HN Explorer

Ask HN: Tell us how you hire

61 points by esharef ↗ HN
We're HireArt (YC W'12), a marketplace for jobs. We're doing a survey to assess how different companies hire (e.g., success rate per applicant, processes used, types of candidates hired etc). We hope the results of this survey will help companies figure out how they compare (e.g, perhaps you're getting way more/less applicants than the average start-up).

The survey is mostly focused on non-technical hiring as that's what our company primarily recruits for.

Please fill this out and we'll publish the results. Would really appreciate your help!

http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us-how-you-hire/

24 comments

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onewong
Interested to find out the results of this!
esharef
will share with you when it's done. thank you!
onewong
Thanks! You should add Product Managers to the survey.
pixeloution
This is a very poorly written survey; you post on Hacker News and you make it very difficult for someone who does 100% technical hires (not unusual for this board) to fill out your survey. I just left one abandoned.

If you're looking for information on non-technical position hiring, this is probably not the place to gather it.

rdl
Founders often do have to hire non-tech people. The first non-tech hires are some of the most difficult for tech founders. HN is a pretty decent place to find technical founders of companies.

It's just a badly written survey, not a bad idea to post the survey. They should fix the survey and re-ask, or just make it entirely and explicitly about "hiring early non-technical hires", which is what I think they care about.

mrtron
Very interesting hiring approach. The space has seemed ripe for innovation for years and years.

Highly motivated job seekers willing to jump through a lot of hoops seem to be on the bottom side of talent. How do you solve this issue?

woah
Wait, are you saying that more talented people aren't going to bust their ass to prove themselves to you? Puzzling.
mrtron
Actually I think that is unfair to say.

I think that lesser talented folks are more likely to bust their ass to prove themselves based on my limited hiring experience.

michaelt
There's a theory that says top tier candidates aren't often on the market, as their employers are keen to retain them and people in their personal networks are keen to offer them work.

It makes sense to me that an employed, well paid person who isn't actively seeking a job wouldn't be as motivated as an unemployed, unpaid person who is actively seeking a job.

rdl
This is a pretty bad survey. It asks if I have hired any non-technical people or technical people, then 100% of the deeper questions are about non-technical hires. Yet, there was no way to enter "n/a" for MOST of those questions, so instead, I polluted your data, unfortunately.

(I have zero desire to hire non-technical hires for as long as possible. I pray I can put that off for well over another year. Even sales can be replaced with Sales Engineer or Sales Analyst, Palantir-style. We outsource the useless non-differentiated parts of the business -- hr, accounting, compliance.)

tptacek
I had the same problem, FWIW. I gave up about 3 pages in. I've hired a lot of technical people, but no non-technical people.
rdl
For me, "hiring" our accountant/HR company was probably my hardest hire so far -- I used advice from an investor and then checked with a couple smart people (joshu, etc.) if they were good.

Patent lawyers were comparatively easy (one of the 20 smartest security people I know from cypherpunks became a lawyer and then a partner...), and for main lawyers, I went with a strong recommendation from an investor/friend, and they were next-door neighbors at the office.

esharef
Hey, thanks for the comment. Makes sense and we made changes to the survey to address this. We're mostly focused on non-technical hires because that's what we primarily help companies recruit for (e.g., scaling marketing, biz dev, customer service, etc). But I agree that the survey needs to have N/A options so thanks for pointing it out.
mrtron
Non technical hires can add tremendous value to an early organization.

A year+ abstaining from non-technical hires is insane of you have traction in the market. Why are you so against the concept?

I agree with outsourcing hr/accounting/compliance early.

rdl
I don't see any need for a company with 3 founders (who can generally do sales better than any salesperson, due to being founders and very familiar with the industry, even if they're inferior at sales skills), in a highly technical b2b/enterprise product, to hire anything but engineers for the first 5-10 hires. (so far we've only hired one)

Maybe a sales engineer for outbound sales, but even that role needs a fair bit of technical expertise, and will probably just end up being founders, or an engineering/technical hire who also happens to be sales-ok -- maybe a traditional SE who wants to move into sales. Support and client management is also fairly advanced for this, and is essentially a sysadmin or engineer. Inbound sales and on-boarding is essentially the same.

Marketing and inbound sales generation through vendor/partnership. That is probably the first non-technical hire which would make sense. And that I think I can put off for a long time through outsourcing and maybe part-time consulting.

redguava
Why are "None" and "Not Applicable" grouped into one answer? Surely they are significantly different responses.
etrain
I will tell you my favorite hiring trick, by far. Before I do, though, I'll set the scene. I was looking for a new gig a few years back. I was mostly happy at my job, doing interesting stuff, not killing myself, and making good money, but itching to do something new. Wanted to get in the startup scene, etc. So I see a new company's job posting, and it looks like a perfect fit (location, mission, everything). I meet with the CEO, have a few conversations with investors and employees, and things are looking good. Then they throw me a curve ball - "We want you to do something interesting with our product." - I spent the next two weeks working my ass off nights and weekends. Mind you, not compromising my full time position in any way. In the end, I did something interesting, and it turned out to be a great thing for the company. More importantly, it let me get to know their product deeply, and I understood the kind of environment I'd be entering.

The moral of that story - when hiring, challenge people to do something for you. Give them a week to work with you. Pay them even. Just see how they actually work. It'll work well for you, and them - even if your rate of hiring is lower than you'd like.

whichdan
Did they compensate you?
etrain
In this situation, I did not receive compensation because of my employment agreement with my then-current employer. That was my choice, and I'm sure we could have figured something else out.

I have seen candidates handle it differently, though - one potential hire we paid for a 3-week engagement as a contractor, for example.

seancron
As others have stated, this probably isn't the best way to do a survey. At the very least, you're going to have some bias from posting this on HN late at night (in the US).

If you want a more representative answer to the question "How do companies hire?", I'd recommend using Google Consumer Surveys (http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home)

You'll be able to survey a much larger audience, get more responses, and have statistically significant results. In addition, Google has a nice dashboard which lets you compare answers according to various demographic information such as gender, age, location, income, etc.

tokenadult
This link to an earlier HN comment from 59 days ago is not a response to your survey, but it includes tips about hiring processes in general.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

Read this for background. Check all the linked articles mentioned in the comment for more details.