I personally agree with you. The best kind of job post, to my taste, is by someone I'd be working with. But I fear it would be a step too far to impose this on the whole thread.

Various mailing lists I've run have done well with "if you're not somebody technical or somebody with the authority to hire for this post, hush"

I think it's perfectly reasonable--after all, it's the HN community posting to/for the HN community. That level of personal interaction is really what adds value here.

I'm not a fan of thread-splitting but that'd be one option (Ask HN: Who's hiring directly). Otherwise what about people add tags like [Direct] or [Hiring Manager] to their posts:?

This would certainly cut down a bit on the volume of posts, but I would be happy to see this rule added; I think it would improve the quality of the thread significantly.

I don't think it makes sense. I am the hiring manager, but I only ~5 positions available where I am the hiring manager. My company has ~50 positions open for engineering.

Do you prefer to see 10 posts from my company, from each hiring manager with open positions?

Actually I think I might if only because your team (and manager!) probably affects your well being much more than what company it is.

But I can also see why it seems inconvenient to have many people from the same company post as well.

Ah, this is a good point too; I hadn't considered that. The rule could be "hiring managers only", but as you said, that may be too strict.

I would personally prefer this stay fairly loose and only exclude recruiters/middlemen who have no relationship to the hiring company. These are the people blowing up my phone and inbox based on one random keyword from a resume or profile.

On the other hand, an in-house recruiter, an outside recruiter contracted by the company, the actual hiring manager, just a peer or colleague, the company's receptionist... I think all these should be allowed.

If we're going to cut one more cohort from the above paragraph, cut the 3rd party recruiters. However, excluding all talent acquisition teams and/or other co-workers within the company seems unnecessarily restrictive.

I agree. And it's easy to rule out people that are 3rd party recruiter (they normally don't want to name the company). But for someone inside the company, how would you know the difference between an in-house recruiter and an engineer? That seems silly to impose those rules.

Then they'd personally be part of the hiring company, no? I think the intent here is to not have "middle persons" posting jobs trying for the interstitial profits, and in the case of a recruiter for FooBar Inc on the FooBar Inc payroll, there doesn't seem to be an issue IMO.

I think Colin's argument is that an HR employee of FooBar, who isn't going to be directly involved in the role, offers no more value to the community than a "middle person" would and we don't want/need either of them.

I agree, but for a slightly different reason.

Only large(ish) companies have recruiters that are also employees. Most small startups have no one in that role, and medium sized startups would be more likely to have a freelance consultant than an employee. (Our startup has used a consultant for more specialised or senior roles).

Its seems strange that we'd want to let the Google/FB/Apple etc HR folk post, but not "Sally Smith, consultant to UltraSecretLabs.io"

It seems the easiest rule is what you suggest, ban them all - you can only post roles that you're personally involved in.

I dunno. I've had some people be shocked that GOOG is hiring in Chicago and Pittsburgh and ask me if my post was for real. I don't do it often, but almost every time I post in one of the hiring threads someone is interested to at least know if it's for real.

Just my 2¢.

If you interact with most people in the Chicago and Pittsburgh offices, then I would think those positions qualify as ones you're personally involved with.