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Comment by ammon | Hacker News Reader

The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a commitment from a company (I understand why some companies don't choose to use us.) But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.

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What about a sliding scale for the commission? The higher the salary the bigger it is? So a junior engineer would practically be free, but a senior engineer would bring in more revenue than the subscription.

Then the company is incentivized to use you for junior hires. Maybe you'll get a few freeloaders who only want to hire juniors, but even those will eventually be seniors who love your platform, and at the same time, will boost your stats on the number of juniors you got jobs for.

Interesting... you've probably considered this but, sounds like to solve that problem you could just have an option for companies to subscribe, or be on contingency? Then the companies hiring for juniors can subscribe and the folks looking for harder hires can be on contingency?

"But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.", right, but as a hiring manager that doesn't make sense to me... I don't care that we're making hires to justify where we spend our sourcing money. I care that we're making great hires, so I want to cast as wide a net as possible. I'm not going to shut my eyes to other sources because I've paid for triplebyte. But maybe in bigger companies I wouldn't be the one making purchasing decisions? And the folks making those decisions would be pushing HMs to use Triplebyte?

It is interesting, how the incentives align and don't align sometimes. Hard to say if I'm even in the target market (raised $15m, hiring a few folks this year in the "hardest" category, #1 problem is qualified folks at top-o-funnel).

Maybe I also have a personal penchant for seeing companies who bet on themselves and clearly align incentives :shrug:

That business model is optimising for large customers that are probably better equipped to replace you with something in house. And leaving the long tail of smaller customers on the table.

I wanted to use triplebyte - but I only want to make 3 hires per year.

We do have discounts for smaller startups (under $10m in funding). Happy to talk about that if you're interested. ammon@triplebyte.com

How can they replace them with something in house if Triplebyte ends up with the network effects?

Sounds like you hit a niche and solved hard problems for companies. Unfortunately not a niche big enough for a company that's taken 10+ million in VC money.

Why not a combo where the subscription isn't paid until a hire is actually made through the platform?

We experimented with this, as well as with trial periods (which are sort of the same thing, but with a time limit). Trial periods ended up being easier to think about and optimize (each account either converts or not at the end of the period). But we may revisit this in the future.

Would be interesting if you could do something like:

-You vet engineers with however you/or individuals engineers see fit (test/ past work/ opensource / interviews/ etc), they highlight what they want + maybe what your data says would help them stand out for the "type" of dev they are.

- force companies to pay you $xk - $1xk to hire them right away if they "match" with someone they select, but with the ability to get a refund if they fire them within 3 months (but like 60 business days to get a refund, and allow them to keep picking but reset the window if they match with someone else again).

- keep in touch with those employees during that window

That way, companies will eventually get their money if they make a bad hire and still be willing to use you again, you can collect more data on the larger part of the employment life cycle and basically get 60 day interest free loans at worst.

Why not just offer junior engineers for free? If companies don't want to pay you for junior engineers, they're not going to suddenly start caring when you're giving them 10 instead of 1. If they're paying you for seniors just let them pay you for seniors.

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