproportionately, insanely, time-consuming and expensive. Many companies (Etsy, Hacker School) get huge press and accolaids for their progressive stance on recruiting. But if you are a small company trying to bootstrap, it is impossible to pay the fees (grant the scholarships, provide the space, etc) that make for good press and recruiting ability.

Help me solve that problem! Once I have more candidates than I can handle, then let's talk about more efficiently vetting them.

From company perspective: Again, what is more important, money (which I am not charging a hell lot, if incase I am, correct me) or developers time. I am just reducing your cost on those interviews which would have failed already.

From candidate perspective: Do you talk to recruiters from hiring agencies? If yes, then you can see me as another recruiter who is much more technical. On answering the candidate's questions, I can obviously do part of the work. I am only taking one round so you have tons of more rounds to ask your questions.

I agree, it is not a hell of a lot. Certainly a drop in the bucket as compared to a developer's salary, even smaller compared to the employee's value to the company.

How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.

You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.

Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)

Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"

He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.

So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.

I actually did this for one of my consulting clients. It was a special situations though. I was the VP of Eng for a defunct company who's assets were bought by another. The purchaser needed to ramp up a team so I was helping with the interview process.

Parts that worked out well: 1. I knew the product/service, so I understand what type of skill sets are needed. 2. I know how to build a team, and the type of individuals you need for a good team. 3. I am local, whereas everyone from the purchasing company was in another city.

Parts that didn't work out very well: 1. I didn't know the direction the company was taking with the product, at least not clearly. 2. I can't comment on the type of relationship or org structure to expect with the parent company. Mind you, no one would really know anyhow, cause nothing was established.

Overall, it worked out well in the end.

However, looking at your resume, I wouldn't hire you for this service as a hiring manager. You don't really have the management expertise to identify the right individuals, because often, personality is more important than technical skills, and it takes management experience to identify the right individuals.

Moreover, in my case, I was putting a team together from scratch, so I can put people together based on strengths and weaknesses. With an existing team, you don't have that option. So the value prop is even lower.

I already hired engineers for several companies of very various sizes, and I can understand the value you're bringing. This said, if you're only going to be a technical filter, some companies will put your services against a combo of "recruiters + codility".

I personally went through codility myself for a company, and I found it decent, even though it has obvious disadvantages because of being online.

That said, if you feel like targeting bigger companies, I believe you should introduce yourself (or whatever company you're building) as a recruiter, but a strongly technical one, and then adapt your business model this way. It will scare companies less (newness equals risk), and it will make what you're bringing on the table more clear. Your value is in your technical skills.

I understand that the difference in your offering is that you're not offering companies to find candidates for them, but this is where you would become more useful than a method consisting of sending all the candidates to a service like codility.

All in all, I would use your services, but only if you solve a problem that my current tooling (recruiters I deal with, and online filtering services) can not solve, which does not look to be the case if I look at your current proposition.

I agree. If I rename myself as recruiter, I fit in well in the system. In fact candidates will be happy to talk to me because I am much more technical than non-tech recruiters. I think my positioning is biting me :).

I like your idea from a company's perspective. I've seen many teams struggling to get good developers - Part of the problem is the existing team (it sucks technically) - they can't ask the right questions and end up hiring the wrong kinda folks.

You should probably explain a bit more in detail (on a blogpost maybe) on the matrix that you will use for evaluation related to techs.

I agree with few of the comments below too.

1) I'll not be interested in talking to you if it seems to me that you are a recruiter. But then - its me and people like me who are humbly confident about their skills - that's mostly not the case with everybody. May be you could partner with an employee -mostly silent- during interviews.

2) You could be doing a great deal of misdeed towards developers. I judge my prospective employer/team based on the questions they asked, how they asked, etc, etc. I've been trapped into a situation where I thought that the team is "very good" based on the interviewer - which turned out to be a disaster - bcoz the interviewer was brought in from some other team (read: excellent team) - but that's not what I was hired for.

I think you said it correctly. And I should write a blog post explaining it better. The reason many companies screw up on hiring is because its difficult.

But to be honest, even after hearing lots of negative feedback from candidate's perspective, if I can smoothen out the interview process for a company, candidates will benefit too. Also, as I said in another comment, through experience (over a period of time) and technical knowledge I will be able to spot talent much faster. And I might end up helping candidate as well if I feel that he is actually the right candidate for a particular job.

I am going to be honest here. I will immediately stop the conversation if a company would pull something like this on me. For me, time spent with a recruiter is time mostly wasted: corporate speak, big magnificent mission statements which tell me only what I can find from the site. For me, the whole idea of talking to a tech person is to figure out very quickly whether aforesaid person is interesting, does interesting work and is possibly a good co-worker. Your service doesn't help me at all: you don't work for the company, your knowledge of the company's backend is going to be superficial unless you have touched their code and I couldn't care less if you were a good person or not because I am never going to see you.

Ultimately such a service is disrespectful of candidate time. Also, if you are a small or medium sized startup, you would be blindingly stupid to do purely a google style Algo/DS interview. You don't have six months to train the candidate and you would be better off focusing more on talking about your own problems, how to solve them and such.

Hi eshvk

Thanks a lot for responding. I agree with few points but my argument against the rest is that I am not hijacking the whole interview process. I am just doing that round one which a junior person from the company would have done and I am hoping that if you clear you would have tons of chances to ask your questions and know the company well.

According to me, taking interview is an art. In fact, many times I have seen the person getting rejected by a company because someone inexperienced from the team took the first round and rejected him. I agree that companies should not do this. They should give another chance, but in real world when you have tons of resumes pouring in, companies end up doing this.

How about think along these lines, that if I really find you good. I will definitely make sure that your strengths are played in front of the employer really well and you are given due chance.

It doesn't matter if you are a junior person in the company or not. You are a team member, you should have a say in who gets hired.

> How about think along these lines, that if I really find you good. I will definitely make sure that your strengths are played in front of the employer really well and you are given due chance.

If I am really good, you will be wasting my time by not giving me a chance to tell me what on earth the company I am interviewing for is doing. Interviewing is a two-way street. It is not only about me passing your tests but it is also whether I will decide to like the company. That time that I spend interviewing with you is time where I still have no idea what the codebase looks like, what the latest problems the company is tussling with, why I would be a right fit.

(with reference to automated_sysadmin_screen_test)

While your idea is good I hardly see it scaling as it is hard to consistently assure quality of evaluations when done by hired consultants (You)

I have been an employer and I took a different approach, of putting technology at work.

What does that mean? Well we all talk about TDD (Rspec Driven Tests for your code), I applied that to interviews Rspec+Puppet https://github.com/zalora/automated_sysadmin_screen_test

This has worked pretty well for me and it will work for similar scenarios.

I was planning to build this into a service someday and have some pending plans on this, Anybody interested in sweat equity?

1.) This can become a service that recruiters can offer 2.) It can be subscribed on monthly subscription or per candidate basis 3.) Github repository shows the basic idea, it can be applied to other niche too.

Get in-touch if this interests you: a[at]parolkar[dot]com

On the topic of incentives: Does anyone know if a system where a recruiter's compensation is tied to their proposed candidates success/failure ratio as opposed to just the raw number of placements made? Or is it always just more implicit where if too many bad candidates are referred the company switches to a new recruiter?

I do not think its tied to the ratio. Its just tied to the absolute hits value. Yeah, if the recruiter is sending tons of unqualified resumes, then a company would end up changing it. But that does not happen often.

What I'll say after looking for a job for a month now: There aren't many companies who even take the first step of emailing/contacting back after an application. I feel like this, if it was well defined and consistent, then it would be valuable.

Yep, Thats the idea. Make it consistent.

I have gotten paid in the past for doing this. In addition to actually interviewing candidates, I also advised the client on the type of developer they needed etc. I actually have a lot of experience interviewing and making hiring decisions (and getting interviewed) so the client was fairly comfortable with this.

I like this idea since you are not having any conflict of interest when interviewing people. A nothing thing along these lines is the idea of getting pre-interviewed with your results shown online. Basically a crowd-sourced hiring platform.

I love this fact about this idea that I am getting paid either ways so I do not have any conflict of interest. About the results shown online idea, I think candidates would not like that for the interviews gone bad. Correct me if I got it wrong.

I am seeing lots of comments about candidates feeling bad about it. Just to clarify on that end.

Do you speak to outside recruiters. Do they ask you questions about your skills before fwding you resume? If the answer is yes, then I am just another recruiter who happens to be actually technical and instead of asking you "Whether you know this tech? or How many years of experience you have with this tech?" kind of questions, I am actually taking proper tech interviews before fwding your resume.

Thoughts?

You are pitching this idea amongst a group of people who hate the idea of talking to outside recruiters. To be honest, maybe your service isn't meant for startups in the Bay Area. Maybe outside there is a larger culture of talking to outside recruiters and going through that torture.

Oh, for the record. I have a firm policy of not answering technical questions posed by a non-technical recruiter who reads from a Q&A sheet.

> who hate the idea of talking to outside recruiters

Wonder why? Could you list the reason. My guess is you would find my response in that.

Interesting idea.

This is part of what employers think they're buying when they use a recruiter to bring in candidates. Of course they aren't getting what they pay for, and there's also the problem of inherently misaligned interests.

You might be able to sell that same service to job-seekers too. Many candidates are so poorly practiced that they hide genuine talent. Some are even aware of those shortcomings.

Absolutely agree with that. A few rounds of practice before appearing will not hurt and will definitely increase your chances. But I am guessing selling it to fellow developers will be difficult. So I am starting with companies. But I agree with your idea and will give your idea a try as well.

Can I suggest that you pitch this service not to tech companies, but to recruiters? I think that's where the biggest disconnect lies - between tech recruiters and tech candidates.

You've got an excellent value proposition for recruiters, too. Anything that would improve their hit rate would presumably be extremely valuable.

I agree that there is a value proposition for the recruiters but its difficult to make a service for them.

I think I have a value proposition for companies as well. I am reducing their filtering time (the time where technical folks from the company itself in involved).

Again, for candidates, if you speak to outside recruiters and judged by them before your resume get fwded, so you can see me as another recruiter who is actually technical and I am testing on your tech skills.

I would also like to know if anyone has tried this before. What was the experience? Thoughts?

If a one hour single-interviewer interview is a significant improvement then it seems like companies should do this themselves, I'm not sure what service you are really providing unless you are just a really good interviewer.

I am saving lots of developers hours. I am saving critical developer hours during, say a launch, when you had to keep your candidate search on hold. It has happened to me multiple times. I was waiting to hear back from companies while they were busy launching a product. In real world it happens a lot. I know I cannot do later rounds and they should be done by the team themselves but initial round can definitely be done by me. And finally, I am reducing their misses which results in saved developer time.

> I am saving lots of developers hours

I don't see how this is really true. You say an interview can use up 15-20 developer hours and in some percentage of the failure cases you are saving that (and hopefully not failing some percentage of the passing casses, btw.)

My point is that if a 1-hour screening by a single developer is effective, I can keep it in-house and save 14-19 developer hours where you'd be saving me 15-20.

I guess I am actually assuming you are only spending 1 hour with the candidate, you never say that above. But my point is, unless you are uniquely good at interviewing, the amount of time you are putting into interviewing the candidate is the amount of the you are saving me.

This is an absolutely great idea. More people need to think like this, just straight out offer a service. If everyone was taught this simple truth - Always Be Closing - there would be no unemployment lines.

for me one of my deciding questions I ask people is "Any questions for me?" If they ask a lot, I know they are interested and I'll bring them in for an in person.

But what if they lack the basic tech skills? I am not talking about tech as in knowing a language but someone whose CS fundamentals are weak.

Would you still consider? Obviously I am not talking about roles which do not require CS fundamentals to be strong.

edit: obviously again I am taking just round one.

What about all your jobs that you only stayed a year or less at on your resume? Has no one questioned that? Do you have any explanation for such apparent job hopping? Not that I blame you...

Well, I have worked on mostly very early stage startups. Very rarely in a big corporation except my last employment. After that I have been working on my own startup.

As you know things change a lot in startups. Statistics show >95% of them fail. Hence the jump. I am not saying I jumped because they fail. But you work in a startup not because you want it to be next run of the mill company. You work in a startup so that it becomes the next Google.

But if my senses say that a company is not going to become next Google, I move on instead of wasting my time and companies time and money. I am not sure whether I answered your question but its more philosophical than anything else.

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