Show HN: Mighty Spring – Passive job search
mightyspring.com
mightyspring.com
The pay per interview rates seem much more sensible, but that's a model that might be seen as high-risk, particularly if there is no pre-vetting of candidates. That's not something the site mentions at all in either the employer or candidate FAQ, but is a pretty important part of the recruitment agency model.
Also, I'm in the UK and the site seems pretty US-centric with no information about which regions are targeted or even supported. It should really be stated pretty clearly up-front - is the focus just on Silicon Valley, or startups anywhere in the world?
All of this said, we hope to not be in the contingency recruiting business forever. We feel that there is a friendlier fee structure to implement (with better incentives for companies and candidates alike), which we will do as our marketplace grows.
RE: UK jobs, most of the companies who have signed up are in the Bay Area and NYC right now, but there are no strict limitations to prevent UK companies from participating. We do have candidates in the UK that have signed up, FYI.
If you are not getting enough traffic in a particular area, it can be worthwhile to close it down completely - preferably temporarily - and then come back to it with a targeted launch at some future time once the core regions are self-sustaining.
So for instance, you could organise some UK-centric marketing, with some PPC, etc., and maybe go speak at some UK events or something around the same time. This will hopefully get you a critical mass of interest in a short period of time, while in the meantime you get to focus on your core demographic.
Otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of time on stuff that isn't working for anyone - if you don't have enough candidates and recruiters in the same place at the same time, those people are potentially just going to go away with a bad impression of the service, so in the long run you actually lose potential clients.
If you can get that same number of people onto the site in a month instead of over the course of a year, it'll work out much better. If you leave it entirely to organic growth, that probably won't happen.
+44 (0) 111 1111 111
I had to enter 1111111111 to get past the validation.
I do trust your good intentions! I don't think your goal in business is to get full access to all of my clients' repos for nefarious purposes. Nonetheless, legally that's not a judgement call I'm allowed to make.
I'm sure their A/B metrics were better by waiting until the end for that distracting information.
Again, that was a different site. That's probably unfair for this site. It's just that I anticipate having my time wasted now.
EDIT I just tried to upload my .rtf resume and it said it wasn't an acceptable format. "Word, PDF, text, and HTML only."
Thanks for the feedback!
Note that we also offer the ability to connect to what is already publicly visible via GitHub if you don't want to grant us full access.
I don't think this is true, and if it is, it shouldn't be. I certainly wouldn't care if a candidate didn't have anything to share on GitHub.
Your reasoning makes sense, and it's perfectly fine to do it the way you are. I think people like me are just pointing out that this makes us self-exclude ourselves from the site, in case you wanted us.
Edit: As a follow-up, how do I remove a github reference once it was set up? I couldn't find it in the update options :)
As for removing GitHub, that's a good catch. We should provide a way for the user to _detach_ their accounts as well as indicate that they don't have said accounts.
Thanks for the feedback!
It probably doesn't help that GitHub's OAuth scopes seem to be rather shotgun: https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes . It seems you can't just ask for read-only access to, say, a list of commit hashes that would prove you've been working on a project without disclosing what you've actually been doing.
Still, I think that button's deserving of a red flashing "only click this if you're sure you won't be fired and sued into bankruptcy" banner.
Candidate affordances let you indicate a willingness to work remotely, and a requirement for remote work only. If your skill set and desires don't overlap, we won't recommend you a remote-only job just because it is remote.
The company browser could do with some work - it's very bare bones for now (But it looks like you're aware of this).
Also, I'll second robert_tweed - this appears very US centric. You should either state clearly that you are US only, for the time being, or you should make it a bit more international. Technically it's probably small changes, but right now it gives an unwelcoming impression for me.
$600?
We are automagically matching new signups to our own open positions to both dogfood our product and give users a sense of how the job match process works when they don't have good organic matches.
Sorry if this was confusing.
Unlike those sites, your information is private on Mighty Spring, so as an employed person you can be more transparent about your search criteria.
Also, hopefully, a much more enjoyable UX :)
Props, guys and gals.
The team however was friendly and very responsive to feedback.
Very well executed indeed. Kudos to the team.
While we're still early-stage and in beta, our candidate and employer base is growing significantly on a weekly basis as well. As a marketplace, this is obviously key to driving more interviews/hires.
My impression is that it's fairly keyword-driven. You're told things like how you're 86% compatible for some job, and maybe you could bump that up to 88% by remembering that you have expertise in another couple technologies, etc.
I didn't end up closing a job through MightySpring, but I like their approach and wish them well.
On the front end, I rolled my own custom framework. I use Handlebars for templating and various mini-libraries for some functionality (shout out to Modernizr, Isotope, and Bespoke :) in addition to jQuery. For CSS I use Compass/SASS. I actually wrote a blog post about it (http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/58803131171/purposefully-a...)
I think that covers it!