Even Financial is building an API for financial product acquisition. We work on the infrastructure that allows companies to connect their users to the right loan, credit card, insurance, etc across the major financial institutions. Think of us like a Kayak/ITA software for financial products.
We're looking for a javascript tech lead who's comfortable working full-stack from react to terraform to lead the team and help us build beautiful, configurable, and performant consumer experiences for our millions of users.
I'm a software engineer & a recruiter. I also work on a SaaS software for recruiters. There are a ton of bad recruiters. But a lot of bad acting happens because of 1) incentive misalignment 2) information asymmetry.
Looking at the list of reasons why a recruiter might be "bad" some of the blame is on recruiting company structure, but another major source of blame is on employers.
They sign contracts with recruiting firms, give little to no oversight, and provide a limited set of information about the role/responsibilities/comp/etc. At the same time, a lot of employers are really bad when it comes to retention. This combination leads to recruiters/recruiting companies that get away with bad behavior and still make a lot of money since it's purely a numbers game and they find that subset of engineers willing to tolerate their behavior. And companies pay them large fees for each transaction.
Protip: If you want to get rid of a lot of recruiter contacts, deactivate your LinkedIn. And make sure your public commits on Github don't include your real e-mail.
Thank you for the insight. Websites like Glassdoor already do a good job of giving you an overview of potential employers but the same doesn't exist for recruiters.
Normally you might be in contact with 10-20 recruiters for a few months and end up working only for one company for the next few years so the impact recruiters have is a superset of the employer's.
Maybe recruiters could stop selling the company to death and openly admit what is wrong with the current state of things (e.g. poor Joel score). People appreciate honesty and I would definitely work for a company that admits their problems but is willing to fix them.
Also getting rid of recruiters altogether is not a viable option.
In my first 12 months, part time, I made ~250k. I split up my time by dedicating one full "day" of work of focused reviewing profiles/taking calls then only had sporadic e-mails and calls for 20-30 minutes throughout the day (usually scheduled for lunch). So ~10 hours/wk? It helped that I only had remote/flexible software engineering jobs.
Source: I'm an engineer & recruiter that works with over 100 tech companies in NYC. I also work on a SaaS platform for recruiters.
After A/B testing tons of messages (and analyzing messages from a SaaS platform I built for recruiters to send messages) the messages that work are ones that are short. So I try to keep messages brief, reach out about a specific company that might be a match, and hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job. It's very hard to convert someone over an e-mail message. Getting you to respond to my e-mail is the first part of the funnel.
From there if I can get a conversation with you I can move on to the "fun" part of my job. Giving candidates a broad overview of the market based on their interests, expectation setting, and career counseling.
Edit: To answer your question directly the reason you get bad recruiting messages stems from a mix of bad recruiting practices, bad companies/ low investment in HR departments, and bad engineers. Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.
I completely buy that. But in a short message there is still the choice between concrete information (tasks, location, level, tech/tools, salary, business sector, team size...).
> hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job
But that's the point: a phone call is a pretty big effort I think. I might do it if there is any clue that the job might be something for me but I won't do it if there is a risk that the job is in the wrong part of the country!
> Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.
> concrete information (tasks, location, level, tech/tools, salary, business sector, team size...).
If location isn't implied the only reason you wouldn't give it is bad recruiting practices in your case. Salary/Tasks/Team Size could be changing pretty rapidly for startups and an external recruiter might not have the up to to date info. Companies do a bad job at investing in their external recruiting process. FWIW, I always provide company name, location, tech/tools, a hook about why I like them, and if I can find it a hook about the candidate.
> But that's the point: a phone call is a pretty big effort I think.
Switching jobs is a pretty big effort overall. A lot of engineers who are willing to take the step of taking a call are generally thinking about leaving or actively looking. For strong recruiters the message is just the hook. If you're able to find a few trusted tech recruiters you can use throughout your career it makes the overall search a lot easier every time. It's like finding the all-star real estate agent when you're buying a home. There are a lot of bad recruiters so in your case, it's more likely you haven't found a strong recruiter to work with yet.
I'm a javascript engineer that does recruiting in NYC/SF (I've wound down a bit to work on a SaaS product for recruiters) and I've been meaning to blog about my experiences. Preface: YMMV greatly based on location. I was able to sign my 1st client and match a candidate within 1 month of starting (albeit I had a small network of engineering managers from working in SV).
Working part-time for the first 6 months I averaged 3 placements/mo, weighted towards the latter period of that time frame as I got better & partnered with a recuriting firm to boost # of clients. I took no salary and took home 45%-100% of the fee based on whether it was a client of my own or not and revenue goals I hit in my partnership. 10% + €3000 seems low for an experienced recruiter.
For client fees, I started with 20% of yearly base salary contract- I now only sign 25% contracts. I only do perm matches, never got into the contracting/freelance game.
Feel free to e-mail me if you have additional questions.
I'm a recruiter that is technical (js engineer) based in NYC. I don't see what TripleByte is doing that is that different from what a good recruiter can offer. Matching at very selective companies doesn't seem challenging.
I don't work with Apple or Facebook, but in the past four months recruiting part-time I've had 15 placements. Over 65% resume submission to on-site rate. And over an 85% offer close rate (close counts if I get 3 offers for someone and they choose one). I can match relatively well without needing to put candidates through a day of tests and I save candidates time by sending them to selectively chosen companies (safety, fit, reach). And I spend a ton of truly understanding each unique process of the companies I work with.
What makes Triplebyte actually unique? What are they changing about the industry? Are they actually reducing bias or is this a gimmick? Are they that different from a recruiting firm with strong lead generation?
I interviewed and was rejected from Triplebyte. It was pretty miserable. Compared to real recruiters, I feel more comfortable talking to recruiters since they care about my background and won't ask me to program an hour's worth of code on the spot or ask me several questions about redis and webscale technologies. They're kind of just filtering through candidates looking for people who they think could work at Google instead of looking for hard-working people.
With that said, do you accept new candidates for the NYC area?
> They're kind of just filtering through candidates looking for people who they think could work at Google instead of looking for hard-working people.
Perhaps just responding to their customers (employers) desires. It seems companies these days, companies that are not Google, are looking for Google-caliber people even if they just need someone who knows how to code and is hard working.
I'm not sure exactly how your process works, from that description there's three ways we differ:
(1) We don't submit resumes to companies. We give them a profile of the candidate which describes their technical skills and their work history but without any mention of specific schools or companies. For a company to move forward with a Triplebyte candidate, they have to trust in our screening process more than credentials.
(2) Companies agree to not do any technical phone screens or coding challenges with our candidates. Instead they do an initial pitch call and then move to an onsite if there's candidate interest. This saves engineers a lot of time spent in repetitive phone screens.
(3) The metric we optimize for is our onsite success rate i.e. how often does a Triplebyte candidate onsite interview result in an offer. Since our candidates don't go through the regular technical phone screens, any improvement we can make on the industry standard of a 20 - 25% onsite success rate saves the company engineering time spent doing those phone screens. Currently we're averaging 2x that rate across all our companies.
> The metric we optimize for is our onsite success rate i.e. how often does a Triplebyte candidate onsite interview result in an offer. Since our candidates don't go through the regular technical phone screens, any improvement we can make on the industry standard of a 20 - 25% onsite success rate saves the company engineering time spent doing those phone screens. Currently we're averaging 2x that rate across all our companies.
I can see where that's valuable to the companies. What value are you trying to provide to candidates? I already know how to apply to companies, pass the phone screen, and wash out of the interview. If I knew how to pass the interview, I'd still know how to apply and pass the phone screen. What is Triplebyte supposed to help with?
If you are someone who behind the veil of ignorance can pass phone screens, then you will wash out 75% of the time through normal interviews. Your typical time cost is 4x offsite process + 4x onsite process to generate one interview. If you use triplebyte, assuming their interview is equivalent to a full interview cycle, your time cost is 1x offsite process + 3x onsite process - one for them, and two onsites with companies since your success rate is doubled. If you want to get more than one offer, the time savings increase further (and faster).
My success rate isn't doubled. Per Harj, they filter for people who will pass onsite interviews. My success rate at interviews is the same whether I go through Triplebyte or not.
> If you are someone who behind the veil of ignorance can pass phone screens, then you will wash out 75% of the time through normal interviews.
Veil of ignorance, huh? I'll run down the ways I've successfully gotten a job:
- Amazon (CreateSpace), by winning a contest they hosted. Multiple times. There was also an interview for this, though not of a problem-solving nature.
- eBay (Milo), by passing their online hiring challenge. There was no in-person interview for this; rather, they had me come in and work for a day.
- NCC Group, by passing their two challenges. There were in-person interviews for this too, largely consisting of them asking me if I knew how to do things and me saying "no". (I was told afterward that the reason my interviews had gone so oddly was that I had never provided them with a resume.)
Triplebyte themselves told me that I was exceptionally strong in "academic CS" -- the first time around. When they asked me to reinterview for their benefit, they highlighted it as a weak point.
My rate of success in applying to companies that rely on an interview instead of a project or other objective demonstration is 0%, not 25%. But I feel safe in saying that my interviewing problem doesn't lie in the fact that phone screens are hiding my basic incompetence from innocent companies.
One of the things they do is data-mining so they can match up candidates with companies where they're likely to perform well onsite (since different companies emphasize different things, Triplebyte can look through data on how their previous candidates have faired and find which companies will value your personal strengths): http://blog.triplebyte.com/triplebyte-engineer-genome-projec...
Harj- thanks for the thoughtful reply. Do you disclose numbers about what % of candidates that get offers choose to take them? I feel like that's pretty important for companies when considering time they save.
the draw they have for engineering talent side is that you do preliminary interview with them and then move straight to on sites with companies they recommend you to. It means you can have 10 on sites without having to do 10 phone screens
This sounds like it's optimizing for the wrong component of the interview process. I've never had issues with spending time on phone screens because they are one of the main ways in which I screen companies I'm interested in.
It's the technical interviewing portion that's a pain to have to re-do over and over again. Especially if it involves travelling across the country to do. Engineers are ultimately looking at company and engineering culture to choose between.
The other thing is that for some engineers, they might perform well in one on-site versus another for many reasons such as the questions asked, interviewer rating, or something as trivial as mood. Seems like Triplebyte giving people one-chance makes this difficult.
Ultimately, I feel the main crux of hiring/interviews/finding the right talent is training. If the industry is over-fitting on people who can pass whiteboarding, then why aren't there more startups focused on this aspect? Not just passing interviews (e.g. outco.io), but actually focused on training systems design and algorithms. Universities don't do that in undergrad or grad school.
I very much agree with all of this. To me, the main draw of Triplebyte was "no whiteboarding." I suck at whiteboarding, so I went through the project track. And, yes, there was no whiteboarding, but what do they replace it with? Live coding. Yeah, like that's going to go any better. I'd have been better off at the whiteboard where I could at least fudge the syntax a little.
(Disclaimer: Applied and at current job through Triplebyte)
Seconded. I don't use LinkedIn or recruiters. When I was looking, I was applying manually to several companies, and setting up phone screens and so on was very exhausting and timing things was complicated. Triplebyte allowed me to combine the primary stages for a couple of companies and helped a lot with prep.
My overall feeling is mixed. Given the time commitment, if all you get to bypass is the initial phone screen of ~1 hour, that means you need to go on 4-7 on-sites to break even. On the other hand, some of those on-sites might be from companies that wouldn't have even phone screened you. It's really hard to say whether it's worth it or not from the candidate side, IMO.
We've never had a candidate do 10 on-sites nor would we encourage someone to. That'd indeed be incredibly exhausting. We encourage them to be broad with the number of companies they do an initial pitch call with, then be selective about who they move forward with to an on-site.
Wow. Do you actually find that less than 10 on-sites is sufficient to obtain at least one offer? A >10% success rate seems very high to me, even with the vetting you provide. Admittedly I have only anecdotal data.
They are indeed reducing bias, and finding value where others aren't, such as in candidates with non-traditional backgrounds.
When I interviewed with TripleByte I had just come out of a 3-month bootcamp, and spent the prior 3 yrs as a teacher. Most companies did not look twice at my resume and it was very tough to break in. TripleByte didn't look at all and judged on ability instead of credentials. I haven't seen that from other recruiting / sourcing organizations and give them a lot of credit for it.
It's hard to get an accurate pulse of the market if you spend only a month every few years searching through angelist/indeed/etc.
I work with about 70 companies (only in NYC) from pre-launch to almost IPO and a new role opens up to a us every week. It's helpful to find a recruiter who knows you & the market well enough to curate jobs you want and tell you about opportunities that might not even be listed or on your radar.
This is true. I'm an engineer that started recruiting six months ago part-time and was able to bill six figures pretty quickly. I realized that colleagues in recruiting had a really tough time making efficient matches.
The best recruiters can not only make efficient matches, but they also connect the dots to reach out to matches in the pool of passive candidates they talked to when a new role opens up.
Even better than that is when I'm able to actual push back with companies and make an impact on the hiring process to get someone hired.
How'd you get started doing recruiting? I've been talking with recruiters lately and I find myself doing enough tech explaining to recruiters that I've wondered if I could consult for them. Interested to hear about your experience.
Feel free to e-mail (in profile). Started by trying to build tools for recruiters and interviewing recruiters for customer feedback. Found a good fit with a recruiter who placed my whole NY team before our startup got acquired and he offered me a consultant gig. Really enjoying it so far. Great way to monetize a mix of engineering career consulting + staying on top of startup trends.
Interesting! Do you feel like as you get further and further from having done the actual work (that you're helping recruit for) that you'll still be as effective?
I'm still coding professionally (js eng) and stay on top of trends! But, I don't think coding in the trenches will make me more effective. I've had a few eng. jobs, most of my friends are engineers, and I'm really passionate about job trends, job satisfaction, and employee retention.
With that foundation I'm more effective as I see more career trajectory data points when I talk to candidates that specialize (data, security, devops, ml) or ladder up (vp, manager, cto). Then I can provide even more value to new candidates with the career counseling approach.
If you're an engineer there's a list of requirements that would convince you to switch jobs whether it be for working in a certain industry, with certain proven founders, your comp., certain tech, title a company can offer, remote/flexiblity, benefits, etc. When I meet a candidate and they tell me that list and a few months down the line I come across a job that matches well it's a win-win for both me, the company, and the candidate.
tl;dr recruiting can be a relationship-based game with many moving parts. At a certain point, with a complete and up-to-date dataset, you can provide tons of value for everyone as an information arbitrator.
I don't disagree actually, but it sort of clashes with my idealism that engineering is meritocracy based (it isn't, I know). If I joined an org thinking I was going to be working with the best and brightest and really it just ended up that they were all connected then I might be annoyed. I dunno... it feels "wrong", but it isn't wrong, and I do think it's a good methodology for staffing.
* pricing
* security/compliance
* differentiator feature vs competition
* partnership structure
* interesting customer use case