Show HN: Canteen – Hire Engineers 10× Faster, at Half the Cost

[andyprevalsky]

Hi HN!

We are a group of YC founders sick of the hiring status quo. We're launching Canteen, a recruiting platform that makes hiring top technical talent ~10x faster, at a fraction of the cost of traditional agencies.

Instead of wrangling recruiters, you just tell Cursor/Claude:

“curl @https://recruiting.thecanteenapp.com and follow the instructions, I want a [your job description].”

From there, Canteen: • Ingests your job description • Searches across arXiv, GitHub, LinkedIn, EthResearch, etc. to find relevant technical talent • Uses our agentic communication layer to handle outreach + lead verification • Pipes warm, verified, hard-to-reach leads straight into your hiring funnel (email, CRM, calendar, etc.)

We’re building this because recruiting engineers shouldn’t require endless cold emails and bloated agency fees. Agents + open technical graphs unlock a faster, cheaper, and more direct way to hire.

Would love your thoughts and feedback!

[mosdl]

I love all the bot comments and upvotes, always a good sign!

I fail to see how this will make hiring faster/better - we already get so much recruiting spam, why would this be any different?

[andyprevalsky]

aint no bots here sir

This is different because you don't need to jump through hoops w/ recruiting agencies or spend a bunch of time looking through your employees or personal networks to find the right hires, and the lead verification part is automated too!

It essentially shortcuts all the hiring headache, and lets you just focus on meeting highly qualified candidates that fit your JD without all the people that get in the middle of that process and bloat it.

[jrflowers]

> aint no bots here sir

That makes sense. A bunch of real folks registered to post “this looks great” within minutes of this being posted

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=osamahqatanani

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=edwardkongg

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cagarza1000

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=amiayoshimura

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=apresser

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aidansimonian

And these two have been waiting years to comment but were finally moved to for first time

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jsjkim00

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=annawang7

[andyprevalsky]

they aren't bots

they are friends & customers of the product that we told about our launch and they came to show support...

[dang]

Of course I believe you that they aren't bots, but it's against HN's rules to have friends show up to upvote and comment like this. It comes across as astroturfing, and HN's community (as you've no doubt noticed) is zealous in defending itself against this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[andyprevalsky]

Yea I saw those rules a little too late after posting , that’s mb

[AllyRectangle]

I'm curious how this is any different from what every startup does when they launch and ask their employees/customers/friends to like and share their posts: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/martykausas_we-built-a-clickf...

[andyprevalsky]

if we wanted to bot this you wouldn't think it was bots lol

[jrflowers]

> if we wanted to bot this you wouldn't think it was bots lol

Can you elaborate on what you mean by that

[slater]

"if i really wanted to astro-turf this, i'd make it so you wouldn't be able to tell" ...

[mosdl]

So your ai agent will send outreach emails to potential candidates it chooses, which is not really any different than using any of the automated recruiting tools already out there. I don't see what is the difference here - using LLMs to solve something that is already pretty much automates (outreach).

[jsjkim00]

Interesting decision to leverage coding agents, wonder how it'll feel to blend those contexts. What does the agentic communication layer do for lead verification?

[andyprevalsky]

It'll communicate with them over their preferred social channel to make sure that they are available / interested in working for the person who asked!

[annawang7]

This is cool! How do your agents handle outreach? Is it email/messages? If I want to approve before reaching out to leads is there a way to do that?

[andyprevalsky]

Yea! They handle outreach on their preferred communication channel, email, linkedin, or github. Agents can reach out to the potential hires anonymously (from our network / handles), or you can include a blurb about the company if that is what you want as well.

Happy to work with you on a more custom solution as well! - reach out to [e-mail] or 972-977-7432 if you want to work w us :)

[jrflowers]

I like that the 3 other comments on this post are the only comments ever made by those accounts

[andyprevalsky]

Boooo

[jrflowers]

I’m a big fan of the six accounts registered just to post in this thread. This makes Canteen look very professional and legitimate

[andyprevalsky]

its just called having friends showing support man, relax. they are all interested in using the product as well...

[cagarza1000]

This is sooooo great - need this for my company!

[andyprevalsky]

yayyy! excited to be working w u :3

[thjo1028]

Cool UX exposing the endpoint

[andyprevalsky]

thank u!!!

[amiayoshimura]

super interesting, trying it out asap

[andyprevalsky]

<3333

[edwardkongg]

This is so sick...can't wait to try it out

[andyprevalsky]

thank u! excited to work w u and make your hiring process world class :)

[osamahqatanani]

Just talked to the team, super dope

[andyprevalsky]

Appreciate the love man <3

[YAndreaRusso]

woah, hiring engineers has always been such a pain... this is super cool

[andyprevalsky]

ik right?!! it shouldn't be so hard..

[apresser]

this looks great

[andyprevalsky]

thank u!!!!