8 ms·

Honesty is the new game changer

69 points by Peroni 9y ago

Peroni 9y ago
Hi folks. Author and chap behind https://honest.work/ https://honest.work/ here. Happy to answer any questions and stuff.
- VyseofArcadia 9y ago
  Hello hello. I gathered through your series of subtle clues that you're based in the UK. Are you going to be focusing mostly on the British job market at launch?
  - Peroni 9y ago
    At launch, yes. We categorically intend to release a US focused version but we want to iron out a lot of the early stage kinks first.
danburbridge 9y ago
Thanks, have registered my interest. The lack of salaries/ranges is one of my pet annoyances when job hunting.
maxxxxx 9y ago
There is the old saying "Honesty is the key to success. If you can fake that, you are golden." :)
- tempodox 9y ago
  You put it in a nutshell perfectly.
hopeless 9y ago
Love the domain name! And some of the screenshots reveal an approach to hiring which is sorely lacking. At this stage, every single LinkedIn email and cold outreach email from a recruiter gets marked as spam. Not a single one seems to understand that hiring should be treating people as… well, people with lives and desires. Not just a resource to plug into a hole; not a fool to be tricked into changing jobs so the recruiter can hit their targets. Any innovation in this space is welcome and I hope there are enough "decent" companies to make it a successful business. fwiw, part of the advantage of going freelance was side-stepping all the bullshit hiring assumptions.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  Recruiters are part of the trend of outsource everything. Most recruiters are just salesmen on par with the kid who knocks on your front door wanting to sell you magazines or AT&T DSL; they'll tell you any lie you want to hear to get the sale. The sooner everyone starts refusing to deal with recruiters, the better off we'll all be.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    Well, recruiters do produce /some/ value. For employers, recruiters will do the dirty business the employers don't want to know about. For example, ignoring PII legislation to get a larger pool of contacts. Advertising highly paid nonexistent jobs to harvest CVs. Lying to candidates and pressuring them if they're wavering. These convert into more hires. For employees, recruiters will bypass bullshit job applicant websites that make you re-type your CV into their agonisingly long forms. They'll free you from emotionally draining work like customising your CV and writing a thoughtful cover letter - or even to really know what an employer does before applying to them. Often they'll also tell you interview questions in advance, and some will help you cheat on take-home tests. This converts into less effort needed per job offer. I'm not saying I like them - clearly, I see big disadvantages - but there are reasons they've lasted as long as they have, as an industry.
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      > These convert into more hires. And more fires. This is why you see more and more Contract-To-Hire and Temp-To-Hire positions being posted. Recruiters provide bad or inappropriate candidates to the employer. When we go through recruiters we spend a lot of wasted time interviewing candidates that should have never been sent to us.
vinceguidry 9y ago
My main disconnect with the hiring process these days is the near-ubiquitous use of code challenges that just keep getting more and more time-consuming. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted a pointer to a job that wanted me to spend six hours of my free time greenfielding a toy. I laughed and said no thanks. Code challenges are sucking all the liquidity out of the job market and are probably responsible for a good bit of the salary hikes I've been seeing lately. One challenge asked me to do everything in Vanilla Javascript. The other asked me to make a commit to their production codebase. Even if you offer to pay me, your offer is never going to be truly enough, and I'm not looking for side work. Code challenges feel incredibly lazy to me. Your organization sucks at hiring, so let's throw all the obstacles we can at applicants and see who makes it through. I wanted the job that asked me to do the production commit bad enough that I made my best effort. I ran into a snag and raised an issue like I was asked to. No reply, and the door slammed shut in my face a few days later when the time frame elapsed. I now refuse to do a more-than-trivial code challenge while I still have a job. It's just not worth it.
- hashkb 9y ago
  How would you fairly evaluate 20 candidates in a month or two and make a couple of hires?
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    This question lacks context. What sort of business are we dealing with here? SaaS? Consulting? Game development? Are we making websites? What does the existing technology look like? From these questions I can come to an understanding of what sort of talent is needed. Can we get away with junior talent or is a senior perspective required? What sorts of management resources are available, will we need the candidates to take on those roles too?
  - kabouseng 9y ago
    Sit down with them, have a decent human to human chat, and see if they can at least talk like they know their shit. If you dig down in conversation deep enough you will figure out what they truly know even with the bullshitters, if you are a domain expert yourself. If not you are unable to evaluate someone in any case.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
> Some of the excuses that I often come up against are worth sharing though... I'd like to add one. Salary range is low (pre-revenue startup) so the company needs to make up for it in non-salary ways. And the company wants a chance to talk to the candidate and sell the position without having the candidate not even bother to apply. With that said, I don't agree with that. I used to, when I was younger, but now I understand the importance of padding your retirement account and saving while you are young. I eventually made my opportunity costs back and then some but it was the long difficult road and most people aren't so lucky.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  It's worth noting that if you want a chance to talk to the candidate and sell the position without the candidate not even bothering to apply, not providing a salary range might be counterproductive. Some candidates won't apply if they don't see a salary range. That's where I'm at these days. I have over a decade of experience and it's a waste of everyone's time to talk if you aren't offering me six figures. When I was younger, the talking to me sometimes worked to get me into the job, but it's worth noting that I didn't stay long at those jobs once I realized that the tradeoffs of lower pay weren't worth it. Turnover at a company has substantial cost, so this isn't necessarily good for the employer.
- watwut 9y ago
  What exactly is non-salary advantage of typical pre-revenue startup?
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    foosball tables
  - debacle 9y ago
    You can wear shorts when you come into work on Saturday.
  - CalRobert 9y ago
    Presumably: Equity (many say you should value this at 0. I tend to agree) Title (You get to be senior whatever because all the other seniors in the job market want stability. And money.) Flexibility in tasks. On the whole, a smaller company will have more people doing a bit of everything. That might be annoying if you just want to focus on one thing, but if you've an interest in React, Keras, talking to clients, Rancher, and devops, it might suit you. You definitely get a lot of exposure to new technologies. When I worked for a "big" company I left when it was obvious I'd never get to work with tech I found interesting. And the usual things a company might offer. Remote work is one I would find pretty tantalizing. Other places uses free food and beer, though I have a bit of a problem with compulsive eating so dislike the former (and there's plenty of people struggling with addiction who dislike the latter, no doubt).
nathanaldensr 9y ago
I fail to see how yet another job board is going to solve what is essentially a human monkey-brain problem. Just how is this company going to get all players to be honest? I just had an interview at what I thought was a good company where I was--get this--accused of being long-winded. Yes, I was accused of talking too much in an interview. How can a website solve this type of problem, among all the others? You're going to discover that companies don't want to be honest during the interview process. They'll lie to your face and tell you Everything is Awesome™. You're going to discover that applicants are dishonest as well. Everyone's lying to signal to the other that it should be a match.
- tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
  > Yes, I was accused of talking too much in an interview. How can a website solve this type of problem, among all the others? You mean you've never had a long winded candidate who wouldn't get to the point, where despite repeated attempts to get things back on track, you could only get through half the material you wanted to cover, and where everyone else who interviewed the same candidate was frustrated by the same thing? I almost envy you.
- amykhar 9y ago
  It seems to be the mentality lately that nobody wants to fix existing stuff and make it better. They want to launch their own disruptive startup, library, whatever. It's true in job boards, it's true in code libraries and tools as well.
- Peroni 9y ago
  >You're going to discover that companies don't want to be honest during the interview process. They'll lie to your face and tell you Everything is Awesome™. You're going to discover that applicants are dishonest as well. I've spent the past ten years in the hiring space so I promise you, I've already discovered all of those things en masse. This isn't a silver bullet to transform hiring. It's a foundation that improves on existing job boards by making simple elements like salaries and info on interview processes mandatory. Our intention is to then build on this foundation and create a platform that affects many more areas of the hiring process in a positive way.
forgottenpass 9y ago
>I really hate the phrase “game changer”. It’s right up there in the TechBro lexicon alongside disrupt, growth hacking, hustle and burn the village All those dumb Valley buzzwords were secretly the fault of bros all along? Fantastic! I'd hate to have to do any actual introspection.

69 points by Peroni 9y ago

Hi folks. Author and chap behind https://honest.work/ https://honest.work/ here. Happy to answer any questions and stuff.

VyseofArcadia 9y ago
Hello hello. I gathered through your series of subtle clues that you're based in the UK. Are you going to be focusing mostly on the British job market at launch?
- Peroni 9y ago
  At launch, yes. We categorically intend to release a US focused version but we want to iron out a lot of the early stage kinks first.

danburbridge 9y ago

Thanks, have registered my interest. The lack of salaries/ranges is one of my pet annoyances when job hunting.

maxxxxx 9y ago

There is the old saying "Honesty is the key to success. If you can fake that, you are golden." :)

tempodox 9y ago
You put it in a nutshell perfectly.

hopeless 9y ago

Love the domain name! And some of the screenshots reveal an approach to hiring which is sorely lacking. At this stage, every single LinkedIn email and cold outreach email from a recruiter gets marked as spam. Not a single one seems to understand that hiring should be treating people as… well, people with lives and desires. Not just a resource to plug into a hole; not a fool to be tricked into changing jobs so the recruiter can hit their targets. Any innovation in this space is welcome and I hope there are enough "decent" companies to make it a successful business. fwiw, part of the advantage of going freelance was side-stepping all the bullshit hiring assumptions.

cptskippy 9y ago
Recruiters are part of the trend of outsource everything. Most recruiters are just salesmen on par with the kid who knocks on your front door wanting to sell you magazines or AT&T DSL; they'll tell you any lie you want to hear to get the sale. The sooner everyone starts refusing to deal with recruiters, the better off we'll all be.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Well, recruiters do produce /some/ value. For employers, recruiters will do the dirty business the employers don't want to know about. For example, ignoring PII legislation to get a larger pool of contacts. Advertising highly paid nonexistent jobs to harvest CVs. Lying to candidates and pressuring them if they're wavering. These convert into more hires. For employees, recruiters will bypass bullshit job applicant websites that make you re-type your CV into their agonisingly long forms. They'll free you from emotionally draining work like customising your CV and writing a thoughtful cover letter - or even to really know what an employer does before applying to them. Often they'll also tell you interview questions in advance, and some will help you cheat on take-home tests. This converts into less effort needed per job offer. I'm not saying I like them - clearly, I see big disadvantages - but there are reasons they've lasted as long as they have, as an industry.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    > These convert into more hires. And more fires. This is why you see more and more Contract-To-Hire and Temp-To-Hire positions being posted. Recruiters provide bad or inappropriate candidates to the employer. When we go through recruiters we spend a lot of wasted time interviewing candidates that should have never been sent to us.

vinceguidry 9y ago

My main disconnect with the hiring process these days is the near-ubiquitous use of code challenges that just keep getting more and more time-consuming. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted a pointer to a job that wanted me to spend six hours of my free time greenfielding a toy. I laughed and said no thanks. Code challenges are sucking all the liquidity out of the job market and are probably responsible for a good bit of the salary hikes I've been seeing lately. One challenge asked me to do everything in Vanilla Javascript. The other asked me to make a commit to their production codebase. Even if you offer to pay me, your offer is never going to be truly enough, and I'm not looking for side work. Code challenges feel incredibly lazy to me. Your organization sucks at hiring, so let's throw all the obstacles we can at applicants and see who makes it through. I wanted the job that asked me to do the production commit bad enough that I made my best effort. I ran into a snag and raised an issue like I was asked to. No reply, and the door slammed shut in my face a few days later when the time frame elapsed. I now refuse to do a more-than-trivial code challenge while I still have a job. It's just not worth it.

hashkb 9y ago
How would you fairly evaluate 20 candidates in a month or two and make a couple of hires?
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  This question lacks context. What sort of business are we dealing with here? SaaS? Consulting? Game development? Are we making websites? What does the existing technology look like? From these questions I can come to an understanding of what sort of talent is needed. Can we get away with junior talent or is a senior perspective required? What sorts of management resources are available, will we need the candidates to take on those roles too?
- kabouseng 9y ago
  Sit down with them, have a decent human to human chat, and see if they can at least talk like they know their shit. If you dig down in conversation deep enough you will figure out what they truly know even with the bullshitters, if you are a domain expert yourself. If not you are unable to evaluate someone in any case.

throwaway2016a 9y ago

> Some of the excuses that I often come up against are worth sharing though... I'd like to add one. Salary range is low (pre-revenue startup) so the company needs to make up for it in non-salary ways. And the company wants a chance to talk to the candidate and sell the position without having the candidate not even bother to apply. With that said, I don't agree with that. I used to, when I was younger, but now I understand the importance of padding your retirement account and saving while you are young. I eventually made my opportunity costs back and then some but it was the long difficult road and most people aren't so lucky.

kerkeslager 9y ago
It's worth noting that if you want a chance to talk to the candidate and sell the position without the candidate not even bothering to apply, not providing a salary range might be counterproductive. Some candidates won't apply if they don't see a salary range. That's where I'm at these days. I have over a decade of experience and it's a waste of everyone's time to talk if you aren't offering me six figures. When I was younger, the talking to me sometimes worked to get me into the job, but it's worth noting that I didn't stay long at those jobs once I realized that the tradeoffs of lower pay weren't worth it. Turnover at a company has substantial cost, so this isn't necessarily good for the employer.
watwut 9y ago
What exactly is non-salary advantage of typical pre-revenue startup?
- dexterdog 9y ago
  foosball tables
- debacle 9y ago
  You can wear shorts when you come into work on Saturday.
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Presumably: Equity (many say you should value this at 0. I tend to agree) Title (You get to be senior whatever because all the other seniors in the job market want stability. And money.) Flexibility in tasks. On the whole, a smaller company will have more people doing a bit of everything. That might be annoying if you just want to focus on one thing, but if you've an interest in React, Keras, talking to clients, Rancher, and devops, it might suit you. You definitely get a lot of exposure to new technologies. When I worked for a "big" company I left when it was obvious I'd never get to work with tech I found interesting. And the usual things a company might offer. Remote work is one I would find pretty tantalizing. Other places uses free food and beer, though I have a bit of a problem with compulsive eating so dislike the former (and there's plenty of people struggling with addiction who dislike the latter, no doubt).

nathanaldensr 9y ago

I fail to see how yet another job board is going to solve what is essentially a human monkey-brain problem. Just how is this company going to get all players to be honest? I just had an interview at what I thought was a good company where I was--get this--accused of being long-winded. Yes, I was accused of talking too much in an interview. How can a website solve this type of problem, among all the others? You're going to discover that companies don't want to be honest during the interview process. They'll lie to your face and tell you Everything is Awesome™. You're going to discover that applicants are dishonest as well. Everyone's lying to signal to the other that it should be a match.

tytytytytytytyt 9y ago
> Yes, I was accused of talking too much in an interview. How can a website solve this type of problem, among all the others? You mean you've never had a long winded candidate who wouldn't get to the point, where despite repeated attempts to get things back on track, you could only get through half the material you wanted to cover, and where everyone else who interviewed the same candidate was frustrated by the same thing? I almost envy you.
amykhar 9y ago
It seems to be the mentality lately that nobody wants to fix existing stuff and make it better. They want to launch their own disruptive startup, library, whatever. It's true in job boards, it's true in code libraries and tools as well.
Peroni 9y ago
>You're going to discover that companies don't want to be honest during the interview process. They'll lie to your face and tell you Everything is Awesome™. You're going to discover that applicants are dishonest as well. I've spent the past ten years in the hiring space so I promise you, I've already discovered all of those things en masse. This isn't a silver bullet to transform hiring. It's a foundation that improves on existing job boards by making simple elements like salaries and info on interview processes mandatory. Our intention is to then build on this foundation and create a platform that affects many more areas of the hiring process in a positive way.

forgottenpass 9y ago

>I really hate the phrase “game changer”. It’s right up there in the TechBro lexicon alongside disrupt, growth hacking, hustle and burn the village All those dumb Valley buzzwords were secretly the fault of bros all along? Fantastic! I'd hate to have to do any actual introspection.