My service: Screening and curating engineers for hiring
Hi everyone,
I'm launching a new business called Arent Standard after learning that hiring software engineers can cost $15,000 or more, due to costs of recruiters, time spent interviewing, etc.
Arent Standard finds engineers and screens them for you to ensure they're top tier. How much does it cost? Well, you only pay once you've hired an engineer and worked with them for 28 days.
Could you benefit from this or do you know of anyone else that could?
So, lots of people have tried this, and they all seem to run into a problem that is two fold.
Software engineers (people like me) aren't going to sign up to take extra screens, particularly if big companies aren't going to value the results of those additional screens.
Recruiters aren't going to pay you for doing something that they currently get paid to do.
Now, if you could get Google/Amazon/Microsoft/LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook etc to accept your certification in place of their initial phone screens, you've got yourself a business model. That's how some of the big HackerRank/Codefights etc sites have managed to claw their way to the top of that space, but those sites did so by first gaining a massive audience for their competitive programming platforms. How do you even get the big players to notice you exist, let alone slot you into their existing recruitment process?
Yes. This.
I'd also add in that the recruiter fees aren't normally the expensive part of the hiring process. Hire the wrong person? That mistake is going to cost easily $30-100k+ to put right, depending on when you find out and how time-critical their role is.
@warent I think you need to need to have a think about what puts you head and shoulders above the competition, and then do a better job at explaining it on your landing page.
Good luck!
But why would I, in the role of hiring manager, trust you, more than I do myself or my team?
That's a big question. Why do companies trust anybody they do business with?
As an engineer, I couldn't hire designers as well as a design expert. If your team has little/no engineering resources, then it would help your business to have an expert help vet potential engineers.
You also don't have to trust us more than your team or yourself (and without an existing relationship I doubt anybody could!)
Compare: an endless sea of bad candidates you have to filter to find a diamond in the rough, vs. selecting from a pool of vetted candidates. Then you always can (and maybe should) interview engineers from our pool to make sure it's a good fit. Which sounds better? Endless sea or vetted list?
Ok, I guess I could see (as a hiring manager) the value of pre-sifting the idiots if the price was right. That is (in theory) what we pay recruiters to do, but zombie candidates just keep shuffling into the interviews anyway.
As a potential candidate, I'd need to see a big long list of companies that I want to work for on the website before I spent my time sitting an interview on spec.
Thanks for the feedback.
We're intentionally not targeting big companies at all. There are many, many more companies seeking SWEs than just those big ones you listed. Not just any company / recruiter is allowed in, it's a curated list from companies proven to be good to engineers with a size < ~250 employees. Not only do engineers know that they're only getting good recruiters from good companies, but it's a certification which stays good for 3 months.
Recruiters aren't getting paid to do tech screens. After speaking with many recruiters, none of them have had any programming experience. It's a roll on the dice that their candidates are able to pass internal coding interviews. Having access to a list of engineers that they know are proven to pass programming interviews has actually received really positive feedback from recruiters.
This is all stuff I should probably add to the website to clarify :)
A few questions for, you might think about. I did not find the answers on the page.
From a company pov:
And now as a peer.
As far as I noticed, there are two ways to do that business. 1. Sending profiles in masses and hope a percentage sticks and transforms to jobs. As a dev, it seemed to be the majority of the headhunters/recruiting firms. Or 2. Quality. Really screen people on tech and soft skills for a single company.
IMHO stick to one tech stack and get pretty good at screening for that, and connect with companies in your target market and tech stack.
Thanks for these questions. There's too many to answer here at once, but there's a couple that I can.
Sorry, maybe I didn't make that clear. The questions were food for thoughts as your potential customer will ask you that. I would ask and also expect you to have answers.
I understood that you only get paid 28 days after hire. Yet, you have to make some assumptions on how much time and effort it takes to fulfill just one successful vacancy where you get paid. I don't know the conversion rate in each step and this field, but when I assume naively 10% each step, it will take a few thousand hours to screen those devs. Sure, the actual conversion rate will be different but I'd run some calculations before. It will drop over time as you build up a database of profiles but you will also invalidate profiles after 3 months. Plus the time you need to find those devs.
I hope you succeed and keep us updated :-)