6 ms·

Ask HN: Do you know startups that are changing the world of tech recruitment?

22 points by ftpaul 12y ago

bluerail 12y ago
hackerrank.com (formerly interviewstreet) - This came in at the right moment when tech companies are struggling to filter out 1000s of resumes for a programmer job.. You can read more about it here.. http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/interviewstreet-disrupting-the-it-sector-hiring-process-103524.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/interviewstreet-disr...
- tptacek 12y ago
  Does anyone have any experiences with HackerRank to share? I'm curious.
  - bluerail 12y ago
    Experience with regards to working with them or getting hired via it? If getting hired via it, I do have. So far, 5 out of 6 jobs I applied used hackerrank for initial level screening on programming knowledge. I ve also worked with them in creating few interview questions, but its via freelancing.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Interesting. What was the screening like? I did a lot of work in candidate screening at my old job; this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Thanks for responding!
      - bluerail 12y ago
        They companies have their accounts with Hackerrank and have some bundles for different set of questions (mostly provided by hackerrank itself[1] and could be self created, but mostly they use the questions provided by the hackerrank) - Python, Ruby, Algorithmic, Testing level- and based on the position they'll invite a candidate to try out the questions (via email). The hackerrank site itself gives a minimal text editor of the language of your choice along with an execution environment. Of the 5 interviews I attended 1 company asked to try the questions while applying itself, 2 companies have sent the invite after a phone level screening and 2 companies invited to their office to attend the same in front of them. But, some of the questions are more obvious (FizzBuzz, ChessBoard) that often come up in the generic hackerrank for developers section itself.. [[1] - to know the interviewer part I signed up as a Employer which has 14 day trial period and got all their interview questions in stock]
        tptacek 12y ago
        What was the most interesting, involved, or realistic question you dealt with on HackerRank? If you were a hiring manager, how big a difference would HackerRank make for you? Would you put more weight on the online Q&A, or more weight on in-person interviews? (If you keep answering me, I'll keep coming up with more questions, because I am not kidding I seriously nerd out on this stuff). Many continuous and real-time thanks.
        bluerail 12y ago
        Alright, here it goes.. >What was the most interesting, involved, or realistic question you dealt with on HackerRank? It was a rather most common one(i didn't know it was common at that time) - the infamous fruit basket question and a question to create a word builder from two notepad input to a JSON output to third file and parse the fourth and fifth notepad with the JSON output, something like that... I was/am a beginner programmer, so it was a challenging one but others will find it easy as 1 2 3. >If you were a hiring manager, how big a difference would HackerRank make for you? Would be huge. On my last interview with the company I am joining soon, after all the technical rounds I sat for an one-to-one HR discussion. At that time, it was clear they are going to make me an offer with an CTC for an average professional programmer of my experience (If you'd read my other comments / submissions, All my experience are from SysAdmin job, so I am a fresher for the developer position). I asked the HR person, "How I am the one sitting here albeit a fresher, rather an experienced dev" his answer, out of 206 applicants only "6" applicants cleared the coding interview and I am one of them. Rest 5 are ruled out on various basis, but the clear point here is, the initial level programming interview (though its more common questions) have subtracted out 98% of the applications which saved huge amount of time for the company. For a company (esp. startups) time is more precious and these kind of initial evaluations surely helps to sweep out the majority of imposters. >* Would you put more weight on the online Q&A, or more weight on in-person interviews* In-Person interview any day. Online evaluation can be treated as an filter but can't be a deciding factor. One problem with online Q&A is its lowest probability to have a fool-proof prevention mechanism. As I previously said, most of the questions are provided by the HackerRank itself, those which can be easily accessed by anyone signing up for a Employer evaluation account and prepare themselves for the interview. For company created questions, it won't prevent applicants from looking up the answers in Google since most of them are obvious ones. There were some multiple choice questions which if isn't properly crafted will be easy to find answers too. And most importantly, you can't KNOW a PERSON from these online Q&A. After all we are hiring a Person, not just his knowledge. >If you keep answering me, I'll keep coming up with more questions, because I am not kidding I seriously nerd out on this stuff Me too nerd out with these since I have an awesome idea (atleast awesome to me) that fills all these problems with respective to hiring landscape. And you are welcome to come up with questions and I ll try my level best to answer them.
      - bluerail 12y ago
        Apparently, the comment depth is exceeded.. You can mail me (id in my profile) and I am happy to discuss it.
        mechanical_fish 12y ago
        Sigh.
        tptacek 12y ago
        Do you nerd out on this stuff too?
        mechanical_fish 12y ago
        Yes, and I also nerd out on the design of online discussion forums. So watching this discussion trip over a misfeature and nearly fall into the darknet was sad, and sad again.
        JoachimSchipper 12y ago
        It's an anti-flamewar device to hide the "reply" on deep threads. You can just click "link" and reply from there, though. I'm be interested in hearing what you have to say, so I'd be much obliged if you'd continue posting. ;-)
      - zvitez 12y ago
        What did you use for candidate screening then? What was your biggest problem? Sifting through irrelevant applications?
  - tom_b 12y ago
    I enjoy Hackerrank very much. Although I've been away for awhile from their site. The coding platform was language-choice-flexible and I did a number of challenges in Clojure as a learning experience - very similar to the challenges from your old company, although I only played with round 1 of the security challenge. I am not a fan of the mathematical challenges on Hackerrank, mainly because I haven't done much interesting math in years and if I get all ambitious on math stuff, I'm going to dive into functional analysis and stats modeling and probably not from a coding viewpoint. Algorithmic challenges are much more engaging to me. Hackerrank has a very interesting option for hiring companies to sponsor a challenge or set of challenges. Based on what I read here, if I was a hiring company I would be doubling down on this approach (eg coding challenges as a feed for potential hires like you guys were doing as well). Heck, companies would probably pay five to six figures just for a curated list of candidates from these sites, right? One specific gripe - sometimes I had the vague feeling that the programmatic challenges encourage non-idiomatic language usage. I did a very fun challenge that involved range-minimum-queries there and to ultimately to have runtime under the JVM cutoff and pass all the testcases, I kind of optimized away from the way Clojure normally looks like. I think my point is code that works well for a programming challenge may not look much like code you would want in production. I can probably spout off more opinions but this is probably already more than you were looking for for someone who didn't use the site for actually finding a job.
rvivek 12y ago
Hi, hackerrank founder here. Happy to answer any questions.
- crazypyro 12y ago
  Could you give any insight into how many companies are creating their own questions versus using your pre-loaded ones?
- ftpaul 12y ago
  Why do you think that are changing the recruitment world? Do you work closely with any kind of recruitment agencies?
lamby 12y ago
Workable? Not world-changing but certainly takes some of the "urgherhergasdasd" out of it.
- zvitez 12y ago
  :) as long as it takes that out of it! What would make it world-changing for you? Is that the only option you've considered?
lazyant 12y ago
Doesn't look scalable for a startup but I'd give my pinky (OK, maybe just a month's salary) for having a decent tech recruiter work for me (developer open to new opportunities), as in sparing me of the 90% of BS that I usually go through when dealing with recruiters/companies.
- rvivek 12y ago
  thanks lazyant; there are specific challenges for a startup which we're trying to address in the product. happy to chat more if you'd like to try.
  - lazyant 12y ago
    sorry, I wasn't addressing Hackerrank in particular, which seems a fine way of doing one of the parts of the recruiting process (tech validation), while my complain is on "everything else" and the general hiring process.
- zvitez 12y ago
  Why do you think it's not scalable? Think there always has to be a level of attention on an individual level? What BS are you referring to btw? The usual, "This guy knows Java. He'll probably interested in this Javascript position!"?
  - lazyant 12y ago
    The recruiting game makes my blood boil, so I'll just point to some issues but the main thing is that tech recruiters are clueless about tech and don't bother reading about you or the target company before wasting your time, and I'm not even getting at having someone really look out for you actively trying to find a good match. General issues or "Top 10 Mistakes Technical Recruiters Make": - Not selling their company (or the position) - Not looking into the prospect’s web presence - Sending “cold call” vague email - Not understanding basic technology - Not disclosing basic information (an idea of salary, company) - Using buzzwords, offering silly perks - Not asking relevant questions - Radio silence, not being responsive - Not being clear on the process, what to expect - Not understanding what motivates people beyond money I think a good recruiter is not scalable in principle since it would need someone to get to know you a bit.
pjungwir 12y ago
I started a project similar to talentbin.com: scraping Github, StackOverflow, and about two dozen other sites to compile searchable developer profiles. Figuring out when a Github and StackOverflow profile belonged to the same person was a pretty fun challenge. Eventually I abandoned it though, because it felt like I was just enabling keyword-based recruiter spam. Selling it to people made me feel bad instead of good.
- zvitez 12y ago
  Good on you for being so altruistic. Do you think there's any way to leverage that while making it desirable for the developers? Imagine you have great offers that you know would be valuable to the people you found. Would it be spam to share it?
  - pjungwir 12y ago
    Well I did believe that when I started the project. I don't know if quitting was altruism. Selling is hard enough for a programmer like me, but for this project I really recoiled from it. My heart just wasn't in it. Perhaps if communications were opt-in for the developers and we controlled the communications channel it would be okay. This piece might be worth keeping: The site scored each developer on various skills, so users could see that a person was better than 87% of their peers worldwide and better than 93% of people within 100 miles, etc. You could still use the whole population to compile those stats, even if only some people had opted in to communications. (Of course the score was based only on public data, so it was not perfect, but still it seemed like a pretty strong signal when I looked at it for people I know.)
knuxus 12y ago
Some guys from here, Lisbon, Portugal are kinda making referrals work without all that linkedin bs... http://www.jobbox.io/ http://www.jobbox.io/ , you can gain some serious money recommending people a better job
bzalasky 12y ago
Hired.com (formerly DeveloperAuction) comes to mind. I found my current role at Lookout through Hired. Having worked with traditional recruiters in the past, the difference with Hired is they have candidates' interests in mind as opposed to focusing solely on commissions. If you're qualified, they put your resume/CV in front of tons of great companies, give you the inside scoop on how interviews work at different companies, and provide more transparency through the whole process.
- athesyn 12y ago
  How long does it usually take for the approval process and to get offers?
  - bzalasky 12y ago
    I don't remember exactly how long it took, but something like a week or so to get approved, and then they run auctions ever few weeks or so. The "offers" are really just invitations to interview where salary, equity and perks are laid out transparently ahead of time so that you can decide if an opportunity is right for your situation.
MalcolmDiggs 12y ago
Angellist. How? Because I can browse the companies that are hiring, see the compensation levels, and apply. The companies can find me and express interest directly. No recruiters involved whatsoever. I think THAT model is truly the future. It's changing the world of tech recruiting because it's challenging that idea that recruiters need to exist at all... and it's a pretty convincing argument.
mallyvai 12y ago
Going to promote http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io here :-) We help engineers and other workers by connecting them with a live human who can help evaluate opportunities, and give them advice to help them get what they're worth. OfferLetter is adding real value to people's lives and careers. We have a lot of great data on market rates, career trajectories, and company cultures. And because of our tip-as-percent-increase structure, the incentives are totally aligned. Shoot me a mail if you have any questions, or I'll be hanging around the comments here! mallyvai AT offerletter.io
- ftpaul 12y ago
  I like the way that you present your website. Do you think that it's scalable? How are you going increase the number of advisors?
  - mallyvai 12y ago
    It's absolutely scalable, and extremely high-leverage to boot. We have a lot of advisors right now - there's a culture in the Valley of proactively wanting to help and connect with good people who need guidance. So even my friends who are busy founders, PMs, and leaders in their own right, are more than willing to make time to serve as Advisors. (It also helps that they get compensated well for it - and compensated proportional to the value they deliver :-). The more interesting question is how we get the word out more aggressively to get more individuals on-board. If you have any ideas about that, let me know - mallyvai@offerletter.io.
- helen842000 12y ago
  Are you looking for any additional advisors?
  - mallyvai 12y ago
    Helen - Always happy to talk with empathetic people. Drop me a line - mallyvai@offerletter.io
seekingcharlie 12y ago
http://hired.com/ http://hired.com/

22 points by ftpaul 12y ago

hackerrank.com (formerly interviewstreet) - This came in at the right moment when tech companies are struggling to filter out 1000s of resumes for a programmer job.. You can read more about it here.. http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/interviewstreet-disrupting-the-it-sector-hiring-process-103524.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/interviewstreet-disr...

tptacek 12y ago
Does anyone have any experiences with HackerRank to share? I'm curious.
- bluerail 12y ago
  Experience with regards to working with them or getting hired via it? If getting hired via it, I do have. So far, 5 out of 6 jobs I applied used hackerrank for initial level screening on programming knowledge. I ve also worked with them in creating few interview questions, but its via freelancing.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Interesting. What was the screening like? I did a lot of work in candidate screening at my old job; this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Thanks for responding!
    - bluerail 12y ago
      They companies have their accounts with Hackerrank and have some bundles for different set of questions (mostly provided by hackerrank itself[1] and could be self created, but mostly they use the questions provided by the hackerrank) - Python, Ruby, Algorithmic, Testing level- and based on the position they'll invite a candidate to try out the questions (via email). The hackerrank site itself gives a minimal text editor of the language of your choice along with an execution environment. Of the 5 interviews I attended 1 company asked to try the questions while applying itself, 2 companies have sent the invite after a phone level screening and 2 companies invited to their office to attend the same in front of them. But, some of the questions are more obvious (FizzBuzz, ChessBoard) that often come up in the generic hackerrank for developers section itself.. [[1] - to know the interviewer part I signed up as a Employer which has 14 day trial period and got all their interview questions in stock]
      - tptacek 12y ago
        What was the most interesting, involved, or realistic question you dealt with on HackerRank? If you were a hiring manager, how big a difference would HackerRank make for you? Would you put more weight on the online Q&A, or more weight on in-person interviews? (If you keep answering me, I'll keep coming up with more questions, because I am not kidding I seriously nerd out on this stuff). Many continuous and real-time thanks.
        bluerail 12y ago
        Alright, here it goes.. >What was the most interesting, involved, or realistic question you dealt with on HackerRank? It was a rather most common one(i didn't know it was common at that time) - the infamous fruit basket question and a question to create a word builder from two notepad input to a JSON output to third file and parse the fourth and fifth notepad with the JSON output, something like that... I was/am a beginner programmer, so it was a challenging one but others will find it easy as 1 2 3. >If you were a hiring manager, how big a difference would HackerRank make for you? Would be huge. On my last interview with the company I am joining soon, after all the technical rounds I sat for an one-to-one HR discussion. At that time, it was clear they are going to make me an offer with an CTC for an average professional programmer of my experience (If you'd read my other comments / submissions, All my experience are from SysAdmin job, so I am a fresher for the developer position). I asked the HR person, "How I am the one sitting here albeit a fresher, rather an experienced dev" his answer, out of 206 applicants only "6" applicants cleared the coding interview and I am one of them. Rest 5 are ruled out on various basis, but the clear point here is, the initial level programming interview (though its more common questions) have subtracted out 98% of the applications which saved huge amount of time for the company. For a company (esp. startups) time is more precious and these kind of initial evaluations surely helps to sweep out the majority of imposters. >* Would you put more weight on the online Q&A, or more weight on in-person interviews* In-Person interview any day. Online evaluation can be treated as an filter but can't be a deciding factor. One problem with online Q&A is its lowest probability to have a fool-proof prevention mechanism. As I previously said, most of the questions are provided by the HackerRank itself, those which can be easily accessed by anyone signing up for a Employer evaluation account and prepare themselves for the interview. For company created questions, it won't prevent applicants from looking up the answers in Google since most of them are obvious ones. There were some multiple choice questions which if isn't properly crafted will be easy to find answers too. And most importantly, you can't KNOW a PERSON from these online Q&A. After all we are hiring a Person, not just his knowledge. >If you keep answering me, I'll keep coming up with more questions, because I am not kidding I seriously nerd out on this stuff Me too nerd out with these since I have an awesome idea (atleast awesome to me) that fills all these problems with respective to hiring landscape. And you are welcome to come up with questions and I ll try my level best to answer them.
    - bluerail 12y ago
      Apparently, the comment depth is exceeded.. You can mail me (id in my profile) and I am happy to discuss it.
      - mechanical_fish 12y ago
        Sigh.
        tptacek 12y ago
        Do you nerd out on this stuff too?
        mechanical_fish 12y ago
        Yes, and I also nerd out on the design of online discussion forums. So watching this discussion trip over a misfeature and nearly fall into the darknet was sad, and sad again.
      - JoachimSchipper 12y ago
        It's an anti-flamewar device to hide the "reply" on deep threads. You can just click "link" and reply from there, though. I'm be interested in hearing what you have to say, so I'd be much obliged if you'd continue posting. ;-)
    - zvitez 12y ago
      What did you use for candidate screening then? What was your biggest problem? Sifting through irrelevant applications?
- tom_b 12y ago
  I enjoy Hackerrank very much. Although I've been away for awhile from their site. The coding platform was language-choice-flexible and I did a number of challenges in Clojure as a learning experience - very similar to the challenges from your old company, although I only played with round 1 of the security challenge. I am not a fan of the mathematical challenges on Hackerrank, mainly because I haven't done much interesting math in years and if I get all ambitious on math stuff, I'm going to dive into functional analysis and stats modeling and probably not from a coding viewpoint. Algorithmic challenges are much more engaging to me. Hackerrank has a very interesting option for hiring companies to sponsor a challenge or set of challenges. Based on what I read here, if I was a hiring company I would be doubling down on this approach (eg coding challenges as a feed for potential hires like you guys were doing as well). Heck, companies would probably pay five to six figures just for a curated list of candidates from these sites, right? One specific gripe - sometimes I had the vague feeling that the programmatic challenges encourage non-idiomatic language usage. I did a very fun challenge that involved range-minimum-queries there and to ultimately to have runtime under the JVM cutoff and pass all the testcases, I kind of optimized away from the way Clojure normally looks like. I think my point is code that works well for a programming challenge may not look much like code you would want in production. I can probably spout off more opinions but this is probably already more than you were looking for for someone who didn't use the site for actually finding a job.

rvivek 12y ago

Hi, hackerrank founder here. Happy to answer any questions.

crazypyro 12y ago
Could you give any insight into how many companies are creating their own questions versus using your pre-loaded ones?
ftpaul 12y ago
Why do you think that are changing the recruitment world? Do you work closely with any kind of recruitment agencies?

lamby 12y ago

Workable? Not world-changing but certainly takes some of the "urgherhergasdasd" out of it.

zvitez 12y ago
:) as long as it takes that out of it! What would make it world-changing for you? Is that the only option you've considered?

lazyant 12y ago

Doesn't look scalable for a startup but I'd give my pinky (OK, maybe just a month's salary) for having a decent tech recruiter work for me (developer open to new opportunities), as in sparing me of the 90% of BS that I usually go through when dealing with recruiters/companies.

rvivek 12y ago
thanks lazyant; there are specific challenges for a startup which we're trying to address in the product. happy to chat more if you'd like to try.
- lazyant 12y ago
  sorry, I wasn't addressing Hackerrank in particular, which seems a fine way of doing one of the parts of the recruiting process (tech validation), while my complain is on "everything else" and the general hiring process.
zvitez 12y ago
Why do you think it's not scalable? Think there always has to be a level of attention on an individual level? What BS are you referring to btw? The usual, "This guy knows Java. He'll probably interested in this Javascript position!"?
- lazyant 12y ago
  The recruiting game makes my blood boil, so I'll just point to some issues but the main thing is that tech recruiters are clueless about tech and don't bother reading about you or the target company before wasting your time, and I'm not even getting at having someone really look out for you actively trying to find a good match. General issues or "Top 10 Mistakes Technical Recruiters Make": - Not selling their company (or the position) - Not looking into the prospect’s web presence - Sending “cold call” vague email - Not understanding basic technology - Not disclosing basic information (an idea of salary, company) - Using buzzwords, offering silly perks - Not asking relevant questions - Radio silence, not being responsive - Not being clear on the process, what to expect - Not understanding what motivates people beyond money I think a good recruiter is not scalable in principle since it would need someone to get to know you a bit.

pjungwir 12y ago

I started a project similar to talentbin.com: scraping Github, StackOverflow, and about two dozen other sites to compile searchable developer profiles. Figuring out when a Github and StackOverflow profile belonged to the same person was a pretty fun challenge. Eventually I abandoned it though, because it felt like I was just enabling keyword-based recruiter spam. Selling it to people made me feel bad instead of good.

zvitez 12y ago
Good on you for being so altruistic. Do you think there's any way to leverage that while making it desirable for the developers? Imagine you have great offers that you know would be valuable to the people you found. Would it be spam to share it?
- pjungwir 12y ago
  Well I did believe that when I started the project. I don't know if quitting was altruism. Selling is hard enough for a programmer like me, but for this project I really recoiled from it. My heart just wasn't in it. Perhaps if communications were opt-in for the developers and we controlled the communications channel it would be okay. This piece might be worth keeping: The site scored each developer on various skills, so users could see that a person was better than 87% of their peers worldwide and better than 93% of people within 100 miles, etc. You could still use the whole population to compile those stats, even if only some people had opted in to communications. (Of course the score was based only on public data, so it was not perfect, but still it seemed like a pretty strong signal when I looked at it for people I know.)

knuxus 12y ago

Some guys from here, Lisbon, Portugal are kinda making referrals work without all that linkedin bs... http://www.jobbox.io/ http://www.jobbox.io/ , you can gain some serious money recommending people a better job

bzalasky 12y ago

Hired.com (formerly DeveloperAuction) comes to mind. I found my current role at Lookout through Hired. Having worked with traditional recruiters in the past, the difference with Hired is they have candidates' interests in mind as opposed to focusing solely on commissions. If you're qualified, they put your resume/CV in front of tons of great companies, give you the inside scoop on how interviews work at different companies, and provide more transparency through the whole process.

athesyn 12y ago
How long does it usually take for the approval process and to get offers?
- bzalasky 12y ago
  I don't remember exactly how long it took, but something like a week or so to get approved, and then they run auctions ever few weeks or so. The "offers" are really just invitations to interview where salary, equity and perks are laid out transparently ahead of time so that you can decide if an opportunity is right for your situation.

MalcolmDiggs 12y ago

Angellist. How? Because I can browse the companies that are hiring, see the compensation levels, and apply. The companies can find me and express interest directly. No recruiters involved whatsoever. I think THAT model is truly the future. It's changing the world of tech recruiting because it's challenging that idea that recruiters need to exist at all... and it's a pretty convincing argument.

mallyvai 12y ago

Going to promote http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io here :-) We help engineers and other workers by connecting them with a live human who can help evaluate opportunities, and give them advice to help them get what they're worth. OfferLetter is adding real value to people's lives and careers. We have a lot of great data on market rates, career trajectories, and company cultures. And because of our tip-as-percent-increase structure, the incentives are totally aligned. Shoot me a mail if you have any questions, or I'll be hanging around the comments here! mallyvai AT offerletter.io

ftpaul 12y ago
I like the way that you present your website. Do you think that it's scalable? How are you going increase the number of advisors?
- mallyvai 12y ago
  It's absolutely scalable, and extremely high-leverage to boot. We have a lot of advisors right now - there's a culture in the Valley of proactively wanting to help and connect with good people who need guidance. So even my friends who are busy founders, PMs, and leaders in their own right, are more than willing to make time to serve as Advisors. (It also helps that they get compensated well for it - and compensated proportional to the value they deliver :-). The more interesting question is how we get the word out more aggressively to get more individuals on-board. If you have any ideas about that, let me know - mallyvai@offerletter.io.
helen842000 12y ago
Are you looking for any additional advisors?
- mallyvai 12y ago
  Helen - Always happy to talk with empathetic people. Drop me a line - mallyvai@offerletter.io

seekingcharlie 12y ago

http://hired.com/ http://hired.com/