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.
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
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.
A headsup in case you are not using official LinkedIn API, LinkedIn is nuclear on browser extensions operating on its site and would even ban the users using the extension[1]. They actively scan for browser extensions and regularly update their blacklist.
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.
