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Please Poach Me
- theli0nheart 15y agoWe built this with the hope that people will find the jobs they truly want. Let us know what your thoughts are. Most importantly, have fun with it ;)
- philco 15y agoCool idea! The biggest risk of volunteering yourself to get poached is that your company finds out BEFORE you get poached. Everyone loses :-( If you block people at the same company, that could be a good way around it for sure. Do you think salary is the only thing that motivates people wanting to leave? Ancillary benefits to the job may be greater motivators for current employees to switch jobs, no?
- theli0nheart 15y agoSince the emails are anonymous (e.g. q8XR1BB2TokDXslewseDlGc9E@pleasepoach.me) and your name isn't provided, there's no way your company can find out if you're on the site--unless it's just you and your co-founder :(
- iam 15y agoUnless they happen to read your resume and see that your experience directly lines up with what your company/team is working on?
- Jach 15y agoOr they see requests to pleasepoach.me in their network logs, which depending on their resolution can nail you to a wall pretty easily.
- tkrajcar 15y agoexcept that every potential-employee listed has their current company listed in the results that this site shows...
- tjsnyder 15y agoBlocking people like that would simply let people compare two lists and give you confirmation on who that person is from the discrepancy. That would be bad.
- vosper 15y agoI agree, ancillary benefits could be just as (or even more) important than salary; in my case salary isn't even in the top 5 things that are motivating me to change my job - even on the low side of the market rate for developers you can have a very nice standard of living. Personally, other motivations for me include: - Being able to work with a team with diverse skills, who're smarter / more talented than me and can help me to improve myself - Working in an environment where people care about doing quality work - Having a decent amount of leave and a reasonable work day (~8 hours or less) - Having varied and interesting work, or at least not repeatedly building variations on the same theme - Doing something that is good for the world, or at the very least not evil
- lsc 15y agoYeah, that's all great, but how do you advertise that sort of thing? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's again the "who you know" network- if you know someone at the company, and they trust/respect you enough to be honest about it rather than going for the referral bonus, (and/or if they are honest enough with themselves to not talk up or talk down the company they work for... I am shocked every day by how loyal some people are to employers that can only be described as abusive.) you can find out about working conditions. But, you know? things are already pretty dang good for those of us that "know people" - If you have a large and functional network, you don't need job sites, and you don't need recruiters. It's been half a decade since I've gotten a job through a recruiter where I didn't pre-arrange things with the decision maker before the recruiter even saw my resume. (quite often for contract gigs at large companies, even if the decision maker knows you and wants you, there is still a body shop in the loop.) The whole point of recruiters, job sites, and that whole industry is to try to move beyond "It's who you know" and while that is a laudable goal, I don't think they have made a whole heck of a lot of progress, in part due to the intangibles you describe, but eh, I think that communicating the intangibles about the employer to the potential employee has all the same problems of communicating the intangibles of the potential employee to the employer, and neither problem has been solved.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoIs it that frowned upon in "industry" to look for other jobs? I'd like to think that whatever manager I might work for wouldn't be irate if he found out I was looking at moving on. This may sound like a naive question and it is. I've only had internships and am soon to go full time at a very large company.
- munin 15y agobad employers can think they own you. if they find out you're looking or are going to quit, they can react very poorly. especially if how they find out is seeing your resume on a job site (or worse, if a recruiter brings your resume to your current boss). "don't work for bad employers then" yeah pretty much! but you need to eat and pay the rent while you're looking for your next job so any way to both get your resume out there while not alerting your current boss is desired. this website is definitely not that (though really, most websites aren't if that's your concern).
- angryasian 15y agohow is this helping finding jobs that I'd want ? Wouldn't I just apply to the companies I'm interested, that are posting on job boards ?
- Michael_K 15y agoIt is, but only from the perspective of a passive seeker. As a passive seeker, you are not under time pressure to find another opportunity immediately. Receiving 1-5 offers a week that you digest in addition to you actively looking at job boards of companies you really want to land (Google, Square, FB, Twitter, Dropbox...) makes a great combination.
- ChaseB 15y agoI'm working on a project in the HR field. I'd love to chat if you're interested. Chase (at) kegstool (dot) com. Hope to talk soon!
- gukjoon 15y agoThis is a great idea. The only feature I think you need is the ability to block companies, specifically the one you're working for right now.
- theli0nheart 15y agoYep, we thought about that. We only provide a way for companies to contact you through an anonymous email (similar to Craigslist) so we decided it wasn't a key feature.
- eogas 15y agoBut what happens if you get "poached" by the company you currently work for? Is the idea that the company will contact you non-anonymously?
- kennystone 15y agoYeah, but I don't think it would be difficult to match experience and projects to a person, especially if the company is small. I love the idea, though.
- damncabbage 15y agoAnd given a lot of people use GitHub or their own blog as their primary method of showcasing what they can do, the anonymity this provides doesn't seem as useful as it might first appear.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- vld 15y agoGreat idea, bad name however. Also, might I suggest SSL for the "enter your credit card number" part?
- theli0nheart 15y agoWe're moving the entire site over to SSL a little later tonight. :)
- vld 15y agoGood. Now set DEBUG = False in your Django settings file. Seriously. You know, private keys and stuff. For, you know, important stuff like stripe.
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoI like the idea, +1 for originality. Just some thoughts though: Not that I have much experience from the employer standpoint, but the fact that I have to keep paying (even if it's $50) each time, will always leave a constant reminder that I'm spending money. That, coupled with the fact that I'm not sure what quality of candidates you'll be showing me (and I KNOW how bad headhunters can be trying to cram someone where they don't fit, just for that commission) seems like you'd have trouble getting anyone to fork over $150+ on this. Not that I have better specific suggestions, but trying to get one big lump sum might work better, as it's easier to spend once, as opposed to multiple times. And one last thing, I don't how long ago you launched, or if you already did this, but i'd try to find as many alpha tester companies (give it to em free) and candidates as possible, cuz if I just spent my third round of $50, and I"m seeing the same people, kiss it GOODBYE, and I'll be sure to warn my friends. Like I said though, you could be there already, I don't know, it's just a thought that crossed my mind.
- absconditus 15y ago$50 is really nothing for recruiting.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- zavulon 15y agoActually, in recruiting you pay nothing until one lump sump when you hire someone. Here, you pay EACH TIME, and it adds up (even if it adds up to less than 20% recruiting fee, it still feels like constantly paying)
- absconditus 15y agoSites like Monster charge employers quite a bit. Even LinkedIn has services for employers that are more expensive.
- cnxsoft 15y agoThat's true but once an agency finds the right candidate you have to pay a lot to hire him/her, like 3 months salary.
- sunchild 15y agoYou need to clean up the homepage copy. Multiple errors inbound: "Pleasepoach.me is built to give people who don't like their job out an option to transition quicker and easier. It's also build with the belief that companies don't want people who don't want to work there - so this is better for them!"
- anto210 15y agowhoops.. thanks!
- leif 15y agoI'd love "pleasestoptryingtopoach.me".
- kloncks 15y agoI got a call from a recruiter recently. Turns out he thinks I'll be a great candidate to be the new CEO of some algorithmic trading/financial services company in New York City...given my decades of experience in the field. MBA required. I'm a 21-year-old who just took a leave of absence to concentrate on Kout.me ; how is it that I'm even a target of these people yet?
- jaylevitt 15y agoBecause you have a phone or an e-mail address. I got a call from a recruiter once who said "So Rails, is that like Java?"
- NathanKP 15y agoI usually get one or two job offers a month, but I always get my contacts via one of my web app projects that I built as a sample of my skills. Surprisingly the offers aren't from ignorant recruiters, and are mostly legit offers from decent startup companies. Of course I am happily employed full time already so I am turning offers down. However, I don't think being contacted is a bad thing. At the very least I am building a list of email addresses of insiders from reputable startups that I can draw from if I ever am on the search for a new job.
- angelbob 15y agoThey're desperate, and they get paid a lot if everything goes well. They could carefully screen each person for exact suitability, throw out bad matches and bring in only a few good ones. Or they could throw huge numbers of resumes and see if any stick. If the recruiter doesn't have excellent technical judgement (few do), the approaches basically pay the same.
- leif 15y agoWhat I don't understand is: why don't the recruiters that do carefully screen people just wipe out those that don't? Are there enough companies that are too clueless to hire a good one that the bad ones still get enough results to keep doing it?
- synnik 15y agoAs a hiring manager, this does not make sense. Why should I pay $50 just to make initial contact with one person, and then still have to do the full recruiting and interviewing process? Recruiters will do all that for me for free, and pre-screen everyone, so it is the same net result to me, at least on the front-end of the hiring process. FYI, answering this question here isn't the point - your site needs to clearly tell hiring managers why it is better for THEM. You won't get a chance to open a dialogue with them when they view your site.
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoGood points, does the website charge for anything besides the connection? They aren't that clear. A headhunter could cost 10% or more of whatever I'm going to pay some guy (lets say cost would be ~10k) edit: and have my hire, or I could pony up $500 to meet some people and hopefully make a hire. I don't know if that's how it's being run, but that's the advantage I see.
- anto210 15y agoAlso - you know people on pleasepoach.me want a new opportunity, increasing the likelihood of finding someone interested in moving to a new company.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mjbellantoni 15y agoHeadhunters will ask for as much as 25% of an annual salary and usually settle around 20%.
- asmithmd1 15y agoRecruiters will charge you $20,000 to $30,000 for a candidate that you hire. I was thinking $50 to look doesn't sound appealing - maybe $500 to contact as many candidates you like, one at a time until you hire one.
- mjbellantoni 15y ago
- harryh 15y agoFWIW, this isn't especially interesting to me as someone trying to hire engineers. I can look at resumes on LinkedIn all day long for free. Why should I pay you $50?
- nandemo 15y agoPresumably because only a small percentage of people on LinkedIn are actively looking for jobs; also, I think you need a premium account on LinkedIn if you want to contact a lot of people who aren't on your network. Besides, U$50 isn't much compared to the fees recruiters charge. Even if you have to contact 20 candidates before hiring someone, $1000 is still cheap compared to, say, 15% of $100k.
- PhilipG 15y agoGreat idea. Filtering linkedin contacts who'd like to be poached. I'd like to sign up but I can't work out how! The login link doesn't take me to a register link. The big red poach button seems to do nothing.
- vld 15y agoIt seems they put <a> inside of <button>, when it should be the other way (<button> inside <a>)
- suyash 15y agoAs a developer I won't use this. I would rather charge myself for someone to contact me with job offer considering the market right now.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jaredsohn 15y agoPet peeve: Are these really "job offers"? (I've seen similar terminology used when companies contact people due to their open source projects and that bugs me, too.) I think a more proper way of describing this is that companies are offering interview opportunities.
- grandalf 15y agoclever idea, but it sort of sounds like a way to find bad apples who any company would be glad to have poached. One idea: Offer a "honey pot" service to companies to see if their employees are trying to be poached.
- PotatoEngineer 15y agoUnless that's an "aggregate data only" service (you have 3 people trying to get poached), it undermines the entire premise of the site. Even then, for small companies, it can be easy to spot the guy who doesn't want to be there anymore, if you know that someone is trying to leave.
- Jayasimhan 15y agoTo start with, let me tell you its an ingenious idea. but, How do I know if this site is active or not? This site looks to me like a proof of concept. I mean the creators are testing out if it would work based on the number of registrations. May be they would be working on the actual promise now. This could be a classic launch first and iterate example.
- mmt 15y agoI mistyped my e-mail address, so, presumably, the confirmation will bounce. There's no mechanism I can see to change it, even though I can still get to the Settings page.
- theli0nheart 15y agoThis is on the todo. Thanks!
- thenextcorner 15y agoAs a hiring manager, why would I hire people who advertise themselves to be poached? In a couple of months, I'm not really sure if they will still be interested, or if they are already on the site again. I guess that depends if you can keep them interested first.
- msbarnett 15y agoDoesn't that logic apply to every potential hire who comes to you while employed somewhere else?
- chrisbennet 15y agoIsn't it normal to hire people who are already employed but looking for work? How would someone is who looking to get poached any different than someone looking for a job the "normal" way? I suppose there are hiring managers who prefer to hire unemployed people but I suspect they prefer desperate job applicants.
- brandonb 15y agoI went to sign up as an employer, but stopped since I didn't want to fork over $50 before even seeing what quality of engineers you have. I'll bet you'd get a lot more employer interest if you let people inspect the goods before entering a credit card number.
- freerobby 15y agoI like the idea. Two implementation critiques: 1) Let recruiters see the value before making them pay (e.g. wait until people want to reach out to somebody). 2) Come up with payment terms that don't discourage use. You want people to pay you and then use your service religiously. Per-use pricing forces people to ration the extent that they use your service which gets in the way of maximizing the value you provide them.
- mopoke 15y agoI agree. There's no way I'm giving over my credit card details and being pre-billed when I have no idea if there is even anyone registered to be poached. Take a lead from dating sites - tease and squeeze.
- joshhart 15y agoI work at LinkedIn, so I think I'm reasonably qualified to provide my opinion. I'm certain that this won't work well. Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per 10) is simply outrageous. Most profiles will be junk or irrelevant - recruiters work very hard to sift through the chaff. Even of those that ARE relevant, there's a small chance they'll wind up working at your company. You'd have to have an unprecedented algorithm here. It's unlikely that you do, given we've had engineers working on optimizing search for recruiters for years. That said, LinkedIn doesn't do the best job of allowing employees to anonymously signal that they are looking for a job. I think there's space for you to make an impact, but I think your payment model will hold you back.
- PakG1 15y agoHey Josh, That's interesting! Curious what you think about mine if you have time? :) We just launched publicly. I imagine you guys must have people who are working on something similar to us as well. Here's a writeup. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/socialcheckme/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/socialcheckme/
- damncabbage 15y agoHello. Your site interests me, but I've no idea what you do. I need to provide an email address to find out. This is not a good value proposition for me. Could you perhaps make your site more informative, please? Thanks.
- PakG1 15y agoHehe, yes, we're making all that good stuff actually this weekend. :) We felt tired of working on little details and wanted to immediately push out to get some feedback. But we've realized we need more detailed information and how-tos available also. I'll email you when we put it up!
- jonknee 15y agoLinkedIn likes to brag about how it's reasonably priced... Just $18 per resume. "The cost to obtain a qualified resume on LinkedIn was less than CareerBuilder; $18.33 per resume versus $175.50." http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/cost-per-resume-lower-with-linkedin-job-posts/ http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/cost-per-r... I don't think pricing is going to be the problem here.
- brown9-2 15y agoAs someone who would consider signing up to be poached, I would really want to know more about these "high quality job offers" before giving you my personal information.
- davekinkead 15y agoI'm not trying to crush your startup dreams but you should stop right now and immediately talk to 20+ recruiters or hiring managers about your app before you invest any more time or money. I built a prototype for a similar idea about 18 months ago - it imported your linked in profile, your network could write skill specific references which back-linked and allowed recruiters/employers to search for skills/experience/geography/salary range they wanted to generate an anonymous short list of candidates in seconds; they could browse shortlisted CVs, read references and they only paid when a candidate agreed to release their details to the recruiter. Great idea eh? The problem was, just about all the recruiters & employers I talked to about it (in Australia) weren't that positive. Their reasons were: * network effects - it only becomes useful once plenty of candidates were in it. * many recruiters already had their own database of candidates that they didn't want to share or duplicate. * many recruiters needed near immediate response (they had 48hrs to fill a role). Waiting for candidates to respond to a request was a negative for them. * some recruiters saw it as a threat and didn't want to support that kind of system. * Companies often wanted a full service solution so while this could generate a quality shortlist for them, many wanted hand holding. HR is ripe for disruption but execution is everything. What does your app do that paid access to searchable linkedin profiles doesn't?
- lpolovets 15y agoThis is connected to an employee's LinkedIn profile, so why wouldn't an employee just change their contact settings to "I am open to career opportunities"? I know a lot of people that have that setting on, even if they are very happy with their job, and I don't know of a single person who has gotten flak for it from their employer.
- angelbob 15y agoUnfortunately that's very error-prone from the potential employer side. It's not a very strong signal that they're actually looking.
- lpolovets 15y agoVery true. However, the impression I've gotten from recruiters emailing me is that most of them are just sending uncustomized emails to a lot of people who match some keywords. If that is the case, then contacting 100 people instead of to 25 people means an extra hour of work. I don't think it's worth paying $5/contact to avoid something that takes so little time.
- vidarh 15y agoConversely most e-mails from recruiters get ignored. I'd be far more likely to take an e-mail that I know someone had to pay to get to me seriously, on the assumption it'd likely be better targeted.
- angelbob 15y agoThat might be an argument for premium job sites like TheLadders advertised as ($100k+ jobs). It seems like they've backed off on that branding, though. So maybe that doesn't work out well in practice?
- munin 15y agoif you work for a small company (10-200), displaying the company name basically destroys any anonymity. why display your current company name?
- tkrajcar 15y agoYup, exactly. Decent idea, but this kills it completely.
- lambda 15y agoWhen you sign up, they have a question "does your company have less than 10 employees", which is presumably to deal with this issue. Of course, 10 is a pretty low cutoff for this question.
- theli0nheart 15y agoYep. We hide the company name if you mark this as "Yes".
- dagw 15y agoEven at larger companies this is a problem, if you're not part of huge team all with similar skills and specialties. The company I work for has ~3000 employees nationally, but if you combine geographic location, education, the type of work I do and skill set, you'd be be able to pick me out from those 3000 fairly quickly.
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoReally. I can't think of single time when knowing where a candidate is/was working influenced me or any other interviewer on my team. It simply doesn't matter. OK, there were a few times when we said in a debrief "how did someone so clueless ever get hired at XXX" but that's hardly a positive influence :-)
- arooni 15y agoI think this is brilliant. And I think that it will be successful as evidenced from the strong opinions in this thread. Strong opinions help products spread. The fact that some people hate this app is only evidence that they'll tell someone else how much they hate it; which can only help you. I'm a big fan of polarizing products.
- Michael_K 15y agoI agree, it is super polarizing. The fact that it was ranked at #1 at HN for quite a while is proof of it. I am excited, that someone tries to tackle the passive job seeking market. The market for active seekers with indeed.com, simplyhired.com, monster.com, careerbuilder.com etc. is already pretty crowded, but nobody has really cracked the passive job seeking market. Granted that it's current form has its flaws (I assume it is just a first version), but this could be huge.
- tedroden 15y agoYou REALLY need to be able to limit your "browse" results to location.
- andrewflnr 15y agoIt took me a while to figure out what I don't like about the design, but I think it's just the yellow highlight on "anonymous": it the throws off the colors and visual balance. More importantly, though, it was quickly clear what exactly the site did and how it worked. I'm impatient, so I appreciate that.
- BadassFractal 15y agoGenerally speaking the best jobs are given through word of mouth and knowing the right people, so you'd still be far from getting the cream of the crop positions. I think the HN crowd can be more ambitious than this. Also, startups and small businesses most likely cannot afford this service.
- Rickasaurus 15y ago$50 for one reference? Are you serious?
- slackmeister 15y agoIf the job market for the target audience is so great (which it is), a service like this doesn't make sense. You'll only attract employees who are not competitive. Also, grammar check your landing. Even the first sentence has an error.
- Maro 15y agoSome feedback: 1. About the name: Non-native speakers may not know what "poach" means. I've lived in California for four years in the past and I was confused. 2. The cartoon fox looks like it's about to steal my mouse. It looks like you're trying to sell me lockpicking tools... 3. I think you should better explain what recruiters get out of this versus what LinkedIn offers. 4. Your landing page is really two landing pages: one for the people (they're the product), and one for the recruiters (they're the customers). I think you should better seperate the two, or just drop one of them altogether.
- tchock23 15y agoJust curious about your fourth point above... Why do you think two landing pages would be better? I've seen this approach used on a number of other sites that are seemingly successful, and am debating the single landing page approach for a project of mine, so I would be interested to hear the pros and cons.
- Maro 15y agoI'm not really an expert on landing pages, it just seems to me that coming up with a good landing page for one set of users is hard enough... This isn't that bad until the first horizontal line (except for the fox), where it's clearly targeted at the users, with a smaller link for companies. But I don't think it works below the line. I think they should focus on the users and assume that the recruiters are professionals willing to jump through more hoops.
- diminish 15y agoWe would love if you could also give some hints about www.jobrupt.com; a free web tool - in beta, for people to initiate job applications. (pls excuses for the design and language)
- jsight 15y agoI think two landing pages would be useful due to the discussion of price on the homepage. When I first quickly skimmed it I was wondering why they were charging job-seekers so much. People scan sites for unfamiliar services very quickly. Having the pricing so close to the free service is likely to confuse some subset of readers.
- hrktb 15y agoNitpicking: "Don't like your job?" feels too negative IMHO. I think the concept is good, but reading this as the first words in the site sparked a mental "I like my job, no thanks." response, and would have just closed the tab if it wasn't a HN submission. Wanting to get poached if there is a good opportunity doesn't mean hating one's job. Instead if I hated my job I'd try to run away from it within three months, and wouldn't expect to get poached within this timeframe.
- alexlin 15y agoPutting aside all the costs of how much it costs to recruit a talented engineer/designer, I think the current monetization model these guys are using for the site is terrible for gaining traction. When I first saw this on HN, I thought, "Sweet! If I can browse through the candidates and only pay $50 per email, I think this could be manageable!" I immediately started to look for where I could begin browsing before I realized I needed to enter my CC #.... There wasn't even a free trial... It was straight up, "Hey! You don't know how good/bad our candidates are, but give us $50 and just trust us!" My suggestion? Make it like the dating sites like many here have already suggested. Let me browse your PF and see your qualifications. Why not set a bidding system on the 5 emails sent out a week? That way you can even rank how good each candidate is and what the demand for them are. All in all, current model for me is no bueno. For all I know, you're grabbing people off CL.
- atomicdog 15y agoGood idea, but saying "I work at X company doing Y" for most companies is about as 'anonymous' as the average Facebook profile.
- sdfjkl 15y agoIf I wanted to look for a job anonymously, the last thing I'd want to do would be to sign in with my LinkedIn profile. I'd probably rather make an extra email account somewhere and use that. It seems way to easy to implement a third column to this offer: Companies! Find out which of your rat bastard employees is about to abandon ship for only $50 (per month). Get email notifications as soon as one of your employees logs into our site and use our handy Word template to fire them automatically!
- jurre 15y agoI think that goes completely against the whole point of the website, it's a platform where you can let people know your interested in finding a new job without your employer finding out about it.
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoHonestly, I'd like to know how often this actually happens. Most employers with half a brain know that they will lose employees if a better offer comes along. Most of them also realize that at any given time, people are exploring their options. They also realize that the vast majority of them will stay put and won't leave without signalling in some way and it's really not a productive use of time scanning the web trying to figure out who might quit next. I've worked for some pretty stupid people and even they wouldn't bother doing this.
- troels 15y agoIsn't this what linkedin is for?
- seivan 15y agoReally fucked up (from a engineers point of view) that it only supports linked in and not Github to begin with.