In many ways, it’s a great time to be a software engineer. Pay is high — typically in the six figures and on very rare occasion, reportedly much more. Engineers can increasingly live and work wherever they want, too. But demand for software engineers has turned into a nightmare for many developers who are routinely deluged with requests from recruiters on LinkedIn.
Enter Humble, a kind of dating app for engineers who are looking to land at the right company. Created last night at the Disrupt Berlin hackathon, the idea was born of the “realization that engineers get harassed, like when women get harassed on Tinder,” says cofounder Steven Renwick, who has appeared on TechCrunch’s stage before. Last year, his startup Satago — a U.K.-based fintech startup looking to help small business owners get paid on time — was a Startup Battlefield finalist and wound up raising £4.6 million in funding from ESF Capital shortly afterward.
Satago has since pivoted into MindMatch, which aims to help recruiters hire more effectively, so Renwick knows a thing or two about the demands on both recruiters and their corporate clients.
Now, by focusing on engineers with his newest hack, he’s working to empower them, too. In fact, the more swiping developers do, the smarter the system gets (theoretically) about what he or she is looking for in a job.
In another interesting twist, Renwick doesn’t see Humble charging based on a successful match, which is how most recruiting platforms work. Instead, the pricing is again similar to dating apps, in that the more popular the hiring company, the more it pays Humble. (“If SoundCloud is getting a swiped a lot, it should pay more than a little startup that no one has heard of,” says Renwick.)
The app, which was largely built off the public APIs of SAP — a hackathon sponsor — will eventually be localized to engineers, too, says Renwick. The reason: he also wants to make it easier for them to swipe on the jobs closest to where they live or want to live.
You can learn a bit more about the app and its pitch below.