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Comment by pmcgrathm | Hacker News Reader

$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.

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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.

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