HiredBox – Ask the right questions in your technical interviews | Hacker News Reader

HiredBox – Ask the right questions in your technical interviews

hiredbox.com

43 pointswavelet35 comments

Who are these industry leaders who only price their time at $60 to $120 per hour? (Certainly not anyone who's read the advice by tptacek, patio11, et al. about consulting.)

This is an introductory pricing to get a feel of what people think / need. Our experts’ time are definitely worth much more than that in their day jobs!

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

I highly recommend patio11's newsletter :)

If anyone ever feels the need to do introductory pricing, do yourself a favor and estimate market rates, put them on the page, then strikethrough them and quote the introductory pricing. This conveys a) the customer is getting a deal and b) the service provider is not wildly irrational about what they're offering.

We're clear that this pricing is wildly irrational, right? $30 for a half hour is, literally, not what it would cost to assess someone's skill at performing haircuts. Many of your customers, who after all have hiring authority for engineers, can do the math about what your interviewers' market wages and chargeout rates must presumably be. Those rates make these rates look like a joke. That quickly sets your customers to thinking "OK, there must be a catch, because clearly one cannot sustainably pay a CTO $30 per half hour to do schedule-in-advance work with a half-hour minimum? What is that catch?"

None of the answers your prospects will dream up to that question will induce them to give you their business.

To add some data:

Companies like Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) pay experts $750 per hour for one hour of talking to someone on the phone.

You're right. This is absurd pricing, both from the perspective of what expertise at this level costs, and the value the service intends to generate. A 1-hour interview in this service is ~0.08% of first year salary. A recruiter takes 15-25%.

It's hard to take this seriously. It's one of those things where, if it worked, you'd have to assume the owners would be using it to print infinite money. At these prices, there's a positive ROI to having their panel of experts interview random people off the street.

It's also not clear what the price tiers mean. "Junior/Senior/Management" --- is that the skill level of the interviewer?

>> "Junior/Senior/Management" --- is that the skill level of the interviewer?

That's the position you would be hiring for, right ?

That's right, the technical depth that the interviews would dive to would be different depending on the experience your candidate is expected to have.

How much does a typical software company burn on talent acquisition? I'd wager it's at least one or two orders of magnitude larger than the rates posted on this page, but I've never hired before.

The rule of thumb I've heard is 25-30% of first year's salary is spent on finding, hiring, onboarding and training a full time employee.

And it's worse than that, because not all hires work out, and that 25% number doesn't account for the costs you absorb with broken hires.

So naively...

    (0.25 * base salary * (average number of broken hires - 1))

That is the value you can create if you have experts successfully vet new hires (assuming they succeed at this).

How much time would it take for an expert to do this? Not just in the interview part, but the after-service (write-ups)?

I'm sure if they tethered their prices to the value they're actually creating, and they had experts capable of screening clients, then I could see this taking off.

Very interesting to see all these comments about pricing. Our introductory prices were based off similar services where you chat with an experienced dev for an hour for help with your code, etc.

Are any of those services any good? People who can code well enough to improve a design after a 1-hour phone call generally aren't incentivized to spend an hour on the phone talking to random developers.

Are you talking about, e.g. "AirPair"?

I wouldn't be an "expert" for hire on those services, either, because the prices are all race-to-the-bottom programming/engineering-skill-is-a-commodity prices.

Perhaps they're doing it during their day jobs, meaning on top of their normal job, effectively "double dipping." Could be a good, low-risk way to fill downtime.

Most employers don't tolerate this behavior.

"What, you're making money for yourself during the time you're supposed to be working for us?!"

It's unethical and almost certainly illegal, but IANAL.

No argument that it would definitely be unethical. But how is it illegal? What criminal violations are occurring?

I would be interested to read more on their interviewing process since every "interview" thread on HN receives triple digit comments and there doesn't appear to be any consensus on how best to interview candidates.

$60/slot from someone that is likely making 5-10X that an hour in their day job via base salary (not including stock grants) is a bit ludicrous. I like the idea, but you really have to charge what the time of these people is worth. On one side, this pricing will likely only serve to further the interest in the product from a customer. On the other side, you may actually get real significant talent onto the platform, not people who are trying to run a consulting business.

How about this - pay the expert a portion of the salary. The $/hour would make a bit more sense, and the 'experts' aren't going to laugh at how overrated the recruiter is in the process.

Just some pricing pedantry: unless you're selling a like-for-like substitutable commodity, you should ignore your costs and price according to the value you generate for customers. (If the value you generate is less than your costs, you should find a new business).

So it really doesn't much matter what their panel of experts makes; the big pricing issue they have is that a single percentage point of value in a recruiting context is worth several thousand dollars.

Please. Who, in tech, is making $300 to $600 an hour "base salary"? Pretty much nobody other than a handful of VPs and CEOs. None of which are likely able to to do a real technical interview anyway.

$300 constitutes, before taxes, around $550k. This is not unheard of for senior / director level product management or engineering hires at some large tech firms. Do not believe what you read on glassdoor. There are plenty of Googlers that are making around $1M in salary in these types of roles.

To emphasize pmcgrathm's point, the $60/hr "level" is for "Management/C-level" candidate interviews. If you're paying a consultant to ask "the right questions," then at that level you're paying another management/C-level person, or a very experienced "C-level" headhunter/recruiter, and they're unlikely to do it for $60/hr.

That said, the same is true across all these pricing tiers. I wouldn't consult on a Junior level interview for $60/hr, much less $30. I can earn twice that as a W-2 contractor doing boring, unchallenging enterprise architecture and software.

Sounds like a cool concept. I would want to know how you address the obvious conflict of interest issue since many of these experts presumably would be hiring (or have friends who are hiring) as well.

Despite all the negativity around pricing I think this is an excellent idea.

I would certainly do frontend coding tests with people for say $100 per hour. From a beach. In Bali.

Hard to say if your service is valuable without some references but the pricing looks quite attractive if your people really are qualified. I know job titles look good but some of the smartest people I've met haven't beent CTOs or founders, they've been senior developed who have years of experience.

Nevertheless good luck and I think this is a great idea.

Thanks for the comment. True about the titles - the people we work with have years of experience in industry, and setting out to build their own companies. They’ve had to recruit along the way too and so know the struggles of finding good candidates, especially when expanding and having to interview for new roles. Our process starts with a chat so that we get to know the client’s requirements and they get to know us before going forward.

as someone who been a sysadmin/devops engineer for 15 or so years now, I think you should add that as an option. I've interviewed for at least 10-15 first devops hires and all the interviews technically were a joke. Comparing them to interviews with at least one other devops engineer in house that is.

I am curious to see what people should expect as the output of the service.

Does the interviewer return back a single "hire/no hire" bit or is there a more detailed assessment of the candidate's strengths/weaknesses within the topics covered?

There is a lot interesting stuff going on in the hiring space, I like that this has a human touch - uber-for interviewers.

have you thought of working with something like https://clarity.fm/?

I'd certainly be interested in having myself interviewed at the listed price. I think I'd also have someone who I didn't want to hire be interviewed to see how the results compare.

At the price listed it certainly seems viable.

Has anyone had any experience of using services like this? I struggle to interview for completely new roles when we first establish them, and could see this being useful in those scenarios.

perhaps it's how I am, but if I'm not interviewing with people who are part of the company, how am I supposed to make judgements about whether I want to work with these people?

It's a technical interview to assess your technical knowledge. The idea is you'd have another interview with your boss about your teamworking skills and similar rubbish.

I can actually see a need for this, but they need to get more experts than "our mates from nearby startups and their parents."

Also the subjects they've listed are all for programming topics when I doubt you're going to be in the situation of not already having some in house experts. They need much more niche subjects.

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