I'm interested in what the worst part of the hiring process is, from the employer's side. What's something you wish could be changed?<p>I've recently heard about how finding talent is one of the most important, yet difficult things a startup has to face. I'd like to investigate how technology might be leveraged to help this. So...<p>What pain points do you need alleviated to make your hiring life easier?
The most fundamental problem is the risk involved in making a decision. When you hire the wrong person it hurts badly. It's painful, stressful, and expensive -- usually for both parties.<p>One way I've found to mitigate this is by having potential employees work on a contract job first.<p>The trend right now is for job sites to employ programming tests and the like, but I don't think these answer most of the hard questions you have about a potential employee.<p>A hybrid Elance/Monster might be just the ticket though. Employers post <i>real</i> jobs, like "Port our Oracle stored procedures to Postgres" or "Rewrite this Ruby server daemon to support XYZ", then they <i>work together</i> with candidates on the project, while paying them. Employers would make full-time offers to people who do well.<p>Employers might pay three candidates to do the same job and then pick which one did the best. Still far cheaper than a recruiter.<p>Candidates that don't look good on paper might even <i>volunteer</i> to do work for free/cheap just to prove they have what it takes. I know I would have before I had job experience.
Unless you're google, hiring someone means not hiring someone else.<p>At any given time we would love to hire 3 people that are all as amazing as we can think, but the budgets never are that large.<p>Making a choice between 2 amazing guys is even harder than searching for one.
Logistics. More time is spent making posts, culling resumes / cover letters, scheduling phone interviews, coordinating in-office meetings with the team, and following up than actual searching. Even with an admin assistant, it's a huge burden on me.