Three months into my first job I saw why hiring is broken, so I built something for it
I graduated with a CS degree a few months ago and started working at a tech staffing company. I figured I'd spend a while learning the ropes before touching anything real. Instead I spent my first weeks watching the same broken pattern play out over and over.
A company posts a role and gets 300 applications in two days. Maybe 10 get an actual look. A genuinely good candidate applies and hears nothing back, and assumes they weren't good enough, when really nobody got past the first page of the pile. Job boards get paid whether or not the hire actually happens, so there's no real pressure on them to make the matching good.
That felt fixable. So I built PrimeScale. Free to post a role, we only get paid when someone is actually placed. If we send bad matches, we make nothing, so there's no reason to flood a hiring manager just to look busy.
How it works
Employers sign up, post a role, and matching runs once it's live. Recruiters review high-confidence matches before anything hits your dashboard. You're not sorting through raw AI output yourself.
Candidates sign up, build a profile with skills and resume, and see roles that fit once the profile is complete. If you're interested and it's mutual, a recruiter takes it from there.
What surprised me building this fresh out of school
I had zero instinct for how much small stuff matters. I burned way more time than I expected on the favicon and wordmark, because when you're asking someone to trust you with an actual hire, sloppy details read as risk even if the product underneath is solid.
I also had to unlearn my first instinct, which was to lead with credibility I didn't have yet. Early drafts of the site leaned on vague experience language. It fell flat the second anyone actually tested the product. What worked was just being specific about the mechanic: paste a JD, get real matches in a day, pay only if it works.
Where it's at
Very early, and still shaping it. Free to post a role. We handle the sourcing, screening, compliance, and payroll on our end, so a hiring manager isn't left managing contracts and paperwork on top of finding the person.
A few things I actually want your take on:
- Would this beat just posting on a job board yourself?
- What's burned you most about remote tech hiring?
- What would make you trust a marketplace enough to actually pay for a placement?
https://primescale.io/ if you want to poke around. Genuinely want the pushback.
One thing I'd keep testing is whether your advantage is better matching or better alignment of incentives.
"Pay only when someone is placed" changes how employers judge the platform. If they believe you only succeed when they do, that's a much stronger reason to try PrimeScale than simply claiming the AI finds better candidates.
That's a fair distinction and honestly I think you're right that it's the incentive alignment doing more work than the matching itself right now. The AI matching helps with speed, but I can't claim it's dramatically smarter than what a good recruiter already does manually. What I can claim is that we don't get paid unless the hire actually happens, so there's no reason to send you volume just to look responsive.
Long term I want both to be true. But if I had to pick which one is the actual reason someone should try this over a job board today, it's the incentive part. Appreciate you naming it, it's making me rethink how I lead with this.
I'm glad it resonated.
Your reply made me think there's one strategic decision sitting underneath that positioning shift which becomes much more significant as PrimeScale grows, but I don't think I can explain the reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?