Ask HN: How do small companies do recruitment?
Well… I can share how we get often get 1000+ applicants and end up with a few incredibly talented individuals joining us.<p>I should note:<p>The companies I’m hiring for are not (yet) household names. Most of our employees had never heard our company names before applying.<p>We’re not offering crazy salaries — we just aim for market-rate.<p>And we’re not using external recruiters to help. We have some recruitment costs, but they’re relatively low.<p>So… how do we do it?<p>1. We hire remotely.<p>We do care about timezone, and we avoid a few countries due to the legal challenges of hiring there, but we’re not restricted to only hiring in a given city (or even country).<p>This massively increases the pool of talent that could meet our needs.<p>2. We identify the things that make us special.<p>It’s not the salary, our company name, or the job title.<p>It is:<p>- Our core values, where we combine a focus on impact with enjoying the journey<p>- The opportunity to work in a small and rapidly growing company, where you can learn loads and make a huge impact<p>- Being profitable, so the above benefit isn’t combined with high stress<p>- The opportunity to work was directly with successful entrepreneurs<p>- Our wider benefits package, including 40 days vacation leave, 4 months paternity&#x2F;maternity leave, an annual in-person meet-up, and so on.<p>To the right person, these are huge!<p>3. We create an ad which _really_ sells this message<p>We do not have an ad titled “Mid-level developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”<p>We have an ad titled “Join our remote team and enjoy work-life balance as a Full Stack Developer (JavaScript, NodeJS, React)”<p>Spot the difference? :)<p>You can review the rest of one of ads here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.spidergap.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2011605-join-our-remote-team-and-enjoy-work-life-balance-as-a-full-stack-developer-javascript-nodejs-react" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.spidergap.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2011605-join-our-remo...</a><p>4. We post on job boards<p>Our favorite for developers used to be StackOverflow. It cost £3–5k but was worth it for the quality of applicants. Sadly they’ve stopped supporting job ads now.<p>We also use weworkremotely.com. Posting here is cheap, and your ad will get picked up a number of other remote job boards for free.<p>5. We ask 3 simple questions to start the filtering process (— and we do NOT look at their resumes — at least not yet)<p>We want to make it easy for the right candidates to start the process, but in doing so we’re going to get a lot of junk.<p>So we ask 3 simple questions:<p>- What’s your proudest achievement, and why?<p>- What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?<p>- Which of our features do you like the most, and why?<p>80% of the applicants will fall at this first hurdle.<p>Loads will fall due to poor English, or by giving one word answers.<p>A surprising number will answer the 3rd question with “I haven’t looked, sorry!”<p>They aren’t difficult questions, so we should be looking for great answers. And some answers will stand out. So they’ll go through.<p>Reviewing these applicants is quick — well under a minute each on average. But it still takes time with 1000 applicants, so we do outsource some of this work to a virtual assistant.<p>6. We then have a sequence of steps to filter it down further.<p>For a developer, these would be:<p>- Answer 2 coding challenges (75% filtered out again — ~62 candidates left from 1000)<p>- 15 minute core values and communications interview (50% filtered out — 31 left)<p>- 30 minute dev team interview (50% filtered out — 15 left)<p>- 90 minute head of department interview (75% filtered out — 4 left)<p>- 20 hour mini-project (50% filtered out — 2 left)<p>Yep… after 6 stages, we&#x27;ve turned 1000 hopeful applicants into just 2 outstanding candidates who we offer jobs to.<p>Now — it’s worth noting that for other roles (sales, HR, finance, etc.), we have fewer steps (e.g. there’s no mini project as we’re can effectively test their ability in the interviews) and a much higher rate of great candidates get to the end of the process.<p>Hiring developers is particularly hard because we maintain a high bar for engineering talent, and fewer candidates meet our expectations for communications etc.<p>To manage this process, we simply have a series of forms and checklists. We’ve used Podio in the past, but expect to be using AirManual to manage the whole process for future roles :)<p>In both cases, you’re getting a very affordable and flexible tool — we’ve seen no need to spend $1000s on an expensive recruitment tool.<p>7. We offer a job to the great candidates we’re able to hire!<p>8. If we can’t hire everyone who makes it this far, we ask them to join our “farm team”<p>This concept, and many of the other ideas in our process, came from “How to Hire A-Players” by Eric Herrenkohl.<p>Recruitment takes a lot of time, so it’s every manager’s responsibility to build a farm team of people who we’d love to hire, and are keen to join in future.<p>When the next job comes up, we know exactly who to reach out to!<p>And… that’s it.<p>Hope that&#x27;s useful :)