In this case, I know that Diane Greene advocated for her team to have the opportunity to launch their product, which they had been developing in stealth from 2012-2016.
I haven't worked there for some time now, but Google has historically supported teams in launching into the market through experiments, labs, new product launches, etc. However, Google's current scale makes it very difficult for a new product to be worth improving and maintaining. They must make billions in revenue directly or indirectly to show up in a meaningful way. In most cases, products are given a few years, tested for impact, and ultimately the most likely outcome is that a product will fail when that is the bar. It is not entirely different from the reality of a startup—the majority of startups don't last either.
Lever charges on company employee size as well! You can have as many job postings as makes most sense for your talent marketing / candidate experience.
Lever's G Suite integration for both calendaring and email is quite extensive. In addition, we have a feature called Easy Book that enables candidates to book their own interview times, especially useful for phone screens. Here's more with some screenshots: https://help.lever.co/hc/en-us/articles/360025622851-How-to-...
I'm the founder and CTO of Lever (https://www.lever.co), a similar product and part of YC S12. I recommend you check us out!
I was also a PM at Google from 2007-2011. A big part of why I left and founded Lever is that I'm super passionate about enterprise software, and vertical enterprise software (even in huge markets) isn't aligned well with Google's core business.
Hey houshuang! Thanks for mentioning this. I do think that replay and the potential to invert operations (including some operations and not others) is a very interesting feature of OT and we use it at Lever quite often. It is incredibly useful when doing enterprise customer support in addition to something that you can build user-facing features around.
Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me (https://github.com/nateps). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.
Thanks, Eric for writing this fantastic overview! It covers why we have made some key technology choices, both building off well established technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and AWS as well as some areas in which we've made outside of the box choices. It's been a fun adventure!
I think that this particular and special combination of leveraging open source and finding ways we can innovate technically makes being an engineer at Lever a fun and exciting challenge. I also think it comes through in our product, which stands out in a software category with many choices, but few of them innovative.
So much to do! We believe that talent acquisition is the most important thing that each company needs to master in order to be successful at its core purpose. This might sound obvious now, but it is pretty new! Thus, most companies are still figuring a lot out when it comes to recruiting.
I'm sure we have a lot to learn as well, and what we've learned so far is years in the making. Lever Nurture (https://www.lever.co/nurture) is our most innovative product to date, which we released a bit less than a year ago. There is a lot more we can do to make this new product even better, and we have some other tricks up our sleeves. :-)
Yes, I think both scenarios you outlined are what the companies that are most successful in the changing world of employment will do. They will both get to know people far in advance so that when the timing is right, they are able to get the best of both worlds—highly qualified talent when needed.
In addition, companies will look ahead to anticipate which talent might be a strong fit in the future and keep tabs on them as they develop in their careers. I think the honest truth as to why it is not happening more today is that it is so difficult! One part of the solution is building software that has this model for hiring as key part of it works, and that is Lever's focus.
Thanks for asking such a great question and offering your commentary as well!
Yes! This does in fact turn hiring on its head. Our vision for Lever is "Connect human potential to meaningful work." What we mean by that is that if we are able to help organize talent a bit better so that human potential is realized and the most meaningful work is done by talent that is the best fit for it, the world will collectively produce more value and people will be have a better experience of work itself.
Already, Lever believes that the talent acquisition is everyone in the company's job. This idea will become even more mainstream. While recruiters are only getting more valuable as hiring becomes more important, everyone in the company will think of the suite of hiring products as part of the tools that they use to do their job, not as the recruiting team's tool. Just like every knowledge worker in a company thinks of email or calendar as a tool to help them do their job, we believe hiring will be so much a part of everyone's job that they think Lever is a tool for them.
As well, we predict that 5 years from now, every company will be developing long standing relationships with potential, current, and future employees at scale. Talent acquisition will be about predicting attrition and strategically modeling future hiring for a company, anticipating pipeline development well in advance. There is a great model for this—sales is a function that has mastered this already. It will be a revolution in the strategic importance of talent acquisition into a key operational function at every company.
Here’s a text description of the GIF, for anyone who relies entirely on a screen reader (compared to using it together with a magnifier).
A user has www.lever.co open in Safari, with the VoiceOver narration popup open at the bottom. They type jobs.lever.co/lever into the address bar. On that page, they navigate down to the Backend Engineer position and go to the job description page for that position, where they then hit the Apply button. On the application form, they quickly go through the form fields, all the way down to the Submit Application button. The GIF ends there.
Lever's products are quite different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with sourcing, referrals, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.
Brian is not currently with the team. I'm personally grateful that I had to the opportunity to work with Brian as my partner before Lever on our open source efforts (http://derbyjs.com/ and https://github.com/share/sharedb), taking part in YC, and in the founding and early days of Lever.
In this case, I know that Diane Greene advocated for her team to have the opportunity to launch their product, which they had been developing in stealth from 2012-2016.
I haven't worked there for some time now, but Google has historically supported teams in launching into the market through experiments, labs, new product launches, etc. However, Google's current scale makes it very difficult for a new product to be worth improving and maintaining. They must make billions in revenue directly or indirectly to show up in a meaningful way. In most cases, products are given a few years, tested for impact, and ultimately the most likely outcome is that a product will fail when that is the bar. It is not entirely different from the reality of a startup—the majority of startups don't last either.