Long time no see!
If you’re following this, you might remember I’ve been dabbling in the (broken) hiring space for about a year now (with e-commerce and mobility in between). The first time, we were automating the first round of interviews. The last time, we (a different team) set out to standardize interviews as no one wants to give 5 interviews in 10 companies. We onboarded a few startups, early-stage as well as growing ones (including a series A funded, a series B funded, and a series D funded one). The good part is that we generated revenue (yay!) but with time, we became an Uber-for-interviews.
I left that team (they’re doing good by the way) as I didn’t see my impact there. Meanwhile, I experimented with the social media space. I convinced one of my friends to leave his job if we got selected into YC. Alas, we didn’t.
I went back to the drawing board and wrote down all my learnings from the meetings I had with founders and recruiters over the year. I also got in touch with another friend of mine and we figured out a synergy.
One has to “prepare” for interviews, which results in people getting stuck at their current workplaces. Also, recruiters give a lot more emphasis on degree/college rather than hands-on skills while screening (and oh, the dreaded ds/algo rounds :P). It’s a chicken-egg problem; to influence the criteria for hiring, you also need to provide companies with developers who have good technical skills but don’t have a degree / not from a Tier-1 college / not good in ds/algo. It’s time for developers to step in, and fix it once and for all. Fast forward to today, we are ramen profitable. 🥳
I don’t intend to raise funding as of now, as I believe the problem should be solved by developers. Taking external money would eventually lead to losing control, as then we would be running towards the next goal post. Also, I’m a big proponent of sustainability and that’s another reason why I’ve decided to bootstrap this. We’re here to stay! And have a lot of fun.