Hi HN. We were tired of recruiters so we built this because it was something we wish existed. We had "satisfying" jobs and liked who we worked with but we were not naive and knew there could be a better job out there. Either building a product more aligned with our personal interests, making more doing something we enjoyed even more, or work with a team that challenged us further. It was too time consuming to actively look for jobs and the thought of dealing with incompetent recruiters turned us off so we built Pitchbox. We link to think of it as a talent agency for developers so only personally relevant jobs are pitched to you... think of it as "Here's what I'm looking for, if you can provide it then let's talk"
Yep. Sure solves a huge problem, in a very nice, subtle way. Thank you for fixing this! :) Co-incidentally, someone today posted a link about how LinkedIn's recruiter spam is killing the quality of the product[1]. I think your timing is just perfect :)
EDIT: And your site is amazingly simple yet elegant! Keep it up guys :)
How much does it cost? I assume this is going to be fee-based on the employer side? I'd feel more comfortable participating if the nature of the transaction were more transparent.
We'll be creating a FAQ from this HN discussion. We intend to be very transparent.
It is free for the developer. Even though it is different, we found it easiest when employers pay us similar to how they pay contingency recruiters, placement fees. Typically recruiters charge 25-35% of your first year salary, we charge a flat 25K fee to the employer that hires you. We also have a unique offering for startups where they can amortize the payments over 12 months. This pricing structure means more interesting companies can afford to be on our platform and therefore more interesting opportunities for developers.
Wow, that's pretty steep. Maybe that's just a west coast thing. Where I live (Ohio) that's 50% of the salary of a developer with 5 years of experience. I signed up for your service but... that seems like a good chunk of change I'd prefer to have in my pocket :)
Wow, that's pretty steep. Maybe that's just a west coast thing.
I don't think most developers realize how much recruiters are getting paid for placements. 25% is pretty standard across US, we're less then that with our flat rate.
Where I live (Ohio) that's 50% of the salary of a developer with 5 years of experience.
This is why we built this product - assuming you are even remotely decent at programming and write code in modern languages, a dev with 5 years of exp can easily be making more then 80K+.
We have several companies right now that are hiring and paying more then that for roles where the developer can telecommute 100% from anywhere in the country. Not only do they pay well but they have really awesome teams.
25% is pretty standard across US, we're less then that with our flat rate.
Fair comment however your flat fee equates to 25% of a $100k role. It doesn't become a viable economic alternative for employers until you reach the $150k mark. If your primary target is CTO level roles then great, otherwise your fee is ridiculous.
I think you might be underestimating the level of pay for developers in a lot of the "big" areas. (SF, Silicon Valley, NYC) I've personally heard of friends (fresh college grads) getting offers anywhere from $70k to $150k.
This is not terribly hard to believe depending on what projects they have in their portfolio. I was getting offered jobs that paid upwards of $170k with 2 years' experience and no CS degree. I can only imagine what someone with Stanford CS and more projects would look like.
As a fresh college grad from a non-top tier school in Silicon Valley, many of my friends are making ~$100K/year right out of school. I'm sure people from top tier schools going to Google and Facebook can make double that.
Have you considered the possibility that charging a flat fee instead of a percentage of annual salary makes your service inappropriate for most areas outside of silicon valley or NYC?
Yeah, I go to school in Ohio and am going to be working on the west coast. Salaries on the west coast are >2x (close to 3x) what I would have made in Ohio (Cleveland).
I haven't seen anybody raise the point about the cost of living. The salaries are more because the cost of living is higher. With 50k you can afford a mortgage for a nice house in the midwest, but in NYC the equivalent monthly income will qualify you for a tiny studio or 1 BR apt.
As someone who is hiring, my problem is to also find developers who are not actively looking. Sometimes those are the best because they are talented but have an inertia to move anywhere and may not even be aware of interesting challenges in other areas that their skills are applicable to, such as Healthcare etc.
Also for a 80K salary, 25K is just too steep, given that we do not know how your screening process works.
developers who are not actively looking...are the best because they are talented but have an inertia to move anywhere and may not even be aware of interesting challenges in other areas that their skills are applicable to
Exactly. We couldn't agree more and that seems to be the majority of Pitchbox members. It's more of passive tool..."here are some things I'm looking for, don't contact me until you find it, in the meantime I'll enjoy what I'm currently working on."
Being contingency based, there is no cost to anyone until everyone is happy.
What's your experience or background with finding jobs for other people? What you have is an idealistic approach to recruiting, which is great, but may not that easy to pull off, if possible at all. There are not just spammy recruiters, but also b/s applicants either with bloated self assessment, unrealistic expectations or just simply unpleasant and unprofessional people to deal with. What's your plan for handling such people? After all, the pool of sensible skilled developers with honest resumes and reasonable expectations is very limited. If you ever put a developer job positing out there, you probably saw that 95% of all inbound applications are worthy only of going straight to the shredder.
(edit) Not to put you down by any means. I would love to see this work, I'm just having trouble seeing how it would.
Yes, very! What about amending our profiles? I just signed up and have a github profile, but not a resume that's particularly up to date. Is there some way I can add it if I brought it up to date?
Yes. If you just signed up, you'll get an initial email package soon. We're full service though...so you can email us anytime with questions or updates, like a new resume, at support@trypitchbox.com and we'll do the updating for you. Whichever is easiest.
Good work! However, there is no mention of telecommuting/remote positions. Even as a US worker, I prefer remote work, and it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central office.
> it baffles me that us "internet folk" are not working hard to fight the industrial-era assumption that software has to be written in a central office
Have you considered that some of us LIKE working in an office?
Of course, some people like working in offices; that was never disputed. However, there are an increasing number of organizations which have caught on that offices are not "software factories", but rather, an optional luxury.
-1 for the strawman argument. The OP didn't dispute that some of us like the office. They only pointed out that some (others) of us don't like the office, and that the site didn't take this into account.
Yes, several of the teams we are hiring for have 100% telecommute roles if you are able to legally work for a US based company. Just let us know in the Goals of this when signing up.
If you can work from outside of the US (technically), what sort of requirements for working legally for a US based company are? As far as I understand, you can just send them an invoice as a contractor and be happy, no?
I also found it odd at first that "remote" wasn't one of checkboxes in Step 2, but figured it was something I would type in a subsequent free-text box.
Well, given that the Agile cult demands colocation in a single office along with all sorts of other one size fits all cargo cultisms, what do you expect?
In my case, I prefer to not get in the way of my enemy while he's making mistakes.
YES !
Beside the fact that ask for uploading a resume is not a good move. Resume can be very quickly outdated, why not asking to link a linkedin account instead ?
+1 i only update my resume when im planning to change position, since this tool is not to actively look for jobs i would care less to keep a resume updated
Seems like a great idea. I recommend making the "what do you want to do" a bit more explicit (e.g., more multiple choice, asking me to give examples of jobs I'd leave my current position for, etc). When I completed this, I wasn't sure how you'd know what my "dream job" was. I know you're probably trying to keep it short, but I think I'd be more of a believer that this was going to yield good results if I were asking for slightly more info.
Thanks @esharef - we really are focused on making the experience very simple and painless. For developers, we can extrapolate a lot from the basic information provided (GitHub/Salary/Goals/Location/Resume)...the goals in particular are often revealing. It may take one or two pitches to calibrate but overtime pitches get more relevant.
Interesting - kind of reminds me of a site a friend built a few years ago. It was a resume site with contact info hidden. In order to contact you the recruiter had to pay you - at whatever price you put on a contact (usually a buck or two). If you didn't respond in a reasonable time the money was refunded. But he was trying to solve the same problem - recruiter spam. Unfortunately he launched right in the deepest pit of the financial meltdown and he was unable to get any traction with the site.
If I'm looking for a high paying job, a few dollars isn't going to interest me. Your friend probably had to create a ton of code to allow for the applicant to store and eventually withdraw his few bucks. If I'm really looking for a job, how many recruiters could possibly contact me? 10-15? at $2, that's $30 at the end of the process. Seems more like a distraction from my job hunting.
It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting.
I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
I expect the intent was really the other way around. To someone who is truly interested in what you have to offer, a buck or two is just a rounding error on the salary they will eventually pay you. To someone who is harvesting contact information to fire spam your way, $2 * n-number-of-contacts starts to add up very quickly.
But that's the point. It's supposed to be a no brainer for someone who actually wants a real contact with the applicant but prohibitive for a spammer.
A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.
Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.
I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.
I see your point. He really didn't ever get enough usage on the site to know if the refundable upfront fee would have been a sufficient anti-spam tactic or not. Several sites with the same basic idea all launched around that time. His was bootstrapped, at least one of the others had millions of VC behind it. I don't think any of them made it.
> I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
Just make the applicant choose a charity. (Have a list to choose from, and allow them to add one for themselves, too.)
Yes if they are serious about being pitched relevant jobs. It is one of the filters so we don't pitch jobs that will not meet your basic salary exceptions. If you don't have experience and your expectations are unreasonably high then you likely wont receive many pitches.
Fair point...right now we associate your salary with with where you live. If you are open to relocating, we'll reach out to find out where and then make sure salary is adjusted...our intent is to help you find something great, so we'll work with you to make that happen.
Just went through the signup process. There should be a textbox for those of us who don't maintain great github profiles to say a few words about ourselves.
If you attach your resume, we'll parse it for you. LinkedIn has set a precedent of cease and desists for products like this, we wanted to avoid that path.
I feel like you could emphasize your DEVELOPER-ONLY focus a little better: it's not clear who should be filling out the form a) unless you scroll down the page and read all the content or b) until you get to the github handle input and think, "Hmmm..."
I'd say they're focusing on software developers (ok, software engineers). They're more niche than 'engineers', which CS intersects. I agree it's less than obvious.
I understand you're trying to create an alternative to spam from say Linkedin, but that really is what I use for my resume these days. Can I use that for my "application"
Putting your resume online, on a resume board, or elsewhere is sure to send many unsolicited jobs in to your inbox. You'll then have to engage with each individual to determine if its interesting work, good pay, etc...That works if you are actively looking but it can be time consuming and you can be overlooked by great companies. This is meant to be a filter, we'll spend the time filtering out the junk jobs for you.
One item to pay attention to is location. If someone currently works in San Francisco and choose to remain there, will a Palo Alto company be able to contact them? Is there a default radius?
Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice.
Yeah, we understand there are unique situations like this so we typically reach out for more information when someone says they are willing to relocate.
I submitted my information; it doesn't hurt to give it a try. I live in the Philadelphia area, but I'm open to relocating if the position is right, so a service such as this may be able to work for me. I'll have to see.
Nice site. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem; have you thought about an "allocate <number> points" solution? I've had the thought that an "allocate 20 points" resume / requirements list might be superior to the traditional, cluttered approach. ( http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/why-i-wiped-m... )
I applied, it will be interesting to see what kind of jobs you have in mind. Although one way to improve is to be able to tell you where I would be willing to relocate. Id love Seattle for instance, but wouldn't consider a job in Colorado or Austin. Other than that, it is a very cool service and look forward to finding out what you find for me.
If you are legally able to work for a US company then we have several teams that are hiring for 100% telecommute roles. Just mention that in your Goals on signup.
I was about to make the same comment. @kylerush, the developer with Obama posted the A/B testing of Barack Obama's donation page. Its a great design (apparently well-tested design) glad you guys are using it.
As a developer, I love the concept - obviously, a tool that filters for great jobs and pitches them to developers is really appealing. However I'm curious about a few things:
1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?
It is a combination of all of the above. All companies are screened so we know what makes them unique and what type of developers excel there. We do the same for the developers. Everyone is happy only when we make appropriate matches...since we are developers, we think we can do this better then anyone else.
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
Yes, right now we pick that up from your goals and by looking at your background. At times we may reach out for more information so we can understand your unique situation.
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
You can supply your GitHub profile and/or Resume...ideally both. We'll look at improving the sign up process though. We just wanted to make it super simple and easy for developers to start.
Every single developer is reviewed by a human before we begin any matchmaking and we also screen every employer (this means names are in a predictable format).
Ah this clarifies something for me. I was just wanting to try it out but didn't want to put my details, can't go to the next step, but down the bottom it says "stay anonymous".
I'd prefer it if I could see the possible "goals" before entering my contact information. At the moment it is the usual: no information before signup. (I didn't proceed past the contact information tab, so can't comment further).
Out of curiosity, are you also working on Coderwall?
Your email ( from your HN profile) matches the twitter username of a Coderwall founder.
In your privacy page, you have "Appdillo, Inc. [..] provides this Privacy Policy" and the domain http://www.appdillo.com has a coderwall email address in it.
Looks pretty sweet. It's been a few years since I've done the job-search thing, but this looks like what I'd want to use.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Feynman's pickup technique [0] - why waste your time with the whole song-and-dance routine if what you want was never on offer to begin with?
I was asking because if you optimize for pitches response rate, you end up with better pitches but not necessarily good matches between candidates/companies.
I can't fill out the form as I have two major problems. I am legally entitled to work in the USA, but only for my current employer. - there is no option for this. The salary I expect depends on the type of job and total compensation (equity) - there is no way to specify this.
1% at one company vs 1% at another company can vary so drastically we thought it was almost meaningless to ask...we instead prefer to present the whole pitch and let you determine if that equity and everything else that comes with it is interesting. It is preferable if you let us know you want in the goals...something to the effect of "small startup where X, Y, and Z" or something.
I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.)
I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into.
What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-)
I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.)
There are a few things I dislike about recruiters that we aim to fix:
* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.
* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.
* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.
* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.
* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.
(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)
Whilst I don't agree with the practice, the reason most recruiters are cagey about disclosing too much info on the company they represent is because they don't want the candidate to go to the company directly and saving the company $25k. How do you deal with that challenge?
Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something?
Generally they have a contract that says something along the lines of "if your initial contact with a candidate is through me, then you'll have to pay if you hire them". I think the caginess part is just an extra precaution.
This is my thought exactly. Recruiter here, 15 years with software engineers. The concept is interesting, and I dislike what many recruiters do to give the industry a bad reputation.
That said, you are contacting a select pool of self-identified candidates about a select pool of jobs after matching them through some algorithm or criteria. Then you charge a fee to the hiring firm which is probably only competitive in NY and Silicon Valley.
Engineers that are contacted by recruiters through other social media sites only consider it 'spam' when it's a job they don't want to hear about. If your system selects a candidate to share a job with, and the candidate is not interested, then the contact is pretty much the same as spam.
I have a pool of candidates that tell me what kinds of jobs they are seeking, their criteria, how active their search is, etc and I contact them accordingly. If they aren't interested, hopefully they don't feel it is spam, but it is just as invaluable.
The recruiter/engineer relationship is broken and hopefully good recruiters and entrepreneurs are able to think of some better ideas. This has potential, but for the price I'm not so sure.
I didn't see in the thread - one advantage for candidates in using a recruiter is being a buffer in negotiations, a guide, and coaching for interviews. An upside for companies that use recruiters is the negotiation help (at times) and closing deals that might not close without an intermediary. Does your service provide these additional perks to companies and to candidates?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadIs this something that you want?
EDIT: And your site is amazingly simple yet elegant! Keep it up guys :)
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5021744
It is free for the developer. Even though it is different, we found it easiest when employers pay us similar to how they pay contingency recruiters, placement fees. Typically recruiters charge 25-35% of your first year salary, we charge a flat 25K fee to the employer that hires you. We also have a unique offering for startups where they can amortize the payments over 12 months. This pricing structure means more interesting companies can afford to be on our platform and therefore more interesting opportunities for developers.
I don't think most developers realize how much recruiters are getting paid for placements. 25% is pretty standard across US, we're less then that with our flat rate.
Where I live (Ohio) that's 50% of the salary of a developer with 5 years of experience.
This is why we built this product - assuming you are even remotely decent at programming and write code in modern languages, a dev with 5 years of exp can easily be making more then 80K+.
We have several companies right now that are hiring and paying more then that for roles where the developer can telecommute 100% from anywhere in the country. Not only do they pay well but they have really awesome teams.
Fair comment however your flat fee equates to 25% of a $100k role. It doesn't become a viable economic alternative for employers until you reach the $150k mark. If your primary target is CTO level roles then great, otherwise your fee is ridiculous.
Are you assuming west-coast? Generally speaking, "easily" sounds like a stretch to me.
Also for a 80K salary, 25K is just too steep, given that we do not know how your screening process works.
Exactly. We couldn't agree more and that seems to be the majority of Pitchbox members. It's more of passive tool..."here are some things I'm looking for, don't contact me until you find it, in the meantime I'll enjoy what I'm currently working on."
Being contingency based, there is no cost to anyone until everyone is happy.
What's your experience or background with finding jobs for other people? What you have is an idealistic approach to recruiting, which is great, but may not that easy to pull off, if possible at all. There are not just spammy recruiters, but also b/s applicants either with bloated self assessment, unrealistic expectations or just simply unpleasant and unprofessional people to deal with. What's your plan for handling such people? After all, the pool of sensible skilled developers with honest resumes and reasonable expectations is very limited. If you ever put a developer job positing out there, you probably saw that 95% of all inbound applications are worthy only of going straight to the shredder.
(edit) Not to put you down by any means. I would love to see this work, I'm just having trouble seeing how it would.
Kudos particularly on your landing page design. Very clean and easy to parse mentally. The long-form is beautifully done.
Have you considered that some of us LIKE working in an office?
Not that I would be opposed to the option of course.
In my case, I prefer to not get in the way of my enemy while he's making mistakes.
It seems more like a distraction from core development (having to manage the cash accounts for applicants) and not enough money to be interesting.
I can see charging the recruiter to email people (sites like Elance do that) but that's where it should end. The money will never be interesting enough for an applicant to care and it confuses the process.
A recruiter who is genuinely interested in you for a job opportunity wouldn't mind paying the $2 but a spammer who is emailing hundreds or thousands of people just trying to build an interest list would suffer.
Still, this hinges on the person actually responding so the spammer wouldn't suffer in this case. They'd be happy to pay for a $2 lead and not suffer any expense if the person doesn't respond.
I think you'd have to pay regardless of the lead responding for this to have a chance of working. Again, that's how a successful system work with Elance. You pay regardless of getting your bid accepted.
Just make the applicant choose a charity. (Have a list to choose from, and allow them to add one for themselves, too.)
It would be interesting if you could find an appropriate way to explain that to users; perhaps with a reference to http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/?
That being said we have also seen an overwhelming response from those that don't write code. We are figuring out how to expand the product.
Perhaps someone wants to relocate, but only to specific cities. Expanded options would be nice.
Right now we are only hiring for US companies and a few in London.
1) It sounds like companies are hand picked. On the other side: How do you filter for great developers? I'm sure you can't assume every prospective employee signup is a top-tier developer. Do you have some algorithmic, human, or other process?
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
Thanks!
It is a combination of all of the above. All companies are screened so we know what makes them unique and what type of developers excel there. We do the same for the developers. Everyone is happy only when we make appropriate matches...since we are developers, we think we can do this better then anyone else.
2) As someone about to graduate and transition to a PHD program after the summer, I'm looking at technically challenging summer internships. I'm sure there are other prospective interns. Do you have any plans to support matching summer internships?
Yes, right now we pick that up from your goals and by looking at your background. At times we may reach out for more information so we can understand your unique situation.
3) Assuming a github profile is the only "resume" your site accepts (implied by another comment here), where do developers list journal and conference publications? (Apologies in advance if this assumption is wrong -- I haven't signed up due to reasons mentioned in question #2.)
You can supply your GitHub profile and/or Resume...ideally both. We'll look at improving the sign up process though. We just wanted to make it super simple and easy for developers to start.
Out of curiosity, are you also working on Coderwall?
Your email ( from your HN profile) matches the twitter username of a Coderwall founder.
In your privacy page, you have "Appdillo, Inc. [..] provides this Privacy Policy" and the domain http://www.appdillo.com has a coderwall email address in it.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me a bit of Feynman's pickup technique [0] - why waste your time with the whole song-and-dance routine if what you want was never on offer to begin with?
Anyway, good luck!
[0] http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynm...
"Every pitch received improves our personalized matching algorithm, making pitches get even better over time."
how would you distinguish a "good" pitch from a "bad" one?
https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters
Become a recruiter.
I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.)
I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into.
What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-)
I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.)
* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.
* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.
* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.
* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.
* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.
(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)
Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something?
Or maybe the company name (or contact details) is NOT part of what they will expose to the candidate.
That said, you are contacting a select pool of self-identified candidates about a select pool of jobs after matching them through some algorithm or criteria. Then you charge a fee to the hiring firm which is probably only competitive in NY and Silicon Valley.
Engineers that are contacted by recruiters through other social media sites only consider it 'spam' when it's a job they don't want to hear about. If your system selects a candidate to share a job with, and the candidate is not interested, then the contact is pretty much the same as spam.
I have a pool of candidates that tell me what kinds of jobs they are seeking, their criteria, how active their search is, etc and I contact them accordingly. If they aren't interested, hopefully they don't feel it is spam, but it is just as invaluable.
The recruiter/engineer relationship is broken and hopefully good recruiters and entrepreneurs are able to think of some better ideas. This has potential, but for the price I'm not so sure.
I didn't see in the thread - one advantage for candidates in using a recruiter is being a buffer in negotiations, a guide, and coaching for interviews. An upside for companies that use recruiters is the negotiation help (at times) and closing deals that might not close without an intermediary. Does your service provide these additional perks to companies and to candidates?