The Best Recruiting Is Done Face-to-Face

While the "third space" concept presented here is interesting as a social hack to get the most out of the conversations you do have, I think the real lesson here is actually something else:

Outsourcing parts of your hiring process, especially first-round interviews, can be detrimental to the quality of your second-round candidate pool.

Mentally divide all potential candidates into three buckets: Definitely not, definitely, and possibly.

The first group, "definitely not", should be immediately discarded in the interest of time-savings. Of all tasks, this makes the most sense to outsource.

The second group, "definitely", are folks that you obviously want to interview. Folks that EVERY company in your space hiring for a similar role wants to interview. They're expensive and hard to get.

The third group, "possibly", is where the real gold is found. There will be candidates here who are perfect fits, yet undervalued in the market. Third parties tend to be bad at identifying the traits about these candidates that make them so special. The secret to getting the most value out of this group is to have someone in the know (first party hiring manager) talk to A LOT of them. Ideally these conversations are intentionally brief — this is a volume game, after all.

Some more relevant info: http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/63656960436/hiring-diamond...

Full disclosure:

I'm the founder of Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com) and we help companies with this exact challenge. Our method, in short, is to expose more information about these "possibly" candidates to make it easier to decide if they should be in one of the other two buckets. Then we make it super simple to talk to the candidates you like. A bit like your dream recruiter, but online and without hassle.

Is the company willing to do video chats after work hours, for example 8pm? I, and I assume many others, will not be able to have a video chat during work hours. I can get away for a phone call, but not a video chat.

I think this personalized approach is really important - showing that you're not a faceless corporation but in fact a team of people working towards the same goals is a great thing to strive for.

Would love the hacker news community's thoughts on the subject too!

I totally agree, great article!