This is awesome! There are so many gems here that even if pick up 50% of it and deliver on it, we would be golden.
This is probably the most nuanced advise I have received on the sector/our approach and I would have spoken to 100+ VCs and other people doing recruitment.
HN is great
Thanks for that feedback. Yeah, that's one of the major aspects we are focusing on (we are not 100% there). Especially since we work with early-age startups and founders directly in most cases we theoretically can do that. It might take sometime to build that trust though
Interesting. So instead of recommending your friends, you would be recommending best-suited companies to your friends?
I have seen a few of my friends do that when they are helping someone with a job switch.
It is an excellent point and very similar to the experience we had seen when we first started with this approach. We have seen that once financial incentives and limits on no of people whom you can recommend, were introduced, people were not just praising anybody and everybody.
Another interesting phenomenon we see is that people don't generally recommend people from their current emplpoyer, they generally do from previous ones or their college friends.
Very legit point! That is a concern that some of our prospective users do share. What they do in that case is vouch for ones who they know are looking out or can benefit from vouching (eg. folks who struggle at DS/algo interviews etc).
On the "no recruiter mails", I just realised that it might be confusing. What I meant that just because you vouch for someone, it doesn't mean that they will get bombarded with spammy recruiter mails. I think that means object is the person you are voucher for and subject is contingency and in-house recruiters at tech companies.
Yeah. That does happen to be an inherent problem with a recommendation/referral based system. We do see that people recommend engineers very similar to them in profile/demographic. We try to solve it by seeding with a diverse base of scouts.
We also have a different plan where it's completely success-based. You pay only if you hire any of our vouched engineers. We charge 15% of annual base salary in that case though.
Can you check now? It should be available. We do have 1 canadian company who is hiring for engineers in both US and Canada.
We had not opened it till now but have just done that.
Great. On 2, we are currently live in US and India so are available in that geography. We couldn't do much about recommendations coming from other geographies (as we don't have many partner companies there) so have put that limit.
On 1, yeah, we do make exceptions there. we have not yet decided if we want to keep it a hard limit but we are sure that we would want recommendations from people that would have definitely worked directly with software engineers.
Yeah, that's how most current recommendations work (when one understands the needs of both sides). But we feel that it puts too much friction to recommend.
"It sounds like once I as a scout refer my top 10, you prospect them for all of your companies, not just one. Is that right?" - yes
"Also curious about pjam15's question about whether the people you recommend know that we were the ones that recommended them" - you can choose to make yourself anonymous selectively. for example, for people you know very well, you could choose to have your name mentioned. for acquaintances, you could choose to be anonymous
"Also, how do you know if my (or any other scout) has recommendations that are any good?" - Well, this is a little bit tricky. We currently just pass on the information while internally maintaining a score of how many of your recommendations have received how much interest from companies and what the interview experience was.
Great question. It is something which we ourselves asked quite a bit. Currently we don't vet the person who recommends. We leave that decision on to the companies we work with. We have found that credentials of the person who recommends ends up being important to the companies.
We also score the recommender if any of their recommendations ends up getting interviewed.
Wrt seeding, it's currently with a combination of personal networks and launches within niche communities.
Regarding growing, we have seen that a bunch of people who are recommended end up giving recommendations as well