Is there a market for contract interviewers? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a market for contract interviewers?

7 pointsblooberr5 comments

This is from a friend. He's very interested in disrupting the interviewing process --

I believe there are fundamentally 2 big things to solve when it comes to companies hiring staff:

1) Finding the right people. This is a problem often at the "top of the funnel" where finding enough of good talent is hard.

2) Selecting the right people. This is a problem in the middle of the funnel where it can be really tough to determine whether or not someone can do everything they say they can, can learn quickly and strongly enough on the job to effective, and fit with the culture of the organization they're entering into.

I have heard of companies like InterviewStreet/HackerRank, Hire Vue, HireArt, and Talentex. I also know that a lot of companies do written tests (e.g. McKinsey), writing/portfolio samples, or recorded video interviews to filter people out without having to be in a room with a candidate or his/her teleconned presence. Nonetheless, I see most of these companies attempting to save more time on problem 1 rather than problem 2. I see problem 2 being especially difficult outside of engineering where assessing intangibles is often so difficult, and it can take 10+ hours of time per candidate.

To save companies time and effort, would there be a market for professional, contracted interviewers at least for first or second rounds?

I've worked in law enforcement for 8 years and the hiring/promotion process is kind of interesting. In a way my agency used "contract interviewers."

The normal process includes some sort of written test to make sure the candidate meets some general baseline of intelligence. After that there is an oral board interview. It is usually a set list of questions on which the candidate's score is graded by 3 - 5 interviewers. For my agency the board usually consisted of the supervisor over the position applied for, someone doing the position applied for, a command staff member and 1 - 3 of the board were from a different agency.

I always thought it was odd that we used outside interviewers during our process. I believe the goal was to get an unbiased view of the candidates.

So, I could see a contract interviewer as a useful tool. Especially if the goal was to bring in someone who was unbiased. The obvious difficulty you would have to overcome would be the lack of knowledge concerning the specific business - what is their culture? How well would a candidate fit in?

I've specialised in this field (sourcing & hiring) for years and issue #1 above is categorically the hardest part of the whole problem. Finding good talent is incredibly difficult, everything that follows is very straightforward. This is why the billion dollar industry of third-party recruitment exists, purely to solve problem #1 (even a terrible solution can make billions). If problem #2 was even marginally as difficult to solve as problem #1 then I'd say go for it but it's not.

You are asking the wrong people. He should be asking his potential customers. He should have a landing page on which to offer the upcoming service. An email sign-up form for people to get notified when it launches. People tell you through their actions.

no. in this tight job market most of the resumes are crap anyway -- even bozos can detect this.

maybe something like that would be big in asia but big companies could use it too...

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