Show HN: Peer to Peer Recruiting?
gethigher.ioInteresting concept
"By paying £500 now to endorse Paul, you will receive £1000 if Paul is hired and passes probation.
If Paul is hired and fails probation, your payment of £500 will be donated to charity.
If Paul is not hired then your payment of £500 will be refunded."
There are interactive demo pages https://gethigher.io/endorse/demo https://gethigher.io/dashboard/demo linked on the homepage, that qualifies for the "HN users can try it out" (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) even though the service isn't launched yet.
This seems to be quite a fragile way of offloading some of the recruitment/interview/screening process to the persons friends. What stops Paul paying his friends/acquaintances to endorse him?
Doesn't this perpetuate the lack of diversity in the job market? Whenever I hire I'll ask anyone I know that's worked in the same place if they have an opinion on them - but won't use a lack of one to not bring in for an interview.
> What stops Paul paying his friends/acquaintances to endorse him?
AD: The fact that Paul is taking on all the risk, in effect Paul has made a self-endorsement via proxy... Paul can already self-endorse it's a valid signal of confidence that they feel they can do the job.
> AD: The fact that Paul is taking on all the risk, in effect Paul has made a self-endorsement via proxy...
Is funding your own stake via a third party explicitly allowed, or is it abuse that's too hard to police and therefore you turn a blind eye, with the above justification?
If the latter, employers should be aware they may be biasing hiring in favour rule-breakers.
For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can do it. Of those people, this system advantages those with easier access to some financial capital. Not great for diversity or social mobility.
> If the latter, employers should be aware they may be biasing hiring in favour rule-breakers.
AD: It doesn't matter if you fund your friends to do it or you do it yourself, someone is taking the risk and so from a signal processing point of view it's a strong signal.
> For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can do it. Of those people, this system advantages those with easier access to some financial capital. Not great for diversity or social mobility.
AD: The stake is commensurate with the salary, and people are likely to be in similar socio-economic bracket with their peers. The rich already have an advantage in life, we can't change that, but we can equal the playing field by adjusting the price per unit of influence to match wealth distribution.
This makes tonnes of sense with being confident in yourself to do the job. I would endorse myself
AD: The service has been launched! However it's a manual on-boarding at the moment :)
"Here's 500, please endorse me"
AD: Interestingly... thats just a self-endorsement via a proxy, someone is still taking a risk.
> Endorsers put down a reasonable but significant sum of their own money in support of the candidate's application to your role.
This feels like it's flirting with "pay to apply", which is an absolutely reliable sign of a scam and is rightfully illegal in many countries.
This scheme also feels inherently exploitable as it relies on all parties behaving honestly to function... which is somewhat ironic given all the astroturfing happening in this very post.
AD: I hear you, we've just launched and money is our first and most generalised form of staking, expect more to come.
Endorsements remind me on how bank loans work. For every loan transaction that exists a collateral security or deposit is required to acquire the loan. Same can be said to this idea of endorsements -an amount of money (collateral security / deposit) to endorse the candidate and backs their skills / talent to get the role.
I don't think the website communicates whatever service they're offering effectively. Unless the visitor knows exactly what they're looking for.
IE. What is ATS? why do I want to see demo immediately?
There's a lot of "we're amazing!" on there.
It's trivial to get a flood of inadequate resumes and incompetent applicants.
So how does this avoid that problem in concrete market differentiated ways without using platitudes and self congratulatory language?
Is it the "Endorsement flow"? Why is it buried, sandwiched between a bunch of what Steve Krug called "happy talk" over 20 years ago?
AD: It wouldn't be a startup without an amount of "look how good we are"!... It absolutely is the endorsement flow. People will only be willing to endorse their candidates if they are confident they can pass the companies probation... They can only really be confident if they have experience of their candidate in the workplace.
If you personally have to explain this to me then your website sucks. Take that to heart.
I know your business but ONLY because I read your comments on this thread. The website did not tell me this
Use the wayback machine, look at websites of companies prior to getting funding or on the introduction of what eventually became cash cow products, you'll start to notice clear patterns. You're violating a bunch.
Applicant tracking system. Basically a CRM for candidates. This is 101 level jargon.
If you don’t know it, now you do.
Thanks for the explanation.
Maybe 101 level jargon for you, but not everyone; especially who are not familiar with this particular domain.
This assumes that candidates succeed based exclusively on their own merit, where a poor employer or culture could actually be the reason why a good candidate does not work out.
AD: We have clauses in place for these scenarios, Higher will act as the mediator in instances where a clear reason can't be established.
Hello! Adrian and Paul here, we conceived of Higher almost 2 years ago now, partly inspired by a HN thread! The other part was Paul being asked to endorse a colleague he had worked with before, he did so positively, however the owners asked him if he'd bet anything on it and he retracted his endorsement!
We invented the concept of a confidence curation market as a spin off from content creation markets, the system wide effect is those who rise to the top have the most network confidence in passing probation.
We also wanted to bring the human element back into recruiting, giving control back to the candidates to indicate their keenness and applicability for a role whilst staying informed (it's amazing how many recruiting processes right now DON'T update you), candidates can self-endorse or reach out to their network for endorsements.
It's a big idea with lots of nuances and we've just launched our MVP, we're happy to answer any questions!
AD: It's worth pointing out that Harvard Business School just published a report[1] on what they deem as 'Hidden Workers' - one of the major factors in these workers remaining hidden is that their CV or digital profiles can't get past the AI filtering engines almost all ATS system use... We've side stepped AI filtering systems with peer-to-peer collateralised endorsements, humans are doing the match-making and at scale.
[1] https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/re...
Less AI and more people. I hope this succeeds.
But AI can weigh connections too, if reqruiters use outdated AI systems doesn't mean AI cannot solve the current problem.
This might also be worth reading, if you want to learn a bit more about the project: https://medium.com/get-higher/talent-ranking-evolved-introdu...
AD: I'm very over-due on the second part to this series... On my third re-write. I promise to have it up very soon. It covers why human-centric systems are important particularly in this space.
There needs to be clarity on what qualifies as a success and a failure.
If they quit in two days, do I lose my money? As I know a great candidate who has done that because he was mislead (literal Java developer hired to do JavaScript kind of thing).
How about if they are just let go in a downsizing and not really fired for performance?
But otherwise this is a great idea.
AD: Thanks for your comment, if you get into the T&C's we have clauses for when a candidate applies and is let go for reasons outside of being not fit for the role, there are pro-rata returns for the endorsers in those instances.
congratulations on getting to launch! And in a notoriously difficult field - I hope you can "fix" recruiting :-)
My thoughts are :
I would only make the bet if I understood both sides - the skill of the candidate I am betting on (ok) - and the needs, culture and requirements of the company looking to hire.
As that second part is basically unknown then the only rational part is to withdraw the bet. Perhaps a smaller sum would work, but then betting 5 to get back 10 is no incentive - you may as well just ask.
I think I should put more effort into networking and recommending people for jobs - so something in this area is needed.
Good luck
> I would only make the bet if I understood both sides
AD: So this is integral to our system, those who are being asked to endorse candidates won't be doing so if they don't feel they either understand what the company is looking for or how capable their candidate is.
Think of the person you respect and admire the most in the workplace, and they've just asked you to endorse them for a role similar to their current one. The endorsement you give is contingent on them passing the probation only, would you give it?
Does this peer ranking network integrate with my Klout score?
Dont think it does - it ranks from its peer endorsements. Correct me if im wrong @gethigher
Typo in the very first sentence: yourhiring
AD: good spot! It actually line breaks on desktop view there, it must of snuck through.
That's fixed now. Prettier and I had a misunderstanding.