Jobstart – Personalized, expert guidance to land your next software job

Creator here (shamefully submitted myself, haha). Happy to answer any/all questions or ramble on and on about the problem.

We basically think there needs to be a legitimately trustworthy service out there. Something that acts more like a a career coach instead of a position spammer. Something that understands your needs and specific situation.

Along the lines of "doing things that don't scale", we're completely human powered but technology assisted. There are a lot of things that are involved with career coaching or recruiting that are simply tedious -- we automate them away so we can better focus on relationships.

We make deals (recruiting contracts) with companies who really want first dibs on top talent. When a candidate comes through, we'll discuss all their options, but mention that we also work with some companies and talk about those companies as well. If they'd like an intro, awesome! If not, totally cool.

We're sacrificing potential revenue to build the most trustworthy brand. The economics of recruiting let us do that... just an insane market right now.

This was a pivot -- we started off as a mentorship platform, so we're not actively using all of our expert pool at this time. After realizing the nuances of mentorship were making us solve the mentorship problem instead of the job placement problem, we moved onwards. Fun fact: we didn't have any female experts until we had about 30 male experts. But that changed quickly! The first one liked helping out so much she personally invited all of her friends, and all the sudden we were nearly 50/50 for short while. :D

We have contracts with mostly Silicon Valley startups, but there are a couple in there from NYC and even Georgia. The fact that we don't force our candidates down our own funnel though, and will help them attain a job anywhere, is our real uniqueness.