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> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had

> We tried some new tactics near the end that seemed to be bearing fruit, and I think in a world where tech hadn't crashed in mid to late 2022 we would have had a reasonable shot. Is this referring to Magnet? I thought that was neat product idea.

rachofsunshine 4y ago
Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that companies would complete a questionnaire about what they wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and they would review only candidates who indicated interest. We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to make this a good experience, because taking control of the messaging let us actually do that.) Magnet grew out of four main observations: * Our users got much better results when we helped them search rather than leaving it to them. * What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our head of finance put it during a discussion last January that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a credit card and get candidates". * The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and bringing that in-house meant we could show that information very accurately and without incentive for companies to be dishonest, and * We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that problem if we actually had it, which we didn't. So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on platform by a factor of like five and made companies way happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us. And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least on paper, that our number of connections between candidates and companies actually grew through much of fall 2022 despite the collapse in hiring. That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it took off at all suggests that there was probably something there.
- Terretta 4y ago
  This is model-adjacent to what we're looking for someone to help try again, but with a return per match that makes it easier to make a company out of.

rachofsunshine 4y ago

Yeah. (For those unfamiliar with it, Magnet was basically an attempt to automate sourcing. The way it worked was that companies would complete a questionnaire about what they wanted, we would message candidates on their behalf, and they would review only candidates who indicated interest. We applied some throttling and quality thresholds to try to make this a good experience, because taking control of the messaging let us actually do that.) Magnet grew out of four main observations: * Our users got much better results when we helped them search rather than leaving it to them. * What company users fundamentally wanted was to - as our head of finance put it during a discussion last January that ended up leading to the creation of Magnet - "swipe a credit card and get candidates". * The most interest we'd seen on the candidate side was when we could tell them what companies really wanted, and bringing that in-house meant we could show that information very accurately and without incentive for companies to be dishonest, and * We had a fundamental lack of activity problem. We talked often about how nice it would be if we had Linkedin's spam problem, because we had lots of ideas for how to solve that problem if we actually had it, which we didn't. So we built Magnet, which ended up increasing activity on platform by a factor of like five and made companies way happier. We scaled it up over time, and right as we really turned it up in June, the market fell out from under us. And it's a testament to just how well it worked, at least on paper, that our number of connections between candidates and companies actually grew through much of fall 2022 despite the collapse in hiring. That's not to say Magnet didn't have problems. It did. It had issues with fraudulent profiles (there turned out to be quite a few of these - a lot of job sites are dealing with this problem at the moment in the remote-work world), and we were definitely hitting a point of diminishing returns as we scaled it to some extent. But given how quickly it was built, and how bad the market was, the fact that it took off at all suggests that there was probably something there.

Terretta 4y ago
This is model-adjacent to what we're looking for someone to help try again, but with a return per match that makes it easier to make a company out of.