Given that I've hired a couple of very good people via it...
And given that a while after that I went through the round (at least 12 interviews by 10 unique people) at AWS because of it (though I later turned that down - I wanted a combination of tech and customer focus, they wanted either one or the other and felt I was too strong technically to be used on a customer focused role)...
Yes.
It works.
If you are hiring you should think hard about how you present it. Corporate-speak is ill-advised, and less is definitely more. Plain developer-to-developer language is the best route.
It is not unusual for candidates to go back over old whoishiring posts, filter by city and then look... so if you can include a permalink to a "positions available" page on your site you will continue to reap the rewards of a good, short advert for quite a while. Make sure to include an email address too (in the advert) so that HN candidates reach you directly rather than get lost in the official HR process.
If you are going for a position, I would advise that you use the opportunity to strike up a conversation and learn about the position and company, rather than just spam them with your CV (how does that help either of you?).
And as mentioned above... look at the whoishiring posts for the last quarter or 6 months, a company in growth probably is still looking.
It works, so long as you realise that this platform connects individuals, rather than treating it as an agency/corp HR style thing.
My impression of Amazon was that they really are customer obsessed.
They did say I was too technical, but what I think they really meant is that they were looking for someone with more business/customer-facing experience and a bit of tech... it was an AWS Solutions Architect position.
What they offered instead was a very compelling purely technical position, but I have this deep belief that technology is a set of tools that solves customer problems. I didn't feel comfortable accepting a position in which I could not directly hear from a customer.
I've gotten a couple of interviews through the Who's Hiring threads. I've found that you tend to get a faster response from posts where the poster include an email address (for obvious reasons).
I've yet to get a job from those threads (if that's what you're asking), but I have met some awesome teams and my pool of contacts has significantly increased.
The "Who's Hiring" threads are very interesting to me, and I imagine they also are for those who aren't currently looking for work. It's fascinating to see what established companies and startups are looking for.
One minor gripe I have about WH submissions is that many still aren't abiding by the rules. I see a lot of them that leave crucial info out, especially those that don't say if the role can be remote or must be at their office.
Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.
Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
> whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding
I don't understand this. HN is an open website where anybody can sign up, and the Who's Hiring posts can be reached from a google search. What makes you so sure that applicants are all high-quality people?
My guess is that the most unqualified job seekers don't know about HN. You have to be interested in Tech/startups to stick around HN for the most part.
And perhaps are the users who read the Who's hiring threads more restrictive with to whom they send application. That is, they only send CVs to openings that they think they can carry out.
The last part is just total speculation though but that is my own experience with Who's hiring, I've read many posts but have not applied for those I would be unqualified for. Unfortunately for me, that is almost all of them as I am no developer but it is quite interesting to see what kind of skills HN value highly.
I helped a client write their own HN hiring letter.
They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.
Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.
Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.
I cannot speak for the grand-parent but simply being on HN marks something, having contributed and some karma shows that the community has read your comments and approved.
Agreed, an application from an account created ten minutes ago tells you very little, but even that amount is an order of magnitude more revealing than a mailgun reply from a Monster ad.
I'm not sure I understand either, but the empirical evidence is that I get a very low volume of replies but almost every one is from someone very well-qualified and worth interviewing. Like some of the other commenters, I think it is simply the quality of this community as a hacker-friendly environment (a testament to good work by pg and its members to keep it that way of course).
The secretsales.com domain and company name came first (2007). When I joined last year it was the subject of much mirth and occasioned the gift of a T-shirt with the cartoon character on it.
Can we scale tight communities? Isn't that what reddit is doing with the subreddit system? Check and mate sir. Don't tell me what I can and can not scale! </sarcasm>
I've gotten a few interviews out of them, but more importantly, they were for places that I was very interested in. IMO the personal touch and EFFORT that it takes to post in a "Who's Hiring" thread makes me believe that the company is serious about hiring someone from the tech community.
I'm just reading my comment above and thinking about how it's a bit elitist, but again I like it more for the personal touch / effort / show of good faith vs. "exclusive club" reasoning.
This reasoning is the converse of the importance of a cover letter with your application. Targeting and personalised messaging are important for both sides of employment!
I think there's an unrelated and positive aspect to it as well:
I moved to London 3 months ago and often checked the freelance and job threads on HN. Seeing the amount of jobs available for London gave me a boost of confidence.
(I'm yet to approach anyone via those threads - because I've already got too much freelance work.)
I got hired from a HN "Who's Hiring" thread back in mid-2010. My life's changed for the better ever since. And I live in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Been working remotely since then. Although I've switched jobs since then, that first gig was life-changing.
Was hired using the thread last year. Would look here before looking elsewhere in the future. There are always clueless companies mixed in, but less noise here.
Picked up a long term contract a couple of years ago, started out with 20-30 hours/week and has tapered off a bit as they transitioned from bootstrapped to venture funded and hiring full time devs. I mostly do one off must haves for them these days as I've moved on to other things.
Best way to handle such clients is to be available, adaptable and competent.
Was introduced to and hired by a company through one of the who's hiring threads. Given my location in the US Midwest, the fact that the company even knew about HN and had employees active here was a good indicator that it was the kind of company I would like to work for - which turned out to be the case.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadAnd given that a while after that I went through the round (at least 12 interviews by 10 unique people) at AWS because of it (though I later turned that down - I wanted a combination of tech and customer focus, they wanted either one or the other and felt I was too strong technically to be used on a customer focused role)...
Yes.
It works.
If you are hiring you should think hard about how you present it. Corporate-speak is ill-advised, and less is definitely more. Plain developer-to-developer language is the best route.
It is not unusual for candidates to go back over old whoishiring posts, filter by city and then look... so if you can include a permalink to a "positions available" page on your site you will continue to reap the rewards of a good, short advert for quite a while. Make sure to include an email address too (in the advert) so that HN candidates reach you directly rather than get lost in the official HR process.
If you are going for a position, I would advise that you use the opportunity to strike up a conversation and learn about the position and company, rather than just spam them with your CV (how does that help either of you?).
And as mentioned above... look at the whoishiring posts for the last quarter or 6 months, a company in growth probably is still looking.
It works, so long as you realise that this platform connects individuals, rather than treating it as an agency/corp HR style thing.
seems like amazon and google have the same ideas when it comes to support.
They did say I was too technical, but what I think they really meant is that they were looking for someone with more business/customer-facing experience and a bit of tech... it was an AWS Solutions Architect position.
What they offered instead was a very compelling purely technical position, but I have this deep belief that technology is a set of tools that solves customer problems. I didn't feel comfortable accepting a position in which I could not directly hear from a customer.
I've yet to get a job from those threads (if that's what you're asking), but I have met some awesome teams and my pool of contacts has significantly increased.
One minor gripe I have about WH submissions is that many still aren't abiding by the rules. I see a lot of them that leave crucial info out, especially those that don't say if the role can be remote or must be at their office.
ps: it was for London.
Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.
Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
I don't understand this. HN is an open website where anybody can sign up, and the Who's Hiring posts can be reached from a google search. What makes you so sure that applicants are all high-quality people?
And perhaps are the users who read the Who's hiring threads more restrictive with to whom they send application. That is, they only send CVs to openings that they think they can carry out.
The last part is just total speculation though but that is my own experience with Who's hiring, I've read many posts but have not applied for those I would be unqualified for. Unfortunately for me, that is almost all of them as I am no developer but it is quite interesting to see what kind of skills HN value highly.
They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.
Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.
Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.
Agreed, an application from an account created ten minutes ago tells you very little, but even that amount is an order of magnitude more revealing than a mailgun reply from a Monster ad.
If you need a job in London, talk to Squirrel. He's a great boss.
Which came first the nickname or the domain?
The same.
(And by the way, hi Martin!)
P.S. - For anyone thinking "oh wow, I could scale this type of thing with a website", think again. Tight communities > scale.
I'm just reading my comment above and thinking about how it's a bit elitist, but again I like it more for the personal touch / effort / show of good faith vs. "exclusive club" reasoning.
I moved to London 3 months ago and often checked the freelance and job threads on HN. Seeing the amount of jobs available for London gave me a boost of confidence.
(I'm yet to approach anyone via those threads - because I've already got too much freelance work.)
Although I'm trying to market myself as an iOS/ Objective-C developer.
And in Prague, so it's not "SV only" either.
Best way to handle such clients is to be available, adaptable and competent.
I'm looking forward to working with them next week.