Ask HN: Do you get good applications from “Who is hiring?”?

HN demographics plays a role, of course. More discrete and tailored manners through headhunters or, at the other end of the spectrum, cold calls to engineers working at direct competitors in your niche should give better outcome.

Most of the people prefer remote these days.

I've not received one single usable resume. Lots of headhunters regularly send me email now, though, so the admonishment to not use the contact info provided for commercial purposes is not being heeded. I've given up posting.

If you point to the particular postings might be easier for people to give helpful feedback.

Complete speculation, but may be that in general EU salaries are lower than US so not many ppl want to take that kind of cut despite differences in cost of living?

Thats been a blocker for me in the past in moving back to the EU.

My company had the same trouble. The demographics here trend too hard toward the Bay Area (we are located in a different, large, and tech heavy US city). Overall candidates tend to be younger and less experienced, oftentimes with boot camp backgrounds. Posts here also apparently tend to attract applicants who specialize in trendy, fad of the moment stacks or more "light" languages and frameworks, when we are looking more for embedded people. In any case, the candidates here are the type we don't have trouble finding through more traditional and better targeted channels. Our recruiting pain points are at the senior and up levels, in enterprise and embedded stacks.

I've just received a few speculative emails from recruiters and some from freelancers on different continents wanting to take on office-based roles from their location.

Chiming in from the other end of the line, I occasionally check the hiring threads to see if there are any interesting offers up. There's a lot of content and most of the time, the descriptions are pretty poor (namely buzzwords and fluff) or the offer is not easily findable. To stand out, make sure your post is clearly titled, straight to the point and findable by common keywords.

I think optimizing the content by looking at other posts isn't a good strategy — in my (personal and biased) opinion, most of the offers are badly written.

Let me guess, no remote and no or low salary listed?

I got my current job from a 'Who is Hiring' post, so clearly it worked for someone! It's not a replacement for a solid recruiting team/funnel, but having been on both sides of the process I found it a useful resource. FWIW.

I never had a lot of hits for Clojure in Chicago, but the candidates were above average. I've made 2 hires over 5 years and a small handful of posts.

Years back I posted saying my local team was hiring (at Amazon) and mentioned we hire interns. Got 20 resumes from students looking for internships, 6 of whom got hired.

When I submitted them to the recruiting, I made it clear these weren't personal references, nobody I knew. But the recruiter filed them that way anyways, so I got like $500 bonus per intern hire. A nice $3,000 bonus for a HN post and funneling some resumes over to a recruiter.

None of the full time resumes went anywhere, sadly- they're worth considerably higher bonuses.

You link to the German versions of your website. I don't know German. You don't talk about your development practices or team experience. Your industry isn't shiny. You don't list salary. Incidentally, I was just talking to the guy who posts for a Boston manufacturing startup who says they have hired many solid engineers from here

I'm looking for remote work only (family issues). I'd love to work in European hours. However, US companies pay 30-50% more. This way I don't even send any applications to the European ones.

I'm not sure if you would consider me above medium (however during the last 16 years I learned a lot). The people I know who are much above medium have jobs. They don't look too much for them and are old enough to forget about traveling for work (house, dogs, kids, school).

I noticed that you only post about on-site positions. I'm too old for ad-hoc moving to another country. I don't speak German enough to do shopping. I could work for you but only remotely.

If you would consider remote employees, I'm sure you would get much more interesting applications. But then there is the problem from the first paragraph: if someone is looking for a remote position and some companies pay more, it's rather obvious that they will get most of the most interesting applications. The rest will go to those paying less.

We're in London. Mostly applicants are based in other countries (like the US) when we explicitly say that's not an option, so they're ruled out immediately.

Over the last couple of years we haven't had many applicants via it at all - but we did hire a really great developer through it, so it's still worth it.

The one thing I would say is that it's worth setting up a hiring page generally. Then you can have an application form on there which most the lower grade candidates just bounce on anyway.

Yes, some. I've gotten at least one good hire (and referral bonus) from one of my HN hiring posts.

As a senior software engineer who has successfully contributed to startups that were subsequently acquired, and with over 9 years of experience across a variety of technologies, "Who's hiring" is probably not the first place I would go to look for job if I needed a change of scenery.

I love it for keeping an eye on the market, to see where trends are going, and for looking at what's local. If something REALLY interested me, I might establish a dialog, but the chances of something being interesting and local (or willing to hire remote at the salary requirements of the metro area I live in) are very slim.

The first place I would look for a job is my professional network: people I have enjoyed working with in the past. If you can't lure top talent with talk of tech, maybe also spend some time describing the team and what the work environment is like? Senior devs know that you don't work with the tech stack, you work with people, and the stack is just another tool in the toolbelt for solving problems.

Slightly off topic, but can anyone chime in on their experience hiring for non coding roles from HN threads? Especially marketing and biz dev?

There is another section Who Wants to be Hired which should work for many I guess

I looked at your comments to find your position posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15149582. I'm not your target group, but still...

Here's the introductory sentence: "Service Partner ONE is the technology partner for modern office management in Europe." OK, sounds fine. I don't know what office management is, but there are a few more sentences coming up that will surely explain. Next: "Our platform supports customers across all industries in all processes outside of their core business, pursuing the digital revolution of office management." This looks impressive, but all it says is "Our platform runs on computers and people in offices use it." Next: "By connecting customers with the right service providers and streamlining their interactions we improve the working situation in every office we operate in." So, um, people in offices use your stuff to connect, which I guess means communicate. Maybe you are talking about email? "Someone called us the WeWork without walls." OK, but I don't know what WeWork is, and "without walls" sounds weird.

In summary, it sounds muddled and boring. Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but it's simply not as gripping as many other Who is hiring posts.

Your other post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17663077, specifically the part "We analyze this data and utilize advanced statistical methods to take our client’s guest communication and marketing efforts to a new level." sounds like you're a spam company. Nobody wants hotels to "market" to them.

Edit: Oh, forgot to say that you didn't post salary ranges. Post salary ranges please. Even if you don't believe that it's a good idea (although it is), it would make you stick out a bit. Also, it might even be required by German law? It is in Austria, though sadly not enforced.

I have had really good experiences with "Who is hiring" – from meeting interesting independent contractors that have heavily influenced projects to making my best technical hire ever.

When hiring I've used a mix of approaches – job boards, recruiters, HN. HN doesn't produce a lot of volume, but anecdotally, the candidates often get through initial screenings because they are generally both technically proficient and well rounded (from a stack standpoint). With other channels I find a lot of spam and/or mismatches on stacks.

I wouldn't move to Berlin, so that's an issue. For such locations only option is to have occasional travel like once a month or two and work remotely.

Yes, but a tiny percentage. A lot of spam. (_A lot of spam._) Tons of recruiting services. 80% of people obviously didn't read the post.

That said, I have hired a few amazing people, including some great technical leaders, that would have cost 15-20% salary to use a recruiter to find & snipe (this was before I had internal recruiters to help).

I use a separate email alias for it, and have a few canned responses (1/ you didn't read the job post 2/ I said we cannot do visas or major relocations, but you're in Greenland 3/ too junior, but please keep an eye on future posts) to keep things efficient.

Not going to add too much, but I love how well HN tackles this important yet so often skewed discussion.

In my opinion, companies that struggle to find great candidates almost always aren't competing for talent:

- paying well

- offering great benefits

- taking time to write great job descriptions

- recruiting through a variety of channels

- putting thoughtful effort into every step of the recruiting process

A lot of the top comments point to OP missing the mark on some of the above points.

From there, the discussion delves into some of the finer points I hadn't fully considered:

- EU vs US differences for comp and readership

- Seniority/stack expertise on HN vs elsewhere

- Hiring for non-technical roles on HN

I'm a senior full stack developer with data science experience living in EU(Norway). I have not applied for a position that has been advertised in 6 years. All the offers I consider these days comes from cold calls from recruiters or the companies them self. They have to sell them self, as I am the interviewer.

Where I work now, we really struggled last year with recruiting developers, so we changed the recruitment process by searching LinkedIn for profiles that could be a good fit and called them with a sales pitch about why we are better place to work at than your current company. That worked much better, but surprisingly we also learned that many is very happy with their current position and is not looking for a change. You know, there is risk involved with changing work, especially if you are happy where you are. The saying, don't fix it if it ain't broken applies to recruitment too.

And I would like to add, some of our best hires we got from Berlin ;-)