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My initial thoughts are that this does not actually tell me anything. Take this...

"What traits do you value in engineering managers and leadership?"

"Servant leadership is everything to us. We want managers and leaders who are humble and know that their role is to support their teams and make sure nothing is standing in the way of doing great work. So not only work blockers but also ensuring our team has the time and energy to balance their personal lives with their work lives."

Every company I have ever worked for claims something similar. This doesn't actually tell me anything. I would still need an inside person to tell me how it actually is to work at the company.

Yep, one thing that is part of our process is pulling specifics for how they support that value/trait. That means how they spend time or money to provide that value to the team. You might have two companies that each list "Cross Department Teams" but how they actually implement that tells you so much about them (along with specific examples gathered from the individual engineers).

We want to show how the company delivers on that value/trait, and what individual engineers say as well.

We know we can't be as good as the friend who is on the inside. But, we are trying to get closer to that gold standard.

In the past year or so I noticed a lot of companies started having a set of "values" that are (or used to be) just common sense. Like things that you'd be doing anyway if you were a decent human being but now they are official company "values" and they even had an interview process around those. Of course, those values magically go out the window when an incident gives the higher-ups a reason to cover their ass.

Hey! I like the general idea, just a small bit of feedback..

The comments are going to seem fake if they come from current employees. Something like glassdoor might be better suited for that.

No employee (or founder) is going to post bad things about their own company of course. This website gives you a view of what the founders might _think_ their company culture is like, but not what it's actually like.

Sorry, I can't give a solution to that, just a problem statement :(

We gather those directly from the team ourselves. You are correct though. The point of the employee feedback is not to be negative, it is to highlight what the company is doing right in the words of individual team members.

This is like a dating profile. You don't write a dating profile to explain why they shouldn't date you :), you show them what you are about and what you doing well at.

We want to give job seekers this info so they filter and find companies that might be a match for them. And, make it easy to get that first date so they can see if this company is a good match for them or not.

I totally would love this as a candidate. But I don't see any incentive as a company to fill out a profile. I could write all this on my hiring page of my own web site already.

And now that I think of it - even if I am a candidate, this is still just the company saying what they want, so how is this any different than just trusting what the recruiter says?

Great Q!

Companies pay us to become their engineering careers page. Not only does this profile 10x the response rate for any recruiter outreach, but it also builds an ongoing pipeline of interested engineers who like the culture and engineering practices they see described.

For small to medium size companies this is huge as they can show candidates what they are about. This helps them fill the top of the funnel instead of fighting to get candidates to even respond.

It is kinda like a dating profile. You don't jump straight to marriage from a dating profile, you just get enough information to filter who you want to go on a first date with.

So, how is it different than a recruiter? A recruiter gets paid when you join the company. This is the company explaining who they are and how they work and then letting you decide if you want to have a chat and see if you are a match. In our minds that is a big difference. And, with our setup you can ask engineers at the companies questions you have anonymously.

I don't think many companies in software are fighting to get them to respond. Our want candidates to respond? Offer more money.

Usually it's the opposite where job seekers are fighting to get companies to respond.

Hiring developers when you're a small or medium size company is really hard. Nobody knows you exist and if they do there's no way you can compete with FAANG compensation.

So what can you do? You show off what makes you different, whether it's cool technology, family friendliness, remote work, etc.

I interviewed a ton of companies as we built this and nobody is finding it easy to get candidates to respond. They all have issues finding people for the top of the funnel, especially smaller companies under 100 people.

I think solving this problem is a great idea and is something I've thought of building a product around myself. I just haven't acted on it and haven't gotten clear on what such a problem/solution would look like. Congrats on launching!

I'm no legal expert but I would suspect there could be a point of friction with legal teams inside companies. Things like liability for hiring practices, IP leakage, and security. Not to dissuade you but just some thoughts about possible challenges that might work against the goal of transparency.

Yep great point, in most cases it hasn't been two bad with our first batch of clients. Most companies that want to use a product like this already have a great culture and open mindset we have found thus far.