Creator here (shamefully submitted myself, haha). Happy to answer any/all questions or ramble on and on about the problem.
We basically think there needs to be a legitimately trustworthy service out there. Something that acts more like a a career coach instead of a position spammer. Something that understands your needs and specific situation.
Along the lines of "doing things that don't scale", we're completely human powered but technology assisted. There are a lot of things that are involved with career coaching or recruiting that are simply tedious -- we automate them away so we can better focus on relationships.
Do you have women on your panel of experts, and if not do you have plans to add women to your panel of experts? Asking not because "OMG MORE WOMEN IN TECH" but because the experience of being a woman trying to navigate a tech job is going to be different than a man's experience, so I would have more confidence in signing up for/recommending your service if I knew it catered more towards my specific demographic.
Also, what's your geographical range of companies you're working with? Companies all over the US? Only SV? Only West Coast? Worldwide?
We have multiple women in our expert network. I should have highlighted them... doh. We'd love more! https://jobstart.co/experts
This was a pivot -- we started off as a mentorship platform, so we're not actively using all of our expert pool at this time. After realizing the nuances of mentorship were making us solve the mentorship problem instead of the job placement problem, we moved onwards. Fun fact: we didn't have any female experts until we had about 30 male experts. But that changed quickly! The first one liked helping out so much she personally invited all of her friends, and all the sudden we were nearly 50/50 for short while. :D
We have contracts with mostly Silicon Valley startups, but there are a couple in there from NYC and even Georgia. The fact that we don't force our candidates down our own funnel though, and will help them attain a job anywhere, is our real uniqueness.
> We have multiple women in our expert network. I should have highlighted them... doh. We'd love more! https://jobstart.co/experts
Getting a good candidate:expert match sounds integral to your model, so it may be useful to have a process for leveraging your expert network to review the pairings (including the advice they produce and candidate feedback) to identify places where the coaches may need coaching, or the fitting process may be able to improve.
Thanks Zach for doing this (both starting the company and coming here to Hacker News to answer questions).
Based upon what you're seeing:
1. Please rank these in order of importance:
- technical skill in one (or few) technologies
- broad technical skills
- years of experience
- raw smarts & ability to learn
- user/customer domain knowledge
- soft skills (project mgmt, systems analysis, etc.)
- cultural fit
- attitude & determination
2. What % of opportunities are in large companies vs. start-ups?
3. What % of a "typical" programmer's energy should be spent presenting themselves better vs. actually getting better?
4. What makes your coaches/experts so special? Do they have last names?
Nice concept. Best wishes to you and all your candidates.
1. The importance there depends on the company. This is why we take a human-oriented approach, instead of just building a marketplace. We can understand the nuances of what different employers want better. Data models will follow, but we're hand picking the points to start.
2. Remember we're open to helping you get anywhere. We've placed people at both startups and large companies already, but most of our contracts are with startups. Large companies don't do recruiting deals unless you're pumping them huge numbers or giving some crazy insightful data.
3. This depends on the programmer. I think, unfortunately, a lot of getting the right job is knowing how to present yourself better. In addition, I think most programmers already know how to get better at programming, but few learn the tricks to land more interviews and get more offers.
4. The status quo is pretty terrible. I like what some of the new companies are doing (Triplebyte for example), but recruiters are still the predominant factor in hiring. Some of them are good, but most of them... nope. Our coaches are all engineers. Our experts are all engineers. Our coaches have a full-time job -- that job is to understand the job market, understand the candidates they work with, and help them out however they see fit.
I'll also mention that since we're still only 3 people, we, the founders are also doing a large portion of the coaching. Gotta love startup life!
Whenever you reach the point when you can use the point of view of a non-SV, non-tech industry programmer with heavy enterprise & SMB experience, let me know how I can help. Contact info in profile.
I can agree with you here. One thing businesses are constantly telling me: "We are flooded by unsuitable candidates, because recruiters are playing the numbers game. Their strategy is submitting large lists of candidates in the hope that one or two are suitable."
The status quo has evolved because employees don't feel qualified, or like they have the resources, to conduct an initial candidate search. They don't think they have the networks, but they need a new hire fast. So they outsource to 'experts', but the incentive is all wrong.
Good luck to you. I'm on the other side of the Pacific thinking about what we can do to take recruiters out of the mix, focusing on better marketplaces, but you've certainly piqued my interest.
For the salary negotiations, you take 20% of the difference. What do you do? Do you wait for the candidate to get an offer, then actually go talk to HR at the company on their behalf, or do you simply coach and tell them "Hey ask for $XX,XXX more!"
Are you hiring? While I'm hunting for tech work in NY even now, but have had a frustrating enough experience that I'm open to just tackling the problem directly.
Being that you are based in SF, do you think that you are equipped to provide services to job seekers in other cities (i.e. Austin, NYC, Boston, Raleigh, or Seattle)?
Looks like you're based in SF. Do you primarily work with West coast based companies? Because I love where I live right now (unwilling to relocate atm), and that limits my options quite a bit.
Hey Zach, Creator of InterviewBit here, we are doing something similar, however relatively less human powered, would love to hear your thoughts about what we are doing at InterviewBit.com
Almost every company with a half decent optimization strategy will use similar sites to measure interactions and categorize users. Most of these measurements are things that a site could do on its own (like analyzing how effective a call to action is) but it makes sense time and cost wise to outsource to an expert.
If you're worried about this- use an adblocker or don't go to corporate sites.
1) Addthis is what we use for sharing. It's helped us a lot.
2) Google analytics puts in doubleclick.
3) Facebook sharing... yup.
4) We're currently running an A/B test with Optimizely.
5) Segment.io is a great analytics tool.
I'd recommend all the above services. That's my opinion on the above!
The trouble with the FB button is that is lets FB track you just by visiting the page, even if you don't click on the button. You could use a non-JS version of the button, or use a "two-click" button that doesn't load scripts from FB until the user is ready to share something.
We make deals (recruiting contracts) with companies who really want first dibs on top talent. When a candidate comes through, we'll discuss all their options, but mention that we also work with some companies and talk about those companies as well. If they'd like an intro, awesome! If not, totally cool.
We're sacrificing potential revenue to build the most trustworthy brand. The economics of recruiting let us do that... just an insane market right now.
Jobstart works with job seekers to help them get hired, and gets paid when their recruiting clients hire their candidates. Sometimes Jobstart's candidates get jobs at non-clients, and Jobstart doesn't get paid.
Jobstart can help negotiate offers, for which they charge the candidate 20% of the difference between original and accepted offer.
I'm an independent agency recruiter, and it sounds a lot like what I do. I don't charge candidates for negotiating services though.
I agree that most recruiters aren't very good at what they are supposed to do. Positioning yourselves as coaches is a marketing strategy to differentiate from those recruiters, but what you are doing is basically the same thing as what a good (both skilled and 'benevolent') recruiter might do, no?
1) All of our coaches are experienced engineers.
2) We're much more involved than recruiters. We're going to run you through in-house interview gauntlets if that's what you want and need (detailed feedback included). We'll rip apart your resume and start from scratch if that's a smart thing to do. I've found 0% of the recruiters I've talked to can do those things effectively -- perhaps you're different, but we've never met. :]
3) We help you network.
4) We'll actively help you look at companies outside our recruiting contract scope. We'll recommend companies that we don't work with. This is not a "sometimes candidates get jobs at non-clients" sort of thing. This is more of a "let's put you first, no matter what" sort of thing.
Being experienced engineers is helpful. Whether or not you're "much more involved" than recruiters probably depends on the recruiter, but running multiple interviews internally with coaches is definitely a worthwhile service.
Most experienced recruiters can rip apart a resume and are usually willing to help make changes (specifically when it's for their own client). I've seen recruiters that claim ownership of the resume they modify for their candidates, which seems tacky.
I understand that you will recommend companies that you don't work with, although your business model has all the same incentives that the traditional contingency recruiting model has.
You have two ways of making money.
1 - Getting paid when a candidate accepts a job at your client (standard contingency model).
2 - 20% (of difference) paid by candidate for negotiation
You can recommend candidates to companies you don't work with, and you can make money off these deals by providing a negotiation service.
I respect that you are trying to provide a superior service to what most recruiters are providing. It's a sad state for the recruiting industry when companies are reluctant to even use the term "recruiting". I'm as critical of the recruiting industry as anyone, so I do wish you well.
1) That's neither a distinct nor a unique advantage. Being an engineer doesn't immediately qualify you as being better placed to advise someone on how to improve their career opportunities.
2) Recruiters won't rip apart a resume. They'll advise you on how to improve what you already have because they'll respect the time and effort you put into creating it in the first place.
3) Is this is short-hand for 'we'll tell you what meet-ups/events to go to'?
4) Again, neither a distinct nor a unique advantage. Recruiters constantly spec candidates out to companies they don't have contractual agreements with. It's how they win new business.
I respect the fact that you're attempting to create a better experience for candidates but ultimately, what you have created is simply a traditional recruitment company that acts and behaves the way a recruitment company is meant to behave.
1) You're right it doesn't immediately qualify you, but it does give you a better understanding as to what position requirements actually entail and what people mean when they say "I want to avoid all non-linux dev environments". We just use it as a base filter and then build coaches into the most qualified people over time.
2) Some people need light changes, some people need harsh truth. Recruiters ignore the latter and treat them as lost causes. I don't mean to say we'll disrespect people -- sorry if it came across that way!
3) We're building a network of helpful experts (see https://jobstart.co/experts). We'll give people tips on how to explore their own network, connect with our experts, and do generic things such as attend meetups/events. Depends on the coach and the candidate.
4) Hmm, I'm trying to figure out how to explain this part properly and it's admittedly a bit difficult. Have you ever been sent a specced candidate by a company? What was that experience like -- good or bad? In our experience, it's almost always been bad. Usually it's so bad they don't even get the position requirement and candidate aligned properly, let alone send an outstanding candidate. I think some of this comes back to point #1, having the engineer-coach understand the specs, and letting the candidate themselves even do some initial contact. We don't run the entire job search for you -- we'll intro you to some companies, sure, but we're also going to teach you how to get better conversion % on your own efforts.
"that acts and behaves the way a recruitment company is meant to behave". I disagree with everything in that sentence. Everything is temporary and no company or service is meant to act in any such way. Startups thrive only by finding creative ways of doing things.
I like it. I like that you do the 20% difference thing. I have never seen that before, and it's clever and aligned well with the goals of the developer. You're basically saying "if we can't get you at one of our customers, we'll find someone else and grind out a great offer for you." You get paid better if it's your own client, but if there is no fit, you at least still go to bat for your engineers.
It's up to the developer to accept it, though, right? They can back out at any point, right?
One thing recruiters are useful for is that usually have a list of interview questions their past candidates got from each company. But usually this list is not as comprehensive as even just careercup or glassdoor.
But every company I have worked at had an internal wiki of interview questions and guidelines for evaluation. The number of questions is usually very small and study-able. With just the knowledge of my company's current wiki (and some past experience as the interviewer) I am pretty confident I can train even the weakest of candidates to pass the interview.
Probably due to legal or ethical reasons though, I haven't seen anyone try to collect these database of questions from each company. Is it that risky to ask your candidates to leak them to you after they get hired?
I've been in agency recruiting for almost 20 years, and I've never told a candidate what question to expect. I might say there is a whiteboard exercise, or years ago mentioned if a client asked Fermi problems, but never a specific question.
The biggest problem with contingency recruiting is when the recruiter feels that the size of the fee > the value of a recruiter's reputation. This issue caused me enough angst that I created my own business model that eliminates these incentives to cheat.
I personally have never considered asking about the specific questions/answers for my clients' interviews. I may be in the minority on that.
Well it's definitely cheating, not going to argue that.
But it doesn't hurt anyone other than other people vying for the same spot (but they are not paying you, so fuck em).
Your candidates get to take out variance by passing interviews they can clearly pass if they "by chance" prepare for it ahead of time.
And the company will just see you as someone who refers a lot of high quality candidates in terms of interview skills. And it's not like pure deadbeats can pass even with studying all the questions ahead of time. The work being done at tech companies is nowhere near as hard/interesting as the interview questions themselves so they will do just fine on the job.
Again, I'll help a candidate by letting them know what type of interview to expect (whiteboard, grilling, pairing, etc.), but not specific questions. I'll also mention if there is a drug test, and I can't help them pass that either. I don't think anyone would consider that cheating, especially in this day and age where candidates can find actual interview questions and answers in a ton of places.
I'm sure other recruiters may be inclined to try and let their candidates cheat. My reputation is worth more than that, and since my work isn't contingency I don't have the same incentives to cheat as contingency recruiters do.
How do you plan on helping candidates practice interview questions? Surely you have narrowed down the list of topics/questions somehow or else it won't be a very efficient use of time or of your service.
The juicy part is just how you plan on procuring those questions. Careercup/glassdoor? Getting previous engineers who had access to those interview question wikis to be coaches? Surely the most effective way is to just get access to the actual list interview questions/grading rubric (at the past 3 companies I worked at they were accessible to any fulltime employee). Of course you shouldn't answer me if that's what you're actually doing since it's probably illegal. But if you have that kind of data I would use your company and recommend it to all my friends.
I think this is the first time in a long time that I see a startup that aims to solve the hiring problem with something other than technology (with people), so my sincere congratulations.
As a CTO of a successful startup, I would sign up as an expert if you were a non-profit in a heartbeat - and I don't mean that you don't charge your clients, just a B corp or something that aims to solve this problem without getting rich. If you are successful and have a solid network that works, you will still prioritize paying clients over non-paying ones, no-matter how hard you try not to. Convince me otherwise?
Our hypothesis is, that if someone showed candidates how to prepare rigorously for interviews, how good engineers actually do things, and how to think about things the right way, then they'd avoid making several mistakes in interviews and at work.
We're taking a very hands-on detailed human approach. Because interviews are more like a date, than they are like a test.
I agree that the hiring process is broken; but when I look at this, it just comes across as ordinary recruiting with some (snaps fingers) pizazz.
How do you help the hiring companies choose the right candidates?
In my experience, the best recruiters are those who bring in ideal candidates without being pushy or overselling. Do you have some objective way of ranking candidates? Do you filter out unqualified candidates?
I think there's a spectrum when it comes to recruiting -- some recruiters are good at their job, no doubt, but the majority of people get left behind by the industry. Helping people become better versions of themselves simply isn't a value recruiting firms hold dear.
The best recruiters, as you said, take already ideal candidates and figure out how to sell them on their companies in an authentic way.
We flip the model around and start with the candidate, no matter where they're at. That's not just a "snap fingers pizzazz" - that's changing the core process.
We'll build tools internally to rank candidates and companies eventually, but right now it's goodm old-fashioned human power! (We have a couple tools already built, but nothing game changing is live)
I know this beats the very premise of your product - "personalized" guidance but thought I would ask anyway.
How open are you to sharing general guidelines (that are insightful and not already available everywhere) ?
It would also help if you could ask the people who are successfully placed to write their learnings along the process. Similar to how the Insight data engineering fellow and others at coding schools share what they learnt/built.
The "what's in it for me" question is a good one. While very unintuitive, we've had no problem signing people up who are simply helpful types. There's a large population out there of talented people who enjoy helping others and this is the most impactful, time efficient way to do it.
At first we were thinking about offering money, but the economics of the model don't really work out. No matter what we do, since we're not guaranteed money, we can't guarantee experts money. Under that situation, we could offer them on average less than $60 an hour... at which point 1) it feels like work and 2) the people who become experts usually make 3x that.
After we worked on this for months, it turned out the best system was simply a volunteer system. Strange, eh?
Are you guys willing to coach to self-taught programmers(who do not have a comp sc. degree) for the entry level jobs? Or you are focused on taking experienced candidates and groom them for more senior level position?
Absolutely willing to take self-taught programmers. In fact, in our experience thus far, we've found self-taught people tend to get better results when coached/mentored.
I am a self-taught programmer but I find hard to crack the entry level full stack developer position in SF bay area. Almost all startups are looking for a senior developer (at least 3-4 years experience). So I am in a catch 22. Do you guys have plan to coach newbie developer for junior level position?
I ran into this same problem: everybody only seems to want senior talent. There's a chasm between intermediate and "unicorn" that needs to be bridged. I hope these guys can improve that situation.
It's tough to find good mentoring when you're a n00b to intermediate.
This is a neat idea! Btw OP looks like you're serving the Google Lato font over HTTP while your site is coming over HTTPS; I think this is causing some of the issues folks are having not being able to see the text very well.
Another question, are you guys aimed at programmers only or are you placing people who work in all aspects of software? I'm a business analyst/strategist in the tech sector but not a programmer- is that a position that you'd be able to help place?
Our goal is to eventually scale the coaching model so it's financially sensible to expand into other positions and eventually industries. The expert network is a big piece of that!
"empower all people," "help they deserve," "status quo is unacceptable," "they have had decades to find a solution to help the masses. They have failed," "facilitate this _movement_," "increase the rate of innovation across the world"...
Who do you think you are? MLK? You're a fancy-pants version of "Goodwill" that literally caters to just the 1%, get over it.
I do believe everything that is written there. If you want to take it as inflated or egotistical, go ahead -- that's your right.
If you understand the mission and what we're trying to do here though, we're really aiming to help everyone. Starting with software is simply a foothold that works when you're an early stage startup. It lets us focus the business and run the model against an industry that moves so ridiculously fast, we are forced to keep up. As we can build tech to scale coaching, we'd like to achieve price points low enough to help everyone.
That's the plan at least. Not over it! Will keep dreaming!
"We work with top companies who pay us to specially refer them the best candidates. If we think you're good enough, we'll recommend them as a company for you to check out."
This sounds like a new twist on the same old recruiter workflow. Is that an unfair judgment?
Also, what if you don't think we are good enough? Do you still offer help?
1. New twist on old recruiter workflow -- 100% correct. Making money sort of demands you fit into old models at least a little bit. Once we gain more traction, we can try out more daring things. Up until now, though, the main question was "do people want coaching?". We've found that answer. :)
2. If you're not good enough for those companies, we'll figure out why and still help you out. Granted, we won't help you for months and months -- but we're not going to leave you hanging there. We think helping everyone is going to build a strong brand and service.
Looks like a neat service. Just as a point of information, should I assume if I don't get a response that my submission has been rejected? Would be nice to get a replying if submissions are not taken into consideration just to know not to wait.
Good luck with expanding the service to other cities!
Thanks! No we just haven't sent out emails yet. We should have had an automated message upon signup but didn't put it in (stupidly). We're adding the automated message and will send updates to everyone tonight.
Very cool - small thing, there's a spello in the footer "We have helped place candidates at top technoogy companies and startups." Bigger thing, software jobs are pretty much all jobs, or do you mean tech jobs? Either way I like it, nice one!
Also, "where you're at" is poor grammar. You could simply say "where you are." In general, you should probably avoid contractions (say "you are" instead of "you're").
Awesome! Are you willing to help someone from a classic engineering background transition to development and getting a more entry-level job? Or are your focus on already experienced developers working in the industry? Thanks!
This is excellent idea. At least how I understand it. Recruiters such badly and we have very little reason to work with them. This would provide better value proposition and make devs more motivated to work with them.
Seems you're taking the 10X approach and focusing on full-time jobs instead of freelance/per-project jobs. I like it! Too bad about the location restriction, are remote positions possible to hire for?
As a hiring manager, I use LinkedIn either to primarily source engineers or to validate the experience of an engineer that I found via some other means (open source project, coding event, etc).
To some extent, if you don't have a LinkedIn you don't really exist within the job market - which is fine I guess if you never intend to change jobs but might be something you do want to do some day :)
I'm actually curious why you wouldn't have a LinkedIn?
I have considered moving away from LinkedIn and designing an online resume. LinkedIn is not perfect, there are plenty of reasons you might not want to use it.
Besides finding engineers, what does LinkedIn provide you as a hiring manager that a resume would not? (Assuming an online resume or a pdf has links to company information, references, etc.) I can't imagine anyone actually puts stock in LinkedIn "endorsements" or "recommendations".
Actually not a requirement -- that's why we asked for email first. :)
We don't message it, but the last two fields are optional. Truth is we won't be able to handle every candidate that comes through yet so we're working in batches. The more information we have on people, the more we can prioritize them.
That being said, I'd love to chat -> zach@jobstart.co. I'll make sure you don't fall through the cracks.
We have contracts with a certain number of companies and understand their needs the best.
When we see a candidate come through who is a shoe-in for a company on that list, we'll let the candidate know that's an opportunity for them but not pressure it. If they'd like to chat with the company, we'll make the intro. If not, cool.
Our model prioritized creating a trustworthy brand over everything else. Everything. Including revenue at this point. We'd much rather be the first place candidates think about heading when starting their job search than converting 20% more inbound.
Creator here (shamefully submitted myself, haha). Happy to answer any/all questions or ramble on and on about the problem.
We basically think there needs to be a legitimately trustworthy service out there. Something that acts more like a a career coach instead of a position spammer. Something that understands your needs and specific situation.
Along the lines of "doing things that don't scale", we're completely human powered but technology assisted. There are a lot of things that are involved with career coaching or recruiting that are simply tedious -- we automate them away so we can better focus on relationships.