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I've thought about piloting a temp personal assistant service for software engineers during their job search. Imagine the following... - Recruiter outreach is

I've thought about piloting a temp personal assistant service for software engineers during their job search. Imagine the following... - Recruiter outreach is filtered / summarized. - Recruiter phone screens are scheduled for you, batched together. - Your assistant pre-screens for basic preferences: remote, salary, company size, role scope/level. - Interview loops are scheduled for you. - Receive a packet of spaced repetition exercises (optional), digest of Blind/Glassdoors messages, compensation data from the company/industry/area. - Negotiation practice, coaching In my experience, "forwarding this to my assistant for scheduling" is a power move. Some of above is handled by agency-style recruiting (Cybercoders) but the quality of those leads is on the low end. The high-end recruiting agencies focus on the employer side of the equation. Feels like there's an interesting gap for a service focused on a highly-skilled candidate's side of the equation.

arthurcolle 5y ago
It's a great idea!
izzygonzalez 5y ago
I've worked on a lot of these processes. If you're interested in talking, my Twitter is linked in my HN profile.
- grepLeigh 5y ago
  Followed, just in case! I probably won't pursue this idea (too many other things going on), so anyone who wants to run with this should try it.
a_t48 5y ago
I had good luck reaching directly out to a recruiter working at a VC firm last time I was looking. I'm not sure how this would work without a direct introduction, but presumably one could reach out on linkedin/email. This was great from the perspective of outreach/filtering.
ryandrake 5y ago
It's a good idea. In show business, this person is your agent. If you can afford someone to do this, it makes sense to offload this tedious work.
- zeroonetwothree 5y ago
  A key difference seems to be that in show business you get many more offers. In software you might only switch jobs every few years. So the benefit of saving X hours every time gets amortized to a very low amount.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    No, in show business you get lots of offers at a higher level but at a lower level the agent is also in charge of going out and selling you, also at the higher levels if you hear of a role you want you tell your agent, Sy, get me that part. I know of one guy who was a consultant who had a dedicated agent to handle this stuff for him. Which lots of consultants get their jobs through agencies who match consultants with companies anyway, so it just seemed like a natural jump up to this level for him.
kqr 5y ago
On the one hand, this sounds like a fantastic idea. On the other, I get sort of a bullshit-job vibe on this, in the sense that it would an entirely new type of professional invented just to paper over inefficiencies in an existing system. Is there a way we could improve recruiting across the industry that would make this sort of specialised PA unnecessary? (Asking not just hypothetically -- it could help me design sensible recruiting processes.)
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  If everyone did this, recruiters would get no advantage over sending an email with the same information, since they wouldn't be able to "persuade" an assistant of anything. So using assistants would be one way to make using assistants unnecessary.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    I don't get the reasoning, when a recruiter contacts me they tell me we think you would be fantastic for this job, and then they describe the job, sometimes no match, sometimes match. The assistant takes care of this step, should the recruiter that has a bad job be able to convince you to take the meetings even though you are a bad match? The recruiter with good matches asks for meeting time, salary, you figure it out reply. In this scenario assistant does that. Do you think recruiter is supposed to talk people into meeting at inconvenient times, interviewing for jobs with salaries below what they require? I think none of these things make a difference to the recruiter whether you provide the information or the digital job filtering agent does it.
- itronitron 5y ago
  It might surprise a lot of us here on HN but there are people who absolutely love this type of work. The trick is finding someone who also has the discipline to record notes and track all of the details.
bradlys 5y ago
While nice in some sense - I honestly find this part of the job search the least tedious, least stressful, and least time consuming. Yes, helpful to have done by someone else. Willing to pay a lot of money to have someone else do this? Probably not. Leetcode and system design prep take up the overwhelming majority of job search time. (Hundreds of hours - months of nights and weekends) Then the interviews themselves come second. I did something close to 200 hours of interviewing for my last job search (including some dozen onsites which were all 5-6+ hours). This is hugely time consuming… spending a half time spamming some websites is hardly that difficult in comparison. And yes, I had to finally take time off of work to accomplish this. I usually take PTO to do this or just quit my job outright or get severance to help as well. (All the above sometimes)
- shahbaby 5y ago
  I'll second this and add that you're probably sending out fewer but more targeted applications as you progress further in your career.
  - bradlys 5y ago
    Eh. Maybe but I still have to interview with dozens of companies because you need competing offers, warm ups to calibrate performance, and so forth. I don’t expect any less than 10 onsites for any job search regardless of tenure.
bearbearbear 5y ago

arthurcolle 5y ago

It's a great idea!

izzygonzalez 5y ago

I've worked on a lot of these processes. If you're interested in talking, my Twitter is linked in my HN profile.

grepLeigh 5y ago
Followed, just in case! I probably won't pursue this idea (too many other things going on), so anyone who wants to run with this should try it.

a_t48 5y ago

I had good luck reaching directly out to a recruiter working at a VC firm last time I was looking. I'm not sure how this would work without a direct introduction, but presumably one could reach out on linkedin/email. This was great from the perspective of outreach/filtering.

ryandrake 5y ago

It's a good idea. In show business, this person is your agent. If you can afford someone to do this, it makes sense to offload this tedious work.

zeroonetwothree 5y ago
A key difference seems to be that in show business you get many more offers. In software you might only switch jobs every few years. So the benefit of saving X hours every time gets amortized to a very low amount.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  No, in show business you get lots of offers at a higher level but at a lower level the agent is also in charge of going out and selling you, also at the higher levels if you hear of a role you want you tell your agent, Sy, get me that part. I know of one guy who was a consultant who had a dedicated agent to handle this stuff for him. Which lots of consultants get their jobs through agencies who match consultants with companies anyway, so it just seemed like a natural jump up to this level for him.

kqr 5y ago

On the one hand, this sounds like a fantastic idea. On the other, I get sort of a bullshit-job vibe on this, in the sense that it would an entirely new type of professional invented just to paper over inefficiencies in an existing system. Is there a way we could improve recruiting across the industry that would make this sort of specialised PA unnecessary? (Asking not just hypothetically -- it could help me design sensible recruiting processes.)

MichaelBurge 5y ago
If everyone did this, recruiters would get no advantage over sending an email with the same information, since they wouldn't be able to "persuade" an assistant of anything. So using assistants would be one way to make using assistants unnecessary.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I don't get the reasoning, when a recruiter contacts me they tell me we think you would be fantastic for this job, and then they describe the job, sometimes no match, sometimes match. The assistant takes care of this step, should the recruiter that has a bad job be able to convince you to take the meetings even though you are a bad match? The recruiter with good matches asks for meeting time, salary, you figure it out reply. In this scenario assistant does that. Do you think recruiter is supposed to talk people into meeting at inconvenient times, interviewing for jobs with salaries below what they require? I think none of these things make a difference to the recruiter whether you provide the information or the digital job filtering agent does it.
itronitron 5y ago
It might surprise a lot of us here on HN but there are people who absolutely love this type of work. The trick is finding someone who also has the discipline to record notes and track all of the details.

bradlys 5y ago

While nice in some sense - I honestly find this part of the job search the least tedious, least stressful, and least time consuming. Yes, helpful to have done by someone else. Willing to pay a lot of money to have someone else do this? Probably not. Leetcode and system design prep take up the overwhelming majority of job search time. (Hundreds of hours - months of nights and weekends) Then the interviews themselves come second. I did something close to 200 hours of interviewing for my last job search (including some dozen onsites which were all 5-6+ hours). This is hugely time consuming… spending a half time spamming some websites is hardly that difficult in comparison. And yes, I had to finally take time off of work to accomplish this. I usually take PTO to do this or just quit my job outright or get severance to help as well. (All the above sometimes)

shahbaby 5y ago
I'll second this and add that you're probably sending out fewer but more targeted applications as you progress further in your career.
- bradlys 5y ago
  Eh. Maybe but I still have to interview with dozens of companies because you need competing offers, warm ups to calibrate performance, and so forth. I don’t expect any less than 10 onsites for any job search regardless of tenure.

bearbearbear 5y ago