Ask HN: Are YC startups actually hiring?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856752

by logotype • 1 year ago

108 136 1 year ago

news.ycombinator.com

Having applied to 20-30 YC startups without any meaningful replies and I’m wondering, are YC startups actually hiring? Having worked in finance for a decade and other high pressure jobs I don’t consider myself a spring chicken.

Edit: I now run a fintech startup https://fixparser.dev and we do look for a technical/business co-founder, feel free to reach out.

very_good_man• 1 year ago

[flagged]

alberth• 1 year ago

Just curious, why do you say that - given that many job board cost money to post on.

luismedel• 1 year ago

I never thought about this, but maybe it's way cheaper than other methods of personal data capturing.

georgeecollins• 1 year ago

Many do, but not all. Also the cost to post a job is trivial compared to the cost of filling the role.

I don't know what the OP was thinking but it is very common for companies to say they are hiring when they don't have a specific position to fill at the time. First, because it is a sign of health, particularly if you want to position yourself as growing. Second, a lot of HR people want to have a pool of people to contact when a position opens.

kevmo• 1 year ago

The cost to post is trivial, especially if you don't fill the position. It's about looking prestigious and maintaining the impression that you're hiring.

Also seems necessary for all the H-1B fraud.

segasaturn• 1 year ago

One of my friends almost got scammed by a fake job posting just yesterday. The job was for a real company with a real site and headquarters in the US, and the fake recruiter was impersonating the identity of a real recruiter on LinkedIn. They realized it was a scam when the "recruiter" told them that the job interview would be over Telegram. Often these fake jobs will string applicants along, then start asking them for money to pay for "onboarding fees".

PyWoody• 1 year ago

Sometimes it's the job board itself creating the fake ads to boost their own numbers. Indeed is pretty notorious for doing this.

rvz2• 1 year ago

Almost all the postings are fake and used for data collection.

Why would they spend their seed or series A cash on people who they have never worked with or they do not know?

For them it is easier for them to hire with in their own network in YC rather than gamble on candidates that they have never worked with before.

grajaganDev2• 1 year ago

Companies post fake jobs to scare their existing employees, discourage them from asking for raises, etc.

They see ROI from the cost.

ArtemZ• 1 year ago

That's my experience too. Absolutely no response from jobs where I am seemingly a perfect candidate.

grajaganDev2• 1 year ago

Yes and then they complain about hiring regulations.

"Do you want to be regulated?

Cause this is how you get regulated."

tslocum• 1 year ago

I've seen a YC startup post for the same back-end job for a year now. I admit that I did not apply, but it doesn't look that unappealing.

jagged-chisel2• 1 year ago

… developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857294

I hear bullshit excuses like this often. “Not enough experience with $[unusual product]” (‘enough’ experience is acquired in about a week); “Not a cultural fit” (oh the many things this could mask - not old enough, too old, wrong gender, wrong cultural group - all of which would be illegal to admit); “we … uh … well, we moved on to other candidates” - at least you didn’t ghost me, but this one feels like cover for the previous one (though that one is cover for legal issues…)

I’ve aced technical screenings, made it to the final interview, all sounds positive, then I get some bullshit response. In one interview, there were three dev leads on the call and one unrelated manager who ran the call (and completely ran over the other three), was clueless about the technology he was asking about, and when I disagreed about something (the other three suddenly went from yes-men to silent), this guy decided I wasn’t worthy of hiring.

How can anyone possibly solve the social issues around hiring? I have a (non-starter) idea: some amount of accountability to the people they turn down late in the process.

HFrank• 1 year ago

Companies need many backend engineers as hey scale. Logically, for a general backend role, it would be the same backend role advertised continuously.

TheGamerUncle• 1 year ago

I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees. Most notable offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.

aimazon2• 1 year ago

Some companies are just very selective, i.e: they're hiring the right people not the best candidate. Most of us get jobs because companies need to fill a role and we're the best candidate of a bad bunch... most of us (whether we have 22 years and a fancy title or not) would not get a job at a company that hires carefully because we're probably not a good fit for their very niche view of what a good hire is.

ninininino• 1 year ago

I agree and there's nothing that disincentivizes companies from "over-soliciting applications". Having 100000 applicants vs 100 has no downside other than: 1) you need to literally post your application URL more places. 2) you might not get through skimming or auto-screening / OCR-ing all the resumes/apps.

From an incentives POV, the job application space does not properly incentivize saving the mental energy and time of either recruiters or applicants.

Automation and reduced friction has made the situation a kind of arm's race and mess.

LittleTimothy2• 1 year ago

It makes total sense for a startup to be highly selective. But being overly selective at the CV/application stage is dumb. If they really do have some really highly specialized requirement that should be on the advert. If they don't then being having a high rejection rate at the CV screen stage is going to be easy - it's easy to reject people, but you're overwhelmingly likely to screen out the few candidates that are actually a good fit. So sure, expect a low success rate but a low reply rate is an indicator the company isn't serious about hiring.

serial_dev2• 1 year ago

These are two separate categories.

Firstly, there are the monthly "Who is hiring" posts. There, basically anyone can post their company and their positions. They don't need to be YC companies.

And secondly, there are the promoted "Company ABC hiring a Software Engineer (YC '23)" (or similar). There, commenting is not allowed, and the listing will stay on HN for a set amount of time.

I believe the question in this post talks about the latter.

But it's certainly interesting to see in this thread, that basically both of these groups of companies don't reach out to candidates...

heurist2• 1 year ago

Not a YC startup, but jobs I've posted recently had over a thousand applicants in the first few weeks. I post multiple places, including HN. There's a huge culling process to find the 20-30 most applicable candidates, then to narrow down from there to the 1-2 that fit best.

The best way to stand out (for me) is a real application not written with AI. Everyone uses AI now and it all sounds the same. Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter (maybe 20% of applicants submit a cover letter, and a smaller fraction of that was written by real people, and smaller fraction of that gives authentic enthusiastic vibes). Use your real voice in your writing. I give the AI applicants a chance if their resume makes sense, but it's a minefield.

themanmaran6• 1 year ago

Agreed on the "no AI messaging". And keep it incredibly short. Like 140 characters short. The messages that stand out look a lot more like tweets than they do cover letters.

AI messages are always 500 words of rehashing the JD, so your goal is to not look like that.

jagged-chisel2• 1 year ago

Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter…

I just can’t muster honest enthusiasm for all the companies/missions to which I must apply to get even a call from their internal recruiter. I have enthusiasm for creating viable, efficient, maintainable software. I can adapt those skills to the mission du jour. But apparently, that’s not sufficient - if it were, my 30yrs of experience would get me hired.

If, by chance, a company or mission are reprehensible to me, I just won’t apply. If I’ve applied, I’m certainly willing to apply my skills to your project.

drillsteps53• 1 year ago

Just an FYI: every single career/job search coach I've worked with or read advises either to use a generic cover letter (basically referring the reader to the resume) or to skip it entirely.

RE: "the enthusiasm" part, you obviously decide who you hire as a hiring manager, but you might be overlooking a LOT of qualified candidates if you're looking for "enthusiasm" on the resume...

tennisflyi2• 1 year ago

Same experience - people are getting hired, just not me

ceroxylon• 1 year ago

It is a complicated scene right now. Bots are taking over on both ends, both in creating and interpreting resumes. Companies can have ulterior motives for posting job ads in many directions, including just scraping data.

My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms for scammers.

serial_dev2• 1 year ago

It's crazy, now candidates apply to everything they see with crap, fake, or AI generated resumes, and companies filter most of the candidates out with APS automation, AI, even if you carefully considered a position and spent time on their application....

Candidates generate a lot of crap, companies filter out a lot of crap and more.

logotype7• 1 year ago

Exactly! The system is flawed right now because it’s automated on both sides, for often the wrong reasons

mywittyname• 1 year ago

My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users.

Turns out, maybe those recruiters that we love to hate on, do actually serve a valuable function.

drillsteps53• 1 year ago

My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users.

Was this not the sole premise of LinkedIn? Then they were acquired by the M$ and investors demanded ROI, and it turned out being honest (ie, demanding users to be honest in job postings and job applications) is not a profitable business model.

linebeck• 1 year ago

It’s likely they know someone they’ve effectively already offered the job to, but equal opportunity laws require a job posting to be made. So while they are technically “hiring”, the job posting is fairly meaningless.

bpodgursky• 1 year ago

There are easier ways to address equal opportunity requirements (really just immigration stuff)

More often you just want a way for extremely strong tactical inbound candidates to find you. Even if you're not desperate to fill the role, you want strong candidates to find you, reach out, and then work with them to find a role to fit the candidate.

chrisoconnell• 1 year ago

In the past, I have applied to many YC startups, and have a pretty high response rate. Being that the job board is pretty prominent in the tech world, and engineering jobs are highly competitive, it is likely that a smaller startup does not have the resources to reply to every applicant.

This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.

Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.

I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.

burgerrito• 1 year ago

Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672>

caminante2• 1 year ago

It is related, but tells the same anecdotes, including people complaining (e.g., hurt ego about not getting shortlisted after completing an internship 2+ years earlier).

rgbrgb• 1 year ago

yes, but most are hiring very selectively and with AI applications some companies are getting thousands of cold applications.

rvz2• 1 year ago

Here is the truth: They really are not.

Why? They don't have the money nor will they risk it on people who they do not know.

The best way to get "hired" by them is to fiercely compete against them to the point where they wave the white flag and buy you out.

ryandrake4• 1 year ago

It would be cool if the monthly Who's Hiring threads asked companies to optionally disclose useful information like "How long have you had this job open?" or "When was the last time your [company | team] hired someone, and how long did the process take from first posting to the employee's first day on the job?" Better yet, a response SLO for getting back to candidates (this will never happen).

Pedro_Ribeiro3• 1 year ago

I believe HN is a high quality forum that enforces high quality standards, there is no reason this shouldn't be a thing. Companies that advertise here should be held accountable.

mikhael284• 1 year ago

Maybe a startup could work on this problem - HN has two moderators, I’m not sure it’s realistic to ask them to track more than what they already do. How would they even track and verify such hearsay anyway?

steele• 1 year ago

Hiring deepseek

kdamica4• 1 year ago

The reality is that the vast majority of startup hires are referrals. For hiring managers, having someone you trust tell you that they've worked with a candidate and vouch for them is invaluable, especially when the company is at a stage that you don't have good performance oversight. The cost of a bad hire is immense.

My advice: never do a cold application. Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.

z3c0• 1 year ago

This is likely what's going on. Public pools are often the very last stop on the search for candidates. The precedence is almost always

1) internal hires (obviously not as possible at a start-up)

2) referrals

3) direct engagement from a recruiter

4) talent pools curated by online services like LinkedIn or Indeed

5) forum pools, like those here in HN

6) applications from the Careers page

Almost all my jobs have come from referrals or directly from recruiters. I've gotten calls back from four-and-beyond, but have never made it through the process, despite being overqualified in those cases. On the flipside, I've been underqualified for jobs I got via referral. The power of having someone inside can't be overstated.

caminante2• 1 year ago

the vast majority of startup hires are referrals.
Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.

OP's process is actually that of a spring chicken by not realizing this reality.

I still don't understand why people, especially "experienced hires," expect more from passive applications.

kdamica4• 1 year ago

I also think people don't appreciate the sheer volume of online applications that a desirable startup gets. There have been times were I would literally get hundreds of applications per week, with none of them standing out in any way. You want to give unknowns a chance but when it's a waste of time 99% of the time, you learn to reject quickly.

bambax• 1 year ago

Yeah ok sure, this is common sense. But then what's really the point of advertising open positions? The only certain result for companies who do this, is they'll be inundated with pointless random candidacies...?

kdamica4• 1 year ago

One reason is to have a public URL that your employees can share to their network to pull referrals.

Also the success rate is not zero. I've hired great people from cold applications, it's just very rare.

scarface_7413• 1 year ago

Hypothetical candidate: “Hi, my name is John and I’m a ‘full stack developer’ interested in working at your company”

Me: “Okay submit your resume to our job board and someone will get back to you”.

Doing a “warm introduction” isn’t enough.

kdamica4• 1 year ago

This is not what I would consider a warm intro. I mean that someone within the company or who is a friend of friend of someone in the company can vouch for the candidate, or has some specific reason for referring (like a project they were impressed by).

fraaancis• 1 year ago

Now that I think about it, I never once got a job from a cold application. It was always on either an employee recommendation or having met a family member.

CoderJoshDK• 1 year ago

When I was ready to move on, to a new opportunity, I spent most of my effort in the HN thread and work for a startup (owned by YC.) And while most applications resulted in no response, that is on par with any other platform. That said, I did hear back from multiple companies! I made it to late stage interview with 3 companies but stopped once I took an offer from one of them. And this was all in the span of 1 month.

As a data point, yes, some companies do hire here. Maybe not all. But I had a great experience through YC.

I think in general, the hiring market is a mess (on both sides) and HN suffers from similar issues.

awkward• 1 year ago

In my career I've split time between startups, fintech, and consulting. Last year I've had a few interviews with VC funded startups that went to second and third rounds, where I would be told outright that developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.

I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.

logotype7• 1 year ago

interesting! I haven’t heard about this, thanks for sharing.

scarface_7413• 1 year ago

@burgerrito posted a link to a similar submission three months ago where one commenter said for one job they got over 1000 applications.

It’s almost impossible to stand out and rise above the noise these days if you are just randomly submitting your application to a job board.

When I mentioned this before, someone asked me should they reach out to the company directly. That doesn’t help either unless you have a special set of skills or experience that would make you stand out.

Neither “I am a full stack developer” or “I worked for a FAANG” set you apart.

fasteddie31003• 1 year ago

I think we need to turn hiring on its head. I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. I'm running https://customizedresumes.com/ as my side project and it shows how applicants can now basically spam job applications. It's only going to get worse for hiring managers.

Pedro_Ribeiro3• 1 year ago

Don't you think part of the reason companies prefer that you reach out to them is that they want people specifically interested in them? Though it could be the case that the job spam is so fucked that that no longer works as an accurate cutoff.

TeMPOraL• 1 year ago

I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company.

That already exists, and had for some two decades now - it's called LinkedIn.

It works the way it works. Whatever the reasons (which are most certainly related to running a two-sided marketplace and trying to squeeze both ends of it), any such project will end up in a similar spot.

pyb• 1 year ago

You described Linkedin?

xenospn• 1 year ago

Yes, they are. I’ve gone through multiple rounds with multiple YC companies a few months ago before ultimately starting my own venture.

logotype7• 1 year ago

best of luck!

themanmaran6• 1 year ago

As a YC company that is currently hiring, yes! And all of the YC companies I know are also struggling to find engineers. But the job listings (HN, WorkAtAStartup) practically never bring in good candidates.

A few big problems:

1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

2. Purely automated applications. There are a lot of "Apply to 1000 jobs with AI" startups out there that just spam job boards [1][2][3].

3. Qualifications. There is a shocking number of engineers applying to work at an AI company who have never made a single API request to OpenAI. After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup.

The signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's better to just do outbound. At this point the job listing is mostly there so we can share it with candidates that we reach out to.

[1]https://lazyapply.com/

[2]https://aiapply.co/

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used...

nedwin• 1 year ago

Adding to this: we mostly focus on outbound, mostly using WorkAtAStartup or LinkedIn as a source.

rors• 1 year ago

I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a generative AI startup in 2019 and signed deals with huge consumer goods companies, debugged distributed training jobs on a cluster with thousands of A100s, and wrote PyTorch training pipelines for a financial ML trading signal that made money.

Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI

yapyap• 1 year ago

Make ur first API request to OpenAI today and who knows, rooting for ya!

mikhael284• 1 year ago

This is a bad faith comment - if you had all that in your resume, they wouldnt disqualify you for not ‘sending an api request’.

beambot• 1 year ago

The attitude underlying this comment likely makes you a bad culture fit...

sshine• 1 year ago

Having a PhD vs. making that API call might ironically suggest you don’t emanate hands-on product thinking.

I know PhDs in data science and language technology who are not startup material because they’re too uncomfortable outside of MatLab/Jupyter/R.

doctorpangloss2• 1 year ago

The unspoken problem is that most people want way too much fucking money.

themanmaran6• 1 year ago

So far we haven't had a candidate pass because of salary yet. Typically candidates looking for that stable $400k salary never even talk with startups, because they know that's only a FAANG position.

daemonologist• 1 year ago

I don't think demand for engineers is necessarily that elastic - even if candidates were willing to accept less money, it would take a long time for companies to respond by hiring more and they might never match supply.

I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.

Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.

busterarm2• 1 year ago

I have seen some YC startups offer absurdly low "fucking money" for the ask.

If you want a founding engineer for on-site only full-time work in the Bay Area at 50-80K and a fraction of a percent of equity, you deserve every volley of AI shitspam resume dumping that awaits your inbox.

And I think it was only two or three months ago that I saw a hiring post offering exactly that.

scarface_7413• 1 year ago

No people want the amount of money that the market will give them. If you can’t afford the inputs that are required for your business, that’s a you problem. Come back when you have enough funding to pique my interest with cash comp - not worthless “equity”

WD-42• 1 year ago

The irony of an AI company’s hiring woes due to too much AI.

themanmaran6• 1 year ago

Hey we process unstructured data so we're trying not to make things worse :')

no_wizard• 1 year ago

Interesting to me that 'working with AI' is using OpenAI's API.

Thats really working with someone elses AI, no?

FWIW I have used it quite a bit, but its not really the same thing as developing AI

(nevermind my usual rant that we shouldn't call any of this AI, but I digress)

lytefm• 1 year ago

I'd be fine calling myself a "AI Engineer" for having worked with TensorFlow, PyTorch and scikit-learn and having experience in running AI Models in production.

Nowadays, making requests to the API of a LLM provider is what makes an engineer a good fit for working at an AI company? Really?

AznHisoka2• 1 year ago

It begs the question: why not just post your job in your website and nowhere else (ie LinkedIn/Indeed)? That reduces the spam AND gives you a link to point people to.

I hear these complaints all the time from companies. To me if you’re leaving your jobs up at aggregators like LinkedIn, you have no right to complain (not singling you out btw, just a general thought)

themanmaran6• 1 year ago

Because maybe we'll get a good candidate. The cost is virtually free (30 minutes a day clearing an inbox). And once a week we get a decent application.

synicalx• 1 year ago

After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup.

Devil's advocate; why would I have made an API request if my employer has never used that service? Maybe that lack of interest on their part is why I'm trying to leave and get a job in a field that's of interest to me.

tennisflyi2• 1 year ago

1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

Is that not the ideal answer? Those that get to move forward are the one's that just happen to write a message that hits a non-descriptive sweet spot? A fucking Magic 8 Ball

drillsteps53• 1 year ago

1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

This is what it takes to get through the filters/recruiter search. In majority of the organizations the first line of defense is the recruiter who has a limited knowledge of the job responsibilities, technologies involved, etc. They employ various search techniques in their ATS (lately enhanced by the various LLM tools) and whatever resumes come up in the keyword search will end up in the pile presented to the hiring manager. This is especially true now when volume of resumes is in hundreds, you can't just go through all of them manually. So the only way to get through the first stage is to create resumes to fit the LLM/keyword search...

EDIT: I've been seeing more and more of these disclaimers when I submit an application: "We use Machine Learning for an initial comparison of resumes against the education, experience, and skills requirements of the job description." Check here to out out of this analysis.

So candidates tweak resumes to match the requirements (likely) with the same LLM that will be checking the resume match to the same requirements. Why is this surprising?

mjasher• 1 year ago

Sorry you've had that experience. My 2 cents is that unless they've done a "big" (> 5 million) seed or series A they probably don't have the money or appetite for much hiring. So target later stage if you aren't already.

tptacek• 1 year ago

The smaller the company, the less likely the hiring process is a well-oiled machine, from responses to inbounds to true-ing up the JDs currently advertised on the site; compounding that, smaller companies get fewer inbound applicants and can end up holding out for a unicorn fit for a role for a long time. I wouldn't read much into no-response from a startup (totally reasonable to be irritated about it, but it's always a numbers game regardless, so you might not want to be hanging on a response from any one company).

asdasdsddd• 1 year ago

There's a lot of coping here. These YC startups only hire a few applicants. If they have hundred of applications (which is low) then the interview rate will likely be less than 5%.

jjice3• 1 year ago

I work for a small YC startup and we have recently wanted to hire another engineer. Our CTO posted a listing on WorkAtAStartup and within two or so days, got over 200 applicants. Apparently, WorkAtAStartup (which I've used successfully in the past) allows you to bulk send applications.

He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense.

He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.

We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.

We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.

Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.

mikhael284• 1 year ago

Crazy to hear how much spam & straight up liars are applying nowadays. Not being able to pass a technical interview is one thing, but sending a fake resume and then expecting to not be exposed as a fraud is just crazy, sociopath behavior.

aimazon2• 1 year ago

Yes, you need to get better at filtering. Yes, it has always been like this. Public job listings have always attracted mostly junk.

The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is.

Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough.

Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.

jjice3• 1 year ago

The best hires I’ve ever been around have been from a previous connection to someone. It’s so much easier. Unfortunately, none of our small team had someone fitting who wasn’t looking to make a job change at this point.

I do have a few friends that may be interesting within the next quarter though, so I’m crossing my fingers.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

If you got no viable candidates presumably you aren't offering enough money, or are offering "competitive salaries"?

jjice3• 1 year ago

I bet there were definitely some viable candidates in there, but I don’t think we had the resources to properly screen with the volume we got, so unfortunately, we didn’t get to sit down with them.

Hormold• 1 year ago

Time to build something by yourself!

logotype7• 1 year ago

100%

clarkalistair• 1 year ago

Also a YC company who's actively hiring. We had two new joiners start last year, we have another two lined up for March/April and we have one open position (with more to come later in the year if all goes well). I'm "in charge" of hiring at Devyve (YC S22), and by "in charge" I mean that I'm acting as the TA team because, you know, startup. I don't mean "in charge" as in I make all the decisions on who gets hired - we do that as a team.

bobthecowboy• 1 year ago

I've applied to a couple of these. If I remember correctly PostHog and Enveritas both posted here and for both I went past the initial screening step, but that's where it ended for me.

I also participated in the hiring side for the previous startup I worked at - SoftIron - and we did actually hire someone we found through a post I made here on the monthly Hiring thread. He was a good candidate, but eventually everyone got laid off anyway. I actually felt bad about that - I think we were only around a year after hiring him.

On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.

rjbwork• 1 year ago

On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.

Also put an entry up on the monthly hiring thread a few years ago. Even though we explicitly stated US-Based and authorized to work in the US, we did not get a single application from US-Based people. All Indian, Eastern European, and South American.

mikhael284• 1 year ago

Yes, they are. It’s a numbers game.

steve_adams_86• 1 year ago

Not a direct answer, but months ago I was applying to YC startups that were actively posting opportunities. I had great references from past YC startups, what I'd consider a good resume, a proven track record of actually building stuff. Not a single company was interested. This was true outside of YC companies too, though. It was surreal. I started to think I must be a fraud or something.

wendyshu• 1 year ago

Not as far as I can tell

dang• 1 year ago

There are over 5000 YC startups, over 3500 of which are still active. For sure some of those are hiring.

gentlesoulcarp• 1 year ago

As an applicant, the sign up box forces everyone into narrow roles. It’s a radio button, so you can’t be good at “product” and “dev ops”, for example. It’s realistic for people to be good at multiple things.

Last I checked, that radio category is account-wide, so if you do “frontend”, that’s all your account can do. This makes it difficult to apply to multiple kinds of roles through the interface and it makes it harder for founders to find people who can wear multiple hats. Most of them could probably use a versatile person at their stage.

0x0000000• 1 year ago

Wow, that edit is something. Post something inflammatory that will garner engagement, then turn it into your own "I'm hiring" post once it's on the front page.

Quality hack.

scarface_7413• 1 year ago

And then it’s for a “technical cofounder”. I bet the pay is peanuts

logotype7• 1 year ago

:) it's all part of the game

scarface_7413• 1 year ago

Based on the edit:

What are you offering to pay your “technical cofounder”? I bet it’s peanuts and “equity”. If that’s the case, do you not see that you are part of the same toxic culture that defines many startups hiring process.

carlbren• 1 year ago

They (YC W23) are actively looking for devs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/capimoney

Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?

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Ask HN: Are YC startups actually hiring?