Ask HN: Should I build a tool that helps founders showcase their team?

[grease]

No matter how we hire, candidates today research the company before talking/applying. What they find is not too helpful. Many startups have good-looking careers pages, but they don't answers questions like "what engg. problems do you solve at XYZ" [1], "What is the interview process at XYZ" [2] etc. These give a much better window into the team than opaque career pages or job descriptions.

(This is also why engineering blogs are a powerful hiring tool. Unfortunately, most such blogs languish or die slowly.)

Do you think there is value in helping startups create a better picture of themselves?

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-engineering-problems-and-challenges-is-Stripe-solving [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-engineering-interview-process-like-at-Stripe

[brudgers]

If I were pretending to be a startup VP HR, I'd pretend to ask for data showing the value of such a service. In particular I'd need to compare how optimizing for random visitors to the careers page returns value relative to targeted recruiting.

Good luck.

[grease]

Good point.

In (email) targeted recruiting, the recipient will check the company out first. Isn't it worthwhile to build what they would like to see?

[brudgers]

There's a hypothesis there, and it may be a good one. My thought is that getting someone to hand over money for a tool based on the hypothesis will be easier if the hypothesis is supported by data indicating to what degree the product will affect the bottom line.

[grease]

Got it. Agreed.

[kvemparala]

Would this tool be able to provide a better picture than what the company website and the company pages on LinkedIn and Facebook be able to provide?

[grease]

Yes, and here's why.

A team's picture gets better when it sees collective participation from a large number of people in the team. Which is why I feel this will beat company LI/FB pages, that are updated by a single person(or a select few)

[rajeshinf]

What about glassdoor reviews?

[grease]

IMO Glassdoor reviews suffer from extremity bias. For some reason, most reviews there either sound artificial or angry.

More importantly, glassdoor gathers "what people think of a company". Isn't it more interesting to know "how people think in a company"?

[vinodkumaar]

Glassdoor reviews are mostly anonymous and sometimes I have seen angry people venting out there. I feel some of the positive reviews in Glassdoor are in because someone in the company pushed people to write them.

[rnvneeth]

Thats right. The Org generally gets some of its marketing team members to write reviews and get it posted on Glassdoor.