Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/21/hackruiter/

by davidbalbert • 15 years ago

114 42 15 years ago

dongle• 15 years ago

The site looks fantastic, and those are all A+ companies to apply to. I especially like that their roadmap involves developing intelligent ways to search for new jobs (like by languages in use – why has it taken this long for such an obvious filter?).

jhuckestein2• 15 years ago

I understand the problem. Recruiting engineers is hard, but is engineers recruiting engineers sustainable? Do they hire more engineers to do recruiting?

nicholasjbs8• 15 years ago

That's an open question. Right now, our time doing the legwork with this isn't our bottleneck. We're focused on being 10x better than the status quo.

Once we hit our capacity, we'll scale with some linear combination of software and people.

jhuckestein2• 15 years ago

Here's something I could think of:

Engineers might one day have agents to haggle with businesses. Those agents need to know a lot about engineering in the same way that many sports agents are former players.

Is there reason to believe that such a time is coming?

aschobel5• 15 years ago

Good luck! You are trying to solve one of the biggest challenges we face right now.

We have a good product, happy users, catchy domain name (har) but are having a hell of a time hiring because nobody knows of us.

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

I am not affiliated w/ the company, but it sounds like it could work out. Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like recruiting?

pgbovine• 15 years ago

Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like recruiting?

that sounds a bit over-confident, eh? i read that as, "Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like X?" where X has nothing to do with their training or specialty.

joepestro• 15 years ago

The hints on the bottom bar are a nice touch. I kept refreshing the page to see them all. Also found out about the keyboard shortcuts that way! (Hint: Press ?)

nostrademons3• 15 years ago

I'm curious how this works out. My perception is that hiring is intrinsically hard, and whether you have engineers or HR doing the recruiting, it will remain hard. I would absolutely, totally love to be proven wrong on this though.

nicholasjbs8• 15 years ago

We fully acknowledge it's an open question. Hiring is intrinsically hard, but think of it this way: What are the odds that the status quo is the best we can do? That seems highly unlikely to us.

nostrademons3• 15 years ago

Your competition isn't really other recruiters, it's personal referrals from inside the company. Everybody knows that recruiters suck; that's why whenever possible, people try to find friends or former coworkers of their existing employees and bring them on-board.

Now, if you could devise a system that's as effective as having worked with a person for years and being able to convince them to join you, yet didn't require a personal connection that takes years to build up, that would be golden.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

If my HR folks could parse github repos, I would have much less noise to weed out.

spoiledtechie2• 15 years ago

the hiring business of engineers is big money. This isn't anything new and its sad to such good engineers chase theall mighty dollar instead of building something of real value.

fleitz5• 15 years ago

Please explain the difference between 'real value' and that which someone is willing to pay money for? In my world 'real value' is when people pay you.

spoiledtechie2• 15 years ago

Something that has the ability to change the World/Country/State....

nicholasjbs8• 15 years ago

People should be be happy with their jobs. In our experience, this is frequently not the case, even for great engineers. We want to change that.

We're specifically being selective about the companies we work with. This keeps us honest, since we'll never be in a position where it's in our best (short-term) interest to recommend that someone takes a lousy job.

And, of course, we would like to someday stop living off our savings.

nostrademons3• 15 years ago

Getting people into the right positions is building something of real value.

Think of how much better our software would be if people were excited about their jobs and genuinely enjoyed the work they're doing, instead of just putting in their 40 hours in a cube farm.

incently• 15 years ago

Best of luck. I have a feeling the incentives for hiring are out of whack and need a correction.

What is your fee structure like? Do you take 25% of what an engineer would make their first year like other recruiters? How will you avoid becoming corrupt like most other recruiters?

nicholasjbs8• 15 years ago

We have a flat fee structure that's less than the 20-30% that regular recruiters take.

We're trying to avoid being corrupted by 1) only working with companies we know, like, and respect (so we're not tempted to encourage people to work at bad ones), and 2) the fact that our advantage over regular recruiters is that we're not like them. Good hackers know one and other. If we started doing the crap many recruiters do, people would (and should) call us out, and good people wouldn't want to work with us.

[EDIT: Fix typos from writing in haste]

shazow• 15 years ago

You'd probably want to avoid working with companies you don't know/like/respect to keep your filter in place.

On the other hand, I've made referrals to companies I wouldn't want to work at but the fit was simply perfect for the person in question. They're very happy there.

Rough balance.

starpilot• 15 years ago

I hope this goes beyond the software engineering field eventually.

pnathan• 15 years ago

Do you have plans to expand beyond New York or the San Francisco Bay Area?

mkramlich• 15 years ago

What I like about this is that it's trying to help solve the number one problem in the software field. Which is not some esoteric or fancy computing problem, and is not a hardware issue, etc. It's the fact that the demand for folks who can do software, and well, far exceeds the supply of such folks. Especially ones who are available, interested and affordable. Trying to take even a tiny bite, percentage-wise, out of a very large pie is always promising.

unov• 15 years ago

Good luck, this is a good idea. The problem is not just compensation:

I believe there are tons of talented developers "locked up" in large corporations due to health insurance / health benefits, especially those with kids. Universal health insurance would help start-ups and small business compete with the Facebook's and Google's and also Bank of America's as health care would become an "even playing field".

Currently most small business and start-ups cannot compete with the health care and other benefit cost structures large American firms can achieve.

In fact, lots of corporate roll-ups exist only to reduce benefit costs - think of them as large health insurance providers.

Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10)

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