Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.
Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)
The secretsales.com domain and company name came first (2007). When I joined last year it was the subject of much mirth and occasioned the gift of a T-shirt with the cartoon character on it.
> whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding
I don't understand this. HN is an open website where anybody can sign up, and the Who's Hiring posts can be reached from a google search. What makes you so sure that applicants are all high-quality people?
My guess is that the most unqualified job seekers don't know about HN. You have to be interested in Tech/startups to stick around HN for the most part.
And perhaps are the users who read the Who's hiring threads more restrictive with to whom they send application. That is, they only send CVs to openings that they think they can carry out.
The last part is just total speculation though but that is my own experience with Who's hiring, I've read many posts but have not applied for those I would be unqualified for. Unfortunately for me, that is almost all of them as I am no developer but it is quite interesting to see what kind of skills HN value highly.
I helped a client write their own HN hiring letter.
They'd originally had corp-speak in there like "5y PHP Developer". "Must have BS in ..." and we rewrote their requirements to things developers would have to know how to use (PHP OO, SQL with X, Able to do Y in Z, etc) and a description of the challenges you'd have.
Despite having chopped out the arbitrary restrictions, we made the posting much tougher. Which is good, it was for essentially engineer #1 and they needed someone who'd let the founder be able to delegate.
Yeah, many of the posts here are much more exacting than "regular" job boards. They're written by the people doing the work rather than via an HR filter.
I cannot speak for the grand-parent but simply being on HN marks something, having contributed and some karma shows that the community has read your comments and approved.
Agreed, an application from an account created ten minutes ago tells you very little, but even that amount is an order of magnitude more revealing than a mailgun reply from a Monster ad.
I'm not sure I understand either, but the empirical evidence is that I get a very low volume of replies but almost every one is from someone very well-qualified and worth interviewing. Like some of the other commenters, I think it is simply the quality of this community as a hacker-friendly environment (a testament to good work by pg and its members to keep it that way of course).
Average hit rate for me (in two different roles as hiring manager) has been about one inquiry every two or three postings and one hire per year. This volume isn't enough to grow teams as fast as I normally do, so it doesn't work on its own. However, unlike broadcast methods like StackOverflow that I also use, whoishiring gives me _only_ high-quality people so I don't have to do any CV weeding - so it is always a very important part of my hiring strategy.
Most recent hire was in March and we're _really_ pleased with him (hi Ben!)