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I just thought of this, and it's been over 24 hours since I last slept, so this might not be the best idea. But, I'm imagining a world in which it exists, and

I just thought of this, and it's been over 24 hours since I last slept, so this might not be the best idea. But, I'm imagining a world in which it exists, and it's pretty exciting. What I think would be awesome is if you made a company that screens for only the highest level candidates: You do all of the technical screening to ensure candidates are of a certain value. You look at open source contribution, their blog, some source code (which coders could submit to you with an NDA or something), experience, LinkedIn, references, interviews, etc. And you assign them a score, or maybe just a yes/no. If you could have a screening process that was on par with, say, Google's, and became notorious for such a thing, I think you'd be in a position of extraordinary value. You'd be offering Google Quality Engineers who are actively seeking jobs. I think that's huge! You'd attract business that are willing to pay for the best, and you'd attract talent that wants the best pay. The main goal here is to establish yourself as having a rigorous and "industry best" screening process. You only attract and accept awesome developers. You do all of the work in the technical screening, and you front your reputation on that. You only deal directly with candidates, and on the other end, with people in the position to hire. Of course, there is a chicken and egg problem here. So you'd need a lot of publicity out the gate, a decent pool of acceptable candidates, or a decent set of job availabilities. I'm tired of being asked if I know what a join is, the pros/cons of indexing, the difference between by reference and by value, various OO questions (What's an abstract class do?), design patterns, what memcached does, etc. And I'm sure places are tired of candidates that don't know these things. Solve both of our problems.

ig1 16y ago
You'd essentially be a recruiter with all the positives and negatives of that. Most of the job is sales not filtering and building connections with companies. It's a very drawn out process as well, for a successful hire you might not get paid until 5-8 months after submitting someone for a job, so it's pretty much impossible to bootstrap and it takes a long time to build a decent revenue stream. Plus you can't scale efficiently, your primary costs is skilled labour, and the cost of that grows linearly with your customer base.
- photon_off 16y ago
  In terms of scaling, if you're having to screen so many employees that it becomes your bottleneck, then it'd be a business on the path to success. It doesn't need to scale non-linearly, because each candidate screened is worth, on average, some dollar amount. I see it as an analogy: YC is to Angels & VCs as <this thing> is to Companies that are Hiring. If you get into YC, you are definitely a noteworthy team. Furthermore, YC is able to prune down 1,000+ applicants to under 40 in a short amount of time. They probably turn down 75% of all applicants in 20 minutes or less per applicant. If it's your job to discern, you're going to figure out how to do it efficiently. They also attract very good applicants. Why can't there be something like this for brilliant people seeking jobs just like YC is for brilliant people seeking to start companies? You're right, though, about building connections with companies. Though, in this case the "connection" has more to do with reputation of "offers only Google quality candidates, via a rigorous screening process" than "hey, they are hit or miss but have provided some good hires in the past".
  - ig1 16y ago
    Sure but it's a service business like consultancy rather than a startup business where you might be able to scale rapidly. Plus it comes with other complexities, it's very easy for your staff to leave and start competing services taking many of your customers and your candidates with them. Most recruiting firms have tighter computer lockdowns than banks because of this, they often do crazy things like have their contact/CV management system served over citrix as images to prevent employees walking off with the data.

ig1 16y ago

You'd essentially be a recruiter with all the positives and negatives of that. Most of the job is sales not filtering and building connections with companies. It's a very drawn out process as well, for a successful hire you might not get paid until 5-8 months after submitting someone for a job, so it's pretty much impossible to bootstrap and it takes a long time to build a decent revenue stream. Plus you can't scale efficiently, your primary costs is skilled labour, and the cost of that grows linearly with your customer base.

photon_off 16y ago
In terms of scaling, if you're having to screen so many employees that it becomes your bottleneck, then it'd be a business on the path to success. It doesn't need to scale non-linearly, because each candidate screened is worth, on average, some dollar amount. I see it as an analogy: YC is to Angels & VCs as <this thing> is to Companies that are Hiring. If you get into YC, you are definitely a noteworthy team. Furthermore, YC is able to prune down 1,000+ applicants to under 40 in a short amount of time. They probably turn down 75% of all applicants in 20 minutes or less per applicant. If it's your job to discern, you're going to figure out how to do it efficiently. They also attract very good applicants. Why can't there be something like this for brilliant people seeking jobs just like YC is for brilliant people seeking to start companies? You're right, though, about building connections with companies. Though, in this case the "connection" has more to do with reputation of "offers only Google quality candidates, via a rigorous screening process" than "hey, they are hit or miss but have provided some good hires in the past".
- ig1 16y ago
  Sure but it's a service business like consultancy rather than a startup business where you might be able to scale rapidly. Plus it comes with other complexities, it's very easy for your staff to leave and start competing services taking many of your customers and your candidates with them. Most recruiting firms have tighter computer lockdowns than banks because of this, they often do crazy things like have their contact/CV management system served over citrix as images to prevent employees walking off with the data.