[cushychicken]

Do you say “hardware” to mean “mechanical engineering”? That’s kind of what it seems like from your description and screenshots. It’s probably worth making this a bit more descriptive - to some people “hardware” means PCBs and electronics. (I’m one of them!)

It’s an interesting idea and I like that you’ve stood up something minimal to test your product offering quickly.

What’s your elevator pitch for your value proposition?

How do you plan to scale this business beyond you and your co founder?

[cporios]

That’s a good point regarding hardware in the name. Eventually we’d like to do all hardware and more (e.g. architecture), but currently our expertise is in mechanical and robotics engineering.

Our pitch: We make recruiting easier, better and cheaper for the companies building the hardware of tomorrow, by letting them focus on their product rather than repetitive candidate skill assessments. Currently, senior engineers in small startups and scale ups spend a lot of their time interviewing, and they often don’t do it well (remote CAD sessions aren’t really a thing). We save them time and money.

We will scale this by hiring freelancer interview engineers. This has already been done in software, very successfully: karat.com. So we think it can work at least equally well in hardware.

[cushychicken]

That’s an interesting thesis.

I know recruitment firms serve some of the phone screen purpose you’re proposing, but just with basic Q/A of resumes.

I think, if I were looking to hire you, I’d be wondering how alike your working style was to that of me and my team. I’d want to know how much I could trust your judgment in a candidate’s technical approach.

I’d also offer that you can’t really outsource the job of evaluating cultural fit - which is still really important in spite of all the baggage that term carries.

[cporios]

Thank you - we think we’re at least 10x better than a non-technical recruiter (also because they have completely different incentives).

These reservations are fair. Hopefully, eventually we’ll have enough endorsements and references to give you some confidence. If you’d like to give us a try before then, happy to talk whenever at [e-mail]!

We don’t do cultural fit at all, and we don’t intend to. I agree this is very important, yet very difficult and inefficient to outsource. We don’t aim to replace all interviewing: becoming a better substitute for early-stage technical screening is more than enough.

[Aromasin]

I just want to reiterate the comment you're replying to; in mine and I safely assumed until now everyone else's mind, hardware means electronics/electrical. When I job hunt for a computer engineer role, I often use "hardware engineer" as a prompt and I've never seen it return a mech eng or robotics one. Hardware just seems the wrong word to use in your case.