Sure, it's a VERY extreme example of "First World Problems" or whatever the meme is, but do you want a job when the offer is a con from the start? What kind of relationship with your employer does that create?
I've been feeling for a while now, software developers need agents.
I only talk to one recruiter. If I want a particular job I know is going I will direct him to it and he will handle any side lining from other recruiters.
I can think of a few things. I've recently been on both sides of the table here. Found my job a year and a half ago, interviewing candidates for a junior now.
First off, I can see how you might miss out on a lot of potential clients because you don't know just how good they are. You could reduce this miss rate by getting good at fishing out details from people you approach or who approach you. Even be prepared to write their resumes. I'd recommend having a technical person on staff to assist with the buzzword bingo and alphabet soup.
Second, a lot of people simply might not know how to negotiate a job search, but wouldn't really be lucrative enough to chase as clients. By-the-hour consulting might turn into a decent revenue stream. Then they can come to you in a few years when they are ready to chase the big bucks.
Third, there's a lot of wishful thinking out there that causes seekers to not chase or turn down perfectly good jobs because of that haunting vision of landing that whopper $120K+ job. (in Atlanta) Being able to tactfully talk them into a perfectly good $85K job could work out well for both of you. I've seen lots of really good guys strike out interviewing for those unicorn jobs because the company has ridiculously selective criteria. I know a guy holding out for $110K but doesn't want to go where he could legitimately make that money with his skills, e.g. a Java shop. He spent down his savings and told me it's going to hurt pretty soon if he doesn't find one soon.
Thank you for this. (We are very technical, and building an online application, which is what I meant by "purely online", though. i.e. features we could bring online via an online/web agent that is on your side rather than the side of companies.)
Oof. I foresee a hard road ahead of you if can't bring on someone knowledgeable with the actual interpersonal dynamics of hiring. Reason is this isn't a technical problem, it's a social one.
One of the things that the recruiter who found me my job did for me was to interact with the company for me. I told him my concerns, and he either talked me through them or relayed them, through the filter of someone whose seen this all before, to the company. Had I had to do this directly with the company, I wouldn't have done so well, and I might have gotten passed over.
When my company wanted to keep me on a contract basis three months after his job was technically over, and I was prepared to walk, I called him, and he calmed everyone down and got the company to bring me on full time. Had I had to negotiate it myself, I might have said something unwise and a bad decision would have been made.
Now that I'm on the other side of the table, I find myself playing the same role my recruiter played for me as far as the interpersonal dynamics is concerned. I talk through his concerns, I discuss the money aspect with him, advocate his case, and protect him from HR bullshit.
I don't see a purely online web agent as bringing any more value to the table than (just another) job board.
- Honed my CV (more like made me rewrite it), it was full of fluff pieces and bullshit that made ME happy. He basically took a red marker to all the things that weren't purely factual and provable (or at least explainable.) He was an ex developer and current on tech so he knew what he was talking about in regards to what needed to be said and what wasn't. This could easily be done online with google docs and a skype call.
- Answered all the dumb questions every developer wants to know but really shouldn't be asking a prospective employer in an initial interview (can I wear shorts and a tshirt? how much $$$? flexitime? holidays? beer on friday? - This would be solved by an FAQ employers could fill out.
- Filtered jobs I'd call awful on anyway (multiple reporting lines, under paying, no source control, one man bands, etc etc This is easy for development, just make sure it passes the joel test.
- Found opportunities that actually match my skill-set (Full stack PHP Developer with javascript tendencies) - Sort of job board style sites attempt to solve this but suck at it pretty badly, because who pays their bills?
- Interview prep happens but its essentially just reminding me to be myself and if I don't have an answer say so. I don't know what would be worth it to you for putting this online but you could certainly do some last minute reminder calls with the candidate and follow up directly afterward to ensure everything went well / any issues can be discussed while they're fresh.
Sorry if that doesn't help much, a lot of it requires a person and a phone, I'd certainly start in those areas though, do things that don't scale n all heh.
Feel free to email me if you want any further info, don't follow HN too much.
I think it's more "What's wrong with this country? Can't a man walk down the street without someone trying to get him to give up something of value for less than it's worth?" The issue's not with being offered a job, it's the "here's a smart person making money for themselves, let's see if we can get them to make money for us instead!" attitude.
This attitude isn't even really a problem (why hire anyone who can't run a surplus in their personal life, if you want them to run a surplus for your business?), the problem is, "let's try to trick this person down a garden path of making money for us" and "I get to decide who this person is, and if I say they're an engineer, that's their identity", both of which are absurd and essentially doomed to be wastes of time for everyone involved.
Yeah all the comments on here about being tricked into job interviews just seem so crazy to me. Is google really so desperate to interview people? I've always heard they get tons of applications and that it's incredibly difficult (and time consuming) to get an offer after an interview with them, so why would they be going through all of this trouble to get people in the funnel? I'm really not sure what to make of it all.
I'm CTO at a small startup in a small-ish city in Germany. Every time we advertise a position we get _tons_ of applicants, and yet that doesn't mean anything. Good and reliable engineers are _very_ hard to find and recruit. We've managed to crop together a rock solid team, but only by sheer dumb luck (and getting burned several times).
As a separate, off topic note, I'm looking to move to Germany from the states (CTO of two prior 'smaller' startups). Where would you look for positions? I'm a damn good engineer - but I can't NOT lead - and all I'm seeing thus far are junior/senior dev positions.
If you can afford the travel, come and mingle at some startup events. Berlin is obviously the best city to do that, although Cologne (where I'm located) and, I imagine, Munich/Dusseldorf/Hamburg are pretty good too.
If Switzerland is also an option, we're a small company developing RF-ICs and -modules currently looking for a CEO/CTO. If you are interested in high-frequency electronics, firmware development and a bit of management drop me an email at s.bryner/axsem.com!
Given the legendary meat-grind that is the Google interview process, perhaps people need to be tricked to overcome the initial aversion. Since Google can throw money at recruitment, they basically don't care about wasting their own time, which means they might waste quite a lot of yours.
And, let's stipulate that Google's a good company - there are going to be a bad apple here and there. I had to ask my friend who was a senior-director at GOOG to mark me as "do not contact" in their recruiting database to get them to stop calling/emailing me.
Maybe the top of the funnel is the easiest part to optimize in a data-driven fashion, so it's what Google has ended up optimizing. And it's probably to their deficit; it seems to me that the only thing widening your funnel at the top ever gets you is more unqualified leads.
When I hire, I don't think about trying to find more people to interview. Instead, I think about designing the interviewing process such that it's short, simple, and fun for the person being interviewed—because the people who I most want, have the least time and patience for me and the most alternatives, so I have to make choosing to "try my job on" as easy as possible.
When I do this, word spreads (both among those who get hired, and those who don't) that "you may as well go and see if you like them, it's not too much of a hassle" and the result is far more inbound (qualified!) leads, and far less friction in outbound lead-gen.
Shame on you for being unable to empathize with engineers. Recruiting tactics in this industry should be made illegal as a form of harassment, and people like you aren't helping make that happen.
See Paul Graham's recent article about how even talking to someone about an acquisition can be a huge distraction for someone running a small business.