[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) - Hire engineers vouched...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Weekday (YC W21) - Hire engineers vouched for by other
engineers
Hey HN. We are Amit, Chetan, Anubhav and Hari, the cofounders of
Weekday (https://www.weekday.works). We are building a recruitment
platform centered around recommendations. We help companies hire
engineers who are vouched for by other engineers. Discovering top
talent is challenging. It's easy to check for great credentials,
but that's not the same thing as on-ground reality and achievement.
It works the other way, too: someone with credentials may not be a
great contributor, and screening for credentials eliminates many
contributors who are. Our company is based on the insight that
great contributors tend to know other great contributors and are in
a position to recommend them. We believe that a network-driven
approach can help to discover high-caliber candidates. We chanced
upon this idea when we were doing our previous startup where we
found it excruciatingly difficult to hire our first engineer. We
tried all job boards and tech hiring marketplaces but nothing
worked. We asked 50 of our friends if they knew a good engineer for
us. Many said that they would recommend someone, but few actually
did. We realized that it was because the friction to recommend is
too high. Instead, we asked those friends to do a screen-share call
and scroll their LinkedIn connections and just tell us which ones
they would recommend. This ended up increasing our pipeline
multifold and is what gave us the idea to productize the same
approach and try to make it work for a global network. In an
attempt to productise the same approach of hiring via
recommendations, we have built a Chrome extension which removes the
friction of coming up with names to refer. We give people a
shortlist of people to choose from (based on a matching of roles we
have available and your connections' profiles) and they can
recommend anyone they like out of them. They get financial rewards
if the people they recommend end up getting interviewed by
companies or get hired. Our business model works on a success fee
model, we take 15% of annual salary from the company's side. We
pass on a percentage of that finder's fee to the engineer who
recommended them, while also paying if any of your recommended
friends get interviews (as we have seen on avg companies take 20
interviews to hire 1 person). We have experienced that in hiring,
neither a fully automated nor completely human-driven approach
works. Having to interact only with software can be a dehumanizing
experience. A fully human-led approach leads to a lot of recruiter
spam as every recruiter in their silo tries to reach out to every
possible engineer. We believe our approach of hiring based on
recommendations leads to more targeted matching and gives
opportunities to people who otherwise would find it difficult in an
overly credential-driven job market. We would love to get your
feedback on our approach and hear about the problems you have faced
while hiring, looking to switch jobs or interacting with
recruiters!
Author : amitsy
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-07-15 13:54 UTC (9 hours ago)
| jedberg wrote:
| Usually when someone asks me for a recommendation, I ask them
| what kind of skills they are looking for and their preferred
| contact info, and then if I have a friend who might be interested
| I send my friend the contact info of the person hiring.
|
| So maybe you might want to consider flipping your process. Make
| it so I can see what skills the companies are looking for and
| then make it easy to send a message to my friend with their
| contact info, in a way where you can trace the recommendation
| back to me.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| Exactly. Then I don't have to give up my friend's contact
| info without permission.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Thats good point.. what was the name of that company that
| shared the candidate assessment data with companies without
| their permission?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| How do you seed & grow the network? How do you identify and vet
| the engineers on whose recommendations you rely?
| Fjolsvith wrote:
| I.e. Good ole boy's club.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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
| neeleshs wrote:
| I'd subscribe (as a company) if you didn't have the 10k yearly
| fees. I view recruiting as point in time events (we are a
| startup) rather than a continuous process.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| neeleshs wrote:
| Thanks!
| sealeck wrote:
| cronyism institutionalized?
| pjam15 wrote:
| If I recommend connections on LinkedIn will my name be mentioned
| in outreach?
| amitsy wrote:
| You can choose to remove your name from the outreach if you
| want to
| sinstein wrote:
| Anyone else unable to get the extension to load? I can install
| it, when I click on in on LinkedIn, I just see a white drawer. No
| content loads. Tried disabling ad block as well.
| anubhavmalik wrote:
| Sorry for the bad experience, the extension needs 3rd party
| cookies to be enabled in chrome.. You can go to chrome's
| settings and select either "allow all cookies" or "block 3rd
| party cookies in incognito" and it should start working
| normally
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Which geographical regions is this open to? I am in Canada, but
| got "It's great to see you here but unfortunately we are just not
| in your geographical region yet."
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Nope, it did not work. Will try again at home through.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| US and India (I just asked a similar q)
| dreamer7 wrote:
| I would love to try out your platform for my current hiring
| needs. Good luck with the launch!
|
| One UI feedback for your website - On your contact form for
| companies, text isn't visible when the form field is not in
| focus. The text colour matches too closely with the field
| background.
|
| Edit - Also, on submitting the form, the success/ confirmation
| text did not appear in the visible window. I had to scroll up to
| see it
| amitsy wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We will fix it right away :)
| tomhallett wrote:
| When I "vouch" for a friend, what happens on the friend's side?
| Am I opting them in to getting email(s) from weekday?
|
| If so, that seems slightly odd that I'm going through my top 10
| friends on linked-in, vouching for them so that they are now
| going to get some a cold email(s), but I have no insight if those
| 10 people are looking for jobs and want this email at all. I'm
| pretty much saying to my friends "Hey, I just gave your info to
| this random company so hopefully I'll make some money off you."
| (And yes, it is true that I'm "helping" them get a job, but the
| people I'd vouch for don't need help, in this market they can get
| a job very quickly)
|
| I will admit that some aspects of what I mention above are true
| in the "screen-share call" example you gave above, BUT it's the
| fact that the screen-share alternative is clunky/painful which
| makes it more socially acceptable. The automation/scale of your
| new approach starts to feel more spammy.
|
| When you say "No recruiter mails" on your website, what does that
| mean exactly? Who is the subject of that sentence and who is the
| object? Subject: weekday recruiter? in-house recruiters at tech
| companies? contingency recruiters? Object: me the voucher? the
| person I'm vouching for?
|
| Note: I'm not trying to be mean or negative, I'm just trying to
| understand the full feedback loop, so I can be empathetic to all
| parties, especially my friends. :)
| amitsy wrote:
| Very legit point Tom! 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.
| abraae wrote:
| The recruitment industry has always had parallels to dating.
|
| We have two parties who don't want their time wasted, but want
| to get together as quickly as possible if it's a good match,
| while maintaining their dignity and their privacy.
|
| The industry is permanently grappling with ways to make this
| process scalable. The road is littered with the dead hulks of
| companies that felt like they had cracked the code. Yet still a
| huge chunk of the industry belongs to plain old middlemen -
| recruiters - or even to word of mouth and other age old human
| behaviours. That reflects the fact that so far, no-one has
| really cracked the code, and there is often still benefit to
| both parties in having someone in the middle.
|
| All of the questions that you ask are totally valid and can be
| viewed as just part of the dance of bringing job and talent
| together.
|
| My personal belief is that the solution is out there, it's just
| quite complex (human are complex). It probably involves:
|
| - karma of some kind (randos can't arrive and start pushing
| their friends/colleagues in front of employers without
| restriction)
|
| - rate limits (if you've put forward 20 people, maybe you need
| to slow down until some of them have been "processed")
|
| - candidate care limits (employers probably can't access more
| "candidates" until they have courteously dispatched any
| existing ones by hiring them or providing a formal rejection,
| ideally with feedback).
|
| - saving face (graceful ways for candidates to be told their
| salary is out of whack, for them to push back on referrers who
| are spamming them out too widely, for employers to make
| candidate feel they were a good second place, as opposed to a
| failure, etc. etc., all the social lubrication that makes the
| world go around.
|
| In short, the whole area of recruitment will always be fraught
| and fought over because there's no much damn money to be made.
|
| But no one IMO will meaningfully "win" in this area until they
| deliver a platform that has deep, rich set of human-oriented
| behaviours and functionality that really dig in deep to what it
| means to be a candidate, an employer, a referrer, and treat
| everyone with courtesy and (yes) financial reward as required.
|
| Just as StackOverflow became successful because it catered to
| the exact question and answer communication patterns that are
| suited to programmers seeking help, some recruitment platform
| will succeed because it caters to the communication patterns
| that are associated with gigs finding talent and talent finding
| gigs.
|
| Source: many years spent building corporate recruitment
| systems.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > My personal belief is that the solution is out there, it's
| just quite complex (human are complex). It probably involves:
| [...]
|
| I'd say, anything that helps connect people in genuine
| relationships without getting in the way.
|
| ... which is not easy, since relationships aren't easy. Many
| of the features you mention (karma, rate limits, care limits)
| seem to be trying to limit the downsides of failing to
| cultivate genuine relationships.
| rememberlenny wrote:
| Love this idea. Congrats on launching!
| amitsy wrote:
| Thank you so much Leonard for the support and wishes :)
| shrox wrote:
| I'd given this a shot. Nice way to make some money, ha. (Got
| about a $1500 in Indian rupees which was neat.)
| [deleted]
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Regardless of how wonderful this product may, or may not, be:
|
| "Install chrome extension to APPLY"
|
| No thanks.
| amitsy wrote:
| Sorry about that. I understand that it's a big friction point.
| We would be piloting a web app as well soon to solve for that
| :)
| thescribbblr wrote:
| Best wishes the Memer team!
| amitsy wrote:
| Thank you so much! Yeah, Memer was our previous startup where
| we figured out the extent of difficulty of tech hiring.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| When I've made recommendations in the past it's usually because I
| understand the needs of both sides. 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? Also curious about
| pjam15's question about whether the people you recommend know
| that we were the ones that recommended them. Also, how do you
| know if my (or any other scout) has recommendations that are any
| good?
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Cool, on the first point, that's fair. I've also been at
| startups where they ask us to just list all the interesting
| people we know and would like to work with and then they just
| take that info and prospect them independently; sounds like
| you're just productizing that process which is great.
|
| On the last point, interesting, I guess you will have to take
| a lot of time at the beginning to do your own screening of
| all the referred people to make sure they meet your standards
| before you decide a scout is any good and needs less
| supervision than others.
|
| 2 other things:
|
| 1) It says only software engineers can apply. I sort of
| understand but wonder if you'd consider making exceptions - I
| was early on at Gigster (another YC co but doing software
| development as a service with a network of freelance
| engineers) and some similar co's and so although I'm not an
| engineer, I have a ton of great ones in my network.
|
| 2) It says you're not available in my geographic area. Where
| are you recruiting from?
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Ah, my fault on point 2, I'm on vacay in Uganda and
| didn't turn on my VPN but usually in the U.S. Sounds
| good, very cool idea and I'll be signing up shortly
| amitsy wrote:
| Awesome! Looking forward to have you as a user :)
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Is there no danger of collusion among reviewers?
|
| Can negative reviews come back to haunt the reviewer? Or are
| users only asked for positive reviews (i.e. silence being the
| most negative review possible)?
| amitsy wrote:
| Yes, there is that danger but we have not seen that happening
| as of yet.
|
| Users are only asked for positive reviews
| abraae wrote:
| If you are successful, then next I suggest you will be
| following in the steps of vendors offering online reference
| checks, e.g xref, checkster.
|
| You will need all sorts of fraud detection, e.g multiple
| reviewers all coming from the same ip, and your customers
| will pay for that security.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| If this doesn't let you skip the whiteboard interview, it sounds
| like just one more step in the terrible process of interviewing
| for engineering jobs.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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
| endymi0n wrote:
| As much as I'd like to give this a go, my findings so far is that
| recommendations from anyone you don't fully trust already are as
| broken and prone to gaming as any other indicator in the job
| market.
|
| As (almost) always, it's so ubiquitous that the German language
| even invented a word for that fact: "wegloben". Loosely
| translated as: praising someone away.
|
| Why is it broken? Because while it's certainly possible that
| someone would recommend the best people they've ever worked with
| in the rare case of a sudden bankruptcy, chances are usually far,
| far higher that people try to recommend the weaker ones they had
| to let go in times of hardship to others, simply because they
| want to be nice and soften the blow.
|
| Been there, done that. Multiple times.
|
| If there's _really_ someone excellent, you move heaven and earth
| to keep them around in your own team.
| amitsy wrote:
| 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.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Let's say that you think highly of Ivan, who works at FooCo
| as a C++ developer.
|
| When Ivan starts recommending Paula for her C++ skills, and
| Paula used to work at Bar, LLC where Ivan used to work, you
| can trust that to a certain extent.
|
| When Ivan recommends Istvan for his Haskell skills, and
| they've never worked together, Ivan's recommendation might be
| worth less (he's doing a favor for a friend) or worth more
| (Ivan is recommending the leader of a local Haskell User
| Group.)
|
| When Ivan recommend Maura for C++ skills, and Maura works at
| FooCo, that could mean:
|
| Ivan sees Maura as a threat or an irritation and would like
| her to go elsewhere - low value
|
| Ivan is getting ready to leave FooCo and is pre-emptively
| arranging exits for people he likes - medium value
|
| Ivan is getting ready to leave FooCo and is trying to do as
| much damage as possible on the way out - high value
|
| Ivan sees that FooCo doesn't have a place for Maura to grow
| and wants her to thrive - high value
|
| People are complex.
| dang wrote:
| > "wegloben". Loosely translated as: praising someone away.
|
| Wow, that's fabulous.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-15 23:01 UTC)