[liberatus]

Our solution to recruiter spam:

Become a recruiter.

I'm sorry but how is your business model any different from that of a recruiter? (Other than claims of human or AI filtered quality.)

I just don't see how you will not run into the exact same problems that existing recruiters run into.

What makes you different than a normal recruiter building profiles of companies and employers and soliciting both? This just looks very familiar, abeit drop dead gorgeous. :-)

I guess if good design and AI are enough to solve the recruiter problem, then count me in, it's just not clear to me how you are really different from your landing page. (Other than of course it is beautiful, seriously fantastic work.)

[bitsweet]

There are a few things I dislike about recruiters that we aim to fix:

* They nearly all are technically incompetent, e.g. thinking Java is the cool word for Javascript and such. We know the difference between interfaces and inheritance, being developers ourselves, we are better at understanding the needs of companies and matching that to the desires of developers.

* Recruiters hide information, almost always. We're fully transparent with each pitch and include details about salary, team, etc upfront.

* Recruiters are about quick turn and will place you at any role that matches their keywords. We're more interested in long term relationships. In Pitchbox, this manifests itself in many ways...for example, just because you signed up today, doesn't mean you'll start getting job pitches tomorrow...instead we focus on relevancy and quality over quantity so you hear from us only when we think its particularly suited for you.

* The recruiting experience is horrible for companies too. The recruiter typically spams that hiring manager with resumes forcing the company to sift through it all. We provide simple useful tools for the companies connecting with Pitchbox members.

* If you liked our homepage for its simplicity and design, then you'll be happy to know we have built our entire product with similar focus. Interacting with it should be easy, purposeful, and enjoyable - pretty much the opposite of every interaction I've had with recruiters.

(BTW - Thanks for the kind words about our design)

[Peroni]

Whilst I don't agree with the practice, the reason most recruiters are cagey about disclosing too much info on the company they represent is because they don't want the candidate to go to the company directly and saving the company $25k. How do you deal with that challenge?

Look, I'm incredibly vocal about the need to disrupt the recruitment industry but from what I understand based on the discussion here, the difference between Pitchbox and agencies is that you're developers not recruiters and you charge a flat fee. Am I missing something?

[jim_h]

They may have an exclusive contract with the company for that position, for a certain period of time.

Or maybe the company name (or contact details) is NOT part of what they will expose to the candidate.

[icambron]

Generally they have a contract that says something along the lines of "if your initial contact with a candidate is through me, then you'll have to pay if you hire them". I think the caginess part is just an extra precaution.

[fecak]

This is my thought exactly. Recruiter here, 15 years with software engineers. The concept is interesting, and I dislike what many recruiters do to give the industry a bad reputation.

That said, you are contacting a select pool of self-identified candidates about a select pool of jobs after matching them through some algorithm or criteria. Then you charge a fee to the hiring firm which is probably only competitive in NY and Silicon Valley.

Engineers that are contacted by recruiters through other social media sites only consider it 'spam' when it's a job they don't want to hear about. If your system selects a candidate to share a job with, and the candidate is not interested, then the contact is pretty much the same as spam.

I have a pool of candidates that tell me what kinds of jobs they are seeking, their criteria, how active their search is, etc and I contact them accordingly. If they aren't interested, hopefully they don't feel it is spam, but it is just as invaluable.

The recruiter/engineer relationship is broken and hopefully good recruiters and entrepreneurs are able to think of some better ideas. This has potential, but for the price I'm not so sure.

I didn't see in the thread - one advantage for candidates in using a recruiter is being a buffer in negotiations, a guide, and coaching for interviews. An upside for companies that use recruiters is the negotiation help (at times) and closing deals that might not close without an intermediary. Does your service provide these additional perks to companies and to candidates?