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Ask HN: Should I build a tool that helps founders showcase their team?

15 points by grease ↗ HN
No matter how we hire, candidates today research the company before talking/applying. What they find is not too helpful. Many startups have good-looking careers pages, but they don't answers questions like "what engg. problems do you solve at XYZ" [1], "What is the interview process at XYZ" [2] etc. These give a much better window into the team than opaque career pages or job descriptions.

(This is also why engineering blogs are a powerful hiring tool. Unfortunately, most such blogs languish or die slowly.)

Do you think there is value in helping startups create a better picture of themselves?

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-engineering-problems-and-challenges-is-Stripe-solving [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-engineering-interview-process-like-at-Stripe

10 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] thread
rajeshinf
What about glassdoor reviews?
vinodkumaar
Glassdoor reviews are mostly anonymous and sometimes I have seen angry people venting out there. I feel some of the positive reviews in Glassdoor are in because someone in the company pushed people to write them.
rnvneeth
Thats right. The Org generally gets some of its marketing team members to write reviews and get it posted on Glassdoor.
grease
IMO Glassdoor reviews suffer from extremity bias. For some reason, most reviews there either sound artificial or angry.

More importantly, glassdoor gathers "what people think of a company". Isn't it more interesting to know "how people think in a company"?

kvemparala
Would this tool be able to provide a better picture than what the company website and the company pages on LinkedIn and Facebook be able to provide?
grease
Yes, and here's why.

A team's picture gets better when it sees collective participation from a large number of people in the team. Which is why I feel this will beat company LI/FB pages, that are updated by a single person(or a select few)

brudgers
If I were pretending to be a startup VP HR, I'd pretend to ask for data showing the value of such a service. In particular I'd need to compare how optimizing for random visitors to the careers page returns value relative to targeted recruiting.

Good luck.

grease
Good point.

In (email) targeted recruiting, the recipient will check the company out first. Isn't it worthwhile to build what they would like to see?

brudgers
There's a hypothesis there, and it may be a good one. My thought is that getting someone to hand over money for a tool based on the hypothesis will be easier if the hypothesis is supported by data indicating to what degree the product will affect the bottom line.