Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

I've suggested to recruiting firms that they should hire (or retain) a couple enterprise architects and have them meet with the technical managers looking for developers and let these highly experienced engineers pre-interview candidates based on the hiring company's needs and only refer people who can pass the enterprise arch's review. The time saved by the hiring company to not have their in-house archs, team leads, and engineers tied up interviewing candidates should MORE than make up for the premium such pre-interviewing would demand.

(Something else that would help is paying employees a lot more than $500 for making an in-house referral. I know of cases where locally where in-house referrals could have happened but by referring through a chosen recruiter got the referred a $1000 referral fee instead of his company's $500 referral fee... but that's a separate rant.)

View on HN

One data point here: my employer's in-house referral bonus is $7500 with an additional $7500 to a charity of my choice. This is paid after the referred hire celebrates their six month anniversary. We have 5-10 inside referrals a month.

I've got a connection on LinkedIn, he's a technical guy turned recruiter. He knows the platform he's specialising on pretty well,can talk to devs the same language as opposed to some random guy who doesn't even know half of the things mentioned on candidate CVs. It would be great to see this a more common practice. .

That's a good question, why don't recruiting firms filter leads through technical guys rather than just looking for term matches?

If there was a platform for doing that, I would offer my interviewing services on it. I bet a lot of high level techs would as well.

OP/author here. This is exactly what interviewing.io does. If you'd like to interview people on our platform, please ping me: aline@interviewing.io.

Our internal recruiter at my previous company had a CS degree so she was quite capable of identifying candidates with good fit.

Internal referrals are great. The problem is that, if you increase the fee too much, it's going to get harder and harder for employees to prioritize referring someone they know would be a great fit for a position (and get a nice spiff in the process) versus randomly referring people they vaguely know on the off-chance they'll get a multi-$K payout.

That very much depends on the company size too. If you're in a 100 person company you'd need a very high referral fee before you start pissing off your colleagues referring crap candidates. Whereas if you're in a megacorp you can pretty much do it with impunity.

I've never seen a referral bonus come without a requirement of te new employee staying at least 6 montha or a year.

In most places, less than 6-12 months implies a pretty serious mismatch of expectations of some sort.

One thing to keep in mind with the internal referrals is that people tend to recommend those who they like or with whom they had had a good "cultural fit" before. So if you only rely on internal referrals you might end up having a very homogenous workplace.

This is exactly how my old recruiting sideline (I was a consultant, but recruiter money is great) worked. I spent time not just pre-interviewing candidates, but pre-interviewing companies; it made it pretty easy to connect good candidates with good companies.

(Been thinking about getting back into it for local Boston companies. Anyone out there interested in working with me to find you great, Boston-local candidates? Please feel free to drop me a line.)

Regarding referral fee arbitrage... An organization might want to stop that on ethics grounds: if the employee is making money by redirecting a referral through a recruiter, without disclosing that to the organization... then the employee might have two conflicts of interest:

* employee is disregarding an official process, to enrich themselves at a cost to the organization

* employee might be involved, officially or unofficially in deciding acceptance of the candidate, without the organization having an opportunity to manage that

Besides the immediate impact of each incident, this can lead to a culture in which such things are viewed as OK, which can then escalate to much worse incidents/scandals, bad morale, dysfunction.

Or... the company could just pay their employees a fair price for referrals. Management asking employees to go above and beyond to provide a referral, then short changing them on the value and strong arming them into not getting a better price from a recruiting agency, is a pretty terrible way to build a loyal workforce.

That's one way to look at it, and maybe the most effective, in the current industry environment.

You could even add more metrics, like tying amount of referral fee employee closely to some quantified performance of the hire over a meaningful time period.

Ideally, I'd prefer a very simple goal alignment, in which the employee doesn't get a referral fee, and instead is motivated by professionalism, wanting the organization to make good hires, of people they'd like to work with, and wanting those hires to further the success of the project/organization. (I realize this is not the situation in many organizations, but it's what I'd prefer, and throwing referral fees into it seems to head in the other direction.)

Seems like a tough sell to find enterprise architects that want to screen full-time, but maybe it would make more sense to someone that actually liked interviewing... or, as you said, maybe you could just pay them enough!

so how many rounds of interviews do i have to endure under this scheme?

why would a company take the word of biased party ( recruting companies) about the ability of a candidate?

I was contacted by a recruiter friend (yes, programmers and recruiters can be friends) a few years back because they had a client with a very specific need to find .NET devs who had a deep understanding of threading and parallelism. I told them to contact Joe Smith (name changed, obviously) as he knew more about multi-threading and parallelism than any dev I knew and suggest he pre-screen all candidates for the client (and offer to have Joe talk to the client's architect to prove his knowledge). The client was VERY happy with the improved quality of the candidates (the only thing about which they were unhappy is that Joe Smith didn't want to work for them).

It's not idle theory... I've seen this work.

sorry my response was in frustration with rounds and rounds of interviews, screens, leetcode, interviewwhaterver.

But this is actually a good idea. Not sure why a service like this doesn't exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com