Ask HN: Tell us how you hire

This is a pretty bad survey. It asks if I have hired any non-technical people or technical people, then 100% of the deeper questions are about non-technical hires. Yet, there was no way to enter "n/a" for MOST of those questions, so instead, I polluted your data, unfortunately.<p>(I have zero desire to hire non-technical hires for as long as possible. I pray I can put that off for well over another year. Even sales can be replaced with Sales Engineer or Sales Analyst, Palantir-style. We outsource the useless non-differentiated parts of the business -- hr, accounting, compliance.)

This is a very poorly written survey; you post on Hacker News and you make it very difficult for someone who does 100% technical hires (not unusual for this board) to fill out your survey. I just left one abandoned.<p>If you're looking for information on non-technical position hiring, this is probably not the place to gather it.

I will tell you my favorite hiring trick, by far. Before I do, though, I'll set the scene. I was looking for a new gig a few years back. I was mostly happy at my job, doing interesting stuff, not killing myself, and making good money, but itching to do something new. Wanted to get in the startup scene, etc. So I see a new company's job posting, and it looks like a perfect fit (location, mission, everything). I meet with the CEO, have a few conversations with investors and employees, and things are looking good. Then they throw me a curve ball - "We want you to do something interesting with our product." - I spent the next two weeks working my ass off nights and weekends. Mind you, not compromising my full time position in any way. In the end, I did something interesting, and it turned out to be a great thing for the company. More importantly, it let me get to know their product deeply, and I understood the kind of environment I'd be entering.<p>The moral of that story - when hiring, challenge people to do something for you. Give them a week to work with you. Pay them even. Just see how they actually work. It'll work well for you, and them - even if your rate of hiring is lower than you'd like.

As others have stated, this probably isn't the best way to do a survey. At the very least, you're going to have some bias from posting this on HN late at night (in the US).<p>If you want a more representative answer to the question "How do companies hire?", I'd recommend using Google Consumer Surveys (<a href="http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home</a>)<p>You'll be able to survey a much larger audience, get more responses, and have statistically significant results. In addition, Google has a nice dashboard which lets you compare answers according to various demographic information such as gender, age, location, income, etc.

Very interesting hiring approach. The space has seemed ripe for innovation for years and years.<p>Highly motivated job seekers willing to jump through a lot of hoops seem to be on the bottom side of talent. How do you solve this issue?

Why are "None" and "Not Applicable" grouped into one answer? Surely they are significantly different responses.

Hyperlink to the survey: <a href="http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us-how-you-hire/" rel="nofollow">http://hireartsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/please-tell-us-how-you-...</a>

This link to an earlier HN comment from 59 days ago is not a response to your survey, but it includes tips about hiring processes in general.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543</a><p>Read this for background. Check all the linked articles mentioned in the comment for more details.

Interested to find out the results of this!