Coderwall, a Y Combinator-backed startup that allows developers to build profiles around their skills and achievements, is ready for companies to start recruiting on the site — specifically by customizing their Coderwall profiles.
Founder Matt Deiters tells me (via email) that there are already 6,000 companies with a presence on Coderwall, but for now, those take the form of unofficial teams, which compete on the Coderwall leaderboard. For example, if you go to the team page for Shopify, you see the team members, but you don’t actually learn anything about the company.
A claimed profile, on the other hand, is essentially a detailed description what it’s like to work for a given company (or at least what the recruiter wants you to think it’s like). Coderwall tested the program out with a few initial teams including Heroku, whose profile includes lots of office photos, a list of favorite benefits, job listings, and more. There’s a lot of stuff packed onto one page — if I could actually code, I might be tempted to apply.
Deiters writes:
Every startup is trying to win the talent war but we found a secret weapon, transparency. The best developers want to work where they can solve interesting challenges and build their skills but job boards and recruiter emails lack this information that resonates with good engineers. When we see teams successfully convey their unique engineering challenges, they rise above others attracting more and better applicants.
So Coderwall is giving companies a chance to get that message across to the more than 100,000 developers who visit the site each month, Deiters says. In fact,the initial test has already prompted more than 300 companies to send in a request to claim their page.
That’s particularly good news for Coderwall, because its business model is tied to recruiting. Creating a profile is free, but if companies want to be featured on the site and add specific job listings, it costs $99 per month. Deiters says Coderwall will be introducing other products for outbound recruiting, so that companies can actually reach out to developers.