Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham

> We started Triplebyte because we were frustrated by the noise present in every step of the hiring process.

This is largely just a software/technology problem. In all other professional industries there are means to validate a candidate's competency before they are allowed to interview for a position: licensing, required internships, legal certifications/authorizations, authorized relationships, and so forth.

Technology doesn't have this. The big difference is that in those other professions they are using the interview to actually interview the candidate, as in the person. In software and technology the entire interview is used to gauge basic competency and even then the trust relationship is inherently broken.

Contrary to what technologists will tell you the problem isn't the hiring process or low salaries (preposterous answer unless you live in the bay area). These are symptoms of a broken trust relationship. Hiring companies inherently do not trust the people they are interviewing as basically competent unless they have been told otherwise by somebody they know personally.

Hiring companies shouldn't trust a candidate is minimally competent, because there is no means to a standard baseline on which competency is measured. That is the primary problem. Solve for this problem and the resulting symptoms are easily addressed by the marketplace as a matter of economics.

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The problem is very clear to see when you have two simultaneous careers: one as a software developer and a different one in an unrelated industry that has professionally addressed these concerns with required professional education and accreditation/licensing.

I got my current job with Triplebyte. I’m incredibly happy with how it all worked out and couldn’t recommend it enough.

I got to interview with some pretty exciting/interesting companies.

The only problem with Triplebyte, in my opinion, is that I don’t think they track job success AFTER the hire. I imagine this is probably a problem they’re working on. But it’s hard to build a successful recruiting company if you don’t know what happens to the employees once they actually get hired.

As a job seeker, how is TripleByte different than the other companies that spam my email inbox with their own "exclusive" coding tests? It seems to me that when you peel back the fancy website, TripleByte is not functionally different from the hiring agencies on other job boards (cough cough, Dice) that would advertise an "exciting opportunity" with their nameless client in order to hook you into signing a contract with them. ("Hey, while you're not qualified for this role, we have others that come by our desk constantly. So how about letting us sell you to other companies?")

EDIT: Their website layout is a classic agency layout.

> header with giant "sign up" button

> "top tech companies" in big print as a selling point

> huge section with the most "famous" companies in their client pool

> free cost (you're the product they're selling, so they're not looking out for a best fit - they're looking to get paid for placing you)

> testimonials

> blogroll that reads like it was built solely for SEO

I believe that this problem is far, far, far more pervasive than just a software/technology problem.

> there are means to validate a candidate's competency before they are allowed to interview for a position: licensing, required internships, legal certifications/authorizations, authorized relationships, and so forth.

The problems with credentials that you mention:

1. They are often weak signals of actual competence, and in the case that they are decent, there is still a lot of room for improvement through experimenting via a data driven process (current credentialing is, in many cases, outdated, and doesn't map to what actual work is like).

2. They are not accessible by everyone. This is problematic as the means to learning is becoming more accessible (through online education, etc.), but the credentialing is still restricted - since the institutions that hand them out haven't scaled credentialing. There is a lot of opportunity to provide signal for competence that scales... and measures skill that is actually used on the job (which is also changing as technology matures and penetrates other industries - we'll need a credentialing system that can adjust to those changes quickly).

In fact, I'll go as far as to say that this is a bigger problem in non-software industries. At least in software, there is a more objective way to measure a candidate's competence independent from the path they took to gain that competence. This means that people that might not have necessarily had a formal education / credentialing have a sliver of a chance of an opportunity to prove their skill. In other industries, if you don't have the credentialing, you have no shot.

This is great news. Hiring needs to be better solved.

The current screening process provides a low signal of competence, and so companies have to rely more on credentials (degrees, previous company brands) during screening, which means that a lot of skilled people still can't get their feet in the door at companies if they don’t “look right”, and companies fight over a restricted talent pool.

Lack of hiring data for smaller companies means they copy larger company’s interview processes, but there’s no strong forcing function to drive innovation in larger company’s hiring processes (i.e. their success could be despite a bad interviewing process - because they have a brand and offer a lot of perks, hence attracting the best talent, and so they aren’t in a “we have to fix hiring or we will die” mode).

This also really hurts startups - who aren’t in positions to take risks with hiring, and with a lack of good evaluations, have to rely on credentials, which restricts their pool, and makes them compete with the big cos for that talent.

Another important implication of fixing hiring is that it will introduce a powerful forcing function on higher education institutions. If students know that they can get jobs without having “traditional” credentials, but if they can pass, say TripleByte’s, or some other company’s, assessment which is more aligned with what’s required on the job, and is a signal that companies believe in, then students can use money that they would have spent on college to instead actually learn the skills that would be useful on the job.

This movement of money out of higher education, would fund a lot more experiments in learning and education.

I can’t stress how important I think this problem is to solve, and I’m glad companies like TripleByte, interviewing.io, are working on it. We need more companies, more approaches, more experiments in this space.