Launch HN: The Lobby (YC W18) – 1-on-1 calls with company insiders to get hired

If we charge companies today, the only we could do that is to let them choose who does these calls on their end, and that defeats the purpose because you get company-filtered advice.

We're going for a more personalized version of Glassdoor. Does that make sense?

We want to move to tech later on - we think the right move is to win in one industry and move onto others. Also, this is the industry we have more domain expertise in and that has seen much less innovation than tech for example.

But we're definitely planning to expand soon!

Why?

Instead, today this is mainly coaching and practice. Later, we're aiming to get insiders to "Rate" the candidates they speak with and have the best-rated ones get sent over to 10,20,100 companies that we partner with as qualified leads.

This helps candidates get noticed more and "credentialize" themselves because someone (or many) in the industry screened them over 30m calls and thought they were a good fit. This lets companies see an added signal that is not their resume, their school, their GPA, or their LinkedIn.

It also helps companies discover diverse & non-obvious talent, something we know first-hand is an important issue to them. Even for the companies who don't care about diversity in the traditional sense, they need to diversify their pool because everyone is going after the same 2% of "good-on-paper" candidates from Harvard and Stanford, because no one can cost effectively vet candidates from the much larger rest.

Interviewees pay because this is time-consuming and valuable insight from the insiders, and because otherwise we rely on altruism which we feel does not scale.

On the candidate side, this entire conversation is about impressing you and making you potentially like me. I'm not going to ask you real questions that I'd ask a friend on the inside on culture, compensation, recruiting process.

And on your end, it's basically an interview. You're not really on the "candidate's side," you're evaluating them and judging everything they say while comparing that to other candidates you speak with.

  Also, why are the interviewees paying? It cannot
  be to pay me (the insider)

There are some pieces of career advice that are, if not employer-hostile, then at least not entirely employer friendly.

For example, will my strong foreign accent block me from promotion into the upper echelons of your company? Someone on the company's side of the table would tell me what the recruitment website says: "We're an equal opportunities employer and don't discriminate, communication skills are important of course" whereas someone on my side of the table might give a more frank response, like "Yes you're going to need to work on that"

This is the most important decision of your life at any given time (maybe except for who you marry) and we still rely on generic forums, our own networks, or spamming people on LinkedIn. We hope this makes it more efficient & accessible.

Former employees still have the network and the knowledge on what it takes to land the job, what the culture is like, and how to help someone prepare for interviews.

If you're a candidate who goes to a 3rd tier school dreaming of getting a top-tier Wall Street job, you have no alumni to reach out to, half of your cold emails don't result in anything, and you're applying online with a poor resume, preparation, and no insights.

What's the solution? You can definitely grind it out on your own for months googling, cold-emailing, trying to catch a break. However, I've seen first hand from my own school and friends that a few targeted & tactical conversations with the right people can catapult you ahead way beyond any textbook, course, bootcamp, and more.

The conversations I had that helped me land my jobs were way more valuable than what I paid for in school or even in tutoring or others.

In a model where a recruiter is paid by the jobseeker; i.e. he's the agent, this problem mostly goes away. A recruiter who say takes 5% of my next years salary if I accept a job, and therefore is incentivised to find me the best job possible... That's a different story.

I encounter a lot of clowns when I work with recruiting firms. I'm open to new ideas where I'm treated as a valuable customer instead of a product.

[Edit] This is because I'm finding that recruiting is turning into spamming. Every recruiter gets lucky from the few candidates they place so they make a decent income from their commission.

[Edit] If I pay to work with someone who handles a high volume, would it streamline the process? Avoid the spam? I don't know, but I'm frustrated enough with the process to keep an open mind.

If this works, how about vendors paying IT personnel for inside dope on how to sell to the company, or paying them directly to come in and make a pitch? Where do you draw the line?

There are gray areas, how different is it to pay for a fancy night out to 'pick your brain' about networking? Or use 'expert networks' for research. Internships are another area that can be useful, or abused in the sense that people have to be able to work for free to even be considered.

You'd have to make a very good case that it will improve hiring. But if it improves hiring, maybe the company should be paying, to improve their internal outreach and give their people proper incentive to spend time on the recruiting process.

I hate to be rude, but people are dedicating potentially years of their lives to these ideas.

I don’t doubt at all you have valid arguments or wisdom to offer here. I just wish your comment could be a couple sentences longer so some of it could be more effectively extracted.

As discussed below, today we focus mainly on coaching & prep. We think that it's a service that should exist no matter what for the reasons discussed in the thread.

Beyond that - we are working on creating a structure where job seekers can get "assessments" from these insiders and if they are above a certain threshold, we can help them get noticed by employers.

If they do poorly on the calls, then at least they get real feedback on how to improve. We've also learned that most employers have liability reasons that prevent them from telling you why you didn't get hired, so here we also solve for that in the "worst case scenario" which is that the insider didn't think you are a good fit for the role today.

At least you'll know why and how to solve for it.

I went to a school where no one really gets the "top jobs" but a select few of us figured out how to do it, and that expanded to over 50+ friends who now all mentor their own networks to do the same.

I think these things have a crazy ripple effect and I think beyond what can be measured from a few calls, the insights people get and the jobs they can land thanks to them can have really exponential (positive) effects.

Thanks again!

Roughly ~65% of hires for all Fortune 500 companies come from employee referrals, and top companies in all domains continually compensate existing employees with bonuses for helping hire their friends (because they know them well).

While it may be more prominent in some industries over others, connections matter everywhere. Instead of trying to change that reality, we're trying to find a solution that mimics parts of the magic that happens when your "insider" friend puts in a good word for you.

If someone on The Lobby thinks you're a good fit for the industry, we're aiming for their "Rating" to help you get some of that benefit you might get if a friend on the inside referred you and vouched for you.

At the lower levels, investment banking doesn't take much brainpower. Analysts spend 95% of the day: making PowerPoint slides, doing research online, or un-doing the changes they made the day before because the VP on the team didn't like the changes the Associate wanted.

The most interesting part of the job (financial modeling) can be learned in a couple of weeks. And then the Managing Director will just tell you what they want the model to spit out and you fudge the numbers to make it happen.

There aren't really 10x investment banking analysts like there are 10x engineers. In investment banking, once you know the basics of finance and get your foot in the door, the hiring becomes very behavioral. I've found that people want to hire other people they'd like to hang out with.

I am sorry but this simply not true. Referrals based hiring is the norm in SV tech companies and I am not talking C-level, this is prevalent in even the rank-n-file roles. We are happier not rolling the dice on the stranger, skills be damned.

To developers — here’s a connection.

I’m hiring 50+ startup-style engineers (mix of pure software, DevSecOps, and SRE) with 80th percentile abilities and current skills — no finance background necessary — right now in New York City.

Send me a resume and a GitHub link.

Notes:

1. You shouldn’t need insider info to get hired. Interviews should be collaborative, not gotcha. Both sides of table want to discover if this is the right thing, you only get there through directness, openness, truth. We bias to full disclosure to combat the usual information asymmetry between the big corporation and the single individual. The job matters to you a lot, “big co doesn’t care”. So we try to tilt in your favor.

2. Insider info — if you can think of a security (such as prevent, detect, automation, or operation) capability that AWS, Azure, GCP, or Kubernetes is missing, and describe to my head of security engineering how you would design and implement it, you’ll be on the top of the stack.

To “The Lobby” —

Consider the edge case where the company wants the candidate to know everything they need to know. If your model supports paying insiders, consider offering to donate to a non-profit such as the EFF instead.

It's actually more because not every call costs $60. For example, ~90% of our users buy calls that are in the $65-$70 range as one of their many calls.

We tried to convey that even in the 1 call option it's an "Average" price of $60, but we still haven't done a good job of conveying this.

Assuming you choose 3 calls that are more than $65 or $70, the number is actually even higher than $190, but we still discount it down to $170 no matter who the 3 insiders are, to entice you to buy multiple calls.

Hope this makes sense and will work on improving how this is communicated.

agree that we need to be much better at telling the story, because the idea itself without the story doesn't get the reception or the "aha" moment it seems most of our supporters get when they hear it from me.

thanks!

Companies _desperately_ _want_ to hire people from schools they don't cater to with career fairs. They don't want to be perceived as monocultures where they only hire from the same three schools. At the same time, they can't feasibly do career fairs at the next 50%ile of schools. Great candidates from "top 100" schools get passed over all the time.

... Well the monoculture observation is at least true of tech companies. For finance companies, hiring only from Harvard/Yale might be an explicit goal. I have no idea.

I think that's a very creative model with good alignment of incentives, but frankly I don't know if it works well. A few friends who tried something similar told me they felt that in that model, the people who end up getting jobs the most are typically the ones who needed you the least and can make for some very unhappy customers who don't know if it's worth paying you a % of salary well into their jobs.

We'll consider it though :).

We're surprised at this ourselves - they seem to enjoy being in the "expert" seat because most of them are junior level people who aren't traditionally thought of as experts or people whose insights are worth money.

I think we're learning it's a powerful combo - get paid to talk about yourself, show off how smart you are + help other people out who are struggling to overcome what you already did.

chicken & egg: we build hyper local liquidity the way Uber tackles neighborhoods or cities, hence the initial focus on investment banking. The few similar products we've seen try this inevitably try to do dozens of industries or hundreds of roles and this makes it impossible to achieve true liquidity or to allocate marketing dollars properly.

Quality control: To me, this is the beauty of The Lobby. We're not trying to get the best written content, or to get the CEO of a company with highly specialized knowledge. It's junior level people talking about how they got their job. If you're bad at this or your quality sucks, our ratings will indicate that and you won't be picked further. If you're a great insider, your ratings will indicate that too and you get more demand + more money.

But the main point here is: this knowledge is not rocket science. Any analyst at a specific team in Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch will have very similar answers on how to land the job. That's what we see at The Lobby too.

No one can guarantee that the information the insider is giving is 100% accurate, but we think with the right reward & incentive systems in place, the best insiders rise up and the crappy ones get booted out.

Edit: To the last points you added. The myth that because you're a job seeker you don't have money is the one we're fighting with our analogy. People spend money on all sorts of things they don't need and absurd amounts of money on schools, bootcamps like GA, and more. Those are all for career advancement.

If you believe our premise that learning from insiders about what life is really like, what it takes to break in, getting personalized tips, etc. is the way to get the best careers, then suddenly a large portion of that spend can go to something like The Lobby, which I profoundly believe is a better use of your cash.

One example that I kept hearing from the YC partners themselves: "If I had your service when I was a freshman, I would have spoken to 2 lawyers, asked them what they do all day, only to realize that I don't want to be a lawyer." Think of the massive opportunity cost of learning what to do or WHAT NOT to do way before even pursuing a career or becoming a full-time job seeker.

Last point: our best users are career switchers, they already make money and want to make a career move. For me, moving from finance to tech was borderline impossible and I had money to spend. I just didn't know what to do or what path to take. The Lobby would have solved or mitigated that too.

Practically speaking - we keep identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you how to prep for these questions anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection, you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting process + helps companies discover more talent.

Further - they are asking you for $3-$5k up front to get a job, so until they deliver you said job, they're failing.

The Lobby asks you to pay for specific tactical things you do on a 30m call - a mock interview, a resume critique, strategy & actionable tips to improve your interview outcomes.

The value is delivered instantly.

There are 1,000 things you can ask professionals inside companies - by starting focused on careers it's easier to market and attract the right audience and get our supply used to those kinds of interactions as well. Industry & market research is more like GLG - and that can be much more complex from a regulatory standpoint (i.e. insider trading).