Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome! I've started a POC, but as with most things I'd rather not have to build it myself.
It's unbelievable that nobody has done this well - I and most people I know are tracking their own job searches on a spreadsheet. Pretty obvious value-add for job searchers. Not to mention that having access to this data would enable tons of other product features. Shows that most services/sites don't care that much about the applicant experience.
Rethinking Triplebyte
221–230 of 463 posts
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…
I referred my friend to triplebyte and never received the promised $5000 referral bonus. My emails to support were ignored.
That shouldn't have happened. Could you go ahead and email our support at support@triplebyte.com again (just so that you don't have to expose your data here) and let them know who you are? I let one of our support folks know to keep an eye out; we'll get you sorted out (and I'll check back here later this evening, so let me know if you don't hear something back quickly).
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#223I'm an engineer who was introduced to a startup via triplebyte. I liked the platform because I went through a technical interview to even be allowed to connect with companies (one that a lot of my peers who are junior level weren't able to pass.) I guess my first thought is that doesn't this defeat the initial purpose of Triplebyte? If you allow everyone in, regardless of if they are qualified to be a senior level en…
(I'm a PM at Triplebyte working on this overall direction, joining Ammon for this thread.) To be clear, we still have quizzes and the ability to show your performance on them to companies. The fact that they’re not completely mandatory to use Triplebyte doesn’t mean that they’re not important or that we won’t build further features around them. Right now, companies can offer an expedited process as part of their reac…
One thing I didn't like about TB is that I couldn't see my own score, or how I compared to others. They sent me follow-up emails, tried to engage me in interviews, asked if I had any questions, and when I asked about my score or how it related to others (top N% for example), they didn't even respond.
If a company asks me if I have questions, and I ask them, and they ignore me, I'm done.
I wasn't looking for a job, but thought the test results would be interesting. Who takes a test and doesn't get results?
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#224A benefit of Triplebyte to big enterprises not mentioned in Triplebyte’s discussion here: acting as engineering assessment proxy for engineering hiring managers stuck with pathologically risk averse enterprise HR departments. Often enterprise HR is paranoid of honestly evaluating anyone for anything, to the point that many HR teams tell one another and engineering hiring managers that it’s “illegal” to assess candida…
I’ve seen this claimed for multiple job pre-vetting sites and am not convinced it does anything than add an extra layer of test interviews.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#225As always with posts about employment, the idea that there's higher demand than supply for engineers is a lie. The demand for highly experienced cheap engineers is high, the demand for junior developers is almost non existent. New CS grads struggle to find employment, there are tens of thousands of very capable devs in open source that cannot find employment. Nobody hears about it because only those that succeed are…
This is true, at least of developers who lack both experience and impressive credentials. A new grad from, say, UC Berkeley might be fine, a new grad from my own alma mater (which has a direction in its name) will often struggle, and a hobbyist without a CS degree has an even bigger uphill battle.
The reason we didn't talk about it as much in the main post is that our approach to the problem of credentials hasn't changed all that much. We still have quizzes, and someone who is having a hard time getting their foot in the door (a) is likely to be willing to put in the effort to take them and (b) will benefit from doing so. That's not a complete solution to the problem (it helps people with skills get hired, but doesn't in itself help people get skills that you only get on the job), but it's better than the status quo.
We haven't forgotten about people struggling as they look for their first job. (And I certainly never will: to get personal for a sec, my first job search was a miserable multi-year affair that nearly killed me.) We've got some experimental irons in the fire here (e.g. a program that basically highlights people who haven't gotten as much attention as they 'should' based on their skills) that we're not quite ready to talk about in great detail. If they work, you'll hear more about them soon. If they don't, we'll try something else.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#226I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one of 10 sources we already work with. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into jobs. If c…
The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a…
Sounds like you hit a niche and solved hard problems for companies. Unfortunately not a niche big enough for a company that's taken 10+ million in VC money.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#227I'd love to work with Triplebyte (as someone who's running a hiring process), but a while back they removed their option to work on contingency, and it's a difficult sell to fork over $X,000k for another source of engineers when it would just be one of 10 sources we already work with. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it gives me the impression that Triplebyte doesn't believe in it's ability to get candidates into jobs. If c…
The main problem we had with the contingency model is that it resulted in companies using us for a few of their "hardest" hires, rather than as a bread-and-butter part of their recruiting. For example, almost no one wants to pay a contingency fee on junior or remote hires (because they are perceived as 'easier'). This made our platform kind of suck for junior and remote engineers. The subscription model is more of a…
Interesting... you've probably considered this but, sounds like to solve that problem you could just have an option for companies to subscribe, or be on contingency? Then the companies hiring for juniors can subscribe and the folks looking for harder hires can be on contingency?
"But it means that once a company signs up, they want to make as many hires as possible through us.", right, but as a hiring manager that doesn't make sense to me... I don't care that we're making hires to justify where we spend our sourcing money. I care that we're making great hires, so I want to cast as wide a net as possible. I'm not going to shut my eyes to other sources because I've paid for triplebyte. But maybe in bigger companies I wouldn't be the one making purchasing decisions? And the folks making those decisions would be pushing HMs to use Triplebyte?
It is interesting, how the incentives align and don't align sometimes. Hard to say if I'm even in the target market (raised $15m, hiring a few folks this year in the "hardest" category, #1 problem is qualified folks at top-o-funnel).
Maybe I also have a personal penchant for seeing companies who bet on themselves and clearly align incentives :shrug:
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair comment. I certainly don't think of us as a market leader. LinkedIn is the market leader. Honestly, the last year has been pretty hard for us (COVID and the problems with our model that I talk about in the post). That said, I think a hiring process that puts engineers in control (no ghosting, get data on when a recruiter looks at your application, search ranking by whether companies lie to candidates) is somethi…
I used TripleByte to recruit people for a startup without paying, by asking people to sign up for the test and screenshot the answers and collecting the scores at the end. I already had an inbound funnel, I just liked your test when I saw it the first time. In 2015, candidates with the same schooling scored about 20 percentage points lower than 2020, the last candidates I used the test for. The number of questions do…
> going to Harvard instead of Berkeley is also worth about 10 percentage points.
That's interesting to me. Most reputable rankings put Berkeley at #2 or #3, and Harvard is usually around #7 or #8 (and US News puts them at #16!). I wonder what the cause of that discrepancy is.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#229Another one bites the dust.
my advice for triplebyte is to partner with leetcode and establish an industry-wide coding certificate, kind of like those SAT or GRE tests that you pass once and apply everywhere.
Re: Rethinking Triplebyte
#230I see a lot of people in the comments describe triplebyte as a “market leader” and discuss how good they are. I can’t believe how gullible everyone is especially on a startup forum. Let me spell it out to y’all, nobody pivots and changes their entire business model if they are crushing it. So the implication is that triplebyte are not crushing it. So, this probably has gone the same way as lots of other tech startups…
Also know as: We spent all of our money on advertising before we found product/market fit and now we are panic pivoting.