[atlasunshrugged]

When I've made recommendations in the past it's usually because I understand the needs of both sides. It sounds like once I as a scout refer my top 10, you prospect them for all of your companies, not just one. Is that right? Also curious about pjam15's question about whether the people you recommend know that we were the ones that recommended them. Also, how do you know if my (or any other scout) has recommendations that are any good?

[amitsy]

Yeah, that's how most current recommendations work (when one understands the needs of both sides). But we feel that it puts too much friction to recommend.

"It sounds like once I as a scout refer my top 10, you prospect them for all of your companies, not just one. Is that right?" - yes

"Also curious about pjam15's question about whether the people you recommend know that we were the ones that recommended them" - you can choose to make yourself anonymous selectively. for example, for people you know very well, you could choose to have your name mentioned. for acquaintances, you could choose to be anonymous

"Also, how do you know if my (or any other scout) has recommendations that are any good?" - Well, this is a little bit tricky. We currently just pass on the information while internally maintaining a score of how many of your recommendations have received how much interest from companies and what the interview experience was.

[atlasunshrugged]

Cool, on the first point, that's fair. I've also been at startups where they ask us to just list all the interesting people we know and would like to work with and then they just take that info and prospect them independently; sounds like you're just productizing that process which is great.

On the last point, interesting, I guess you will have to take a lot of time at the beginning to do your own screening of all the referred people to make sure they meet your standards before you decide a scout is any good and needs less supervision than others.

2 other things:

1) It says only software engineers can apply. I sort of understand but wonder if you'd consider making exceptions - I was early on at Gigster (another YC co but doing software development as a service with a network of freelance engineers) and some similar co's and so although I'm not an engineer, I have a ton of great ones in my network.

2) It says you're not available in my geographic area. Where are you recruiting from?

[amitsy]

Great. On 2, we are currently live in US and India so are available in that geography. We couldn't do much about recommendations coming from other geographies (as we don't have many partner companies there) so have put that limit. On 1, yeah, we do make exceptions there. we have not yet decided if we want to keep it a hard limit but we are sure that we would want recommendations from people that would have definitely worked directly with software engineers.

[atlasunshrugged]

Ah, my fault on point 2, I'm on vacay in Uganda and didn't turn on my VPN but usually in the U.S. Sounds good, very cool idea and I'll be signing up shortly

[amitsy]

Awesome! Looking forward to have you as a user :)