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Ask HN: looking for feedback on my startup idea: making hiring easier

10 points by petervandijck ↗ HN
Whenever I have had to hire a team, I would first figure out a process, then go through the hiring, which involves heaps of emails, often a wiki or something etc.

Idea: a startup that aims to make hiring easier by providing tools to make that process easier. You can easily define your hiring process (ie.: phone screen first? People submit resumes and answer certain questions. Then in-person interviews? etc..), invite your team to participate, and then post jobs and start hiring. All data around hiring for this job would be in one place. Thoughts?

If this description sounds interesting, can I ask you more questions about what you'd want/how you'd use it?

ps: tagline could be "make hiring easier" but not "make hiring easy", hiring is never easy :)

29 comments

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RDDavies
I suppose it'd be useful, however, most larger companies already have these sorts of systems in place. Perhaps target mid-sized businesses that use smaller hiring departments, perhaps encouraging them to move away from staffing agencies and doing their own hiring?
petervandijck
Speaking for myself as target market (and assuming there are a lot of people like me): I avoid those "company approved enterprise" systems as much as possible, going as far as bending the rules to avoid them. Wouldn't touch them with a stick, and that goes for most enterprise systems. And then I use some wiki/whatever tool + email to organize my hiring.

I'm not aiming to be the PeopleSoft or the SAP of hiring, I'm aiming to be the Basecamp of hiring.

revorad
The biggest problem in hiring seems to be finding good people. That might be a more important problem to tackle if you want to improve hiring.
petervandijck
Yes, but harder to tackle.

When I read the "how we hire" posts, it's always about the process and how it helps to find good people. If I can make setting up a good process easier, I am presumably also making it easier for you to find good people. That's the thought anyways.

I also think that, after a while, I'd have one side of a market (the people who hire) lined up, and then I conceivably create a hiring marketplace. But that's a different (and harder) problem to tackle.

revorad
That's true. One way is to improve the process. Another way would be to increase chance encounters between good companies and good candidates.

For example, you could make it easier for companies to organise meetups (e.g. Github's drinkups - see this thread for details http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1804527).

I'm sure a lot of employers would like to do stuff like that, but never end up making the time to do it.

[deleted]
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jdp23
It's an interesting space: hiring's a big challenge for a lot of companies, there's clearly opportunities for improving it, and there's already a lot of money being spent here so people may well be willing to pay for software that improves the process.

A couple of questions:

- what would this add to a dirt simple solution like internal blog pages with the process and job description, and then a blog thread for each applicant going through the interview process?

- who's your target market? tech startups, retail, recruiting firms, ... ?

- what are the limitations of existing recruiting software?

petervandijck
Internal blog pages with descriptions and stuff is what I've used before, and what I think most people use, which makes me think there's a market here for a good tool, because, at least for myself, those solutions never really worked well. As an example, I once invited someone to apply to a job that I had rejected a few months earlier. As someone wrote here earlier: if people are using spreadsheets (or wiki pages) for problem X, it's a market.

This would add spit, fit and finish. Make it easier to use. Add in easily publishing a page with a job description where people can apply/upload resume. Add an email address where you forward applications that then get automatically organized. Etc. In other words: it would add ease of use and features specific for hiring. (Still trying to determine which features exactly, which is what this post is for, but I've felt the pain myself and I'm sure many people have, so I see the problem part of this fairly clearly. Trying to figure out what a good solution would be.)

Existing recruiting software is aimed at HR and "recruiting". This would be aimed at people like (presumably) you and me, who just need to hire a few people for their team, who want to create their own process. I'm not "recruiting". I'm building a team!

Target market: people like me, ie. I would first go for people in tech firms hiring tech/ux people, because that is what I know best. We all read the "how to hire x" posts, it's not easy. The tools would make it easy to quickly set up a process etc.

Existing recruiting software is aimed at HR, at large companies, in other words, it's "enterprise" crap.

jdp23
that makes a lot of sense, thanks.

one area that seems ripe for improvement is after resumes flood in, taking an initial pass and marking which ones you want others to give feedback on, and then tracking email and IM exchanges with and about the applicants.

at Qworky we used tags in a shared gmail account along with cut-and-pasting the IM logs for this which worked okay but even when we just had a couple of jobs open we messed up several times.

petervandijck
To look at it another way: what does a good bugtracking tool add to a dirt simple solution like internal blog pages with a thread for comments?

Answer: domain-specific features. I'm trying to figure out what those features for hiring would be :) Thoughts?

zeemonkee
Maybe something like the "Feedback" tab you see on many sites now.

A "We're hiring" tab. The hiring company signs up & pays the fee and is then provided with a JavaScript tag to embed in their web page. This of course can be customized (position, colour, etc).

Visitors click on the tab, and (assuming they are already registered) can just enter their credentials and hit "Post my resume here". Your resume is then made visible to the company, which can see thumbs of all the applicants at a glance.

Your application would allow people to add their resumes - rather than upload a doc/pdf, maybe instead some nice themes, layouts etc. Only you, and companies you have clicked the tab on, can see this resume (although there might be other options - "make my resume public" or "show to recruiters" etc). Companies might also be able to leave comments/questions for you at specific points in the resume("you said you worked on drivers at IBM in 2005 - could you go into specifics ?") saving time at interviews.

petervandijck
To add some questions: I'm basically trying to figure out what domain-specific features (domain = hiring a team) would be useful to add. What would you like to see in a hiring tool?
cosjef
The recruiting industry is ripe for disruption. Most headhunters use nothing more than keyword-matching software to find candidates. How many recruiting emails do you get where a recruiter finds one obscure line in your email, and presumes you are an expert in the field?

I'm thinking some additional intelligence can be added to the process. Figure out how many OSS projects I have contributed to; figure out how many Github commits I have; figure out who I'm connected to on LinkedIn; what conferences have I spoken at?

Its this sort of metadata, not my cold set of resume skills, that will help employers find a proper match.

petervandijck
"figure out how many Github commits I have" -> That (and the others) are awesome ideas, thanks. Exactly the kind of features that add value that I was looking for.
ig1
There's a bunch of companies already in this space. Taleo is the dominant player and is used by most of the Fortune 100 companies, Kenexa is their main competitor. Although both are aimed at the enterprise.

There might be room for a competitor targeting SME rather than the enterprise though.

There have been a few startups in this space as well, catchthebest.com which was in this area seems to have deadpooled, so it might be worth making contact with the founder and seeing why it failed.

stympy
I'm not quite dead yet! Catch the Best is still kicking, though I've stopped writing blog posts.
ig1
My apologies - I thought you'd moved on to other things !
photon_off
I just thought of this, and it's been over 24 hours since I last slept, so this might not be the best idea. But, I'm imagining a world in which it exists, and it's pretty exciting. What I think would be awesome is if you made a company that screens for only the highest level candidates: You do all of the technical screening to ensure candidates are of a certain value. You look at open source contribution, their blog, some source code (which coders could submit to you with an NDA or something), experience, LinkedIn, references, interviews, etc. And you assign them a score, or maybe just a yes/no.

If you could have a screening process that was on par with, say, Google's, and became notorious for such a thing, I think you'd be in a position of extraordinary value. You'd be offering Google Quality Engineers who are actively seeking jobs. I think that's huge! You'd attract business that are willing to pay for the best, and you'd attract talent that wants the best pay.

The main goal here is to establish yourself as having a rigorous and "industry best" screening process. You only attract and accept awesome developers. You do all of the work in the technical screening, and you front your reputation on that. You only deal directly with candidates, and on the other end, with people in the position to hire.

Of course, there is a chicken and egg problem here. So you'd need a lot of publicity out the gate, a decent pool of acceptable candidates, or a decent set of job availabilities.

I'm tired of being asked if I know what a join is, the pros/cons of indexing, the difference between by reference and by value, various OO questions (What's an abstract class do?), design patterns, what memcached does, etc. And I'm sure places are tired of candidates that don't know these things. Solve both of our problems.

ig1
You'd essentially be a recruiter with all the positives and negatives of that. Most of the job is sales not filtering and building connections with companies.

It's a very drawn out process as well, for a successful hire you might not get paid until 5-8 months after submitting someone for a job, so it's pretty much impossible to bootstrap and it takes a long time to build a decent revenue stream.

Plus you can't scale efficiently, your primary costs is skilled labour, and the cost of that grows linearly with your customer base.

photon_off
In terms of scaling, if you're having to screen so many employees that it becomes your bottleneck, then it'd be a business on the path to success. It doesn't need to scale non-linearly, because each candidate screened is worth, on average, some dollar amount.

I see it as an analogy: YC is to Angels & VCs as <this thing> is to Companies that are Hiring. If you get into YC, you are definitely a noteworthy team. Furthermore, YC is able to prune down 1,000+ applicants to under 40 in a short amount of time. They probably turn down 75% of all applicants in 20 minutes or less per applicant. If it's your job to discern, you're going to figure out how to do it efficiently. They also attract very good applicants.

Why can't there be something like this for brilliant people seeking jobs just like YC is for brilliant people seeking to start companies?

You're right, though, about building connections with companies. Though, in this case the "connection" has more to do with reputation of "offers only Google quality candidates, via a rigorous screening process" than "hey, they are hit or miss but have provided some good hires in the past".

ig1
Sure but it's a service business like consultancy rather than a startup business where you might be able to scale rapidly.

Plus it comes with other complexities, it's very easy for your staff to leave and start competing services taking many of your customers and your candidates with them. Most recruiting firms have tighter computer lockdowns than banks because of this, they often do crazy things like have their contact/CV management system served over citrix as images to prevent employees walking off with the data.

Maro
This sounds pretty interesting.

We're currently in the process of hiring our first employee in our startup, so we're pretty amateurs at this. Here's what we did:

1. Find some sites to advertise the job. Wrote up a description of the position and made up two problems the interviewee must complete to apply (it's at http://scalien.com/pdf/job.pdf but don't bother unless you're in Hungary =]). I guess if you could automate this part, eg. submission to a bunch of job sites, that'd be a killer feature I'd easily pay $5 for. Also, you could provide templates for the job description, reminders what not to leave out, host the files, etc.

2. Went to the local Universities and physically posted printed out ads. Your service could offer that somebody picks up the ads from our office and posts them for us so I don't have to waste my time doing it, I'd pay for that.

3. The person submits their CV and solutions per email. There's always a phase where I send the same template messages as an equalizer, I guess that could be automated, although it may be overkill. What could be nice, but only for a company with a lot of hiring, is to channel these emails to/from your service so you have a nice dashboard and history going back, etc. Again, it'd be nice if your service could provide reminders here, eg. did you remember to tell the guy what address to come to (eg. not the HQ but the other office).

4. Then the person comes in for the interview. Here we wrote up ~20 questions in a word processor and printed them out, we hold this in our hands and ask the interviewee the questions ("what's a JOIN?"). Your site could store these questions, so we could check them off "knows"/"doesn't know" style per interviewee, with an additional comment field. The service has to be really streamlined though, as at this point the guy is sitting across me and waiting for me to ask the next question. Your site could recommend a general flow / template for the interview, and I could maybe time myself on each segment, so as not to spend more time than 60 mins per interview. In our case I noticed that we spend 90 mins per interview, but things are pretty obvious at the 30-45 minute part, so helping me (and my co-founder) save time would easily translate to money.

5. ??? We actually haven't hired anyone, we're still deciding =)

Hope it helps.

petervandijck
Yes that helps, thanks a lot!
Maro
You could use a freemium model where registration and tracking the first two candidates is free, then you have to sign up.

You should also try to contact other HNers who were active in this space, there may be an industry related catch you don't know about. I did this regarding a freelancer site idea, and learned interesting facts. And use a service like pickfu.com to test as much of your idea against real people as possible before writing a single LOC =) I tried this with my project idea, and it was interesting.

matt_s
This would be a viable product. I've worked on a custom Web HR system for a Fortune 500 company, back before the dot com bubble came about and burst. Those ERP systems are way too complex, have lots of bloat, etc. for a small shop to need.

Building something with base features of job posting, collect resumes (no forms to fill out, let people upload PDF or DOC), track applicants (notes, schedule interviews, etc.)

Maybe build in features to allow applicants to link-in their internet profiles from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Find domain specific things to add - like for programmers it would be OSS/github linkage, lawyers might be some sort of link to case work?

Maybe allow some calendar integration with the existing team so it would auto-schedule phone or in-person interviews. For example you just tell it to setup interviews for Thursdays or Fridays and it figures it out, contacts the applicant, blocks your calendars, etc.

Allow applicants to then save their info, and then they can apply any other companies using the SaaS.

Focus on the Applicant experience and the hiring manager experience aiming to simplify everything.

I think the 37signals guys mentioned this problem space as something they might consider... as they grow their team I can imagine they would build themselves a tool to make their lives easier.

BenBaldwin
This topic is well-aligned with much of the work we've been doing, so I thought I'd chime in.

My previous company built software to help Fortune 500 companies hire more effectively, but I quickly learned that there are very few or no effective solutions for smaller businesses/startups with job openings that they need to fill.

Hiring a new employee is hard to do well, especially for small businesses, where it's a make-or-break decision; so we created ClearFit as an online hiring tool for the small business market. We want to help reduce the risk that's inherent to business growth.

We've tried to build our solution to make hiring the best person easy: matching people and employers using experience and personality, which is the most valid predictor of job success (assuming the basic hard skills requirements are met).

Feedback from early users was very similar to what I've been reading in these posts: there's real desire for a solution that can (i) find candidates, (ii) identify the best ones, based on how well they fit the personality and experience requirements, (iii) to be able to tell when candidates are stretching the truth/lying, and (iv) revealing the most critical interview questions that are specific/personalized for each candidate. So that's what we built.

The solution wasn't built for hard-core tech skills evaluation, but it's really good at finding the cultural/job fit in potential employees. With that said, we still have a few companies using it to hire for technical roles.

I'm posting here because I'm interested in what feedback the group may have. Remember that we want to keep our tool simple and we're not cool with adding lots of features (a la 37signals' philosophy).

If you want to try it, you can be my guest and try it for free to see if it works for you: http://clearfit.com/hiring-tool

I'm interested in any suggestions/feedback that any of you may have.