Ask HN: Interview as a Service – Any interest?

If I were hiring somebody to do tech interviews for me I'd want them to have broader skills than "what I learned in school + Ruby". But frankly, the idea of hiring somebody to do interviews for me sounds a bit like hiring somebody to sleep with my lover...it's a job that really should be done personally.

This is probably something you should pitch to recruiters instead.

I've talked to some tech recruiters in my area, offering to do training for them. I may need to talk to higher-ups, but the low-level people seem to actively not want that knowledge. I certainly don't propose they understand OS design, assembler and mobile app dev down cold, but they need to know the difference between Java and JavaScript, for example.

One chap I spoke with recently - he called me for help wording something - didn't know what "JVM" was, yet was actively recruiting for Fortune 500 companies. Again, they don't need to be tech gods, but ... learn the language of what industry you're in.

Another was telling me they don't need to know much tech, because the clients were more primarily concerned about social fit in with their hires, and they could work out the tech details. While I agree social fit is a factor, too many of us have met those who can't FizzBuzz in an interview, wasting everyone's time (or worse yet, get hired and leave years of crappy legacy tech debt to deal with).

I haven't done that many interviews, so take this FWIW, but I'd be reluctant to be interviewed by a 3rd party. I'd have no way of getting a feel for company culture, plus you probably wouldn't be able to answer MY questions about the company.

If you're focusing on the tech only, it's still another layer that adds more time and money, plus if it's specialized enough they'd probably do an internal review of code samples anyway.

As someone who is responsible for hiring engineers at a small fashion company (~10 people), I can say that I would not use this service. It would be difficult to justify the cost.

Also, there is one caveat you are missing: the very last question, "Do you have any questions for me?" Interviews ought to be a two-way street, and a qualified candidate, in this model, wouldn't have the chance to ask me questions about our company. How might you address that?

Recruiting is hard, as we all know, because it is difficult not just to find good candidates, but to find people period. At least, this is the case if you are a small business.

Job postings typically cost ~$350 - $500 to post on the well-known job boards. And I have yet to find a promising candidate via that venue.

So you are talking about a cost of 50% of what it cost me to post the job in the first place. And in all likelyhood, that candidate will be a no-go, and now we're out the money for this interview, on top of what is already an expensive proposition.

And if you've decided not to use job boards to hire (because they don't work), then you're already paying tens of thousands of dollars to companies who make money by placing candidates. By that point, I might as well interview the individual myself.

If you can find quality engineering candidates - and vet their interest, and their technical ability - then I would be interested. But as other commenters have said, maybe your services would be better marketed towards recruiting agencies themselves.

As an aside: recruiting is disproportionately, insanely, time-consuming and expensive. Many companies (Etsy, Hacker School) get huge press and accolaids for their progressive stance on recruiting. But if you are a small company trying to bootstrap, it is impossible to pay the fees (grant the scholarships, provide the space, etc) that make for good press and recruiting ability.

Help me solve that problem! Once I have more candidates than I can handle, then let's talk about more efficiently vetting them.

I am going to be honest here. I will immediately stop the conversation if a company would pull something like this on me. For me, time spent with a recruiter is time mostly wasted: corporate speak, big magnificent mission statements which tell me only what I can find from the site. For me, the whole idea of talking to a tech person is to figure out very quickly whether aforesaid person is interesting, does interesting work and is possibly a good co-worker. Your service doesn't help me at all: you don't work for the company, your knowledge of the company's backend is going to be superficial unless you have touched their code and I couldn't care less if you were a good person or not because I am never going to see you.

Ultimately such a service is disrespectful of candidate time. Also, if you are a small or medium sized startup, you would be blindingly stupid to do purely a google style Algo/DS interview. You don't have six months to train the candidate and you would be better off focusing more on talking about your own problems, how to solve them and such.

I am seeing lots of comments about candidates feeling bad about it. Just to clarify on that end.

Do you speak to outside recruiters. Do they ask you questions about your skills before fwding you resume? If the answer is yes, then I am just another recruiter who happens to be actually technical and instead of asking you "Whether you know this tech? or How many years of experience you have with this tech?" kind of questions, I am actually taking proper tech interviews before fwding your resume.

Thoughts?

If a one hour single-interviewer interview is a significant improvement then it seems like companies should do this themselves, I'm not sure what service you are really providing unless you are just a really good interviewer.

To be blunt, I feel quite strongly that this is a bad idea. You might find business in this service, but only in companies which don't know any better. And if you can sell a service like this to that type of company, everyone (you, your client, their candidates) would be far better off if instead you sold them consulting services which made them more competent. Give a man; teach a man... right?

To explain:

Remember, companies are just formalized groups of people. What's the single most impactful component on a company's success? The people which make up said company.

The best candidates know this rule intuitively. They've completely internalized it. When these candidates imagine an excellent place to work, they imagine it first in these terms. These candidates will read the use of a service like the one you propose as a company shirking responsibility in an incredibly key area.

Yes, yes... it's only a first round interview. You're just separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Maybe the company knows that you/your service is/are incredibly competent at this task. However as a candidate I sure don't, and my first impression is going to be that the company relies on a third party to determine whether or not it's even willing to talk to a candidate? I'm sorry, but I'm outta here. I don't have time to market myself to two separate entities just to work for the final one, especially when I'm already being recruited by two other companies which are competent enough to validate their own candidates.

I already hired engineers for several companies of very various sizes, and I can understand the value you're bringing. This said, if you're only going to be a technical filter, some companies will put your services against a combo of "recruiters + codility".

I personally went through codility myself for a company, and I found it decent, even though it has obvious disadvantages because of being online.

That said, if you feel like targeting bigger companies, I believe you should introduce yourself (or whatever company you're building) as a recruiter, but a strongly technical one, and then adapt your business model this way. It will scare companies less (newness equals risk), and it will make what you're bringing on the table more clear. Your value is in your technical skills.

I understand that the difference in your offering is that you're not offering companies to find candidates for them, but this is where you would become more useful than a method consisting of sending all the candidates to a service like codility.

All in all, I would use your services, but only if you solve a problem that my current tooling (recruiters I deal with, and online filtering services) can not solve, which does not look to be the case if I look at your current proposition.

I like your idea from a company's perspective. I've seen many teams struggling to get good developers - Part of the problem is the existing team (it sucks technically) - they can't ask the right questions and end up hiring the wrong kinda folks.

You should probably explain a bit more in detail (on a blogpost maybe) on the matrix that you will use for evaluation related to techs.

I agree with few of the comments below too.

1) I'll not be interested in talking to you if it seems to me that you are a recruiter. But then - its me and people like me who are humbly confident about their skills - that's mostly not the case with everybody. May be you could partner with an employee -mostly silent- during interviews.

2) You could be doing a great deal of misdeed towards developers. I judge my prospective employer/team based on the questions they asked, how they asked, etc, etc. I've been trapped into a situation where I thought that the team is "very good" based on the interviewer - which turned out to be a disaster - bcoz the interviewer was brought in from some other team (read: excellent team) - but that's not what I was hired for.

On the topic of incentives: Does anyone know if a system where a recruiter's compensation is tied to their proposed candidates success/failure ratio as opposed to just the raw number of placements made? Or is it always just more implicit where if too many bad candidates are referred the company switches to a new recruiter?

What I'll say after looking for a job for a month now: There aren't many companies who even take the first step of emailing/contacting back after an application. I feel like this, if it was well defined and consistent, then it would be valuable.

I have gotten paid in the past for doing this. In addition to actually interviewing candidates, I also advised the client on the type of developer they needed etc. I actually have a lot of experience interviewing and making hiring decisions (and getting interviewed) so the client was fairly comfortable with this.

I like this idea since you are not having any conflict of interest when interviewing people. A nothing thing along these lines is the idea of getting pre-interviewed with your results shown online. Basically a crowd-sourced hiring platform.

Interesting idea.

This is part of what employers think they're buying when they use a recruiter to bring in candidates. Of course they aren't getting what they pay for, and there's also the problem of inherently misaligned interests.

You might be able to sell that same service to job-seekers too. Many candidates are so poorly practiced that they hide genuine talent. Some are even aware of those shortcomings.

Can I suggest that you pitch this service not to tech companies, but to recruiters? I think that's where the biggest disconnect lies - between tech recruiters and tech candidates.

You've got an excellent value proposition for recruiters, too. Anything that would improve their hit rate would presumably be extremely valuable.

for me one of my deciding questions I ask people is "Any questions for me?" If they ask a lot, I know they are interested and I'll bring them in for an in person.

What about all your jobs that you only stayed a year or less at on your resume? Has no one questioned that? Do you have any explanation for such apparent job hopping? Not that I blame you...

I actually did this for one of my consulting clients. It was a special situations though. I was the VP of Eng for a defunct company who's assets were bought by another. The purchaser needed to ramp up a team so I was helping with the interview process.

Parts that worked out well: 1. I knew the product/service, so I understand what type of skill sets are needed. 2. I know how to build a team, and the type of individuals you need for a good team. 3. I am local, whereas everyone from the purchasing company was in another city.

Parts that didn't work out very well: 1. I didn't know the direction the company was taking with the product, at least not clearly. 2. I can't comment on the type of relationship or org structure to expect with the parent company. Mind you, no one would really know anyhow, cause nothing was established.

Overall, it worked out well in the end.

However, looking at your resume, I wouldn't hire you for this service as a hiring manager. You don't really have the management expertise to identify the right individuals, because often, personality is more important than technical skills, and it takes management experience to identify the right individuals.

Moreover, in my case, I was putting a team together from scratch, so I can put people together based on strengths and weaknesses. With an existing team, you don't have that option. So the value prop is even lower.

(with reference to automated_sysadmin_screen_test)

While your idea is good I hardly see it scaling as it is hard to consistently assure quality of evaluations when done by hired consultants (You)

I have been an employer and I took a different approach, of putting technology at work.

What does that mean? Well we all talk about TDD (Rspec Driven Tests for your code), I applied that to interviews Rspec+Puppet https://github.com/zalora/automated_sysadmin_screen_test

This has worked pretty well for me and it will work for similar scenarios.

I was planning to build this into a service someday and have some pending plans on this, Anybody interested in sweat equity?

1.) This can become a service that recruiters can offer 2.) It can be subscribed on monthly subscription or per candidate basis 3.) Github repository shows the basic idea, it can be applied to other niche too.

Get in-touch if this interests you: a[at]parolkar[dot]com

I would also like to know if anyone has tried this before. What was the experience? Thoughts?

This is an absolutely great idea. More people need to think like this, just straight out offer a service. If everyone was taught this simple truth - Always Be Closing - there would be no unemployment lines.