Previously video-hiring service HireHive, the founders behind Y Combinator-backed Hackruiter have taken the next logical step in being solving the problem of hiring good people, and have actually become recruiters themselves. While we’ve chronicled the Silicon Valley talent crunch in a number of ways, we’ve never covered a startup actually attempting to disrupt the process of engineering recruiting. Until now.
Says founder Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, “A lot of people approach hiring as a purely technical problem. We think there’s a lot of value in approaching it from a human standpoint as technical people.”
What makes Hackruiter special is that founders Bergson-Shilcock and David Albert are actually the ones doing the recruiting(!). Having engineering backgrounds gives them a leg up on other recruiting services like Top Prospect and Pursuit because qualifications that sound arcane to non-technical recruiters actually mean something to them. They’re not just matching up words on a resume to words on a job description.
Says Bergson-Shilcoc, “We are hackers ourselves so when we talk to people they’re not just a bunch of buzzwords or key words, we can actually do an intelligent [job] match.”
The Hackruiters also is relatively transparent with their offerings. They’ll you that you can find a job on the Quora jobs page, have an API for all their listings and don’t require applicant exclusivity. They ‘ll also increase your chances at finding a good fit, by offering relevant recommendations: If you want to work at Quora because you like Python and C++, there’s a good chance you’d be interested in Dropbox which is also a Python and C++ shop.
“Big companies like Google and Microsoft can go to colleges and recruit. Small startups don’t have the budget for that,” says Albert. Despite starting small, Hackruiter is selective about who they will work with and only work with good companies, who provide references for engineers (It’s usually the other way around). While not precluding eventually recruiting for a Google or a Twitter, they are starting with startups because those are the companies they know the best and the ones that most hackers never hear about.
The Hackruiters are kicking off their offensive in March by travelling across the country through New York, Boston, San Francisco and Mountain View, meeting people who want to work at or just learn working at smaller startups. If you’re not near any of the three stops, you can ping them for a Skype chat here.
Hackruiter helps good engineers find jobs at startups. It’s a recruiting company, but all the recruiting is done by engineers who travel to different cities around the country and hold office hours for anyone who’s interested.
Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
Boston, MA
