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Rethinking Triplebyte

triplebyte.com

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Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#381

Post by hkmurakami »

I found Aline Lerner's assessment of new age recruiting services including Triplebyte to be informative. She may be wrong, and you may not agree with her take, but I do appreciate that she's not trying to bullshit the reader.

"Triplebyte, to my mind, did an admirable job of trying to solve the credentialing problem. But their approach was not without shortcomings: 1) not everyone wanted to take their lengthy quiz, even though the quiz was well done, and 2) scaling up an army of interviewers, all of whom had to be trained in exactly the same way, was non-trivial and not cheap. These challenges were surmountable, but the challenge that wasn’t arose from the second issue that all companies had to face: lack of candidate autonomy, which was driven in part by a lack of faith in the credential.

Once you passed Triplebyte’s assessment process, just like at Hired, you had to interact with a talent advocate (Triplebyte labeled them “talent managers,” but again they’re just recruiters). The talent manager would examine your background and short-list you for some companies of their choosing, where you’d then go onsite. You could have some input into which companies you spoke to, but it was limited, and if you didn’t meet the company’s (often somewhat arbitrary) criteria, no matter how well you did on the assessment, its doors were closed to you.

As with Hired, having an army of recruiters AND interviewers working for you makes achieving SaaS margins impossible, and then, you’ve essentially become a tech-enabled recruiting firm (albeit this time one with much better performance data!).

Just like Hired, Triplebyte eventually moved away from the auction marketplace model, fired most of their talent managers and interviewers, and fulfilled their destiny, becoming a glorified LinkedIn Recruiter clone. Recruiters could search for candidates, just like on LinkedIn Recruiter, based on their pedigree, languages known, and so forth. One thing Triplebyte still does differently, however, is to leverage their aforementioned coding quiz to annotate candidate profiles. (Presumably, they are using their historical interview data, from when candidates had to do BOTH, to predict how people will perform in interviews.) The limitation, of course, is that great people will be unlikely to take the quiz in the first place, especially now that it no longer fast-tracks them to an onsite."

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

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#382

Post by [deleted] »

ammon wrote: post #186
tdeck wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was pretty telling: > We got jobs for over 1000 engineers Given how many years Triplebyte has been running, "over 1000" seems surprisingly low. I wish them luck with their pivot.

So, under the old model, order 200k engineers applied to us. Because we were exclusive gatekeepers, around 3% of those were "accepted" onto the platform. Around 2/3 of accepted candidates received an offer, and around 1/2 of offers were accepted.

[deleted]

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#383

Post by blunte »

After being enticed to take their quiz and achieving perfect or near perfect (I forget now) generalist score, I was marked as hotlisted for a tech interview position with them. Keep in mind, they solicited me for this.

No response after getting the "wow, nice quiz result" email. No further emails. No replies for months to my gentle inquiries. Eventually they did reply, saying they were sorry but they didn't need help.

I have significant doubts that they were hiring tech interviewers in the first place. I think instead they were gathering market data at our expense.

Furthermore, there were detailed stories from users on Glassdoor about their internal policies and attitudes, mostly painting their leader as lacking scruples and leadership ability. Perhaps this was all fake, but if so it was really convincing and thorough.

I'm curious if anyone has had legitimately good experiences with them.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#384

Post by zerr »

ammon wrote: post #56
reillyse wrote: post #40

I 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…

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…

Would it be still "US-only"? As a suggestion - try to serve more broad audience and also put accent on REMOTE.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#385

Post by anonymoushn »

ping_pong wrote: post #354
crooked-v wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll broadly second this. As an experienced dev, what kept Triplebyte on my radar was being able to at least theoretically cut past the initial round of 'can you actually fizzbuzz or are you just lying about it' that most companies need to filter out the people with inexplicably good resumes but no practical skills.

Triplebyte was basically friction. It didn't help you skip the onsite and instead forced you to do two onsites, once with Triplebyte and once with the hiring company. It didn't make sense to ever engage with Triplebyte.

It should be an upgrade to do an onsite with triplebyte and an onsite with each company instead of doing several phone screens with each company and an onsite with each company.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#386

Post by blunte »

slownews45 wrote: post #255
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…

On hiring side we screen folks out pretty quickly who can't discuss money. I used to be much more relaxed about this, but if you get burned doing a few rounds of interviews and it was a waste you wise up pretty quickly - teams do not like time wasted. I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons. We're happy to talk through the different positions, levels, p…

Indeed as a candidate, I don't want to waste my time either.

Your clients know their budgets. Why not just be upfront about that to the candidates. Tell us your budget or reasonable expected range your client can pay. Then if (when) we find that it's well below what some other hungry companies are paying, we can save you and us time by passing.

If you know your client is paying low, then just be open about it. Something like, "Ok, this client is a bit below market (and tell the upper limit they will pay), but they have these good things to offer." If the client has no good things to offer, and the pay is low, then you're still likely to not seal the deal with a candidate no matter what. So just cut the game and get to the point.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#387

Post by oezi »

slownews45 wrote: post #255
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…

On hiring side we screen folks out pretty quickly who can't discuss money. I used to be much more relaxed about this, but if you get burned doing a few rounds of interviews and it was a waste you wise up pretty quickly - teams do not like time wasted. I've also found that folks who can't / won't talk money - usually not great hires for a bunch of reasons. We're happy to talk through the different positions, levels, p…

The problem is that companies use any salary information you provide as a candidate to adjust their offer. A lot of companies that asked me what I made at my previous job (even though it is illegal to ask in Germany) offered me just 20% on top of my number.

This makes me think that all jobs position should have rather narrow target ranges which are stated up-front. Then you can discuss if you are too high level/low level for that job and range.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#388

Post by noelherrick »

reillyse wrote: post #40

I 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…

I wouldn’t be so certain. Obviously, something isn’t working well or isn’t as good as it could be, but that doesn’t mean they are on the way out. Maybe they are, but plenty of businesses say, this isn’t working like we want it to-we can do better. As a worker, I am happy that this is a product that seems to empower workers over companies. I wish them all the luck and will look at their offering to see if it could benefit my own team.

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#389

Post by asperous »

stove wrote: post #180
akomtu wrote: post #80

Here's an advice. The software engineering market, at least the upper end of it, doesn't need a email forwarding proxy middleman. What it needs is a club-like organisation that acts as a negotiator that leverages insider knowledge to get unreasonable parties on both ends to sign a contract. Good devs don't really search for jobs and don't really talk to random recruiters. They get a steady stream of sales pitches fro…

I very informally do this right now. I think of my role as a sports agent for top engineers. The engineers I work with pay nothing and the companies who want access to them give us no bullshit, all access interviews where we're not working with HR or recruiters. It works so well for both parties that I'm scaling it at the moment.

You are the recruiter in this instance. You should be being paid per hire you facilitate (~20k+)

Re: Rethinking Triplebyte

#390

Post by MertsA »

hectormalot wrote: post #367
filoleg wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I still slightly prefer the direct experience for other reasons, the recruiting agency experience was pretty good for me in its own way. More specifically, when it comes to salary negotiation. Let me elaborate. People at the recruiting agency usually get paid a commission as a percentage of the first year of the hiree’s salary (not taken from your paycheck, but just in general). Which means, it is in their inte…

> Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible. Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time. This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

>This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.

Even worse, real estate pays both sides so realtors are heavily incentivized to get their buyers to purchase from their own sellers so they can get both sides of the commission. Instead of paying them 3% to act on your behalf and do a bunch of leg work they get double and now they can do less work and aren't strictly working for your benefit.

Working on commission just leads to wanting to make a deal happen. Even ignoring the time aspect of it, if a recruiter has much better odds of making a placement at 80% max comp compared to 100% max comp, the 80% is still objectively better. Why risk not closing the deal when the expected return is negative?

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