Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam
trypitchbox.com
trypitchbox.com
Is this something that you want?
EDIT: And your site is amazingly simple yet elegant! Keep it up guys :)
It is free for the developer. Even though it is different, we found it easiest when employers pay us similar to how they pay contingency recruiters, placement fees. Typically recruiters charge 25-35% of your first year salary, we charge a flat 25K fee to the employer that hires you. We also have a unique offering for startups where they can amortize the payments over 12 months. This pricing structure means more interesting companies can afford to be on our platform and therefore more interesting opportunities for developers.
I don't think most developers realize how much recruiters are getting paid for placements. 25% is pretty standard across US, we're less then that with our flat rate.
Where I live (Ohio) that's 50% of the salary of a developer with 5 years of experience.
This is why we built this product - assuming you are even remotely decent at programming and write code in modern languages, a dev with 5 years of exp can easily be making more then 80K+.
We have several companies right now that are hiring and paying more then that for roles where the developer can telecommute 100% from anywhere in the country. Not only do they pay well but they have really awesome teams.
Fair comment however your flat fee equates to 25% of a $100k role. It doesn't become a viable economic alternative for employers until you reach the $150k mark. If your primary target is CTO level roles then great, otherwise your fee is ridiculous.
Are you assuming west-coast? Generally speaking, "easily" sounds like a stretch to me.
Also for a 80K salary, 25K is just too steep, given that we do not know how your screening process works.
Exactly. We couldn't agree more and that seems to be the majority of Pitchbox members. It's more of passive tool..."here are some things I'm looking for, don't contact me until you find it, in the meantime I'll enjoy what I'm currently working on."
Being contingency based, there is no cost to anyone until everyone is happy.
What's your experience or background with finding jobs for other people? What you have is an idealistic approach to recruiting, which is great, but may not that easy to pull off, if possible at all. There are not just spammy recruiters, but also b/s applicants either with bloated self assessment, unrealistic expectations or just simply unpleasant and unprofessional people to deal with. What's your plan for handling such people? After all, the pool of sensible skilled developers with honest resumes and reasonable expectations is very limited. If you ever put a developer job positing out there, you probably saw that 95% of all inbound applications are worthy only of going straight to the shredder.
(edit) Not to put you down by any means. I would love to see this work, I'm just having trouble seeing how it would.
Kudos particularly on your landing page design. Very clean and easy to parse mentally. The long-form is beautifully done.
Have you considered that some of us LIKE working in an office?
Not that I would be opposed to the option of course.
In my case, I prefer to not get in the way of my enemy while he's making mistakes.
If I'd bothered to sign up after reading "It's free to get started" then learned later about the hefty fee, I'd be disappointed at best. Since I didn't sign up, I don't know how much bait there is before the switch, but if you talk about the fee right away after the signup I guess it's sort of okay, since you didn't waste much of my time but you did receive my contact information under false pretenses.
I'll be interested to see how many takers you get at that fee level.
After looking at the dismal state of recruiting and the enormous typical placement fees that well exceed $25K on avg across the US for developer positions, we feel our pricing is comparatively low and the experience and results, superior.
We found that matchmaking developers and companies may seem like simple quick transactions, and many recruiters treat it that way, but the reality is it is a time intensive process to do it right.
(EDIT: typo)
Did you mean overhead?
Moreover, it seems like you don't validate your form input at all. (Sorry about the entry. My email address is not really aa.)
For email addresses, most deviations from a simple pattern are mistakes.
Absolutely no placement fees, no BS, give us a try :)
www.hackerx.org
1) It implies that their offering is heavily productized. To a hiring company, this implies that quality will be high because they have found a way to scale a solution such that improvements benefit every customer.
2) $25k signals a bias towards higher salaries, where this number can be expected to be below typical recruiter prices. It has the same effect as theladders.com's "$100k+ jobs only" policy, but acts as a natural consequence of economic interest, instead of a gimmicky status ploy.
A recruiter that has lots of 150k people on their books can signal that by charging 25% of a 150k salary rather than 25% of a 50k salary. Then people who want 150k people will hopefully come to them.
You can see this if you speak to different recruiters when hiring people, they charge different rates depending on what market segment they target.
It would be just to hard to send you personally relevant pitches without a little background information to incorporate in our matchmaking.
Your TOS states: "For example, we ask visitors who sign up for a wall at trypitchbox.com to provide a username, email address, location and links to their GitHub, Twitter, and StackOverflow accounts." Since Appdillo owns coderwall and PitchBox, and coderwall already has a lot of information about developers, is there any manual or automated privacy bleedthrough?
It'd give me much more confidence in your site, and other recruiting sites as well, if you outlined exactly how my info was presented to interesting parties, and how those parties were selected.
Become a recruiter.
I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.)
I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into.
What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-)
I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.)
* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.
* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.
* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.
* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.
* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.
(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)
Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something?
Or maybe the company name (or contact details) is NOT part of what they will expose to the candidate.
That said, you are contacting a select pool of self-identified candidates about a select pool of jobs after matching them through some algorithm or criteria. Then you charge a fee to the hiring firm which is probably only competitive in NY and Silicon Valley.
Engineers that are contacted by recruiters through other social media sites only consider it 'spam' when it's a job they don't want to hear about. If your system selects a candidate to share a job with, and the candidate is not interested, then the contact is pretty much the same as spam.
I have a pool of candidates that tell me what kinds of jobs they are seeking, their criteria, how active their search is, etc and I contact them accordingly. If they aren't interested, hopefully they don't feel it is spam, but it is just as invaluable.
The recruiter/engineer relationship is broken and hopefully good recruiters and entrepreneurs are able to think of some better ideas. This has potential, but for the price I'm not so sure.
I didn't see in the thread - one advantage for candidates in using a recruiter is being a buffer in negotiations, a guide, and coaching for interviews. An upside for companies that use recruiters is the negotiation help (at times) and closing deals that might not close without an intermediary. Does your service provide these additional perks to companies and to candidates?
1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
Thanks!
It is a combination of all of the above. All companies are screened so we know what makes them unique and what type of developers excel there. We do the same for the developers. Everyone is happy only when we make appropriate matches...since we are developers, we think we can do this better then anyone else.
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
Yes, right now we pick that up from your goals and by looking at your background. At times we may reach out for more information so we can understand your unique situation.
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
You can supply your GitHub profile and/or Resume...ideally both. We'll look at improving the sign up process though. We just wanted to make it super simple and easy for developers to start.
I'm sure I'm not doing 100% of what's possible to be able to sit back and pick and choose whether I want the 150k job or the 180k job, but almost all of these "recruiters suck" posts apply to a small minority of people, those near the top of their profession.
Maybe I need a "Do you make shitty weekend projects that end up going nowhere? Let us know" site.
It really gives me even more reason to hate the recruiting spam - when I'm called "Mr." or when they tell me that "We're looking for a couple of great dudes like you!"
Maybe it's just the information we put online, or maybe it's just the business, but I don't think it's a minority who have bad experiences with recruiters. I'd actually be really interested in hearing peoples' positive experiences, as they seem to be a very rare thing. I'm not trying to be cynical, this has just been my experience, enforced by just about every other developer I've talked to.
I want to believe $180k is doable for a software engineer, but I've yet to meet a salaried programmer over $110k. Am I keeping the wrong company?
I should note I don't live in a major city, but even amongst devs I know in San Francisco, $180k would be very high. It seems most of the programmer salary estimates I see online are similar. Are these numbers real? Or are the numbers I see coming from software fantasy land?
I ask because there are plenty of companies hiring at sub-$70k salaries and they're having no trouble filling their positions with decent programmers. Are the programmers I know selling themselves short, or is $140k for extraordinarily experienced and talented programmers only?
Are the people you know working in startups where part of their compensation comes in equity, or the prestige of working at a well-known "great" place?
But it's not a free lunch: cost of living is high here and some things like commuting are terrible. I know developers who moved back to Minnesota so they could waste less of their lives in their cars.
Hence the appeal of "work from Ohio". 100% remote seems to be an ever more realistic option, but I expect it's still harder to find work, although work is so easy to find this may not matter much. A bigger issue may be finding a 100% remote job at a company with a remote culture. Working remotely with a company whose culture is centred around an office can be an exercise in a thousand little tediums.
The different social dynamics of working remotely can be a challenge as well.
I feel as though my post reads a bit like "don't try to work for an SF company", but that's not really my intent. I mean more to convey that the pitchbox salaries are perfectly real, but it's not too good to be true. Moving to SF to work, or working remotely are options, but salary isn't everything and these choices won't be right for everyone.
Some of my disconnect may be due to where I live. My peers may also be relatively inexperienced, so maybe these salaries aren't nuts. I just wish I knew these numbers before I took my last couple of jobs!
It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting.
I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.
Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.
I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.
Just make the applicant choose a charity. (Have a list to choose from, and allow them to add one for themselves, too.)
It would be interesting if you could find an appropriate way to explain that to users; perhaps with a reference to http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/?
That being said we have also seen an overwhelming response from those that don't write code. We are figuring out how to expand the product.
As an example, I got as far as the second part of the form where I am asked for my name, current company, location and title, and became hesitant because I have zero idea what you are going to use this information for specifically.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Feynman's pickup technique [0] - why waste your time with the whole song-and-dance routine if what you want was never on offer to begin with?
Anyway, good luck!
[0] http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynm...
While I think this approach is along the right lines, the big problem is that it's incredibly hard to get passive job seekers to sign-up, so mostly you'll get active job seekers signing up and then you'll essentially just be another curated job board / CV database.
I think your key to success will be if you can figure out someway of getting lots of passive job seekers to signup.
Personally if I was doing it I'd go the route of making hyper-targetted mailing lists. So like a reverse groupon catering to specific niches. So have one for developer evangelists, one for flash games developers, etc. with the idea being that the niches are specific enough that people want to be on the list not because they're job hunting but because they want to keep their finger on the pulse of their niche.
(feel free to email me if you want to talk more about the developer recruitment space; I've spent a lot of time thinking about it!)
If you want people to do something there is way that often, but not always, works: pay them.
Why not share the fee you charge the companies with the people on the list? Obviously there are issues to be worked out to stop people from gaming the system, they need to be legitimate candidates, but I'm suspect there is a way. Basically it's the same as cashback on credit cards - they charge the merchant and share some of that with the consumer.
Just some food for thought
Someone might happily sign-up to a mailing list for interesting jobs based on the inherent incentive, but offer that person $10 to do the same and they'll think "my time is worth more than $10" and just walk away.
You'll almost certainly better off just putting that same amount of money into traditional marketing channels.
Out of curiosity, are you also working on Coderwall?
Your email ( from your HN profile) matches the twitter username of a Coderwall founder.
In your privacy page, you have "Appdillo, Inc. [..] provides this Privacy Policy" and the domain http://www.appdillo.com has a coderwall email address in it.
Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice.
Companies who can afford to pay for someone with an expansive background will do so, but certain candidates might also be more interested in working with local startups who don't have Silicon Valley or NYC budgets, but allow for more flexible positions (i.e. Telework, like others have mentioned).
Not to mention certain people thrive in a small team environment versus a large corporate culture, and there's a chance to get meaningful equity to build something new and exciting.
We match jobs to your goals AND to your relevant experience, if we didn't collect information about who you are we couldn't accurately do our part.
"Every pitch received improves our personalized matching algorithm, making pitches get even better over time."
how would you distinguish a "good" pitch from a "bad" one?
We feel compensation is very important but so are the problems you'll be working on, who you'll be working with, and the culture fit.
Right now we are only hiring for US companies and a few in London.