Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
I am based in the UK and find it hard to find good developers/designers/product people. Although we advertise on our web site, unless people are looking quite specifically, they are unlikely to find the adverts (unlike FANGs which would attract candidates directly).
Also, Recruiters tend to be a poor and expensive solution. It is hard to tell the good from those who just claim to be good and we get a lot of noise from them. Also, I'm not sure that the best candidates just call a random recruiter to find them a job.
What are others doing to both find jobs and to recruit?
147 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadFigure out what you really need and how "good" is defined.
Good is contextual. My past company spent a lot of time on system design interviewing. Here is the problem. We didn't build anything close to a complex system. We created demos to show off to clients as MVPs. So we left positions open for months until we found the perfect person and they didn't want to join/did not stay as they wouldn't actually use those skills.
Said past company also wanted "product minded people", something in my own background. Devs had no influence on the product there. Yet they waited for people like myself to come along.
A job before that leetcoded. Nobody currently there could pass the leetcode. The dev doing the interview had never even seen a tree in production at any company. We certainly didn't care internally as the database was so small and it was a Scrum team focused on shipping tickets. But we kept reposting the job and then had to eventually just take a candidate (if you could solve a tree leetcode, you would not work at this place).
Day one; here is an excel spreadsheet - type in the new numbers every day please.
That would be ideal, but as a candidate, have you ever really met a company that knew what they wanted?
It is a shame that 95% rotten apples give them all a bad name.
Literally 90% job of a recruiter is browsing through LinkedIn and spamming potential candidates.
Easy to do that job yourself, if you invest the time. Also, you'll be able to do the job much better, and will come across as much more genuine to candidates.
If you have the skills, you pretty much have your pick of which ones to respond to.
- There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month.
- Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It takes time but it can bring massive gains. Extreme example: Cloudflare. But there are many smaller nice blogs. If your blog is good, it will naturally come up when people google for things etc.
- Create an RSS feed for the blog and a Twitter account ${Foobar}Engineering that RTs your blog posts. Just make sure the blog and Twitter are high quality and rare, and not random filler content every day.
- Do something unexpected, like: TikTok or YouTube channel. There's one small company in Poland that has a YouTube channel with basically short fun programming sketches (2-3 min), and this YT channel became huge. Everyone in IT in Poland knows them (https://www.youtube.com/c/HRejterzy).
- Relax your requirements, and post job offers to good job boards. Are you fine with people working remotely? Or 4 days a week? Check stuff like https://remoteok.com/ https://4dayweek.io/ etc.
- Include approx. salary data in job offer. No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".
- Perhaps become a sponsor of some underinvested opensource repos? The repo owners will likely give you some visibility on their website and top of the repo README.
This is the reason I don't even bother with permanent roles in startups anymore. Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income.
Even worse when they approach me on a platform where they can see my profile & history and infer very well what I currently make and still proceed to pitch me their terrible role.
Also, thanks mostly to equity appreciation, I'm almost up to what my previous jobs starting pay was :-)
Protip: on the very first call, say “My current salary is XY. A competing offer is in your budget?”
Protip2: XY doesn’t have to be your actual salary, use a number that is your desired floor to start the negotiation from.
So how about just saying, "I'm currently only considering positions with salary XY. Is that in your budget?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023343
Go to universities and hire motivated juniors. Offer paid internships etc.
Highly recommend to follow https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz
I don't know a single person from my college days who I'd describe as a strong performer that would have taken a job from a random startup (i.e. no name recognition of founders or investors) for subpar pay. The people who ended up working at these no-name companies with subpar pay were almost always 1x or 0.5x programmers, whereas many of the people I knew who got A/A+ in OS and compiler classes were easily 10x programmers capable of building complex products from scratch.
Not saying we don't need 1x programmers but if you're a startup I think paying 3x salary for a 10x programmer is a much better deal than hiring 3 1x programmers.
I mean yeah, you were operating in a different talent market. If you are a U.S. based company it's going to be very hard to get high quality talent out of university as a rando company with median pay. If you are in Europe then it's a lot easier because there is less competition.
> all good tech talent is immediately already in the "amazing" companies as soon as they graduate
Yes, there are going to be missed gems, but if you're looking to hire without going through a couple hundred bad candidates (not even an exaggeration) to find gems you need to stand out as a company.
If you think about this from the employer perspective, there's no signal to go on to find these gems: people with decent, but not incredible grades, no prior internship history, bog standard side projects, etc. Now imagine those resumes are mixed in with a bunch of people with 0 side projects or work experience, subpar grades in core CS classes, etc. What do you filter on? What's your signal for hiring?
- UK: https://devitjobs.uk
- US: https://devitjobs.us
- Germany: https://germantechjobs.de
The audience is growing steadily and the US and UK sites are free to post (but you have to provide the salary)
Of the 100 or so professional software engineers and it pros I have worked closely with over the last decade, I think I know... 1 that used twitter. Maybe they follow engineering on twitter, maybe not. Twitter gets you, twitter people, not necessarily software engineers.
This strategy can work only if your company is behind very high profile/successful projects.
PS: I'm a 30 year old dude from a 3rd world country learning how to code. I'm not good, yet, but I'm hard working and I learn fast. Just trying my luck, but do you guys take an apprentice? Or maybe in need of customer support? I'm just looking to learn. What's in for you is cost reduction and someone who would be grateful for life for giving him a chance.
* Time zones can cause things to take a long time to resolve
* Cultural differences can be confusing (like people who say, "yes" to be polite, not because the answer is yes!)
* The legal protections are much lower when dealing with another country
* You have practical concerns like shipping things (laptops etc.) that just create even more work
* Possible language barriers, especially with very complicated or subtle things
I think it can work well but only when you have designed your company around remote-first working and probably only for experienced staff who you can expect to know what they are doing.
In many cases, that is a severe underestimate.
The local labour market for engineers, technicians and developers is pretty much empty - as in, everybody with the skills required and the desire to live here already does.
Recruiting more often than not means sniping, or, if we're lucky - that someone has recently found a partner with desirable skills and coaxed them into moving up here.
Anyway, we've found that word of mouth is the most effective way; we simply let friends and associates, former colleagues and whatnot know that we're looking for X.
This is a hundred times more effective than LinkedIn for vetting candidates - people are quite unlikely to uncritically recommend someone when they will be reminded of their sell-in for years if it is a dud. (Much unlike LinkedIn endorsements...)
It turns out with friends&associates, friends&associates' friends&associates &c, you can cast a quite wide net - and also, the sell-in works better both ways; the candidates who do show up for interviews already have been told ours is a good place to be and are, more often than not, a good cultural fit.
(And, before someone asks - 'cultural fit' means 'Happy to work in a rather unstructured madhouse where the unofficial motto is 'We've never done that before, so we're probably quite good at it!') - we've assembled a motley crew from just about every nook and cranny of the planet, from Sri Lanka via Belarus to Argentina and Japan and lots inbetween. Oh, and the occasional Norwegian. All making world-class subsea equipment on a small islet way out in the boonies.
(The catch being that we currently do not have any remote employees and it is nigh on impossible to hire someone from outside the Schengen area unless they've already found another way to legally stay here. That usually means either being granted asylum or marrying someone, I'm afraid)
Drop me some contact info, I can refer you. At least you can go through the process and check it out.
I am asking because that reflects my situation and I am having a difficult time interviewing with most people expecting 3+ year exclusively in frontend.
I have been trying to make a switch from backend to frontend development. I went from Backend Dev -> Fullstack Dev and I am currently trying to do the next step to -> Frontend Dev.
Would be nice to know how to approach this.
So you could have javascript and html to power your devices, but you probably do not want to.
We basically sold our soul to SIMATIC, Siemens' automation ecosystem long ago.
While it does have its quirks (to put it charitably), it is utterly predictable; as a first-order approximation, the ridiculously underpowered, ridiculously overpriced hardware never fails. (Unless you exert undue influence with a blunt object or high voltage)
I've (recently) patched code on Siemens PLCs being made in West Germany, that is, before October 1990. They still go about doing their thing. That kind of reliability makes me willing to suffer quite a lot of quirks.
Hence, STL, Siemens' near-assembly experience, it is. Snippet below:
A "InData".Joystick.WinchHoistCmd
L "WinchDrumDb".SpeedExpCmdL "WinchDrumSetupDb".Winch.MaxJoystickSpeedCmd
*R
T "WinchDrumDb".SpeedCmd
JU end2
At least it has mnemonics!
But in other newly developed hardware, it can actually make sense nowdays, to use javascript. Mainly because you can get an abundance of developers for it, but then probably the hard part is to weed out those, who can barely script some website, to those who have indeed the right skillset.
If you are looking for STL people, you probably get STL people.
OTOH, some of us are at their happiest in this kind of environment!
Google returned these photos, which look both desolate and gorgeous: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=62&lon=7
Particularly #5 here https://confluence.org/photo.php?visitid=6821&pic=5
Though in photo #6 that looks mountain fed, and she looks tough.
It's easy to find job boards filled with ads from recruiters; but hard to discover companies that you might like to work for.
I suppose that smaller companies think they don't have the resources to maintain their job listings in various databases, but I think they should.
- In the initial stages, we've recruited from within our own network of former colleagues.
- We had a successful open source project and recruited from amongst its contributors
- We hired people that our employees had worked with before and that they recommended
- We went to meetups and conferences, talked about technology and what we were doing. After the talks you often have conversations with attendees that might be interested in the project.
Here's what never worked for us:
- job ads / "career" section on our website
- going to meetups with the sole goal of recruiting people
- linkedin cold outreach
I can imagine this is a quite sustainable way of recruiting in the long term in general.
You should be articulate and explicit about your hiring needs to your network, and careers page etc. Add a link to your company in your profile! You are on the front page of Hackernews, but even though I'm looking for one of the roles you mentioned and wanted to know more I can't see what you're hiring for or anything about your company.
From experience, there's no single place that will just work. Have to keep trying through multiple channels all the time.
Here are some ways that we try.
- LinkedIn Jobs, indeed etc like job boards
- HN (whoishiring), angel.co
- technology specific job boards (welovegolang, pycoders weekly etc)
- references through current employees, their past colleagues etc
- cold pings on Linkedin, Twitter, github
- Some slack/discord channels for specific technologies
In personal experience, quality of the crowd depends on the channel too, however, wouldn't call this a confirmed observation.
I have communicated with companies via both of these methods.
The other suggestions make sense too.
Even the very largest companies like Google and Amazon use recruiters, they just happen to have an army of them on payroll rather than going out and hiring them on a piecemeal basis from external agencies. You also say the best candidates don't call a random recruiter, and you're right, they don't. The best candidates know one or two really good recruiters who can get them interviews lined up in the next few days and an offer on the table by the end of next week.
The only other thing I've seen have some level of success is going to recruitment events targeted at the sort of people you want to hire. If you're looking for junior developers your local university will run recruitment fairs, and if you're looking for more experienced people there are a few events such as Silicon Milkroundabout (the worst name ever) where you can pay to get a stand. Either way be ready to commit whatever time you're going to be at the event itself, plus a few days to follow up with people you've spoken to.
At least in the US, expect to pay a good recruiter who finds you a candidate you hire somewhere in the 20-25% of first year salary for the hire (ie: you hire a candidate for $100k/year total comp, you pay the recruiter $20-25k in fee for that hire).
No matter what you do, you're going to sift through a LOT of candidates who are definitely not the right fit.
I also concur with going to local university recruiting days. It's a whirlwind and you'll likely lose your voice after the first day talking to so many students, but it costs less than hiring a recruiter and you'll likely get enough good resumes and enough first interactions with the humans behind those good resumes to justify it.
But also, just offer to pay your existing employees a non-trivial referral bonus for finding someone (like multiple thousands of USD, as compared to paying a recruiter this is super cheap). Sure, the incentives aren't perfect, but if you have someone you already trust as an employee or partner or past coworker referring someone they want to work with, odds are that candidate is going to be pretty good.
Maybe also host some user group meetups or whatever. Word of mouth is very powerful. My current employer (same town as previous) is small, and it was even smaller when I joined. Still, I heard about it somewhere and applied.
Disclaimer: No affiliation or anything.
Make yourself easily reachable.
In this instance for example, the fact that you have asked this question means you are hiring. One of the HN reader reading this could be your potential hire but for that person there's no easy way to approach you. A single link in your profile could make that happen :) Otherwise you are wasting this opportunity!
Also reading a lot of these responses... I wish I could more easily advertise the salary I would accept. Its a field to fill in some applications I guess.
As for actionable things - some local devs, in my area, started a tech/dev meetup group here that's evolved into a 500 person slack channel (in-person meetings pre-covid) and it's a great place to find people and talk about jobs/local market. Definitely not a short-term fix. Also, leveraging any kind of news about a funding announcement or big contract or local impact helps get your name out there. I know a few former colleagues who saw the company name in an article/newspaper or an industry magazine and wound up applying for roles.
Best of luck!
- I joined the major slack channels of developers/designers/whateveryoulookforspecialists in the area.
- joined the #workrequests, #jobs, #yougetthepoint channels
- actually read the guidelines of each slack channel and/or talked to the admin to have the right tone of voice, get their feedback, finetune it, etc
- posted the job
- after 1-2 years, specialists still come to us because of the posts
- maintain a spreadsheet so you don't lose track of good people
"Gieb monies, plx!" - potential employee
"K!" - small company
You can be creative about it though. A story: when the startup was small, a maths student applied to work for us as a programmer. They were very smart and had a good personality, but were naive about their very limited programming experience. Most companies would have passed. Instead, the team lead said to them: I don't have time to mentor you, but if you can find another student with good programming experience who I like, and can mentor you, I will hire you both. And so they did. So, a 'pass' was turned into two hires for the price of one.
Of course, this probably only works if you can use new grads, who are all looking for jobs at the same time.