Ask HN: What about a platform for hiring teams instead of individuals?
We see a lot of startups that use existing platforms for individual hiring to team up freelancers. However building teams on in individual hires take too much time and effort, with no knowledge about compatibility or assurance regarding the resulting efficiency of the team.
Startups need more than an group of people, they need an efficient team to move fast. As Aristotle said "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
What do you think of a platform where recruiters can search and hire teams based on their portfolio and soft skills, while still having access to each individual technical expertise?
163 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadBetter off is software consultancy groups. They're more used to this set up.
Happened to an agency I once worked at. We sent 6 people (4 were full time, 2 were contract) to a client to work on their project. After a year, none of the 6 people were still with the agency. The contractors were let go after the contract expiration, 3 of the 4 full timers took jobs with the client, and I left for another company.
I've also worked at multiple organizations now where a great trick is to hire one "influencer" and then slowly hire everyone they know.
I even have some team members in mind ...
> The world’s first team hiring platform. > Assemble your best colleagues today and start receiving full-time or freelance team jobs.
Ravi Grover, Elevator CTO
The situation you're talking about sounds like one where it could make sense to contract out work to a team, outsourcing rather than hiring a team that will likely change soon after you hire them.
There tend to be a couple issues with this model. For one, what if the hiring company interviews the team and wants 7 of the 10? The team has to make a decision to either look for work where they can all be on the team, or abandon members.
The other issue is timing. The team members need to all be available at (or around) the same time, and they typically will have conflicting interests related to other offers or ventures they are considering.
I've had situations where a startup closed and the team wanted to stay together, and they'd ask me to approach companies on their behalf - almost like an acquihire without the company. You would think a company might pay each member a bit more for a team experienced in working together, as in theory they should be more productive more quickly.
From a platform perspective I think it would be pretty difficult to build just based on how to categorize teams and/or individuals. Any given search of the platform seems like it would yield very similar results.
In theory, yes, some actions are 'not allowed'. But this isn't an mathematical excercise it involves real people.
e.g. Who get's told the 'offers'? Do they get separate salary offers, or is it a single pot? If the latter, how do they decide what's fair? What happens if evereyone's extremely happy but one person? Or two people? What happens if there are competing offers that different members perfer unequally? How do the ongoing salary reviews go? Can individual members be fired after being hired?
It's going to be very messy, and I would imagine may not work a good proportion of the time. I would imagine a lot of the answers of the above questions would start looking like the answers given by a union, something that the tech community as a whole has avoided so far.
The whole point of hiring a team is that you aren't evaluating individual performance or skills; you're evaluating the groups' performance and skills. If the team is good, the people who can't immediately be helpful will re-train so that they can provide skills that are useful in the new context. The team will evolve to become the exact team that you need.
That seems like a best-case scenario to me, unless the team is 3-4 people and someone is looking to create a capability or product from scratch.
On the other hand, if you already have an established team, merging them when they see themselves as distinct groups might be tough.
The other issue I see is that I doubt companies will want this to become common in the industry. Even if it's great for hiring (and I think it often would be - especially for new projects), do you want support something that might encourage a group of all the employees in a particular specialization to band together and decide they want to all leave at once? I wouldn't. Especially since that might happen right at the time when new development is slowing down and deep knowledge about the current system is the most valuable asset related to the project.
Remember when the cast of Friends all negotiated for $1M/episode, and they pitched it as "you pay us all, or you don't have a product"? I don't recall any public outcry that they were holding NBC hostage.
As we move toward a completely digital society, it only makes sense that the digital gatekeepers will have more leverage. Employers hate that.
My mental image of the cast of Friends holding NBC hostage is that of two people with guns trained on each other, both yelling, "come any closer and I'll shoot."
Exactly. We've been approached a few times by intact teams all wanting to join. My approach has always been that I love talking to people in this situation, but that our contracts, interviews, and offers are all between the company and the individual and that while we may have an initial project in mind where they'd all work together, that that was not guaranteed to hold true over time.
I'll also ask them individually if a case like the 7/10 above happens, would they prefer to get 7 offers or 0 offers? (I don't want to be the source of telling Alex, Becky, and Charlie that I didn't think Dave was strong enough to join the company if they don't want to hear that.)
It's also possible that he's a "really nice guy" and close friend of theirs and they're blind to his weakness.
It's also possible that he's a very strong contributor in a domain and skillset that the hiring company simply doesn't need.
Is it so bad that 7 of the 10 individuals from a team get an opportunity together? Referrals are a growing part of business, and who is to say that a whole team cannot eventually work at another company? You have a better chance applying as a team than anything else.
There are team hiring platforms out there, and at least there you can see what type of opportunities exist for you team. Worst case you say no.
Seems like this is better for freelancing when you can sell a solution and maintain autonomy in how you produce that solution.
+ web design team name
| team member name | Role |
--
team member 1 - developer
team member 2 - creative director
team member 3 - designer
team member 4 - designer
team member 5 - production artist
The hiring manager at company B has to be thinking, "OK, what happens when company C comes along 18 months from now; am I at higher risk of losing this new team all at once?"
If a team is truly great they are indeed more valuable than the sum of their parts so they would be selling themselves short not to shoot for a more lucrative acquisition.
Ultimate I would expect a platform such as this to either turn into an acquisition tool or be filled with mediocre teams while the good teams are acquired elsewhere.
Maybe we need an anonymous matchmaking platform, no reputational risk to the team for signaling ‘pivoting’ to getting aquihired before they run out of runway.
To put it simply: The software development department of a company might bring the company $10 mil value. A consulting agency with great sales would bill them $9 mil to do the work. Individually hired developers might be paid a total of $1 mil.
If the company hires an entire team, eventually the team figures out that they bring $10 mil value and can easily negotiate their pay up to that because they coordinate together. Individual developers almost never coordinate like this.
It is hard to see why and how a functioning and talented team would be assembled outside those circumstances. I mean a team built to sell suggests that the members are not ideally busy solving technical problems.
As you quite rightly point out this is a long way away from OPs original vision.
It actually works pretty well as long as you realize that the "accounting" works differently offshore -- for every good developer you get, you're paying to have someone's dead weight cousin on the project as well. In the end, it's still cheaper than on-shore, just don't expect everyone to pull equal weight.
It's all about learning what work to do on-shore (anything involving client contact / communication, like requirements gathering) and how to package and hand off requirements to offshore.
The big consulting firms will have an advantage over small ones in this model though, because hiring/training developers becomes an operational task that you're doing all the time. If you can grapple with the training and skills development you end up needing to do offshore, the model does work very well.
It will distance you from the technology side of the business, however... and soon enough you'll find that you're working in professional services rather than software development. :)
Its risky. Perhaps if it was a whole team, who didn't need to integrate any existing employees, it could work.
We're currently accepting closed beta testers. We're a platform designed to create teams with freelancers. Our mission is to make freelancing easy as possible, through team collaboration and specialization.
versus adding some value.
- challenges they ran into - it's working for them or not.
it's just a blatant ad.
If you are selected for our closed beta, you will receive recognition within our platform as early user. Details coming soon!
We have a strong mission, and we want to make it easy and accessible for anyone that wants to become a freelancer. The answer is through teams, with specialization, collaboration, and having that comparative advantage will allow teams to thrive.
Is it just a way to organize a team of freelancers? Or do you also provide client leads?
The bigger picture is to allow teams to "grow together" which is to showcase the work they've done together as a team. We want to have team-based portfolios to make hiring choices easier for companies.
We feel synergy is an essential part of effective teams, and we are putting a lot of emphasis on showing that.
* Why are you doing some unintuitive scroll-jacking?
* Why are you using React for literally a single scrollable page?
* Why are you putting the scroll position into the URL instead of somewhere like local storage? It's annoying that I can't even leave the page without pressing back multiple times.
ugh
Sorry about the mega payload. I was still in process of optimizing it when this thread came out 5am this morning (I saw it during my morning jog). I knew we had to get this out there ASAP.
Scroll-jacking is annoying, I know. I'm in the process of fixing it. I think we need to optimize our designs first.
I'm using React with next.js, which makes deployment + development super simple.
The point of scroll position was for URL shortcuts, sorry about that! I'll disable the history and maybe that will make things better.
Thank you for the feedback! Look forward to hear from us again. ;)
I'm working as a freelancer for a startup that's doing great, thanks.
Which happens a lot everywhere, not just with programmers.
But it should be relatively easy to beat the scammers, learn how to market yourself properly, get testimonials to back up your claims, build your marketing message to answer questions and problems that your potential customers have. In other words: build your authority as a freelancer.
Self-hating mood?
Sounds like you want the team to start a contracting business. Build your platform for that instead.
This arrangement might've worked well for us if the seniors and manager could've kept the quality consistent, but they couldn't. A couple of them were really good, but most were not and problems caused by the juniors kept leaking through to us. At one point I even had to entirely scrap a project their team had worked on, and redo it all myself. (That's one case where I have evidence of being a 10x developer, at least on that project and relative to that team.)
This isn't a great argument for teams vs individuals though, because a lot of the issues we had were more to do with the cultural and logistical difficulties of outsourcing from US to India and the company we were working with, rather than the consulting model.
We told the recruiters to think of us as 'The Bipod' and that we would only go to a new job if we both were hired for the same team, at least initially.
They claimed they had done it one other time so I know it must be asked for occasionally. Long story short, my friend and I are leaving our current employer for the new employer next week. So it can be done. And I think it is nice to have some consistency in a new place of employment. It should make the transition easier for both of us.