I’ve been exploring the hiring space for a while now, looking for a pain to solve.

The Hiring Handbook is aimed at hiring managers like myself, addressing the pain of sourcing and self-recruiting developer candidates.

The issue? It’s time-consuming to do right, which is why recruiters exist in the first place. Also: most hiring managers hire maybe a half-dozen a year on the outside. Just how painful is that pain and is it worth paying for a solution?

Tech Recruiter Guides (and the associated free email course) is aimed at technical recruiters and addressing much the same issue: How to attract developer talent.

The issue? Even that niche feels too big and awash in information. It’s proving quite difficult to break through the noise, even though I’m producing what feels like especially valuable information (especially that email course).

I might need to throw some ads at it and see what happens. I’m just hesitant to do so without at least a teensy bit of traction.

Along the way, I ran across other pain points:

  • The hiring process rampup: If you don’t hire all that often, going from a standing start to hiring mode is a bear. Also, vetting, interviewing and selecting the right candidate is difficult and costly to screw up. I’m not sure of the solve for this one yet, short of technical vetting as a service. Code challenges and scoring as a service, maybe? Maybe not recruiting, but just vetting/screening?
  • New employee training: With small teams especially, getting a new employee up to speed on codebases and culture can (and does, I’m guilty too) fall by the wayside. You’re small, you’ve got important work to do and you don’t always take the time to get a new team member fully integrated. Possible solve for this? It’s much less software than service, but working with teams to document their processes and create new employee training “things” (docs, videos, games?)
  • Managing candidates: A hell of a lot of tech companies are using straight-up GMail to handle incoming applications. That has to be painful. I have a specific idea in mind for this one, but I’m still trying to figure out if there’s an actual pain there. Buffer, for instance, funnels job applications through Help Scout along with their support load. Doesn’t sound ideal to me, but they seem to think that works for their insane volume.

In general, I like thinking about this space quite a bit. I like almost all parts of hiring, from theory to tactics. I want to find a business in this space; it’s just a matter of where and what.

I want to make this better.

Did I miss a pain point? Have an idea? Interested in one of the above?

Let me know: