Ask HN: Problems with current hiring, interviewing, and recruiting processes?

[Gary_TheSnail_]

Hello :)

Just looking for community or experienced/professional insight on how the industry currently handles recruiting, interviewing, and hiring processes. What are problems with the way these are currently handled in your opinion? How do you suggest we fix it?

Nothing is perfect and there is always room for improvement. So if you were in charge of your own company, how would you look for and interview people to hire?

Or if you don't think there are any problems with the current systems, please share why!

[elevanation]

Similar to many modern interactions, the hiring process has become dehumanized.

1. Applicants must wade through large volumes of job postings, which are often poorly written, and frequently lacking key information which is important to the applicant.

2. Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.

3. Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.

4. Applicants are then annoyed with the lack of replies.

5. By the time an employer finds a potential match, the applicant may be difficult to reach, or is no longer interested.

6. By the time an applicant hears back from an employer, they are disappointed in the quality of the response, and already have a bad impression of the employer.

Possible Fixes?

Yet another platform with...

a. Strict expectations from employers. Honest and clear statement of requirements, responsibilities, salary, benefits, and other information.

b. Strict expectations from employees, to only apply to truly well-matched positions.

c. Transparent feedback requirements for both employers and applicants.

d. Response time requirements for any parties to respond to messages.

e. Detailed, consistent formatting of job applications and applicant info.

f. A closed-loop end of the process requirement: employers and applicants must communicate with a certain level of transparency and honesty. Some examples:

Employer:

We are unable to hire you at 95k since our maximum budget is 80k for this position.

We have hired another candidate for this position because they had more (skills/experience) in B2B sales.

Applicant:

I have been offered a similar position for 95k with better benefits.

After interviewing, it sounds like the department is in total chaos right now, and I'm not comfortable with that.

Yes, honesty is really hard, due to cultural, legal, and other issues. Yet it's the best tool I know to improve the process. What else could help improve this quagmire?

[Gary_TheSnail_]

From what I gather from talking to peers, it seems like recruiting companies/services are not utilized and people are suspicious of them. This may or may not be the case in reality, since I've only talked to a small sample of people.

If this new platform is a standalone company/service, how would it overcome this uncomfortable feeling from its target audience? Or would it be a new service to integrate into existing company hiring processes as an additional SaaS product for companies that want to fix their hiring systems? Maybe both?

I also like the idea of transparency and honesty in the example you provided. Yes that could be a tough pill to swallow sometimes, but I think if that expectation is established from the beginning, it may not be as big of deal/problem.

I do agree about the timeline problems. Sometimes, it takes way too long to receive a response from a company - if anything at all!

I have been thinking about how to make the entire process from job posting to hiring better and one of my biggest thoughts was exactly about the processes being far too dehumanized because of the lack of hiring resources.

I appreciate your ideas and discussion!

[elevanation]

Good questions!

Probably start as a standalone company / service, with the goal to get purchased by a large online career "solutions provider" (I can't stand these expressions).

Focus on the psychology of building trust from all parties. Then pick a small group of companies and applicants in a specific sub-field. Jet engine engineers. Snake veterinarians. Or something like that until you find the right sub-field which believes in the vision of trust.

[vanusa]

"5 years of REST" required, as if there's anything to REST that can't be learned in a week.

And ditto for basically all of these "years of X" requirements. Yes, some of these certainly do take more than a week to master -- but the point is, years-in-skill-level is an essentially meaningless measure.

[tboyd47]

The ATS software filters out too many winners.