Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry

http://fitfrnd.com/blog/2014/11/23/silicon-valleys-best-kept-secret-angel-list-slowly-disrupting-hiring-industry/

by durga • 12 years ago

68 52 12 years ago

fitfrnd.com

sundvor2• 12 years ago

If anyone else finds the poor contrast / thin fonts hard to read, ctrl+a to select all text is as always a neat trick.

durga20• 12 years ago

Didn't realize that. What machine are you reading it on? Looked ok on my Mac.

raquo• 12 years ago

It's too light for me too. Mac, Firefox. It's probably readable in perfect conditions (indoors, low ambient light), but if you're tired or it's sunny it becomes uncomfortable.

WildUtah• 12 years ago

Still tiny, moire pattern painful to read on non-retina Mac w/ Safari.

I checked Chrome, too; it's clearly less awful but not good.

ctdonath• 12 years ago

I do the same thing to read heavily down voted posts on FR. (Morbid curiosity.)

durga20• 12 years ago

Fixed now.

sundvor2• 12 years ago

Thanks, huge improvement! Was using Chrome in Windows 7, on a rather old Dell monitor at work. After working on WCAG 2.0 compliance on my own sites I have ironically gotten more sensitive to poor contrast ratios everywhere.

falsestprophet• 12 years ago

"Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry", or "AngelList is useful for hiring people (as just about everyone already knows)"

Is AngelList Jobs unknown (never mind a secret!) amongst start up founders (who generally have AngelList profile for both themselves and their companies)?

Is this job board "disrupting" the hiring industry which is composed of other job boards and recruiters that post to other job boards?

durga20• 12 years ago

You're right. It's very useful for hiring. But that's not really well known.

durga20• 12 years ago

Very much so. Getting so many high quality applications in such a short time is not disruptive to the recruiting industry. Then what is?

If you're familiar with how recruiters work or the general quality and response on job boards, it's hard to characterize it as anything short of disruptive.

walterbell• 12 years ago

Did any of your applicants explain why they listed on AngelList instead of other sites?

freshhawk2• 12 years ago

Then what is it? It's every job board at this stage of the hype curve. It's got critical mass among it's niche and it's not yet hit the big numbers and experienced the inevitable regression to the mean.

CmonDev• 12 years ago

It's not 'disrupt' as in actually disrupt, you have to translate from the Silicon Valley speak:

https://github.com/richardharrington/disrupt-to-bullshit

nojvek• 12 years ago

This makes reading corporate memos so much pleasant.

simi_• 12 years ago

I got my current job in Germany via AngelList, although I was living in UK at the time. I got several other interesting options in Europe too. It's definitely a great tool in my book.

durga20• 12 years ago

Congrats

Iftheshoefits3• 12 years ago

The last time I looked at them, the salaries and equity shares advertised on many of their job listings were mostly chuckle-worthy at best. Some were appallingly lowball. If they're truly "disrupting" the hiring industry, it certainly isn't to the benefit of the labor pool.

durga20• 12 years ago

AL doesn't really have any control on that. But they could suggest best practices.

One reason we got so many applicants is maybe because our compensation feels fair.

Iftheshoefits3• 12 years ago

Certainly AL doesn't control what companies offer. I can't comment on "so many applicants". It is entirely subjective and without context (e.g. for quality of applicant, on any scale you choose). All I can say about it is this: when I narrow the region to my region and the compensation range so that my current compensation is the low end of the bar, the pickings are very, very thin (and I'm pretty sure I'm being paid less than similarly experienced and capable engineers can command, for a variety of reasons). I have a hard time picturing anybody but a desperate or naive person taking most of the listings seriously.

DTrejo• 12 years ago

When they aren't lowball, they are fake high-ball in order to get more buzz from investors and more applicants coming in from AngelList. When the offer is handed over for real, they low-ball. Of course not all startups do this.

durga20• 12 years ago

Yeah. Case by case.

jurassic• 12 years ago

I experienced this first hand. After interviewing with a company I met on Angelist they said their best offer was 80% of the bottom of their advertised range. It was a tremendous waste of time for everyone involved, and I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Even if I'd accepted, they would have landed a candidate who felt misled/disgruntled on Day 1. Not a great way to build a company, in my opinion.

achompas• 12 years ago

FWIW this doesn't hold true for the data scientist salaries I'm seeing in NYC. True "data scientist" roles (not data analyst) seem to line up with market rates.

abalone2• 12 years ago

How are you valuing equity shares? Presumably you're looking at absolute percentages, but remember equity is impossible to value without putting a valuation on the company itself. 0.5% of a company with great product, great team, great opportunity, great go-to-market is definitely worth more than 5% of a company without those things.

If you're saying that AngelList doesn't have those kind of companies, then ok, that's logically consistent. But don't make the mistake of eyeballing ranges based on absolute equity percentages alone.

001sky2• 12 years ago

As a general thought, you should only value cases of equity when the company is $100MM + up in exit mode or your have more than fractional percentages. I think that's what the earlier poster was trying to communicate.

Almost more important: in the 9 of 10 chance that the company fails, what is being done to maximize the marketability of the staff? YC adds a lot of brand value to "failed" projects. Just one example of how the whole picture needs to be taken into account. If you lose $15K a year taking a haircut, but your next job search sees $30K in extra value from your past experience, how does that add up?

mc322• 12 years ago

I imagine if it become mainstream, it'll not have the same level of talent and it'd become just another board. It will remain special so long as it does not broaden.

So long as it focuses on the creme, then it'll disrupt that 'market' but it cannot disrupt the 'hiring industry' because at that point, it would become diluted and another 'disruptor' would cater to the 'cream'.

durga20• 12 years ago

You could say that about discussion forums too. But reddit and HN would disagree. Quality has to be managed and maintained. It's plausible to me that by designing the right mechanisms you could scale AL and maintain quality.

EarthLaunch• 12 years ago

HN and Reddit have not maintained quality, particularly Reddit. They might disagree, yes; for that very reason.

mc322• 12 years ago

HN is very industry specific. It would be like saying HN is disrupting forums. It's not. It has a very specific audience. Reddit has lots of above average and also has below average forums too. So, yes, the AL jobs board could become the board for all jobs, but then, it'd hardly be better than job boards now.

Seen another way, let's say the top talent is 10,000 individuals. There are way more positions and candidates than that out there. So if they became the Reddit of job boards, they'd have tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of applicants in search of tens (dom)/hundreds (int'l) of millions of jobs. Neither the applicants nor jobs are going to become "great" just because they are on the Angellist board.

ericdykstra• 12 years ago

It's great on the applicant side, too. I got my last job from AngelList, and they have gotten me the best-quality leads (apart from referrals from friends) this time around as well. The profile has most of the relevant information for job-seekers that you would never get from an intro from a recruiter (investors, total investment, etc).

Salaries are always negotiable, but seeing them up-front gives you a good idea of what the company is looking at paying.

durga20• 12 years ago

Yes, some of that company information is written with investors in mind, but AL allows you to share that with job candidates. Since that doesn't really contain super-sentitive info, it's almost a no-brainer to share with candidates (at least for us).

johan_larson• 12 years ago

It would be nice to have a bit more transparency on salaries. Yes, they are negotiable, but only within narrow bands. And if you ask for anything outside of those bands, the result is often not a counteroffer, but dropping the discussion entirely. That makes it time-consuming to determine what the market rate for your skill-set actually is, particularly since the "no"s don't typically come with reasons attached.

amorphid• 12 years ago

AngelList is acting as a niche job board. It's definitely cool, but I wouldn't call it disruptive or revolutionary. As soon as people figure out how to use it as an efficient hiring channel, AngelList will become saturated with companies hiring & candidates looking, just like every other formerly disruptive hiring channel.

shaunrussell• 12 years ago

We've had great success hiring from AngelList. More than half of our team at this point.

durga20• 12 years ago

Congratulations. Can you share some insights into what works well for attractive engineers, esp on AL?

Animats• 12 years ago

I dunno. I tried advertising on AngelList for someone to make big-ticket sales to big companies. I keep getting responses from people who claim to be able to grow website traffic.

durga20• 12 years ago

Having worked in enterprise companies, I'd conjecture that enterprise sales guys are not using AL much yet. Just a matter of time though..

CalRobert• 12 years ago

I propose we change every occurrence of "disrupt" to "perturb". Or better yet: "Angellist is promoting perturbations" Seems more appropriate, and I'm sick of seeing "disrupt" everywhere.

OpenDrapery• 12 years ago

This is my favorite bit:

"I emailed everyone I knew, posted the job on LinkedIn, got it posted to the jobs list at several universities, and also posted on some paid sites. End result: nothing very good to show for all the effort."

Exactly how much effort was 'all the effort'? Did it take you all of 2 hours to post the job on several sites?

Silicon Valley’s best-kept secret: AngelList is disrupting the hiring industry

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