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Rethinking Triplebyte

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#311

Post by jabits »

pmoriarty wrote: post #208
tdeck wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small bit of feedback here. I tried TripleByte a couple of years ago and the experience was really polished. I passed the interview and got great detailed feedback which I really appreciated. However, I dropped out completely because TripleByte wouldn't let me see companies without entering in a desired comp number. My recruiter at triplebyte said I could just put in "$1 or $1,000,000" to get past it, but that just…

I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a number as a counter to their offer. I always do this negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for me. Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There a…

Seems to me that you would waste a lot of your personal time this way. They know enough about me before I even step in the door and I want some idea of whether the money can work. I ask for more than might be typical and I haven’t time to waste on companies that just want to show me what a great place they are to be at.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#312

Post by jlokier »

musicale wrote: post #198
an_opabinia wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> there are almost always more candidates than jobs, at least 5:1, in every non-credentialed industry vertical If this were true for "qualified" candidates, there wouldn't be a labor shortage, right? ;-)

A recruiter once told me, if you see 30 applicants for a high level tech job on LinkedIn, not to worry about competition, because ~27 of them were likely to be unqualified trying-their-luck applicants, mostly from other countries where the company was not going to hire, and mostly with no relevant skills or experience.

They told me the actual number of qualified candidates was usually just a handful or less.

I doubt this is true in SV, but I don't live in SV.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#313

Post by 0xB31B1B »

robocat wrote: post #290
0xB31B1B wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea, I went through their process on the employer side, and my guess is an average hire is 10k, that means 10m in revenue total

They work on a retainer basis, not a commission basis, so you really can’t predict income like that. See other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27543931

When I went through it was like, ~1k/month and somewhere from 5k-15k/hire over the top. Industry average is around 10k/hire and their pricing suggests they're probably banking that amount with pricing used to encourage loyalty and appease investors with the Saas narrative. They're not pulling in much greater than industry average, and even if they're double, its only 20m, which is still bad.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#314

Post by duxup »

dboreham wrote: post #310
duxup wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't you just tell them a range you're offering?

Because then the candidate will be upset when you lowball them because they're not as strong or experienced as your range max merits.

And you won't feel the same when someone picks a number?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#315

Post by mikeg8 »

meowface wrote: post #284
mikeg8 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you accepted 6K onto platform, about 4k got offers, and just under 2k accepted. Roughly a 1% conversion rate for those who applied? Yikes.

I don't know much about them, but the post does say their goal was to be "exclusive gatekeepers". If you consider it from that perspective, they had more like a 1/3 conversion rate (2/3 * 1/2). But conversion kind of seems like the wrong metric.

What metric would make more sense here, though? I can agree that from TBs perspective, they may not factor total applicants as their base # (although that is clearly their market). However this exclusivity of only using the small percentage they accept doesn’t seem to be a scalable business model. Having 1% of the devs who try their service actually accept an offer would not entice me to try their service.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#316

Post by usaar333 »

2arrs2ells wrote: post #155
nunez wrote: post #141

Who was the woman that wrote about how every "innovative" engineer recruiting platform eventually devolves into LinkedIn Recruiter? Because she fucking nailed it with Triplebyte. I used Triplebyte. I really liked it. The leads were not as great or as numerous as I was hoping, and I felt like I still had to do pseudo-technical interviews anyway. Fucking COVID, man. I hope this pivot works for them.

Aline Lerner: https://blog.alinelerner.com/ive-been-an-engineer-and-a-recr...

Fascinating post. I'm personally optimistic on interviewing.io - it's both more useful for candidates (interview practice) and stronger signal for recruiting companies, but this is such a difficult market to break into for reasons Aline describes well.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#317

Post by bradleyjg »

ctvo wrote: post #298
ammon wrote: post #56

Earlier 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 can't remember the last time I was ghosted. The problems you listed aren't problems that I experience. I don't care what part of my resume recruiters look at. I don't care what they do with it. Sure, having metrics on how often a company ships code, etc. would be helpful, but frankly I have about 10 companies on my list that I'd work for, and I doubt any of them would give you this data. What I'd really like is not…

> There must be some incentive to create a system that lowers these false negatives.

I’m generally quite pro immigration but when BigTech goes to DC and bellyaches about how they need higher quotas because they can’t find enough workers it really sticks in my craw.

Reminds me a bit of the classic example of chutzpah—-the boy who killed his parents, then threw himself on the mercy of the courts, asking for leniency because he was an orphan.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#318

Post by bigiain »

usaar333 wrote: post #235
pmoriarty wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never, ever, ever give anyone a number until the salary negotiation stage of the interview (ie. after I've been given a job offer), and even then I only give the company a number as a counter to their offer. I always do this negotiation myself, and never let anyone else negotiate for me. Almost all recruiters have been fine with that, but a couple haven't. To such people I wish a good day and go my own way. There a…

A particular problem with doing that is discussed in the post; you risk everyone's time being wasted if the company will never be able to meet your target.

Why should it always be the candidate's problem to reduced that risk and not the companies?

That time would not be "wasted" if the company had done due diligence on what the position and candidate were "worth" and revealed their target (or target range) to the candidate.

The real reason, I'm sure, is that companies think they hold the upper hand in the negotiation. And a lot of time with a lot of candidates that's true. It's clearly _not_ true for the class of candidate who's realistically got a $300k+ target. You are totally not going to successfully headhunt anyone in the top 1% or 5% of FAANG engineers if you try to dick them around with recruiting power imbalance power plays. _They_ don't need your bullshit. They will totally walk away from whatever time you've "wasted" so far trying to recruit them. You need them _way_ more than they need you.

(And I'm pretty sure that generalises a lot further down the experience/renumeration food chain than most devs realise. Fresh grads or devs with only a few years of experience might need to play the stupid recruiter games, but most companies trying to fill a mid level or senior role need the right candidates way more than those candidates need any one specific job. You can and should be able and willing to walk away from any potential job offer over stupid games like this...)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#319

Post by fighterpilot »

ghiculescu wrote: post #167
ammon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That business model is optimising for large customers that are probably better equipped to replace you with something in house. And leaving the long tail of smaller customers on the table. I wanted to use triplebyte - but I only want to make 3 hires per year.

How can they replace them with something in house if Triplebyte ends up with the network effects?

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#320

Post by lumost »

sneak wrote: post #303
baumy wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If your desired comp number actually is $1M/year, will that just flag you as a joke to Triplebyte companies? With post-pandemic stock price increases a lot of engineers at FAANGs are making more than that now. For any reasonable definition of "a lot", no they absolutely are not. A lot of people with 2+ years of experience who've either been promoted once and received a strong annual review, or switched jobs as a mi…

> Nobody was making $1M/year. Nobody that makes 2x what their coworkers do at the same job/level casually discloses their comp at the water cooler.

But people do brag about it on Blind such that the compensation bands are well known. People also complain about cliffs when it turns out the company didn't want to pay them at a certain level.
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