Show HN: Candix, a confidential, reverse recruiting platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Candix, a confidential, reverse recruiting platform

candix.com

63 pointstavoyne47 comments

It's a site where you describe your ideal next job and get approached by top-paying startups. It’s confidential, ensuring that your current employer won’t find out.

It's free for candidates, while we charge companies for access to the pool. They’re charged a subscription fee, not a traditional success fee, because it’s the only way to remain forever candidate-centric and not obsessed with placing profiles at any cost, like agencies are.

I'm opposed to the AI trends in recruitment. Recruitment is opaque and needs more humanity in the process, not less. Consequently, we're stubborn about keeping humans involved at every level, from onboarding to support. This results in high operational costs, which we are working hard to streamline.

Confidentiality is what truly sets Candix apart. It's a tricky concept in recruitment, though, as it needs to be balanced with recruiters' need to know about your background to make hiring decisions. Our approach is to protect access to the pool with NDAs and limit profile visibility to relevant companies only. Additionally, we limit points of access to one per company and thoroughly monitor all recruiter activity on the site to prevent any leakage.

For those who are not open to receiving offers, one interesting feature is the option to mark your profile as unavailable. Interested companies won’t reach out, but they will be able to place an alert on your profile to be notified when this changes, effectively boosting your future search.

We operate in the US and European markets, helping people connect with over seventy companies, such as OpenAI and Ramp.

What do you think about the tool and its positioning?

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Saw this after opening my 12th "we regret to inform you". This seems like a solid alternative, considering recruiters won't even open up your resume anymore before running it through a machine.

I think all these "we regret to inform you" could be avoided. It has always felt weird to me that the burden of the search is on the candidates, although recruiters are doing the picking. It’s more efficient and less painful to just let people express their preferences and be applied to.

But that would give employers the uncomfortable feeling that employees have some power.

They prefer the illusion that their corporation is so desirable that everyone they could possibly want to hire is actively begging to be considered.

I've never really come across this kind of reasoning in practice, though. Companies that want the best candidates are more often than not keen to put in the work to get them.

I don't like that the homepage says "free, free, free", then reveals that it's charging recruiters. This is perfectly reasonable way to monetise, but it's not a free platform - it's a platform that charges the recruiters.

To be fair, there is a "For Talents" and "For Recruiters" selector at the top of the page. For talents, it is a free platform.

That's because it's the most accurate way to phrase it for candidates. We also state clearly in the FAQ on the front page how we make money.

Sounds mostly like a regular job board, except the hard work of describing the job/vacancy is left to the candidate rather than the employer.

I somewhat dislike the idea that you're still essentially stuck with the recruiter in the middle. And I fear that like any other directory it quickly turns into a spam platform. Candidates bugged by unwanted phone calls, startups digging through piles of recommendations...

Have you checked the onboarding? It only asks for your preferences (specifically, type of contract, availability, salary, and location), not for a description of the job or vacancy.

When you try to sign in with LinkedIn it asks permissions to:

> Create, modify, and delete posts, comments, and reactions on your behalf

Why?

The LinkedIn API, weirdly, requires that scope in order to retrieve the profile image. We won't, of course, post anything or act in any way on your behalf. I'm actively trying to find a way around requiring that scope

Is it that important to automatically retrieve the profile picture, can't you ask the user to upload one?

No, you're right. It's in the roadmap to add that image picker.

I would just not extract the profile picture in that case. It doesn't take any time to upload one, it's ok and better than asking so many permissions.

What is the point of using linkedin if you're going to make me retype in all my work experience and education?

Date picker is bugged, Aug 2018 converts to Jul 2018

Funny that you have some R1 universities but not others

Estimated pay needs to be a range, if i need to relocate to NYC then the pay needs to be a lot higher than if its remote

Fair point. LinkedIn doesn't let you access users' experiences, but we're about to add an option for scraping them.

> Date picker is bugged, Aug 2018 converts to Jul 2018

Yeah, my bad. We identified the pb and are fixing it.

I created a profile all the same, I don't have high expectations, but that's the good thing right? 15 minutes out of my day to dump my profile on your website with information that was public anyway. Maybe something comes of it maybe it doesn't. As long as I'm not getting spammed by you in my email it'll have been a good balance between risk and pay off.

> 15 minutes out of my day to dump my profile on your website with information that was public anyway.

Yeah, I agree it's not ideal.

> As long as I'm not getting spammed by you [...]

No, we don't spam. No marketing emails of any sort. Only thing we ask is that you confirm monthly that your profile is still valid. It's one click from the email. You can opt out with one click too.

> [...] good balance between risk and payoff.

That's the idea. Once your profile is set up, there is nothing else you need to do. For many people on Candix, those few minutes spent on onboarding have well converted.

> Funny that you have some R1 universities but not others

We don't do that on purpose. After you submit your profile, we sync the orgs with LinkedIn if they're missing. If you come back in a while they'll all be synced.

Would be cool to load the profile in near real time. It's not terribly difficult. Give folk a spinny-page while it loads? Timeout after 8s?

Was it that slow? I think the DB got overwhelmed yesterday due to traffic.

I like the inversion of the problem.

I think from the hiring side it would be awesome to just search for ideal candidates.

By way of example, UpWork gives some filtering options but seems limited to keyword matching.

I'd thought about building something in this direction; never had time. One thing I think would be useful is more depth on the profile. Like pre-answer a bunch of typical interview questions. A 60s video highlight. Perhaps some skills assessment too (UpWork is NOT good at that).

I think the billing has good alignment. On they but side I would not be an ongoing buyer. My hires are intermittent. Like one a quarter. Would I buys months till I find or maybe a flat OTC search till hired? Or N connects?

Fair point. I don't think it's a big deal if early-stage companies turn their subscriptions on and off over time. That said, later-stage startups and larger companies tend to have ongoing needs.

For simplicity, and because our model doesn't rely on it, we don't track hires. I'm not a fan of credit-based pricing, as it tends to create friction in usage.

I filled out a profile to 80%, hit back accidentally (Safari keyboard shortcuts for back/forwards are apparently the same as default macOS beginning/end of line text editing shortcuts? And a textfield I thought had focus didnt'? Not 100% sure.), and found the entire form empty again. If there ever is a place where state saving using sth like sessionStorage is vital, it's such long-form forms.

Agreed. We've just added that to our roadmap—thanks!

This is really cool! The opposition of the AI hype, in this particular market, is something I strongly approve of. I guess most of us on HN have dealt with the unpleasant landscape of IT recruiting at some point, and hearing that such new approaches are being tried is a breath of fresh air.

What is gold for me is the business model that doesn't charge end-users, although I can imagine this might become problematic when the pendulum of the IT field's supply and demand for experience swings back.

I also like that the form doesn't ask for a PDF resume, meaning no more marketing and social engineering work for the ever-decreasing attention span of recruiters and ever-increasing automation in resume screenings. Further kudos for the straightforward interface and main form of the website.

Question though: how do you plan to combat spam applications? It doesn't seem that difficult to be _completely_ dishonest in one's application, which granted, will be detected in later screenings, but will probably shadow honest profiles.

Feature proposal: integration with major competition platforms to import one's stats (think Codeforces, LeetCode, HackTheBox, etc).

I hope this takes off well!

Preventing fake profiles is indeed challenging. We manually review every profile to ensure they are legitimate. We also offer everyone who signs up the opportunity to participate in a quick, optional interview (10-15 minutes). This allows us to refine the profile data with the individual and add a summary. We also use this to mark profiles as "verified," which ultimately makes them rank significantly higher. However, that approach is far from perfect. We need to add proper verification, but I’d hate to have something like LinkedIn, scanning your ID and all. Maybe we could integrate with an IdP that performs this check in a privacy-friendly way.

> integration with major competition platforms to import one's stats

That's an awesome idea. The tricky part is making sure candidates truly own these accounts.

Thanks for your encouragements!!

> The tricky part is making sure candidates truly own these accounts.

Not sure about LeetCode and HackTheBox, but Codeforces' email account is public if I'm not mistaken. It also has an inbox feature, so you can perform some sort of email-like verification.

I tried creating a profile by logging in through LinkedIn.

I successfully logged in (twice), but at the end received an error: <my email> is not allowed to access this application.

I like the idea, will probably create a profile the old-fashioned way.

Update: definitely not a fan of the date picker. Extremely tedious to click my way back through the years.

Update^2: and the date picker keeps converting a selection of January 2013 to December 2012.

Weird... Can you send me your email at theophile@candix.com so I can check what happened?

Sent an email. I use 33mail.com for my LinkedIn address, might have something to do with it.

Yes, that's the reason. The auth provider (Clerk) marks it as disposable and won't accept it. I'll see if there's a way around it.

Es macht nichts. I've created a profile without it.

Seriously, though, please allow candidates to simply type in the dates. Entering dates for 8 jobs over 30 years was almost enough to make me abandon the effort.

Or default to the last year the user entered, at least.

Fair enough. It actually defaults to a text input expecting a YYYY-MM date if you disable JavaScript, so it shouldn't take long to implement.

I've just identified what's causing the date discrepancy. Will fix it now

The confidentiality angle is interesting but risky. Have you given any thought to what you will do after being hacked and data is dumped?

Why would I, as an employer, pay extra money for an undifferentiated pool of job candidates in a market where there is already an oversupply?

Employers pay because it's not undifferentiated. It's confidential, and as such, it attracts passive candidates, which no other hiring platform apart from LinkedIn has managed to attract. Additionally, there is no oversupply of good candidates in tech, which is why recruiting spending is so high: it is costly to find them.

> It's confidential, and as such, it attracts passive candidates

The cold start problem is really tough. Overcoming it will require things that are orthogonal to site design and business model design.

Actively and cleverly priming the pump on one side or both.

That's absolutely right. The problem can be mitigated by focusing on specific roles and locations, though. You don't need that many candidates if your client only hires SWEs in SF. Our approach is to capture a maximum number of companies per vertical before expanding.

This new look on websites is so common amongst new projects being launched. I love it.

What CSS framework is used to create this type of UI?

You mean the app or the landing? The landing has been designed by a professional designer, and the app is heavily shadcn-inspired (shadcn.com).

I meant the landing page.

Thanks for the recommendations.

The landing page is inspired by Linear and Apple, which are indeed very common sources of inspiration, especially for dev tools

Thanks. What do u mean by "Linear"?

https://linear.app/

Thanks so much again!

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