Technical recruiting platform Triplebyte launches engineer genome project

Technical recruiting platform Triplebyte, which has raised $3 million in funding, just launched its engineer genome project to foster software-driven, intelligent job-matching.

“We figured out the exact list of attributes that top tech companies in Silicon Valley care the most about and specifically, they all kind of agree on the same criteria, but the weight they assign to each one varies dramatically,” Triplebyte co-founder and former Y Combinator partner Harj Taggar told me. “So, some people care a lot about technical communication and other companies care minimally, but a lot more about how well you write implementable code.”

Triplebyte’s engineer genome figures out a candidate’s strengths and automatically tells them the companies that will be the best technical fit for them. Triplebyte has made recommendations from the very beginning, but the engineer genome project will make the process a lot faster.

Since launching last year, Triplebyte has evaluated thousands of engineers in a mostly blind interview process that involves a coding test, “which gives us a pretty strong signal whether we think they’re going to be a good fit for the company’s we work with, which is predominantly YC companies to this point,” Taggar said. If someone does well on the test, Triplebyte will interview them and, depending on how that goes, suggest certain jobs to apply for.

In the last couple of weeks, Triplebyte signed on Uber and Khan Academy. The ultimate aim with Triplebyte is to get companies making judgments about people based on their skills rather than resume. Triplebyte never even asks for a resume, so the company doesn’t know anything about where the candidate went to school or where they’ve worked.

“We’ve sort of been a conduit for engineers who don’t have great resumes, who don’t have MIT, Stanford credentials into startups, from 3-person YC companies to Airbnb and Dropbox,” Taggar said.

Eliminating bias as much as possible in the interview process is key to building a diverse and inclusive team. In fact, several studies have revealed interviewer bias when reviewing resumes that are identical,with the exception of names that might signal race or gender.

“We’re not name blind, so it’s still not perfect,” Taggar said. “Doing them name blind, doing them voice blind — these are all things we would really like to start doing.”

You can learn more about the engineer genome project on Triplebyte’s blog.