Ask HN: Crowdsourced headhunting?

[alamgir_mand]

As a person growing a company: Would you value a service that has resumes rated by industry professionals over a headhunter? (i.e. a bunch of ranked resumes with feedback by other people in the same industry vs. a headhunting agency that has deemed qualified candidates and forwards them)

[neilsharma]

As a person growing a company, what I look for in an employee might be different than what an industry professional working at a larger firm looks for. Depending on how early stage my company is, I might favor someone who has more startup experience, is more passionate about our goal, is capable of doing more than just the job description, has the proper culture fit, and is willing to work more than 9-5. I'd be looking for employee #1 or 2, which is very different than employee #50. Headhunters, although I've never tried them either, might not be a whole lot better/worse.

You also run the risk of misaligned incentives. Ideally, you'd want to have industry professionals who know your industry and can evaluate employees properly, but aren't your competitors. Otherwise, they might try to poach your best candidates or recommend subpar ones.

There's also the misaligned financial incentive for headhunters in general. If they get paid every time you hire someone they recommend, it's in their best interest that you hire sooner rather than later to maximize their revenue/time spent.

How you brand or productize this service can bypass some of these risks. Just some concerns to think about.

An interesting thought: If you have a marketplace with resumes and ratings, the top-rated candidates will be approached much more frequently. This'll make them harder to hire and give them the power to negotiate better terms. Not a whole lot different than the rockstars who get job offers everywhere they apply, but a little more transparent.

[alamgir_mand]

The misaligned incentives are the hardest problems to solve in this case. An example use case could be a weekly email sent to you with 5 anonymous resumes/bios, of which you pick the best two. You would probably be able to passively collect income as the service could pay ~$100 for each "review" and then pay a bonus if one of your reviewed bios gets hired. Still, there's the incentive to sign off on two random resumes and collect $100. At that point, the question is whether it is worth your time as an industry professional to spend a bit of time and earn side cash. This is completely meant to disrupt recruiting agencies by the way, not to source co-founder level team members.