> The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them.

Tons of people in this space hang out on various places online, where you can simply advertise or do some PR and many do, is it really that difficult?

When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

I've hired 3 people from an IRC community I run, they all turned out to be exceptional (sysadmins and developers).

I've never been hired from IRC though.

Don't get me wrong, it's entirely possible if you do it right. I've hired quite a lot of folk as a result of interacting with them on HN alone. My point is that it's a significantly more difficult problem than screening those people.

The monthly hacker news "who is hiring" thread.

Great example. HN is the perfect place to find people right? I mean, I should know.

HN who's hiring, like most online job advertising, is a crapshoot. It's a once-a-month post where you are drowning in noise. Finding a very large group of potentially relevant people for the roles you are hiring for isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Engaging said group and convincing folk from said group to come work for you is exponentially more difficult.

I guess this is sarcasm. I was only responding implicitly to your initial question:

>>When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

So, yes, hn is where I engage with a company with a view with working with them where they happen to post in the right forum. Suddenly your point is that it isn't a good place to find jobs? Maybe not, but that wasn't your original point. You're moving the goalposts.

Apologies. Wasn't intended to sound sarcastic. I genuinely do believe that HN is the perfect place to find great people but it's still incredibly difficult and if you're hiring at scale it can be super tough to engage enough people on a place like this.

Places like HN and relevant IRC channels are great if you're hiring for one or two roles but beyond that then it's a bit of a lottery.

Beyond a handful of roles you already gave up on finding brilliant people. You can't reliably find the best of the best in industrial amounts, no matter what you do. You can (probably) build stable supply for competent people at best.

Regrettably, HN is the only public resource that I'm able to recommend anymore. AngelList had promise, but never really delivered.

Agree 100% with this.

At the past companies I've worked in finding the talent is the real issue. At my previous company it wasn't so bad as we had an in house recruitment team who generally dealt with sourcing, and generally we had a bigger budget for these kind of things.

However now I'm working in a smaller startup and we're having a lot of difficulty finding the right candidates without bowing to the extortionate cost of recruiters. We've tried the monthly who's hiring, angel.co and other such sites but it's a very slow process, and it's a lot of work to trawl through profiles.

Could do with some disruption in this space!

Agree that the sourcing is hard. We have this in mind, too. As i wrote in the Medium article, we will offer a practice mode for sysadmins. If we will have traction in this are, we will take into consideration to offer a sourcing product also. Until then, we focus on delivering a testing product for companies and a practice product for sysadmins.

Indeed Peroni, it's difficult to find and engage high talented people. But we are trying to solve another problem here. We want to optimize the time spent by hiring managers testing the potential candidates. When you have to test 15 candidates (1h per candidate) in a week, you need to take of production 1 technical person (most time a senior one). This is 15 hours per week. The biggest problem is when they look great on resume and during the interview you realize that is not so good as the resume stated. This is where we want to help.

As I see it, in my case, a part of the problem in finding good people to recruit was the grind through the 100s of applications and only a couple being good enough. This grind added up and I had to settle for less mainly because of time constraints. What if I managed to weed through double the amount of applicants by dismissing the ones that don't handle basic / medium tasks, would have had the time to engage more more quality engineers. It's just a game of odds and I hope I can tilt it.