Given that I've hired a couple of very good people via it...<p>And given that a while after that I went through the round (at least 12 interviews by 10 unique people) at AWS because of it (though I later turned that down - I wanted a combination of tech and customer focus, they wanted either one or the other and felt I was too strong technically to be used on a customer focused role)...<p>Yes.<p>It works.<p>If you are hiring you should think hard about how you present it. Corporate-speak is ill-advised, and less is definitely more. Plain developer-to-developer language is the best route.<p>It is not unusual for candidates to go back over old whoishiring posts, filter by city and then look... so if you can include a permalink to a "positions available" page on your site you will continue to reap the rewards of a good, short advert for quite a while. Make sure to include an email address too (in the advert) so that HN candidates reach you directly rather than get lost in the official HR process.<p>If you are going for a position, I would advise that you use the opportunity to strike up a conversation and learn about the position and company, rather than just spam them with your CV (how does that help either of you?).<p>And as mentioned above... look at the whoishiring posts for the last quarter or 6 months, a company in growth probably is still looking.<p>It works, so long as you realise that this platform connects individuals, rather than treating it as an agency/corp HR style thing.
We've hired more people from HN than from any other single source of candidates.<p>I wish there was a rule that the "Who's Hiring" thread happened on the first Monday of every month, not the first day of the month. It's pretty silly to have that thread happen on a weekend.
It has yielded many of our best candidates, but not yet any hires. We judge job boards mainly on the quality of candidates that it connects us with, since what happens from that point on is more a function of us and the individual candidate. So, yes, we consider it to have worked out well for us.<p>That said, I have my doubts about the mechanism. It seems to me that it would be more efficient to have a job board, since even a primitive one would allow candidates to better search for the jobs they are interested in. A basic job board doesn't seem very hard to set up, and we'd be definitely be willing to pay a monthly fee, because the quality of developers here is so high.
My only recent issue with the "Who's Hiring" threads has been the repetitive nature of the posts. It is starting to be that the majority of the posts are the same 95% of the evergreen positions that were in the previous month's post - from accounts created mostly to post in that thread.<p><i>sigh</i> Why did we think it was wise to brag to HR & recruiters about how well this mechanism is/was :)
100%. I would trust Who's Hiring and Who's Freelancing threads over any recruiter, website, etc. any day.<p>P.S. - For anyone thinking "oh wow, I could scale this type of thing with a website", think again. Tight communities > scale.
Works very well for me, a startup CTO in London.<p>Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.<p>Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
I've gotten a few interviews out of them, but more importantly, they were for places that I was very interested in. IMO the personal touch and EFFORT that it takes to post in a "Who's Hiring" thread makes me believe that the company is serious about hiring someone from the tech community.<p>I'm just reading my comment above and thinking about how it's a bit elitist, but again I like it more for the personal touch / effort / show of good faith vs. "exclusive club" reasoning.
The "Who's Hiring" threads are very interesting to me, and I imagine they also are for those who aren't currently looking for work. It's fascinating to see what established companies and startups are looking for.<p>One minor gripe I have about WH submissions is that many still aren't abiding by the rules. I see a lot of them that leave crucial info out, especially those that don't say if the role can be remote or must be at their office.
I picked up a job from a "Who's Hiring" thread, and had a fairly positive experience moving to Boulder last summer to start work. The company offered $15K more than I was making, but in retrospect I should have taken the $30K bump I was offered to stay where I was.<p>What the new company didn't offer was an expenses paid on-site interview, relocation assistance, or an incentive structure. The software engineers work in a dark, boiler-room environment, and struggle mightily to maintain a sprawling, legacy code base. Turnover at the company is extremely high. I lasted 9 months; the last 6 of which were spent trying to 'change things' at the urging of a couple of friends I had made there. Several people from my group have left since, and nearly everyone I worked with has asked me to let them know about other opportunities I might come across.<p>The CTO making the postings to HN was hellbanned at some point, and stopped posting altogether once I pointed it out. I'm really not sure why that happened to him though. Is posting the same text every month grounds for removal? The environment wasn't right for me, but I'm sure there are a few HN readers who would be willing to put up with it to make a 6 figure salary as a programmer in Boulder. The right person might even be able to help turn things around.
Yes, it works.<p>I used it once and tracked responses. The best and worst* candidates came from HN.<p>Worst, as in scattergun "here's my CV" emails.<p>Best, as in the "I love what you're doing because X. Here's the kinds of things I could do for you... and here are the things I've done before. I notice you're using X, Y and Z... perhaps we could try using this instead? Because..."<p>I'd definitely post here in future, but only after posting somewhere else.<p>I also posted for a remote job which I think helped. I had 0 responses from California.
I got hired from a HN "Who's Hiring" thread back in mid-2010. My life's changed for the better ever since. And I live in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Been working remotely since then. Although I've switched jobs since then, that first gig was life-changing.
I found my current gig through the August 2012 thread, so yes.<p>It was immensely useful to me in the many months before I picked up and moved to California because it gave me a great sense of what kind of companies were actively hiring, what sorts of skills were most in demand, and what kind of compensation was available. Now as an engineer helping out with recruiting I find it's a great way to get the attention of candidates with more unorthodox backgrounds. It's especially helpful for companies located outside of S[FV] since we don't have the same critical mass of local personal developer contacts to hire from.<p>I'd second that the thread should be the first Monday of the month.
I've gotten a couple of interviews through the Who's Hiring threads. I've found that you tend to get a faster response from posts where the poster include an email address (for obvious reasons).<p>I've yet to get a job from those threads (if that's what you're asking), but I have met some awesome teams and my pool of contacts has significantly increased.
Picked up a long term contract a couple of years ago, started out with 20-30 hours/week and has tapered off a bit as they transitioned from bootstrapped to venture funded and hiring full time devs. I mostly do one off must haves for them these days as I've moved on to other things.<p>Best way to handle such clients is to be available, adaptable and competent.
I think there's an unrelated and positive aspect to it as well:<p>I moved to London 3 months ago and often checked the freelance and job threads on HN. Seeing the amount of jobs available for London gave me a boost of confidence.<p>(I'm yet to approach anyone via those threads - because I've already got too much freelance work.)
Was hired using the thread last year. Would look here before looking elsewhere in the future. There are always clueless companies mixed in, but less noise here.
As a job-seeker, I've applied to a few posts in HN: Who's Hiring threads, but I haven't managed to land anything (thought it's not like I've applied to hundreds of posts, because most of them are not in my area).<p>Guess my karma can't be cashed in for a job. ;-)
While I'm aware this isn't the actual topic, this is just a warning to not take this thread as a accurate representation of how useful "Who's Hiring" threads really are (e.g. as compared to a recruiters/job site/googling). I say this because that's pretty much what this thread may be miscontstrued as.<p>Reasoning: the majority of the posters will be people saying they got a job, effectively ignoring the swathes of people who were looking for a job and didn't find one they liked on HN. Since finding a job on HN is obviously much more notable than not finding a job on HN.
Chiming in with one more "absolutely yes!" We just interviewed and hired an amazing developer who's right down the street from us.<p>HN does seem to select for a certain set of folks who care about the industry and their craft, and the "who's hiring / who's looking" posts let me take a passive approach and ping people directly when they sound like great fits for what we need.
Was introduced to and hired by a company through one of the who's hiring threads. Given my location in the US Midwest, the fact that the company even knew about HN and had employees active here was a good indicator that it was the kind of company I would like to work for - which turned out to be the case.
Developer in Stockholm, Sweden here. I usually check who's hiring in Stockholm, even though I am not actively looking for a job at the moment. You never now when you need to find something else, and having seen a company posting to "Who's Hiring" is always a good indicator of an interesting company.
Yes. I saw a comment that interested me and was in the area I was looking for. I sent them an email asking if they had any internship positions.<p>I'm looking forward to working with them next week.
For me it helps in the sense that I would prefer to work for a company that actually knows what Hacker News is. Not that easy to find here in Europe...
I would love to see more non-technical/semi-technical posts on the thread as well...<p>Most of the companies that I've dug into from the "Who's Hiring" thread seem to have non-tech jobs open once you get to their site and poke around but they don't seem to get posted on the thread.
About three years ago I've forwarded a link to a friend of mine, and he got the best job ever. Just last week I got hired after responding to the last month's "Seeking freelancers" post. So, yes.
I'm not job hunting but I read the thread anyway and there are a number of companies on my radar that otherwise wouldn't be. Unfortunately about half of them are SV and not remote though.
Worked for me. I applied because of a Who's Hiring post nigh on two years ago, and was hired. As an aside, I eventually ended up working on the same team as the guy who made the post.
Absolutely. I found the job that allowed me to move back out to the place I love (San Diego) and work at a great place from a Hiring thread. It was literally life changing.
I was hired at Monetate (Philly area) after hearing about the job on HN. I believe we have hired several other software engineers who found out about it from HN, as well.
I got a client and several inquiries with my first SEEKING WORK post. The second one got me nothing. How you write it matters a lot and having some karma helps.