Show HN: Our alternative to recruiter spam
Hi HN. We were tired of recruiters so we built this because it was something we wish existed. We had "satisfying" jobs and liked who we worked with but we were not naive and knew there could be a better job out there. Either building a product more aligned with our personal interests, making more doing something we enjoyed even more, or work with a team that challenged us further. It was too time consuming to actively look for jobs and the thought of dealing with incompetent recruiters turned us off so we built Pitchbox. We link to think of it as a talent agency for developers so only personally relevant jobs are pitched to you... think of it as "Here's what I'm looking for, if you can provide it then let's talk"
Is this something that you want?
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.
Sorry, but what part of 'Stay anonymous ... 100% Private & confidential - Learn your market value without your current employer ever knowing' involves me giving you my name, current employer, current title, and email address in step 2? That's just down-right cognitive dissonance. The landing page doesn't give me enough assurance, but to get any more details, I have to click through. Or do you expect a curious candidate to read the two pages of legalese (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy)? Not saying we wouldn't, but that's sort of a slow, boring sell.
Our solution to recruiter spam:
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.)
As a developer, I love the concept - obviously, a tool that filters for great jobs and pitches them to developers is really appealing. However I'm curious about a few things:
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!
Aw man, am I the only one who doesn't have this terrible problem of everyone wanting to offer them a job?
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.
The salary ranges seem very high from my experience. I've been developing for a few years, and I know a handful of excellent developers working for big-name companies...and I know they're not making the numbers listed here.
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?
Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site.
I'd prefer it if I could see the possible "goals" before entering my contact information. At the moment it is the usual: no information before signup. (I didn't proceed past the contact information tab, so can't comment further).
Just went through the signup process. There should be a textbox for those of us who don't maintain great github profiles to say a few words about ourselves.
I think the signup flow could use more handholding as far as telling the prospective developer why you need the information you are asking for and what you plan to do with it (i.e. how it will help you find them a good opportunity).
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.
Looks pretty sweet. It's been a few years since I've done the job-search thing, but this looks like what I'd want to use.
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...
Seems like a great idea. I recommend making the "what do you want to do" a bit more explicit (e.g., more multiple choice, asking me to give examples of jobs I'd leave my current position for, etc). When I completed this, I wasn't sure how you'd know what my "dream job" was. I know you're probably trying to keep it short, but I think I'd be more of a believer that this was going to yield good results if I were asking for slightly more info.
I made a collaborative Gmail filter up on GitHub. I no longer get any recruiter spam at all.
A little sketched out about putting my real name on here.. how do I know my current employer won't see it?
I used to run a software developer job board startup for several years and I came the the conclusion that what the market needs is a better way of reaching passive job seekers.
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!)
I think this is much needed service. However, I did not see anywhere mentioned - how long I might have to wait after I said I am interested in, lets say $100+ job. What I am asking is how exactly does your process-timeline work? (i.e. Roughly how long do I might need to wait? Is there some sort of strategy/rational that helps me set some realisting timeline expectations?
Recommendation: go niche if you have trouble building a critical mass of employers and prospective employees. Be known as the "go to" place for getting jobs in obscure but important technology/programming language <X> (for example). Brand appropriately, and manually reach out to companies and developers that use those technologies and try to kickstart the process. Get on the first page for "X jobs" in google. Then build out from there.
I applied, it will be interesting to see what kind of jobs you have in mind. Although one way to improve is to be able to tell you where I would be willing to relocate. Id love Seattle for instance, but wouldn't consider a job in Colorado or Austin. Other than that, it is a very cool service and look forward to finding out what you find for me.
Nice and interesting idea!
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.
One item to pay attention to is location. If someone currently works in San Francisco and choose to remain there, will a Palo Alto company be able to contact them? Is there a default radius?
Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice.
For me I would do it if the salary field was optional, I think the employer should decide what value to place on a specific candidate based on his or her past experience.
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.
I noticed you guys used the same form UI as Barack Obama's donation page. I like it!
Have you considered adding StackOverflow as one of your "Resume" links? That's, personally, where I keep my most up-to-date information. And now I think it's time to update that information.
Maybe my liberal arts major is showing, but I keep reading your URL as 'triptych box'.
I understand you're trying to create an alternative to spam from say Linkedin, but that really is what I use for my resume these days. Can I use that for my "application"
$25k is ridiculous, unless you make some guarantees, which you don't seem to do (wouldn't know, there's no relevant info for employers without signing up).
I can't fill out the form as I have two major problems. I am legally entitled to work in the USA, but only for my current employer. - there is no option for this. The salary I expect depends on the type of job and total compensation (equity) - there is no way to specify this.
Good idea. Does that Cinema Display on their homepage also look odd to anyone else? https://d2221r371oqwhn.cloudfront.net/assets/feature-image-b...
Quick design comment: I like the clean look, but I find the home page a bit long (i.e., a lot of scrolling is required), even if that's the style these days. Best wishes with your project. I look forward to updates. Cheers.
I submitted my information; it doesn't hurt to give it a try. I live in the Philadelphia area, but I'm open to relocating if the position is right, so a service such as this may be able to work for me. I'll have to see.
I stopped at entering my name, company and position. Why can't I try this out anonymously? The stakes are too high for most people to willy nilly add their personal info to a conduit for recruiters.
Do a lot of people click the lower "what do you want to make?" options?
Nice and clean/simple. Also great use of filepicker, just joined!
I'm curious: in
"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?
Re: Your overboard filepicker thing on the last page, if it's blocked by noscript, enabling causes a total back-to-step-1-hassle for the user.
This reminds me a lot of Developer Auction (http://www.developerauction.com/).
I don't know why but the font on your website appears as times new roman. I'm on Mac OSX, Firefox 12.0. On Chrome looks ok.
Can we make changes? I have submitted, but would like to amend my resume to include some of my relevant side projects.
Just a small ui thing. When the info icon is clicked the layout flicks everytime. Can get annoying for some people.
Is it US only? How about telecommuting?
Awesome, any plans for designers?
I didn't realise it was a requirement of a dream job to be earning over $80k a year...
I may have missed it on a quick glance, but how does this stop recruiter spam?
It reminds me of jobdreaming.com
Nice site. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem; have you thought about an "allocate <number> points" solution? I've had the thought that an "allocate 20 points" resume / requirements list might be superior to the traditional, cluttered approach. ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-m... )
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