hichamin

It's a startup that provides a combo of Triplebyte + WeWork + Zenefits for hiring distributed teams.

unitedremote.com

Wow, is that even true?

I do believe the "technical" layer in a recruiter is the most important thing. Amarraja, how do you go about vetting your recruiter? Have you had any set of criteria to identify a solid talent acquisition partner?

I agree, Silicon Valley is the mecca of engineering talent. However, the demand for that talent greatly outranks the supply. With that being said, how can a seed or even a Series A startup stand out and be able to attract engineers when Facebook & Google are next door? Even better, how can a startup retain its engineer that's probably getting x10 inboxes a day from other companies with better packages?

I'm not challenging you here, but it's common questions I hear that can complement your perspective...

I don't have a particular example in mind, but a lot of recruiters or even companies are still biased by credentials and resume buzzwords and don't have a proper vetting process to filter through the noise.

That is very relatable, and results primarily from failing to identify false positives and false negatives in the hiring process.

An interview can result in a bad engineer being hired and later fired (a false positive). And an interview can disqualify someone who could have done that job well (a false negatives).

In order to keep the false positive rate low in the face of this noise, companies have to bias decision ever farther toward rejection. The result is a process that misses good engineers, still often preferences credentials over real skill, and often feels capricious and frustrating to the people involved. If everyone at your company had to re-interview for their current jobs, what percentage would pass? This is a scary question. The answer is almost certainly well under 100%. Candidates are harmed when they are rejected by companies they could have done great work for, and companies are harmed when they can't find the talent they need.