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Comment by DavidAdams | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently hiring developers, and I also hate recruiters, for the reasons you outline. I was interested to learn about your flat $25K fee in the comments here, and I can tell you that I'd be unlikely to pay it. I have other ways to find developers that aren't so expensive.

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.

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Hey @DavidAdams, Our intentions are not to bait and switch and so far responses have been very positive. I believe most developers share your surprise when they hear about the overhead to hiring, I did. I appreciate that using outside help to build a team is not right for every stage company.

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)

>the overheard to hiring

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.)

Validating email addresses via anything but verification links are a road to hell.

True, but it's not a bad idea to check for an @ in the string as a sanity check, in case the user has accidentally put their username/password/other in the field.

Why? Just restrict your validation in the UI to a warning.

For email addresses, most deviations from a simple pattern are mistakes.

I think that the $25k flat fee is very well done. It sends the right signals, and incentivizes companies in the right ways.

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.

I think these things are beside the point. People are not products, and thus aren't subject to appeal through opulence. It is conceivable that one would buy a product simply because it is expensive in order to distinguish themselves or satisfy some arbitrary desire to have expensive things, or because they view cost as a factor in "quality." People, on the other hand, are more akin to machines in that their only value to a company is through the utility they provide, and thus money spent on hiring should be minimized so that its returned value can be maximized. The fact that expensive things are alluring doesn't work with exclusively utilitarian commodity goods, like labor. So the fact that the service is expensive won't make it any more appealing to employers. (Or, it might. I don't know what goes through the heads of recruiters. But, a rational actor in their position wouldn't draw your conclusion.) Companies are trying to maximize value, which means minimizing the cost of labor. This includes both the money they pay to their labor and the money they pay for their labor.

Companies are not trying to minimize the cost of labour, they're trying to maximize the return they get on what they pay for labour. So they might decide to get someone for 150k rather than someone for 50k because they think they can get more than triple the value from the 150k guy.

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.

We just launched HackerX, where we bring 50 great developers and put them in a room with 15 awesome companies.

Absolutely no placement fees, no BS, give us a try :)

www.hackerx.org

This is tangential, but I'm curious about your partner "startups." Most of the listed companies are established, monolithic organizations that are notorious for onerous and extensive interviewing processes. Do these companies employ different practices in your "speed dating" environment? If so, why? If not, how does this service offer distinct functionality beyond an exclusionary set of abbreviated interviews, which would conceivably be less appealing to both parties?

I'll second this. The HackerX pitch is "Where developers meet startups" but all the partner companies shown in the logo section (namely eBay, Amazon, Groupon, Google, Disney, YouTube, Quora) are very much established companies, not startups.

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