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.
From company perspective:
Again, what is more important, money (which I am not charging a hell lot, if incase I am, correct me) or developers time. I am just reducing your cost on those interviews which would have failed already.
From candidate perspective:
Do you talk to recruiters from hiring agencies? If yes, then you can see me as another recruiter who is much more technical. On answering the candidate's questions, I can obviously do part of the work. I am only taking one round so you have tons of more rounds to ask your questions.
I agree, it is not a hell of a lot. Certainly a drop in the bucket as compared to a developer's salary, even smaller compared to the employee's value to the company.
How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.
You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.
Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)
Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"
He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.
So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.
Comments
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.
From company perspective: Again, what is more important, money (which I am not charging a hell lot, if incase I am, correct me) or developers time. I am just reducing your cost on those interviews which would have failed already.
From candidate perspective: Do you talk to recruiters from hiring agencies? If yes, then you can see me as another recruiter who is much more technical. On answering the candidate's questions, I can obviously do part of the work. I am only taking one round so you have tons of more rounds to ask your questions.
I agree, it is not a hell of a lot. Certainly a drop in the bucket as compared to a developer's salary, even smaller compared to the employee's value to the company.
How many individuals would you interview before a successful hire? Let's say 20. That amounts to a $3,000 headhunting fee.
You can certainly make an argument for developers' time being worth more than $150/hr. Then again, the bottleneck isn't doing interviews, it's finding qualified people in the first place.
Then again, I know I'm not making $150/hr, even after you factor in benefits. (But what about opportunity cost? We can go down this rabbit hole too.)
Finally, at the end of the day, I'm not the one with the checkbook. I'd have to ask my boss. His first question will be "how do you know this will work? Have others had success before? What is your real cost of doing an interview?"
He gets people asking for money every day. So if I'm going to bug him about something - particularly if I'm going to try and chip away at our runway - then I have to have very strong guarantees that it will solve our business problem. And really, I'm not sure I'd be ready to throw my trust behind this concept.
So nothing you are suggesting is incorrect! I think it is an enterprising idea, modulo some of the comments in this thread. I'm offering, however, that for so many of the aforementioned reasons, for our particular company and the constraints I have, I would not pay money for this (since you "Ask HN'd") and there are other parts of the hiring process that are a bigger bottleneck than assessing fizzbuzz or someone's background.