Ask HN: What is the greatest pain point you feel when hiring someone?

3 points by shepbook 13 years ago | 7 comments

I'm interested in what the worst part of the hiring process is, from the employer's side. What's something you wish could be changed?

I've recently heard about how finding talent is one of the most important, yet difficult things a startup has to face. I'd like to investigate how technology might be leveraged to help this. So...

What pain points do you need alleviated to make your hiring life easier?

staunch 13 years ago |

The most fundamental problem is the risk involved in making a decision. When you hire the wrong person it hurts badly. It's painful, stressful, and expensive -- usually for both parties.

One way I've found to mitigate this is by having potential employees work on a contract job first.

The trend right now is for job sites to employ programming tests and the like, but I don't think these answer most of the hard questions you have about a potential employee.

A hybrid Elance/Monster might be just the ticket though. Employers post real jobs, like "Port our Oracle stored procedures to Postgres" or "Rewrite this Ruby server daemon to support XYZ", then they work together with candidates on the project, while paying them. Employers would make full-time offers to people who do well.

Employers might pay three candidates to do the same job and then pick which one did the best. Still far cheaper than a recruiter.

Candidates that don't look good on paper might even volunteer to do work for free/cheap just to prove they have what it takes. I know I would have before I had job experience.

freework 13 years ago | |

As a developer who loves programming, but looks very bad 'on paper', I would totally be down with this idea. Sometimes when I'm interviewing at a company, I just want to tell them, m "Lets skip all this formality crap, and hire me for a week. If you don't think I'm good enough after one week, then you can fire me without pay".

mchannon 13 years ago | |

I think they already have a hybrid Elance/Monster site to perform this- Elance. Once you have a rapport established with a contractor, there's nothing keeping you from sending them a job offer.

staunch 13 years ago | | |

The vast majority of employers want to hire employees to work in their office. Elance is generally not designed around this goal.

I think a site like I'm imagining might restrict candidates to your local area and require that they be willing to work full-time and on-site. Maybe those would be optional, but that's the idea.

romain_dardour 13 years ago |

Unless you're google, hiring someone means not hiring someone else.

At any given time we would love to hire 3 people that are all as amazing as we can think, but the budgets never are that large.

Making a choice between 2 amazing guys is even harder than searching for one.

hoodwink 13 years ago |

Logistics. More time is spent making posts, culling resumes / cover letters, scheduling phone interviews, coordinating in-office meetings with the team, and following up than actual searching. Even with an admin assistant, it's a huge burden on me.