Comment by mjbellantoni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjbellantoni | Hacker News Reader

Hiring velocity is one area where small companies can use their agility to advantage when competing against larger companies for talent. As a hiring manager, I always endeavor to make this process as streamlined as possible.

A couple of anecdotes:

I was able to hire an outstanding candidate simply because I got them through the process and extended them an offer. Our competition was a reasonably high-profile company in the area. In the end he joined us because after more than a week, the other company was unable to execute their paperwork to get an offer generated.

More recently, I saw a very big name West Coast company (think Google/Facebook/Uber) lose out on a great person because they had a third party do a reference check. In the time it took for that check to happen, the job seeker had lots of time to re-consider the offer and instead ended up working for a smaller company on the East Coast which kept in touch and was able to move blindingly fast.

I work for a pretty large company, and the more involvement I have with the hiring process the more painful it is to see. We just move so incredibly slowly, with frequent false starts, and we've lost a number of good candidates because of it. I'm fairly concerned we're going to lose someone I referred because of it, but there's only so much prodding I can do and that doesn't serve to fix the problem.

This sounds like a major cost that maybe isn't really considered when studies are done that evaluate the cost of potentially hiring a bad employee.

The glaring problem I have seen with nearly all of those studies and discussions is that they all seem to underestimate or even neglect the costs of losing good candidates.

Exactly...that's what I was trying to convey.

I've been making some grumblings, and would really like data to back things up. Would anyone who was recently hired (past year or so) mind sharing information about the process?

I'm mostly interested in the length of time from first contact->first day on the job, whether you think that is a reasonable amount of time, and the rough size of the company (or the name, but I understand people not wanting to share that)

I know this was a major factor in joining the company I work at currently. They were quick, they didn't waste my time, they were open and answered questions that I usually would have to push back to get info for.

Sounds strange to me.

If I want to work at a big company, I would only consider small companies if the big ones don't want me and not if the big ones just want me a month later.

If you want to work at a company offering more responsibility and/or more money, you consider the company that's offered it to you more favourably than the bigger company that says they like you very much and will decide if you're good enough after a week or two. Especially if you suspect that reflects how the respective companies will respond to any future requests you might wish to make if working for them.

If you only want to work at a big company, you probably don't interview with the smaller company in the first place.

Some people want to work in a certain domain and don't care much about the size of the company.

If it takes a month to get their shit together to hire you, how long would it take you to get anything else routine done at that company? You need a new machine for your first day at work and they put in a request and you'd probably finally get a machine a month later. That sounds like a nightmare place to work.

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