5 ms·

Coderwall (YC W12) launches a separate new recruiting product, Pitchbox

59 points by bitsweet 13y ago

colevscode 13y ago
I love the design. Something about it makes me feel like I'm planning a vacation, rather than a career. Nice work.
windsurfer 13y ago
I am in the Pitchbox beta, and it's a pretty clever take on traditional CRUD apps. I believe the whole site just dumps data into a backend that is then manually searched by agents to match companies with developers. These agents then manually email the developer and converse with them personally. EDIT: Changed wording
- bitsweet 13y ago
  Hey windsurfer - IIRC you and I did exchange a few emails because of a bug early on that didn't correctly schedule a call with the company from the pitch you liked within the app...sorry about that. I think its been fixed for a while now. BTW we never share data with recruiters.
  - windsurfer 13y ago
    Hey, yes we did. No problem with that bug! Sorry, I wasn't sure what to call your agents. It's a neat app! I like it.
revorad 13y ago
This looks like a nice service, but I don't get this idea of programmers suggesting the salary. Companies should make an offer based on their business needs and the profile of the prospect. Then, it's up to the prospect to accept or reject the offer. The power balance is already pretty heavily in the favour of employers. This just perpetuates the status quo of treating programmers as interchangeable commodities which come with fixed price labels.
- bitsweet 13y ago
  Pitchbox is not just about optimising on salary only, which is important, but also on the developers' interests and career goals. The developer retains all the control...for example the salary is only used by Pitchbox, not the employer, as one of our filters in the matching process. We ask companies for their compensation ceiling and developers for their compensation floor to make sure engineers aren't matched with companies that are not within the same range. Every pitch a developer receives includes compensation information among other things.
  - revorad 13y ago
    Matthew, thanks for the clarification. I'm sorry, my original comment was a bit too harsh. I've been speaking to a few companies recently, and apart from tactics like trying to fish out a salary number, I've also been surprised by their unresponsiveness to emails, strong dislike for employee side projects, and unrealistic expectations. Everyone's crying about how hard hiring is, but if this is how they treat employees, it's not surprising really. I wish you luck with Pitchbox and hope you can help improve the situation.
- vonmoltke 13y ago
  To supplement your point, having the programmer suggest the salary also creates problems in that Pitchbox is separated from specific geographic regions. The salary I want for the exact same job varies greatly depending on where it is. My number for San Francisco would price me right out of Austin, for example.
  - peterjmag 13y ago
    Exactly. A while back, I was considering jobs in both Colorado and the Bay Area. A $100K position in the Bay Area might only be worth half that in my home town of Fort Collins (and perhaps $70-80K in Denver). I wouldn't want to undersell myself by selecting $60K during the signup process if I thought that I could make more than that in the Bay Area. When I first checked out Pitchbox earlier this year[1], that uncertainty was enough for me to skip signing up entirely. bitsweet mentioned below[2] that my selection is used only as a filter and not shown to employers, but I think that could stand to be made more clear either during the signup process or somewhere on the landing page. EDIT for another slightly related point: I take it this is for US-based employers at the moment. Are there any plans to expand to other markets? Now that I'm moving to Berlin, I'd love to use something like Pitchbox in my job search (though incidentally, salaries are a completely different story over there). [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022472 [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521244
aleksandrm 13y ago
Is this tailored more toward experienced and established developers, or junior roles too? The site states that you handpick the best companies; will the companies be able to specify that they may be looking to fill junior positions too?
- bitsweet 13y ago
  Hi Aleksandr, We do screen companies but many of them are hiring for various roles and levels of experience.
esharef 13y ago
Passive candidates are completely under-represented in recruiting efforts. This is awesome.
pacaro 13y ago
Pitchbox certainly worked well for me. I wasn't actively looking, but I was reasonably interested in the possibility if the right job came up. I signed up and forgot about it. About a month later they matched me with a genuinely interesting position. This Friday will be my last day at Microsoft. The experience was very positive for me. I know some people seem overly concerned about the salary selection, but I always got the impression that was more to make sure that candidate and company are in the same ballpark - the previous time I had looked I was seriously low-balled (by ~50%) by a startup that claimed to offer "competitive salary". For me negotiation about salary and package happened when it should, at the end of the process.
phormula 13y ago
how is 20% of first years salary cheaper than a recruiter? seems like the same deal but without the annoying phone calls
gav 13y ago
Would be nice to be able to provide Linkedin details in lieu of a resume.
westonh 13y ago
Is this just for developers or are other positions like UX or product design eligible?
tahoecoder 13y ago
Do you need to upload a resume for this to work? I signed up a while back but didn't hear anything from them.
pdufour 13y ago
This is nit-picky, but the huge vertical padding on the homepage is quite bothersome to me. I can fit just about one feature per page on my monitor. Something more condensed would look a lot better I think.

59 points by bitsweet 13y ago

I love the design. Something about it makes me feel like I'm planning a vacation, rather than a career. Nice work.

I am in the Pitchbox beta, and it's a pretty clever take on traditional CRUD apps. I believe the whole site just dumps data into a backend that is then manually searched by agents to match companies with developers. These agents then manually email the developer and converse with them personally. EDIT: Changed wording

bitsweet 13y ago
Hey windsurfer - IIRC you and I did exchange a few emails because of a bug early on that didn't correctly schedule a call with the company from the pitch you liked within the app...sorry about that. I think its been fixed for a while now. BTW we never share data with recruiters.
- windsurfer 13y ago
  Hey, yes we did. No problem with that bug! Sorry, I wasn't sure what to call your agents. It's a neat app! I like it.

revorad 13y ago

This looks like a nice service, but I don't get this idea of programmers suggesting the salary. Companies should make an offer based on their business needs and the profile of the prospect. Then, it's up to the prospect to accept or reject the offer. The power balance is already pretty heavily in the favour of employers. This just perpetuates the status quo of treating programmers as interchangeable commodities which come with fixed price labels.

bitsweet 13y ago
Pitchbox is not just about optimising on salary only, which is important, but also on the developers' interests and career goals. The developer retains all the control...for example the salary is only used by Pitchbox, not the employer, as one of our filters in the matching process. We ask companies for their compensation ceiling and developers for their compensation floor to make sure engineers aren't matched with companies that are not within the same range. Every pitch a developer receives includes compensation information among other things.
- revorad 13y ago
  Matthew, thanks for the clarification. I'm sorry, my original comment was a bit too harsh. I've been speaking to a few companies recently, and apart from tactics like trying to fish out a salary number, I've also been surprised by their unresponsiveness to emails, strong dislike for employee side projects, and unrealistic expectations. Everyone's crying about how hard hiring is, but if this is how they treat employees, it's not surprising really. I wish you luck with Pitchbox and hope you can help improve the situation.
vonmoltke 13y ago
To supplement your point, having the programmer suggest the salary also creates problems in that Pitchbox is separated from specific geographic regions. The salary I want for the exact same job varies greatly depending on where it is. My number for San Francisco would price me right out of Austin, for example.
- peterjmag 13y ago
  Exactly. A while back, I was considering jobs in both Colorado and the Bay Area. A $100K position in the Bay Area might only be worth half that in my home town of Fort Collins (and perhaps $70-80K in Denver). I wouldn't want to undersell myself by selecting $60K during the signup process if I thought that I could make more than that in the Bay Area. When I first checked out Pitchbox earlier this year[1], that uncertainty was enough for me to skip signing up entirely. bitsweet mentioned below[2] that my selection is used only as a filter and not shown to employers, but I think that could stand to be made more clear either during the signup process or somewhere on the landing page. EDIT for another slightly related point: I take it this is for US-based employers at the moment. Are there any plans to expand to other markets? Now that I'm moving to Berlin, I'd love to use something like Pitchbox in my job search (though incidentally, salaries are a completely different story over there). [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022472 [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521244

aleksandrm 13y ago

Is this tailored more toward experienced and established developers, or junior roles too? The site states that you handpick the best companies; will the companies be able to specify that they may be looking to fill junior positions too?

bitsweet 13y ago
Hi Aleksandr, We do screen companies but many of them are hiring for various roles and levels of experience.

esharef 13y ago

Passive candidates are completely under-represented in recruiting efforts. This is awesome.

pacaro 13y ago

Pitchbox certainly worked well for me. I wasn't actively looking, but I was reasonably interested in the possibility if the right job came up. I signed up and forgot about it. About a month later they matched me with a genuinely interesting position. This Friday will be my last day at Microsoft. The experience was very positive for me. I know some people seem overly concerned about the salary selection, but I always got the impression that was more to make sure that candidate and company are in the same ballpark - the previous time I had looked I was seriously low-balled (by ~50%) by a startup that claimed to offer "competitive salary". For me negotiation about salary and package happened when it should, at the end of the process.

phormula 13y ago

how is 20% of first years salary cheaper than a recruiter? seems like the same deal but without the annoying phone calls

gav 13y ago

Would be nice to be able to provide Linkedin details in lieu of a resume.

westonh 13y ago

Is this just for developers or are other positions like UX or product design eligible?

tahoecoder 13y ago

Do you need to upload a resume for this to work? I signed up a while back but didn't hear anything from them.

pdufour 13y ago

This is nit-picky, but the huge vertical padding on the homepage is quite bothersome to me. I can fit just about one feature per page on my monitor. Something more condensed would look a lot better I think.