10 ms·
Ask HN: How effective have the job posts on HN been?
I do come across job posts on the home of HN. Job postings by Y Combinator alumni, which are guaranteed to appear on the front page for a period of time.
How effective has been these posts?
Anyone here who has out the job post and can share some numbers?
Anyone who has applied to these job posts?
Others, what do you do/think when you see a job post?
We are working on a startup idea, and this question carries some value in validating our concept. However, it is not related to job openings. Our validation is primarily to understand user behavior.
- sheetjs 13y agoIf you go through the whoishiring posts, you'll see some people actually do give numbers. For example, scribd: > We've hired SIX full-time people and TONS of interns from these "Who is Hiring" threads ... it really works! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326306
- rrpadhy 13y ago"who is hiring" thread is great... My specific question is regarding the https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs Also, some of the jobs show up on the homepage, how do they fare?
- minimaxir 13y agoNote that there are two types of job posts on HN: 1) Who is Hiring threads, which are posted on the first of every month 2) Job postings by Y Combinator alumni, which are guaranteed to appear on the front page for a period of time.
- rrpadhy 13y agoI meant the second type. Was not able to frame it correctly. So I have copy pasted your definition and updated the description. :)
- BorisMelnik 13y agoGreat but terrible. Lots of initial contact with people I am offering them jobs with WordPress development and rails but very little followup.
- rrpadhy 13y agoYou had posted a job opening and got great by terrible response, or you applied to jobs, but no follow-ups?
- hbbio 13y agoMight be that WordPress development is "unsexy". I only looked briefly at the code and it seems Wordpress is a popular but poorly written app. I understand why many talented developers would pass.
- MartinCron 13y agoWordPress is the worst blogging and content management system out there, except for all of the others.
- nathan_f77 13y agoMyself and 2 other ZenPayroll engineers found and applied to ZenPayroll through the job posts on HN.
- msutherl 13y agoI got a great job through the the Who's Hiring thread. The company that hired me said the signal:noise ratio from HN was about 50:50, much higher than any other method.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pg 13y agoI don't know specific numbers, but the companies we've funded say they get good people from them.
- arasmussen 13y agoI regularly (twice a month?) check https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs just to see what's out there. I'm not even looking for a job, just more interested in what startups are doing and what kind of employees they're looking for.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hgh 13y agoGot a few interesting nibbles after posting on the who's hiring posts, but specific hiring submission didn't get far. We're based in Cape Town, so perhaps reader geography plays some part. If you're in our part of the world, have skills in frontend development, java, or python, and you want to work at a fast growing mobile payments company, send me a mail (email on profile)
- rrpadhy 13y agoThis is something I would like to discuss a bit more.(not the job opportunity, but the responses) no email on profile. :) Please share if you don't mind me asking a few follow-up questions.
- hgh 13y agoChecking my profile beforehand might have helped :) Feel free to get in touch - hans@zoona.co.za
- Kluny 13y agoSame as the other commenter, I'm interested. Canadian but I'd like to work in Africa. HN doesn't display your email address, you have to post it in your bio.
- mjn 13y ago> We're based in Cape Town, so perhaps reader geography plays some part. I did a bit of geographic canvassing of HN, and while I only went through the "top 100" posters due to it being a pretty manual process, it does indeed seem pretty concentrated, with US/UK/Canada accounting for >80% of those I looked at. Summary at the bottom of this page: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/hacker_news_posters.html
- zbruhnke 13y agoWe've posted two and received a total of about 50 applications. of those 50 I'd say 65-75% of them are high quality candidates at least at first glance that are writing emails specifically about the postings we put up and referencing the things we say in the post vs just spamming everyone in the list with a generic cover letter and resume. So far HN is the best source of high quality candidates for us as a startup working on hard technical challenges.
- laurenstill 13y agoMy current job I got through HN, in addition to a number of interviews. Not a YC Co though.
- akg_67 13y agoMy experience as job applicant: Who is hiring, March 2014: I received three responses to my applications. One for code samples (no follow up afterward), one for quick phone conversation, and one for phone interview (Ed: three different companies). Seeking Freelance, March 2014: No response. Who is hiring, Feb 2014: No response. Seeking Freelance, Feb 2014: No response. YC Companies /jobs: No ACK or response in last two months.
- namelezz 13y agoSame experience here. Need to pass an online code puzzle -> a short phone interview -> No response.
- rrpadhy 13y agoHey thanks for your response. Some follow-on questions: 1. How often do you visit HN in day? 2. How do you generally spend your time on HN? reading new articles, reading comments, Commenting and participating, or something else? 3. Are you actively looking for a job, or you stumble across a good job posting when doing your normal browsing?
- fsk 13y agoWhy is it considered acceptable to just cut off contact after a phone interview or an onsite interview? If you get an onsite interview or phone interview, they should at least have the decency for a form letter "Thanks for applying, but we chose someone else." (especially after an on-site interview)
- danielweber 13y agoSome people don't like to reject others so they take the easy way out and just go silent. This is a tragic mistake, because if you are running a company you need to be able to do something much worse -- cut people who are currently working for you.
- elandybarr 13y agoIt is not acceptable. I have tried to be courteous to everyone who has applied where I am. However, keep in mind that one recruiter may be dealing with 20-50 applicants in that week. And it is never fun rejecting people. It is easy to want to put it off.
- vikas5678 13y agoI've posted many UI programmer job openings I have in my team, never even received a resume. Good programmers are hard to find.
- rrpadhy 13y agoDid you post as in hn/jobs or in "who is hiring"
- ultimatedelman 13y agoI know this is a shameless plug, but my company, Mighty Spring (http://www.mightyspring.com/getstarted http://www.mightyspring.com/getstarted) has a ton of front end people who would be interested in working at your startup ;)
- tptacek 13y agoUntil a year or so ago, they were our #1 most effective recruitment vehicle. (We got better at hiring; HN didn't get worse.)
- zerr 13y agoNext step: get better at management to allow remote employment ;)
- tptacek 13y agoYeah, no. Just not how we work. Sorry! :)
- yonaguska 13y agoSpeaking of which, how do y'all get most of your hires? Referrals? I've emailed your careers email address for matasano, but I've not gotten a response. I'm not sure if it's because I'm not qualified or I got filtered somehow.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, you should get a response and, if you're interested, a phone call from us, no matter what. Our process is pretty much resume-blind. So if you didn't get a response, you fell through the cracks somehow (actual humans read all those mails, we get a lot of them, and we have spam filters). Send directly to me? thomas at mycompany.
- yonaguska 13y agoWill do, I'll just resend what I sent to careers. Thanks!
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoI'd wondered why you read six sets of crypto challenges, but chose not to send a form letter..
- pbiggar 13y agoWe get great applicants (https://circleci.com/jobs https://circleci.com/jobs), and have hired over half the company this way (maybe 6 or 7 people). However, we have a lot that appeals to the HN crowd: a flat organization, CircleCI is written in Clojure, the company is half remote, we make tools for developers and we're committed to private offices per dev for SF hires. So your mileage will definitely vary.
- zerr 13y agoWhy do you limit remote applicants with "US-only"?
- danielweber 13y agoDealing with remote employees is already something of an effort. It churlish to take the minority of companies willing to do it and complain that they aren't doing it enough because they want to stick with their native legal and social system. (Can I let go of my remote employee in London? Do I need to "show cause"? How much will it cost me just to get a lawyer to answer that?)
- zerr 13y agoHire as a [long-term] contractor and that's it.
- pbiggar 13y agoTimezones mostly, though actually we aren't as strict as that anymore, and I should edit it.
- kclay 13y agoSeeking freelancer has netted me a 3 to 1 rate for new clients on average every time I've posted. Far better then posting on elance or similar sites.
- rco8786 13y agoGot my current job on here
- 8_hours_ago 13y agoFrom the viewpoint of a job applicant, I have been very happy with the job postings on HN. Of the 4 jobs that I applied to over the past 3.5 years (I'm pretty selective), all 4 responded to me on the same day, and 3 resulted in phone interviews. Those numbers are very good compared to other job posting sites. I found that job aggregation sites like Monster performed absolutely terribly. In that same category are the careers website that large companies like Microsoft and Boeing have, which are basically black holes. I can't remember ever getting a response from any of them. It's easy to spam your resume to dozens of jobs at once, but 0/1000 is still 0. My favorite technique (which got me my current job) was to apply to the company directly after finding the job opening through Craigslist or other means. Applying directly got me a response rate of 14/17, and an interview rate of 10/14. Emailing companies directly through Craigslist was fairly poor for me, and gave me a response rate of 2/8, and an interview rate of 1/2. I realize that my sample size is small, but I hope it helps.
- danielweber 13y agoYour talk about "black holes" made me realize that when I apply anywhere I should put some URLs into my cover letters to see if anyone ever reads them.
- Evgeny 13y agoHow would you use URLs in the cover letters to check they were read?
- danielweber 13y agoPut them on a server I control and check access logs.
- mmorris 13y agoJust curious... you said your best result was "applying directly" after seeing a company on CL, but that emailing the company after seeing on CL was not as successful. In this instance, does "applying directly" mean you went to each company's website and applied on their jobs page? Or did you call them/research and email someone specific/something else?
- steven777400 13y agoI once applied to a job post in the one of the monthly "Who's Hiring" threads. I got a callback and we discussed the my experience, the company, and the position. They were interested in conducting a further interview, but, based on the what I learned in the phone conversation, I decided we wouldn't be a good fit together and so declined to move forward. I do enjoy reading the threads each month to see what the industry is up to from a hiring perspective.
- croisillon 13y ago1. I don't work in a technical domain 2. I don't look at job offers on HN 3. I never applied to job offers on HN I hope this gives you a great insight!
- guiporto 13y agoI think this post should be a poll instead of just an 'open question'.
- fsk 13y agoJust one data point: I replied to every NYC posting one month. I got zero on-site interviews. (I do get interviews when I send resumes via other methods.) I'm not wasting time responding again.
- yesimahuman 13y agoI'd be curious to hear about how effective the ones that end up on the weekends are. I can imagine they are quite a bit less effective, but I could be wrong. Seems like it would be worth just delaying those to the next Monday, but that isn't exactly a new opinion.
- jonnathanson 13y agoI owe my writing career to HN. I have been writing my whole life (I probably put in my 10,000 hours before I left high school). But until recently, I'd never really considered it as a serious job option. Journalism rarely pays a living wage. Trying to sell book proposals is like trying to make a career out of buying lottery tickets. Unless you are confident you're the next J.K. Rowling [1], you should leave writing where it belongs: on nights and weekends, as a hobby. Or so I'd always imagined. And so I spent the last decade of my life resisting the call to foolishness and misadventure. I've been lurking, arguing, and mucking about on HN for the last few years. I took awhile to realize that HN had become my primary outlet for writing. Once I figured it out, I committed more time to lurking here. I responded to my first HN jobs post in mid-2013, for a writing job with Priceonomics (YC '12). They responded rapidly (same day, if memory serves), and I got to work right away. I have done some very fun, very interesting work with those guys. (And I hope to continue; in fact, I owe them beers when I get back into town!). That work went really well. In the span of three or four months, I landed an agent, a book deal, some NPR appearances, and some columns in national publications. I have yet to make Harry Potter money, let alone my previous salary. But in the meantime, I'm paying rent in San Francisco, doing something that doesn't feel like work to me. That's pretty cool. Lately I've picked up a lot of freelance content marketing and writing jobs through HN Freelancer threads. I get a good response rate, and the people I work with have been awesome. I hope to keep landing these gigs every month or two. And at some point, I'll get around to writing that book. I apologize if this post seems glib, humblebraggy, or even non-humble in its bragginess. That's not my intent. I just saw this topic and felt an overwhelming need to share my story here. My path is atypical and ill-advised. Especially if you like making money. But I know of no other path by which I could have reshaped my destiny so quickly. [1] Or Robert Galbraith, or whoever.
- chunky1994 13y agoI have always been interested in turning writing into a secondary source of income, since I have been writing as a hobby for quite some time now. What genre is your book in, and what kinds of work do you produce? Do you think you could possibly answer a few of my questions over email? Thank you!
- paulmay 13y agoWe posted on HN in November and it was very effective (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6653752). The volume of candidates that came from the HN post was much smaller than other channels, but the quality of candidates was much higher than all the other channels. Here are the numbers we saw: HN - 12 candidates total, 7 made it to the initial phone interview and 3 made it to a full interview....we made one offer and he accepted (and he's awesome). Stackoverflow - 28 candidates, 9 initial phone interviews, 2 full interviews, no offers. Indeed - 40 candidates, 6 phone interviews, none of them made it to a full interview. Craigslist - 6 candidates, 2 phone interviews, neither of them made it to a full interview. Two other thoughts... I think the reason that HN worked so well for us is that we we took a very targeted approach...before posting, we spent a lot of time thinking through exactly what we were looking for and what we thought made working at BuzzStream a unique opportunity for the right person. We wrote a positioning statement for the job that we used as the starting point for our post. Getting the message right was critical. The fact that we don't mind bringing on remote people makes things a lot easier.
- kiyoto 13y agoWe hired our frontend engineer, and he's been nothing short of awesome. To put this in context: We are an enterprise SaaS company (www.treasuredata.com). In other words, this is not something a lot of frontend folks are aware of let alone interested in by default. Still, we managed to find someone who was really good. He and another frontend engineer made a worlds of difference in our webapp and boosted customer engagement.
- akg_67 13y agoVery interesting company. Thanks for making me aware of it. I wasn't aware of an enterprise data storage, management and analytics SaaS company. This is my area of interest. I noticed you have couple of opportunities that I may be a good fit. Sending my application.
- d0m 13y agoHigh quality candidates and also great discussions even with people we end up not hiring (Some we forwarded to other startups we knew were looking).
- kamens 13y agoMultiple hires for Khan Academy. One of our best recruiting networks.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chrisconley 13y agoI got my current gig at Monetate in December 2013 after seeing a post on Who's Hiring November 2013. It turns out we've hired 7 our ~20 software engineers like this over the last few years.
- bliti 13y agoI was hired from a regular HN post. But know of people hired through the job posts themselves. It works well.
- lbotos 13y agoAs an applicant https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs was always a fun way to read the pulse of the YC crowd. I saw something interesting, I applied, and now I'll be starting my new position in a few weeks! In a word; useful. :)
- DevoAKA 13y agoI didn't find my current job directly through the monthly job post but, over a year ago, I found a link to AngelList and then from there I was able to find my full-time job, junior and all.
- sergiotapia 13y agoApplied to 4 front end positions with a dash of Rails work, 2 of them had uninteresting work so I declined, 1 wanted me to jump through hoops answering some silly puzzles - "Lol no... I'm not 21 anymore, you want to hire me look at my credentials and open source code". The last one was a great fit and I'm loving the work we're doing. If you guys want to hire good people who actually respect themselves and will present your business well inside and outside, don't make candidates jump through your silly college-level puzzles. I'm too old for this shit.