Ask HN: Are YC startups *actually* hiring?
Having applied to 20-30 YC startups without any meaningful replies and I’m wondering, are YC startups actually hiring? Having worked in finance for a decade and other high pressure jobs I don’t consider myself a spring chicken.
Edit: I now run a fintech startup https://fixparser.dev and we do look for a technical/business co-founder, feel free to reach out.
I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees. Most notable offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.
Not a YC startup, but jobs I've posted recently had over a thousand applicants in the first few weeks. I post multiple places, including HN. There's a huge culling process to find the 20-30 most applicable candidates, then to narrow down from there to the 1-2 that fit best.
The best way to stand out (for me) is a real application not written with AI. Everyone uses AI now and it all sounds the same. Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter (maybe 20% of applicants submit a cover letter, and a smaller fraction of that was written by real people, and smaller fraction of that gives authentic enthusiastic vibes). Use your real voice in your writing. I give the AI applicants a chance if their resume makes sense, but it's a minefield.
> Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter…
I just can’t muster honest enthusiasm for all the companies/missions to which I must apply to get even a call from their internal recruiter. I have enthusiasm for creating viable, efficient, maintainable software. I can adapt those skills to the mission du jour. But apparently, that’s not sufficient - if it were, my 30yrs of experience would get me hired.
If, by chance, a company or mission are reprehensible to me, I just won’t apply. If I’ve applied, I’m certainly willing to apply my skills to your project.
I'm in a mission driven organization so I pay more attention to that than other companies might. Regardless, a little authenticity and enthusiasm can go a long way. The bar is low.
Drop a link if it's still open. Mission driven orgs sound fun.
Be warned that "mission driven" often means above market workload for below market pay.
That's a given. Many tech jobs still pay well enough to have a luxurious life. Some jobs pay more because they have to. The biggest nightmare for me would be seeing 7 years go by and accomplishing nothing.
When we do our job, we very rarely interact directly with the "mission".
We are coders, if we like the project/technology and the team is fun, of course we will be happy to do our job well.
On the other hand, what does the mission matter if you are unqualified and can't solve the problems at hand.
Yes, a good mission is always a plus, but most capable coders code because the problem/implementation is interesting. They won't magically code better if the code is intended to be used for some Earth-saving purpose.
> When we do our job, we very rarely interact directly with the "mission".
And this is the problem, if I am hiring for a startup or in my case green field initiatives, I don’t need just “coders”. I need people who understand the business and can give prescriptive insights and deal with the ambiguity that comes with any green field initiative. If you are just a coder, how do you plan to stand out from the literally 1000s of applications that every company gets?
You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator.
In my experience, companies tend to avoid people that know or pretend to know too much about the company/vision. I'm not sure why that is, but likely because they want someone for a specific role, not a generalist. They want someone who will be happy doing their job, not have their focus spread across disciplines. In the (really incipient) start-up environment it's good to have generalists, but such jobs are kind of rare.
Plus, when it comes to mission, people can just say what the company wants to hear, a lot easier to fake interest than the coding and communication skills.
> You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator.
There are tens of thousands of “outstanding coders” and even if you are one of the best, how do you communicate that through a resume to stand out from the crowd? Honestly, most companies don’t need great coders.
Historically I haven’t cared about the mission of the company except when I was working for a company that sent nurses to the homes of special needs kids and when I was consulting for state and local government during COVID.
But, what triggered me is the thought “I just care about coding and not the actual business value of what I’m doing
Yeah, that's true, it's very hard to stand out or know how good someone actually is through a short CV.
> not the actual business value of what I’m doing Assuming that you are not willingly going to work for a company that does harm (i.e. gambling, borderline scams, etc.), most businesses should actually provide some sort of value to some people (otherwise they wouldn't have revenue).
Yes, working for a medical company who tries to cure cancer is a meaningful mission, but so is for a company creating entertainment (games/movies), educational content or even for companies that simply aid other companies in achieving their goals, or slightly improving people's lives.
I think the least meaningful type of work is actually the one that has a meaningful but unachievable mission. Like "web3 decentralization". Yes, the idea sounds nice, but if it's impossible or impractical to reach the goal, it doesn't really do any good either, or can even turn it into a harmful process.
Meaning doesn't only come from the business goals themselves, but also from the people you work with. You can still find meaning in helping those around you.
I am not disagreeing with you, but I was raised and spent my life being a coder. If my sole goal in life was to help people (instead of enjoying the coding/creation process), I would have become a medic or something with a clear purpose.
Agreed on the "no AI messaging". And keep it incredibly short. Like 140 characters short. The messages that stand out look a lot more like tweets than they do cover letters.
AI messages are always 500 words of rehashing the JD, so your goal is to not look like that.
Just an FYI: every single career/job search coach I've worked with or read advises either to use a generic cover letter (basically referring the reader to the resume) or to skip it entirely.
RE: "the enthusiasm" part, you obviously decide who you hire as a hiring manager, but you might be overlooking a LOT of qualified candidates if you're looking for "enthusiasm" on the resume...
Some companies are just very selective, i.e: they're hiring the right people not the best candidate. Most of us get jobs because companies need to fill a role and we're the best candidate of a bad bunch... most of us (whether we have 22 years and a fancy title or not) would not get a job at a company that hires carefully because we're probably not a good fit for their very niche view of what a good hire is.
It makes total sense for a startup to be highly selective. But being overly selective at the CV/application stage is dumb. If they really do have some really highly specialized requirement that should be on the advert. If they don't then being having a high rejection rate at the CV screen stage is going to be easy - it's easy to reject people, but you're overwhelmingly likely to screen out the few candidates that are actually a good fit. So sure, expect a low success rate but a low reply rate is an indicator the company isn't serious about hiring.
If you are getting thousands of applications, you have to be selective at the application stage.
If you're getting so many applications that you have to apply such a harsh screen that you're likely losing most of your good candidates via false negatives then you shouldn't be soliciting more applicants to apply. This is what this thread is about - if you're saying these guys are getting so many applications they have to start just brutally cutting CVs almost arbitrarily then they definitely shouldn't be posting on HN about their vacancies. Not least because they're poisoning the well.
This is a real issue - I once got approached by a recruiter for a company, it was a good fit, I think I would've walked the interview and been a great hire - I'd heard of them before. The founder had acted like a dick head to one of my friends, I just immediately turned it down. There is a cost to very publicly treating people poorly. People don't seem to understand that these things that big companies might get away with due to scale, smaller companies cannot. People talk.
I agree and there's nothing that disincentivizes companies from "over-soliciting applications". Having 100000 applicants vs 100 has no downside other than: 1) you need to literally post your application URL more places. 2) you might not get through skimming or auto-screening / OCR-ing all the resumes/apps.
From an incentives POV, the job application space does not properly incentivize saving the mental energy and time of either recruiters or applicants.
Automation and reduced friction has made the situation a kind of arm's race and mess.
These are two separate categories.
Firstly, there are the monthly "Who is hiring" posts. There, basically anyone can post their company and their positions. They don't need to be YC companies.
And secondly, there are the promoted "Company ABC hiring a Software Engineer (YC '23)" (or similar). There, commenting is not allowed, and the listing will stay on HN for a set amount of time.
I believe the question in this post talks about the latter.
But it's certainly interesting to see in this thread, that basically both of these groups of companies don't reach out to candidates...
Same experience - people are getting hired, just not me
As a YC company that is currently hiring, yes! And all of the YC companies I know are also struggling to find engineers. But the job listings (HN, WorkAtAStartup) practically never bring in good candidates.
A few big problems:
1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.
2. Purely automated applications. There are a lot of "Apply to 1000 jobs with AI" startups out there that just spam job boards [1][2][3].
3. Qualifications. There is a shocking number of engineers applying to work at an AI company who have never made a single API request to OpenAI. After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup.
The signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's better to just do outbound. At this point the job listing is mostly there so we can share it with candidates that we reach out to.
[1]https://lazyapply.com/
[2]https://aiapply.co/
[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used...
> 1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.
This is what it takes to get through the filters/recruiter search. In majority of the organizations the first line of defense is the recruiter who has a limited knowledge of the job responsibilities, technologies involved, etc. They employ various search techniques in their ATS (lately enhanced by the various LLM tools) and whatever resumes come up in the keyword search will end up in the pile presented to the hiring manager. This is especially true now when volume of resumes is in hundreds, you can't just go through all of them manually. So the only way to get through the first stage is to create resumes to fit the LLM/keyword search...
EDIT: I've been seeing more and more of these disclaimers when I submit an application: "We use Machine Learning for an initial comparison of resumes against the education, experience, and skills requirements of the job description." Check here to out out of this analysis.
So candidates tweak resumes to match the requirements (likely) with the same LLM that will be checking the resume match to the same requirements. Why is this surprising?
> 1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.
Is that not the ideal answer? Those that get to move forward are the one's that just happen to write a message that hits a non-descriptive sweet spot? A fucking Magic 8 Ball
Adding to this: we mostly focus on outbound, mostly using WorkAtAStartup or LinkedIn as a source.
The unspoken problem is that most people want way too much fucking money.
I don't think demand for engineers is necessarily that elastic - even if candidates were willing to accept less money, it would take a long time for companies to respond by hiring more and they might never match supply.
I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.
Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.
My anecdotes last year and the year before was that when I was looking for my preferred jobs - full time positions at cloud consulting companies and a couple of product companies as an “architect”, I had a 100% response rate.
When I looked for my Plan B jobs - just regular old C# enterprise dev jobs looking for AWS experience paying less - crickets.
It’s seems harder to get interviews for jobs you are overqualified for than ones you are slightly under qualified for.
So far we haven't had a candidate pass because of salary yet. Typically candidates looking for that stable $400k salary never even talk with startups, because they know that's only a FAANG position.
Out of curiosity, I looked at how much your company pays.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai/jobs
This doesn’t come close to what a mid level enterprise CRUD developer could make in Atlanta.
I'm from Atlanta, and $175k is pretty square with ATL ranges[1]. It's not a Google salary, but startup comp is always more equity weighted.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
My bad, looking at the page from mobile it didn’t look like a salary range. I misinterpreted it. I just saw $125K.
That being said, I would hope that position is remote for $175K. I would have jumped on it when I was a pure software developer working in Atlanta. But working locally in SF for that amount?
If you can’t live comfortably on 175k in SF, you have a spending problem.
And according to the calculators I saw, it would be 46% more expensive than living in Atlanta. But we you can choose other metro areas that are not on the west coast for comparison where you could also make $175K as a senior
you guys like sunglasses
$145K is the median according to levels.fyi and 175K is around the 75th percentile.
According to salary.com, that’s the median for the highest level of IC in Atlanta.
https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/software-engi...
A person who takes a $175k/y but works 3.5h/d instead of 8h/d really costs the business $400k/y.
Your colleagues' network of high quality instant hires is only interested in switching to $400k/y opportunities.
This coin has many sides but it isn't complicated.
No people want the amount of money that the market will give them. If you can’t afford the inputs that are required for your business, that’s a you problem. Come back when you have enough funding to pique my interest with cash comp - not worthless “equity”
I have seen some YC startups offer absurdly low "fucking money" for the ask.
If you want a founding engineer for on-site only full-time work in the Bay Area at 50-80K and a fraction of a percent of equity, you deserve every volley of AI shitspam resume dumping that awaits your inbox.
And I think it was only two or three months ago that I saw a hiring post offering exactly that.
I have to double down on what I just said here especially these days because startups are dumping their early stage employees to keep them from actually keeping any of that equity more often than they should be.
You take all of the risk of early stage startup employment and as soon as the company gets long term traction you get shown the door.
I've seen this mostly in NY startups but have heard it's a wide trend.
It begs the question: why not just post your job in your website and nowhere else (ie LinkedIn/Indeed)? That reduces the spam AND gives you a link to point people to.
I hear these complaints all the time from companies. To me if you’re leaving your jobs up at aggregators like LinkedIn, you have no right to complain (not singling you out btw, just a general thought)
Because maybe we'll get a good candidate. The cost is virtually free (30 minutes a day clearing an inbox). And once a week we get a decent application.
30 mins a day isn’t virtually free and last I checked it costs $$$ to post jobs on Linkedin
Interesting to me that 'working with AI' is using OpenAI's API.
Thats really working with someone elses AI, no?
FWIW I have used it quite a bit, but its not really the same thing as developing AI
(nevermind my usual rant that we shouldn't call any of this AI, but I digress)
I'd be fine calling myself a "AI Engineer" for having worked with TensorFlow, PyTorch and scikit-learn and having experience in running AI Models in production.
Nowadays, making requests to the API of a LLM provider is what makes an engineer a good fit for working at an AI company? Really?
The irony of an AI company’s hiring woes due to too much AI.
Hey we process unstructured data so we're trying not to make things worse :')
I have a PhD from one of the best universities in the world in Machine Translation, I was training feed forward networks in 2014, built models in TensorFlow in 2016, founded a generative AI startup in 2019 and signed deals with huge consumer goods companies, debugged distributed training jobs on a cluster with thousands of A100s, and wrote PyTorch training pipelines for a financial ML trading signal that made money.
Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI
The attitude underlying this comment likely makes you a bad culture fit...
Make ur first API request to OpenAI today and who knows, rooting for ya!
This is a bad faith comment - if you had all that in your resume, they wouldnt disqualify you for not ‘sending an api request’.
Having a PhD vs. making that API call might ironically suggest you don’t emanate hands-on product thinking.
I know PhDs in data science and language technology who are not startup material because they’re too uncomfortable outside of MatLab/Jupyter/R.
> After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup.
Devil's advocate; why would I have made an API request if my employer has never used that service? Maybe that lack of interest on their part is why I'm trying to leave and get a job in a field that's of interest to me.
The reality is that the vast majority of startup hires are referrals. For hiring managers, having someone you trust tell you that they've worked with a candidate and vouch for them is invaluable, especially when the company is at a stage that you don't have good performance oversight. The cost of a bad hire is immense.
My advice: never do a cold application. Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.
> the vast majority of startup hires are referrals.
> Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.
OP's process is actually that of a spring chicken by not realizing this reality.
I still don't understand why people, especially "experienced hires," expect more from passive applications.
I also think people don't appreciate the sheer volume of online applications that a desirable startup gets. There have been times were I would literally get hundreds of applications per week, with none of them standing out in any way. You want to give unknowns a chance but when it's a waste of time 99% of the time, you learn to reject quickly.
Then why even play make-believe and have public job postings? If everyone's just ignoring them, most companies should just take them down and stop wasting everyone else's time. Just state for real on your web site "We hire through nepostism and friends-of-friends only" and make it clear and easy for everyone.
Desirable? Every employer is being flooded with applications.
You could list perks of employment as a four-hour commute (one-way), a liberal bring-rabid-dog-to-work policy (mandatory; if you don't have a dog with rabies, one will be provided), and a salary that can best be described as "rounding error", and you'd still get 100 applicants.
Now that I think about it, I never once got a job from a cold application. It was always on either an employee recommendation or having met a family member.
Yeah ok sure, this is common sense. But then what's really the point of advertising open positions? The only certain result for companies who do this, is they'll be inundated with pointless random candidacies...?
One reason is to have a public URL that your employees can share to their network to pull referrals.
Also the success rate is not zero. I've hired great people from cold applications, it's just very rare.
This is likely what's going on. Public pools are often the very last stop on the search for candidates. The precedence is almost always
1) internal hires (obviously not as possible at a start-up)
2) referrals
3) direct engagement from a recruiter
4) talent pools curated by online services like LinkedIn or Indeed
5) forum pools, like those here in HN
6) applications from the Careers page
Almost all my jobs have come from referrals or directly from recruiters. I've gotten calls back from four-and-beyond, but have never made it through the process, despite being overqualified in those cases. On the flipside, I've been underqualified for jobs I got via referral. The power of having someone inside can't be overstated.
Hypothetical candidate: “Hi, my name is John and I’m a ‘full stack developer’ interested in working at your company”
Me: “Okay submit your resume to our job board and someone will get back to you”.
Doing a “warm introduction” isn’t enough.
This is not what I would consider a warm intro. I mean that someone within the company or who is a friend of friend of someone in the company can vouch for the candidate, or has some specific reason for referring (like a project they were impressed by).
It would be cool if the monthly Who's Hiring threads asked companies to optionally disclose useful information like "How long have you had this job open?" or "When was the last time your [company | team] hired someone, and how long did the process take from first posting to the employee's first day on the job?" Better yet, a response SLO for getting back to candidates (this will never happen).
I believe HN is a high quality forum that enforces high quality standards, there is no reason this shouldn't be a thing. Companies that advertise here should be held accountable.
Maybe a startup could work on this problem - HN has two moderators, I’m not sure it’s realistic to ask them to track more than what they already do. How would they even track and verify such hearsay anyway?
I'm mostly just spitballing un-implementable ideas. At the end of the day, the HN "Who's Hiring" tradition relies on people acting in good faith, which cannot be assumed anymore. There is nothing to stop a "hiring" company from lying about every last thing in their job ad.
HN has two moderators but the YC Job Opening ads are not just part of HN, they're part of YC as a whole.
I expect YC to do due diligence if one of their companies receives several reports that they heard no replies (it's not that many companies). If it's found to be more than hearsay, they lose HN ad privelleges.
---
I wouldn't do a startup but I certainly could see myself creating a bunch of fake developer profiles of varying skill levels and sending them to companies en masse. If they don't reply to anything even though they have had a job opening, they get placed on the (public) name & shame list.
Would also be interesting to automatically keep track of which job openings a company has and how long they've been open for.
I work for a small YC startup and we have recently wanted to hire another engineer. Our CTO posted a listing on WorkAtAStartup and within two or so days, got over 200 applicants. Apparently, WorkAtAStartup (which I've used successfully in the past) allows you to bulk send applications.
He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense.
He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.
We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.
We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.
Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.
Yes, you need to get better at filtering. Yes, it has always been like this. Public job listings have always attracted mostly junk.
The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is.
Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough.
Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.
The best hires I’ve ever been around have been from a previous connection to someone. It’s so much easier. Unfortunately, none of our small team had someone fitting who wasn’t looking to make a job change at this point.
I do have a few friends that may be interesting within the next quarter though, so I’m crossing my fingers.
If you got no viable candidates presumably you aren't offering enough money, or are offering "competitive salaries"?
I bet there were definitely some viable candidates in there, but I don’t think we had the resources to properly screen with the volume we got, so unfortunately, we didn’t get to sit down with them.
What company are you at? I've been working on a product to solve this problem.
If you're up for a chat my email is on my page here https://www.zachocean.com/contact/
Crazy to hear how much spam & straight up liars are applying nowadays. Not being able to pass a technical interview is one thing, but sending a fake resume and then expecting to not be exposed as a fraud is just crazy, sociopath behavior.
It is a complicated scene right now. Bots are taking over on both ends, both in creating and interpreting resumes. Companies can have ulterior motives for posting job ads in many directions, including just scraping data.
My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms for scammers.
It's crazy, now candidates apply to everything they see with crap, fake, or AI generated resumes, and companies filter most of the candidates out with APS automation, AI, even if you carefully considered a position and spent time on their application....
Candidates generate a lot of crap, companies filter out a lot of crap and more.
> My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users.
Was this not the sole premise of LinkedIn? Then they were acquired by the M$ and investors demanded ROI, and it turned out being honest (ie, demanding users to be honest in job postings and job applications) is not a profitable business model.
> My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users.
Turns out, maybe those recruiters that we love to hate on, do actually serve a valuable function.
Exactly! The system is flawed right now because it’s automated on both sides, for often the wrong reasons
In my career I've split time between startups, fintech, and consulting. Last year I've had a few interviews with VC funded startups that went to second and third rounds, where I would be told outright that developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.
I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.
interesting! I haven’t heard about this, thanks for sharing.
I've seen a YC startup post for the same back-end job for a year now. I admit that I did not apply, but it doesn't look that unappealing.
Companies need many backend engineers as hey scale. Logically, for a general backend role, it would be the same backend role advertised continuously.
> … developers who worked at larger companies weren't as "Velocity Focused" as what they were looking for.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857294
I hear bullshit excuses like this often. “Not enough experience with $[unusual product]” (‘enough’ experience is acquired in about a week); “Not a cultural fit” (oh the many things this could mask - not old enough, too old, wrong gender, wrong cultural group - all of which would be illegal to admit); “we … uh … well, we moved on to other candidates” - at least you didn’t ghost me, but this one feels like cover for the previous one (though that one is cover for legal issues…)
I’ve aced technical screenings, made it to the final interview, all sounds positive, then I get some bullshit response. In one interview, there were three dev leads on the call and one unrelated manager who ran the call (and completely ran over the other three), was clueless about the technology he was asking about, and when I disagreed about something (the other three suddenly went from yes-men to silent), this guy decided I wasn’t worthy of hiring.
How can anyone possibly solve the social issues around hiring? I have a (non-starter) idea: some amount of accountability to the people they turn down late in the process.
@burgerrito posted a link to a similar submission three months ago where one commenter said for one job they got over 1000 applications.
It’s almost impossible to stand out and rise above the noise these days if you are just randomly submitting your application to a job board.
When I mentioned this before, someone asked me should they reach out to the company directly. That doesn’t help either unless you have a special set of skills or experience that would make you stand out.
Neither “I am a full stack developer” or “I worked for a FAANG” set you apart.
It’s likely they know someone they’ve effectively already offered the job to, but equal opportunity laws require a job posting to be made. So while they are technically “hiring”, the job posting is fairly meaningless.
There are easier ways to address equal opportunity requirements (really just immigration stuff)
More often you just want a way for extremely strong tactical inbound candidates to find you. Even if you're not desperate to fill the role, you want strong candidates to find you, reach out, and then work with them to find a role to fit the candidate.
Related:
Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672>
It is related, but tells the same anecdotes, including people complaining (e.g., hurt ego about not getting shortlisted after completing an internship 2+ years earlier).
Not a direct answer, but months ago I was applying to YC startups that were actively posting opportunities. I had great references from past YC startups, what I'd consider a good resume, a proven track record of actually building stuff. Not a single company was interested. This was true outside of YC companies too, though. It was surreal. I started to think I must be a fraud or something.
When I was ready to move on, to a new opportunity, I spent most of my effort in the HN thread and work for a startup (owned by YC.) And while most applications resulted in no response, that is on par with any other platform. That said, I did hear back from multiple companies! I made it to late stage interview with 3 companies but stopped once I took an offer from one of them. And this was all in the span of 1 month.
As a data point, yes, some companies do hire here. Maybe not all. But I had a great experience through YC.
I think in general, the hiring market is a mess (on both sides) and HN suffers from similar issues.
Wow, that edit is something. Post something inflammatory that will garner engagement, then turn it into your own "I'm hiring" post once it's on the front page.
Quality hack.
And then it’s for a “technical cofounder”. I bet the pay is peanuts
:) it's all part of the game
In the past, I have applied to many YC startups, and have a pretty high response rate. Being that the job board is pretty prominent in the tech world, and engineering jobs are highly competitive, it is likely that a smaller startup does not have the resources to reply to every applicant.
This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.
Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.
I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.
Sorry you've had that experience. My 2 cents is that unless they've done a "big" (> 5 million) seed or series A they probably don't have the money or appetite for much hiring. So target later stage if you aren't already.
I've applied to a couple of these. If I remember correctly PostHog and Enveritas both posted here and for both I went past the initial screening step, but that's where it ended for me.
I also participated in the hiring side for the previous startup I worked at - SoftIron - and we did actually hire someone we found through a post I made here on the monthly Hiring thread. He was a good candidate, but eventually everyone got laid off anyway. I actually felt bad about that - I think we were only around a year after hiring him.
On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.
>On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.
Also put an entry up on the monthly hiring thread a few years ago. Even though we explicitly stated US-Based and authorized to work in the US, we did not get a single application from US-Based people. All Indian, Eastern European, and South American.
As an applicant, the sign up box forces everyone into narrow roles. It’s a radio button, so you can’t be good at “product” and “dev ops”, for example. It’s realistic for people to be good at multiple things.
Last I checked, that radio category is account-wide, so if you do “frontend”, that’s all your account can do. This makes it difficult to apply to multiple kinds of roles through the interface and it makes it harder for founders to find people who can wear multiple hats. Most of them could probably use a versatile person at their stage.
The smaller the company, the less likely the hiring process is a well-oiled machine, from responses to inbounds to true-ing up the JDs currently advertised on the site; compounding that, smaller companies get fewer inbound applicants and can end up holding out for a unicorn fit for a role for a long time. I wouldn't read much into no-response from a startup (totally reasonable to be irritated about it, but it's always a numbers game regardless, so you might not want to be hanging on a response from any one company).
I think we need to turn hiring on its head. I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company. I'm running https://customizedresumes.com/ as my side project and it shows how applicants can now basically spam job applications. It's only going to get worse for hiring managers.
> I think candidates should post their resumes in a centralized place instead of applying for each company.
That already exists, and had for some two decades now - it's called LinkedIn.
It works the way it works. Whatever the reasons (which are most certainly related to running a two-sided marketplace and trying to squeeze both ends of it), any such project will end up in a similar spot.
Don't you think part of the reason companies prefer that you reach out to them is that they want people specifically interested in them? Though it could be the case that the job spam is so fucked that that no longer works as an accurate cutoff.
You described Linkedin?
They (YC W23) are actively looking for devs: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/capimoney
yes, but most are hiring very selectively and with AI applications some companies are getting thousands of cold applications.
There's a lot of coping here. These YC startups only hire a few applicants. If they have hundred of applications (which is low) then the interview rate will likely be less than 5%.
There are over 5000 YC startups, over 3500 of which are still active. For sure some of those are hiring.
Time to build something by yourself!
100%
Here is the truth: They really are not.
Why? They don't have the money nor will they risk it on people who they do not know.
The best way to get "hired" by them is to fiercely compete against them to the point where they wave the white flag and buy you out.
Based on the edit:
What are you offering to pay your “technical cofounder”? I bet it’s peanuts and “equity”. If that’s the case, do you not see that you are part of the same toxic culture that defines many startups hiring process.
Yes, they are. It’s a numbers game.
Also a YC company who's actively hiring. We had two new joiners start last year, we have another two lined up for March/April and we have one open position (with more to come later in the year if all goes well). I'm "in charge" of hiring at Devyve (YC S22), and by "in charge" I mean that I'm acting as the TA team because, you know, startup. I don't mean "in charge" as in I make all the decisions on who gets hired - we do that as a team.
Not as far as I can tell
Yes, they are. I’ve gone through multiple rounds with multiple YC companies a few months ago before ultimately starting my own venture.
best of luck!
Hiring deepseek
[flagged]
Just curious, why do you say that - given that many job board cost money to post on.
One of my friends almost got scammed by a fake job posting just yesterday. The job was for a real company with a real site and headquarters in the US, and the fake recruiter was impersonating the identity of a real recruiter on LinkedIn. They realized it was a scam when the "recruiter" told them that the job interview would be over Telegram. Often these fake jobs will string applicants along, then start asking them for money to pay for "onboarding fees".
Or they'll ask you to fill out an "application form" that includes your full name, date of birth, address, SSN, driver's license number, etc. Hmmm...
Many do, but not all. Also the cost to post a job is trivial compared to the cost of filling the role.
I don't know what the OP was thinking but it is very common for companies to say they are hiring when they don't have a specific position to fill at the time. First, because it is a sign of health, particularly if you want to position yourself as growing. Second, a lot of HR people want to have a pool of people to contact when a position opens.
> Second, a lot of HR people want to have a pool of people to contact when a position opens.
I wonder, is that even legal in California given the CCPA? If they're not actually actively hiring, what "business purpose" do they have for retaining that data?
I feel like anyone in California who gets a call back from HR thanks to this data mining should report the privacy violation.
The “marketing” aspect of a job posting is bad because it’s not genuine. And a large proportion of applicants are using automated tools which is adding to the problem. The people who are actually looking for a matching role and who actually write their application themselves are simply lost in the noise.
Sometimes it's the job board itself creating the fake ads to boost their own numbers. Indeed is pretty notorious for doing this.
I never thought about this, but maybe it's way cheaper than other methods of personal data capturing.
Plus, the personal data on a resume is likely high-quality and accurate because the job seeker is incentivized to be contact-able. High value PII and it's just being handed over...
I was advised by a few recruiters to remove all PII from my resume but my email, both for privacy reasons and because it's better to funnel all offers to the same location. I still keep my phone number on there, but if someone really wants my data, it's remarkably easy to find, so I am not really doing much by just removing it from my resume. Oddly, I've had a few people actually try to find more PII on me and fail miserably. They claimed to be good at it, and should have known enough to find at least my legal name with ease. Used to be able to find old AIM conversations of mine if you knew what to search for (or got lucky).
The cost to post is trivial, especially if you don't fill the position. It's about looking prestigious and maintaining the impression that you're hiring.
Also seems necessary for all the H-1B fraud.
Companies post fake jobs to scare their existing employees, discourage them from asking for raises, etc.
They see ROI from the cost.
Almost all the postings are fake and used for data collection.
Why would they spend their seed or series A cash on people who they have never worked with or they do not know?
For them it is easier for them to hire with in their own network in YC rather than gamble on candidates that they have never worked with before.
That's my experience too. Absolutely no response from jobs where I am seemingly a perfect candidate.
Yes and then they complain about hiring regulations.
"Do you want to be regulated?
Cause this is how you get regulated."
[dead]