Y Combinator-backed Coderwall started out as a social site for developers to list their achievements and projects, but it has been moving into recruiting — first by allowing companies to build their own profiles and now with the launch of a new service called Pitchbox.
It’s a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they’d want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company.
Founder Matt Deiters said this has a number of advantages over the normal recruiting process. For one thing, it avoids the random spam that developers often receive (and ignore) from recruiters. For another, it puts people who aren’t actively looking for new jobs in a position where they can still hear about opportunities that they’d be genuinely excited about.
“They are very complementary,” Deiters said when I asked why Pitchbox isn’t just a feature on Coderwall. “We had initially … thought about Pitchbox as being a product in Coderwall. As we evolved and added things around the community aspects of Coderwall, it kind of became its own network and its own community.”
Ultimately, Deiters said he decided that he didn’t want to have yet “another thing that we had to communicate” within Coderwall. At the same time, he said that the company has created “touch points” between the two services, for example by promoting Pitchbox to certain Coderwall members.
Deiters added that, thanks to the company profile feature (the profiles are free, but companies pay to promote them and add job listings), Coderwall’s revenue has been growing 40 percent “nearly every month” for the past six months, and in March, with the early tests of Pitchbox, it went up 10x. Coderwall is now profitable, he said. He also said that Pitchbox customers include YC startups, Dropbox and “a few Fortune 500 companies.”
As for how Pitchbox might expand, Deiters said there’s been interest from startups that want to recruit other types of positions. He wants to stay focused on developers for at least the next few months, but Pitchbox might expand after that.