Introducing: Hackers & Hustlers Jobs
We all know that hiring is hard. At Olark, we spent months trying to find the right people. For bigger companies this is a problem, but for a startup it’s a matter of life and death. So every startup I know is desperately looking for a better way to find their next hire.
If you’re in the YC network, you’ll attest to the immense value added by the YC jobs board on Hacker News. HN Jobs is so useful because it exposes your job opportunity to a lot of the right type of people. You’d probably get more eyeballs on a Monster.com listing, but those eyeballs probably don’t belong to talented hackers, designers, or startup business types.
So most non-YC startups rely on word of mouth and their social networks. I haven’t heard of any startup successfully using other job boards to find high-quality recruits. I have a theory as to why this might be the case.
When you launch any product, your goal is to find the people who need your product most. In the case of jobs boards, you typically find people who badly need a job. But those don’t tend to be the most talented individuals. So companies that post listings on the most popular jobs boards tend to get flooded with unimpressive resumes.
The reason why HN jobs works so well is that it’s hidden on a popular social news site where some of the world’s most talented hackers like to discuss startups and technology. They’re not there because they need a job, they’re there for intellectual stimulation, and if a great opportunity happens to bubble up, well, they might consider it.
The same thing is true on a vastly smaller scale for Hackers & Hustlers. Michigan’s most talented startup people hang out and talk shop every day on this Facebook group. It makes sense that you’d start to see a lot of people posting job opportunities as the community grew.
The problem is that job opportunities are not always the most interesting community discussion point. I don’t think people mind being gently notified that CompanyX is hiring, but they don’t want it to get in their way. That’s why Nate West and I created Hackers & Hustlers Jobs.
Our goal is to give startups in the Hackers & Hustlers network a cleaner way to expose more people to their job listing. Anytime someone posts a job listing, Nate and I will check it to make sure it’s legit, and then once we approve it a tweet will get sent out to everyone on our subscriber list that looks something like this:
We decided to go with twitter instead of email for notifications because it’s a nice low-hassle medium that gently notifies people of an opportunity and won’t annoy them. Not annoying our subscribers is actually the top variable we’re optimizing for. So we’ll rate-limit the jobs that go out to one every couple days.
If you’re reading this, you’re in our target market for subscribers, even if you’re not looking for a job. You’ll benefit from a flourishing Michigan startup community if you can connect your talented friends with people who are looking for jobs. Also, I think you’ll benefit from keeping a finger on the pulse of who’s hiring and what they’re looking for, as it gives you an early indicator of where that company is headed and what they’re worried about [1].
Nate and I are very anxious to see how our little experiment will turn out, and to hear your thoughts on the matter on the thread in H&H. We built the first version of this in a weekend [2], and we’re hoping maybe it will make a dent in the Michigan startup universe. Maybe a couple more startups will survive or thrive because they were able to find the right person. Maybe one of those startups will go on to become an anchor company for the region. Who knows?
What you can do to help:
1. Subscribe to twitter updates at http://hackersandhustlers.org
2. Look at the job postings and send them to any friend you think might be a match. I try and do this a couple times a week in my own life, as I think it’s immensely valuable to be a connector. What matters isn’t that you’ve made a match, it’s that you gave it a shot and made yourself more central to our community.
3. Blast out a link to http://hackersandhustlers.org through twitter and/or facebook. When just one person posts a link people usually ignore it, but if we all do it and people keep seeing it in their feed they can’t help but click.
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[1] This type of awareness was what actually originally made me want to be a designer. I didn’t start out loving user interfaces, but I grew to love them after I noticed that no one is ever hiring a “general purpose idea guy”.
[2] For the technically curious, we built it using Sinatra and MongoDB, hosted on Heroku.
