
Launch HN: The  Lobby (YC W18) – 1-on-1 calls with company insiders to get hired - dchhugani
Hi HN! I’m Deepak, founder of The Lobby, from YC’s W18 batch. We’re building a marketplace where you can buy mock interviews, resume reviews, and coaching calls from company insiders, starting with top finance roles. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelobby.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thelobby.io&#x2F;</a>)<p>I went to a school where the big banks, consulting shops, and tech companies didn’t come to recruit on campus. As a result, it was really hard not only to get interviews and job offers, but also to figure out what these companies were looking for in candidates in the first place.<p>I got lucky and landed jobs at big banks and it was always because I somehow found someone on the inside who was willing to coach and mentor me in a very personalized way. I used that experience to help 50+ friends from similar backgrounds land jobs at top firms, and that’s what inspired the idea for The Lobby.<p>We have some incredibly happy users who’ve already landed jobs, and a very high repeat purchase rate both amongst students and career switchers because of the value in speaking to people in the specific teams and companies they&#x27;re interested in vs. generic company-wide advice.<p>It has, however, been challenging to get everyone receptive to our new approach. Even though people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on college (to ultimately land a good job), it&#x27;s controversial to build a recruiting-focused company that charges job seekers instead of just the companies.<p>We’ve had 2 schools buy packages of calls where they subsidize the costs for their students, and are thinking through ideas to pass the cost away from students, even though this service is not just meant for college (our best users are career switchers). We’ve also received a lot of interest from companies who are interested in getting access to our best-rated candidates because they’ve been pre-screened by real humans who’ve done the job, vs. recruiters who have not.<p>Any feedback and ideas from the HN community on how to convey the cost&#x2F;benefit of what we’re offering to students, recent grads, career switchers, parents, and even schools is much appreciated.
======
eganist
This is extremely smart. I hope you succeed, especially considering I was
initially filled with cynicism for the first five seconds until _I read your
marketing type._ Others might disagree, but it won me over because it reminded
me of similar products in other markets.

A good analogy in the audit space would be a pre-assessment. You pay for a
pre-assessment to get an informal walk through the process on a much smaller
timeframe to get a better understanding of your gaps. Examples could be SOC1
or SOC2 pre-assessments, where failing the pre-assessment is a no-impact
matter. Failing an actual assessment which produces results could mean having
an exception-filled report to give to clients or potentially even deciding
that disclosing such a report poses more downside in converting sales, meaning
you just wasted a six figure assessment by burying the report.

Lobby conversations/interviews could result in referrals, which means these
effectively act as no-risk interviews with people in the know with hiring
processes at the desired firms.

This looks like a potentially solid initial go at a practice market, where the
risk of utterly bombing an interview and potentially getting turned down for
future opportunities at a desired firm might actually run high.

There's a market for practice runs in anything where the final result will be
materially impactful in the long term, especially where final results pose
potential significant downside compared to the base state.

~~~
dchhugani
Exactly! Do you have any thoughts on how to convey this benefit to users? Most
of them get it, but sometimes we get people who compare us to "reaching out on
LinkedIn" which clearly is not the case, since any other kind of conversation
isn't really a practice run - it's the real thing!

~~~
eganist
Let's talk. I have some ideas, but I also have another vertical in mind that
thrives on connections. I'm on keybase as bryant.

As for the simplest way: convey the benefits of practice runs (even if you
don't want to call them "practice" \-- maybe pre-screens?) not just as means
for improving the odds of suitable outcomes but also for reducing the odds of
adverse outcomes in an environment where character testimonials spread fast.
It's not just the careers that are in demand, it's the desire to gain upside
for a person's own brand.

You may benefit well from investing in strong marketing type

~~~
dchhugani
Love this - amazing ideas. Writing all this feedback down to improve our
offering.

------
jawns
About 10 years ago, I had a similar idea (called RungJump).

It allowed you to fill out a detailed job dossier about your position at a
particular company, and then users could purchase the dossier; RungJump would
take a cut, and the person who wrote the dossier would get the rest. It was
kind of like a premium version of Glassdoor, where the expectation was the
dossiers would contain more candid info.

Here are some of the problems I ran into:

* You had to solve the chicken-and-egg problem twice. Once to attract insiders and once to attract paying users. It was hard. I would imagine The Lobby will face the same problem, and in fact possibly even to a larger degree, since my dossiers were "write once and then forget about it" whereas The Lobby is scheduling phone calls, so the insiders need ongoing availability.

* Quality control is hard, because of the information imbalance. Who's to say whether a particular insider is actually giving you information that's worth the price of admission? If you knew enough about the company to call B.S., you wouldn't be paying for the service. I would imagine The Lobby will face the same problem.

* Employers really, really do not like their employees being paid on the side to dish about the company. And employees were (rightly, I think) hesitant to potentially put their jobs on the line to make a little side cash. In fact, the more exclusive and well-paying the job, the less likely it was worth the risk for insiders to participate. I would imagine The Lobby will face the same problem, especially since it's starting out with a narrow focus on "elite finance" roles, and promising anonymity only goes so far.

* As Deepak noted, it can be hard to persuade job seekers to pay. One big reason for that? If you don't have a job, money is probably tight. And when your target demographic is, in general, hard up, it can be a very difficult business model to get right. The Lobby is trying to get around this problem by partnering with colleges who subsidize the costs; I think that's a smart move, and I wish them luck!

~~~
dchhugani
thanks for this! Great points. Here's how we think of them:

chicken & egg: we build hyper local liquidity the way Uber tackles
neighborhoods or cities, hence the initial focus on investment banking. The
few similar products we've seen try this inevitably try to do dozens of
industries or hundreds of roles and this makes it impossible to achieve true
liquidity or to allocate marketing dollars properly.

Quality control: To me, this is the beauty of The Lobby. We're not trying to
get the best written content, or to get the CEO of a company with highly
specialized knowledge. It's junior level people talking about how they got
their job. If you're bad at this or your quality sucks, our ratings will
indicate that and you won't be picked further. If you're a great insider, your
ratings will indicate that too and you get more demand + more money.

But the main point here is: this knowledge is not rocket science. Any analyst
at a specific team in Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch will have very similar
answers on how to land the job. That's what we see at The Lobby too.

No one can guarantee that the information the insider is giving is 100%
accurate, but we think with the right reward & incentive systems in place, the
best insiders rise up and the crappy ones get booted out.

Edit: To the last points you added. The myth that because you're a job seeker
you don't have money is the one we're fighting with our analogy. People spend
money on all sorts of things they don't need and absurd amounts of money on
schools, bootcamps like GA, and more. Those are all for career advancement.

If you believe our premise that learning from insiders about what life is
really like, what it takes to break in, getting personalized tips, etc. is the
way to get the best careers, then suddenly a large portion of that spend can
go to something like The Lobby, which I profoundly believe is a better use of
your cash.

One example that I kept hearing from the YC partners themselves: "If I had
your service when I was a freshman, I would have spoken to 2 lawyers, asked
them what they do all day, only to realize that I don't want to be a lawyer."
Think of the massive opportunity cost of learning what to do or WHAT NOT to do
way before even pursuing a career or becoming a full-time job seeker.

Last point: our best users are career switchers, they already make money and
want to make a career move. For me, moving from finance to tech was borderline
impossible and I had money to spend. I just didn't know what to do or what
path to take. The Lobby would have solved or mitigated that too.

~~~
hectormalot
> Employers really, really do not like their employees being paid on the side
> to dish about the company. And employees were (rightly, I think) hesitant to
> potentially put their jobs on the line to make a little side cash. In fact,
> the more exclusive and well-paying the job, the less likely it was worth the
> risk for insiders to participate. I would imagine The Lobby will face the
> same problem, especially since it's starting out with a narrow focus on
> "elite finance" roles, and promising anonymity only goes so far.

I think you skipped this point, or I misunderstood. I work as a management
consultant and get regular request to help people (eg is the job something for
them, practice interviews, etc). It’s internally encouraged to help in this
way, but I’d be extremely hesitant about taking money for it because I don’t
think it passes the blush test (couldn’t tell this to a colleague without
blushing), and creates wrong incentives (eg there are things about the
recruiting process that should not be shared)

Anonymity only strengthens the impression that it’s not ‘kosher’ for me

What are your ither ideas to tackle this? (And perhaps you get sufficient
people with just anonymity, that’s fine too :)

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks for pointing that out - I missed it here. Answered a similar question
elsewhere in the thread:

"Definitely agree that this could be a problem. Practically speaking - we keep
identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you
how to prep for these questions anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection,
you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your
odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are
always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable
problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting
process + helps companies discover more talent."

The summary is that we're fine with keeping it anonymous now and here we have
to take a bit more of a disruptive approach. Airbnb and Uber were both illegal
(As in literally breaking laws) and still scaled and ultimately succeeded
because they believed in the fundamental benefit of their service to the
world.

The Lobby is completely legal, just maybe against some company policies, but
we feel the benefits far outweigh the cons of some random company policy, even
for the company itself as described above.

------
shermablanca
Advice: tell this story! Create a video where you describe this same thing,
and promote it on the right channels. You can even add production value by
showing b-roll of specific points of your story, such as footage from on-
campus recruiting. Perhaps include interviews/testimonials from those happy
customers that you mentioned.

Your point about spending thousands on education while simultaneously having
an aversion to paying recruiters is especially prescient. When presented in
this manner, it’s likely an aha moment (was for me), and is probably going to
improve conversion rates.

Stories sell, and you have a good one here.

~~~
philsnow
Another part of the story that I didn't see in your launch HN summary that you
should definitely play up:

Companies _desperately_ _want_ to hire people from schools they don't cater to
with career fairs. They don't want to be perceived as monocultures where they
only hire from the same three schools. At the same time, they can't feasibly
do career fairs at the next 50%ile of schools. Great candidates from "top 100"
schools get passed over all the time.

... Well the monoculture observation is at least true of tech companies. For
finance companies, hiring only from Harvard/Yale might be an explicit goal. I
have no idea.

~~~
dchhugani
Thank you! This is awesome feedback. We know that banks also want to diversify
where they recruit people from. They're having trouble finding people from the
non-Ivy schools, females, and also diverse backgrounds. We've heard that from
people who handle recruiting there and it's an important initiative. We think
that's an emerging trend in other industries like tech too, as you say!

------
ghufran_syed
Reading your answers below, I feel you haven't really addressed the issue of
breach of company policies / confidentiality, and specifically about people
being paid for it. It is true that many people will, for free, help their
friends get interviews at the companies they work for. This does not mean that
doing the same thing for money would be acceptable to their employer.

To use a distasteful analogy: in the US, two consenting adults having sex is
legal - two consenting adults having sex where one pays the other for the
'service' is not.

So I think there will definitely be a subset of companies and employees where
this will be a problem. One way to allow this subset of employees to take part
in your service might be to offer some (non-political) charitable donation in
exchange for their time. That way they can contribute, feel like they did some
good in the world, and still be able to say to their employer (if it ever came
up) that they didn't receive any compensation in exchange for helping
potential new hires.

Assuming for now that the basic business is legal, and that the only issue is
compliance with company policies, another potential 'hack' might be to just
let people get 'karma' that builds up in their account at The Lobby, that can
be converted at any time into cash. Then the people providing this info could
choose to 'cash out' later, when they leave the company, or use it to pay for
intel about _other_ companies when they themselves are looking to move

Feel free to contact me if you want to chat :)

~~~
dchhugani
Hello! Appreciate your deep dive on the thread and agree that if we look at
bits and pieces of my comments, it's not totally clear. So let me write up a
unified answer here.

In some cases, this is definitely against the company's policy. For those
companies, we focus on former employees most of which are no longer bound by
any contract (if any).

We protect our insider's identity and that leaves them protected, but we also
encourage them to check with HR to make sure they're allowed to do this.

I already addressed the ethical/moral bits - we are simply giving more people
access to the same insights you would get if you had a friend on the inside.
You're just paying for it in this one interaction, whereas the privileged
person paid for it by being born into or falling into the right circles
(higher kindergarten, middle school, high school, college tuition, and being
in the right families or circles).

Without The Lobby - the alternative is to live your life cold emailing and
trying to find these connections, which is both inefficient and in our view
very different. If you get some of these folks to answer you - you're not sure
if they're going to be helpful or just discount you as a non-eligible
candidate because you don't have what they're looking for. Being in a friendly
dynamic where their goal is to help you makes this the opposite.

In terms of legal risks, please look up GLG, AlphaSights, and other expert
networks. They have been doing this in what I consider to be a real ethical
gray area with higher up executives and much larger dollar sums - and still is
legal. Let me be really clear here - I'm not agreeing with what they do, I'm
just pointing to it as an example where this has worked with much more
sensitive information than "interview prep" and has maintained to protect its
supply side and operate, which is why I'm confident we will be able to as
well.

The only thing I hope this thread proves is that HN or those seeing The Lobby
execute is that we have the right intentions. That goes a long way - whether
you agree with our particular approach or not.

This was a personal problem, and our solution we've seen solve a real problem
mainly as an information gap. Solutions like the ones you're suggesting on
karma points or donating to charities as suggested below are on our roadmap-
but for now we're staying focused on making this work well first :).

Hope this answers the question and if anyone wants to chat on this topic
further - please reach out! deepak@thelobby.io

------
lifeisstillgood
I sit squarely in the "insider" role here, and normally would be very
interested in anyone who is proactively calling me up and saying "i want to
work on your team" \- but to avoid breaking any protocols / laws we would want
the interviewee to come in the front door as usual.

All I suspect that is happening here is if I sign up as one of your insiders,
you drop me interesting candidates and then they have to go through the normal
channels. So I may be missing the point but if an individual reaches out
through LinkedIn looking for a job that's a plus sign, of a recruiter does it,
that's just the usual noise. What is being added?

Also, why are the interviewees paying? It cannot be to pay me (the insider)
cos that breaks many ethical and probably legal rules. And if they are
successful I am guessing you get a cut?

~~~
michaelt

      Also, why are the interviewees paying? It cannot
      be to pay me (the insider)
    

It's a question of whether the insider is on your side of the table or the
company's.

There are some pieces of career advice that are, if not employer-hostile, then
at least not entirely employer friendly.

For example, will my strong foreign accent block me from promotion into the
upper echelons of your company? Someone on the company's side of the table
would tell me what the recruitment website says: "We're an equal opportunities
employer and don't discriminate, communication skills are important of course"
whereas someone on my side of the table might give a more frank response, like
"Yes you're going to need to work on that"

~~~
ShabbosGoy
> For example, will my strong foreign accent block me from promotion into the
> upper echelons of your company?

The thing is, if people can’t understand you when you communicate, you will
have major league issues with your team in my experience.

I had a rockstar “10x” programmer on my team who was fired because his
communication style was...let’s just say he wasn’t a fountain of unbridled
optimism. He would yell at interns and generally treat people like shit, that
was his communication style. The thing is, he is a genuinely nice person. It’s
just that his negative view of the world seeped into his communication style,
and rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

I’m not disagreeing with your original point, though. You can get unfiltered
career advice that may or may not align with whatever ideals the company
claims to have.

------
karambahh
As several mentionned, "spilling the beans" about the ins and outs about a
current employer, and getting paid for it, is really frowned upon in some
industries.

At least in Europe, in the industries I worked in, I always had a clause in my
contract about releasing company information that was ground for termination
without pay and/or damages. Being paid to reveal intel would be ground for
termination.

I get it, we all do spill the beans at industry gatherings for instance, even
sometimes publicly on hn! I also try and help young graduates get good jobs at
great companies but I do it as a former student...or as a side help when I
part-time teach classes at universities. (and I pay attention to who I mentor
and where I suggest them to apply to)

While I don't agree with this state of mind, I know quite a few companies
where a prospective employee is considered a potential asset but still an
outside. The interview process is gamed to bring the brightest at the smallest
pay possible. Be paid to counter these tactics...not good.

Being paid to essentially deliver intel to an outsider will not go well at
some companies.

The interview process is confidential/privileged information. Revealing
specifics would/could be in breach of employment contract. Being paid by
TheLobby would be actual proof/reasonable doubt that you breach the contract.

(Despite this comment, I like your idea and your personal story and I'm glad
someone was there to help you/mentor you when you needed it, I just wanted to
expose what was, to me, a potential pitfall )

~~~
dchhugani
Thank you for the kind words and feedback! I'm copy pasting some stuff from
the thread below.

"Definitely agree that this could be a problem. Practically speaking - we keep
identities anonymous and so employees are protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you
how to prep with information the company wouldn't want you to know anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection,
you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your
odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are
always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable
problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting
process + helps companies discover more talent.

The summary is that we're fine with keeping it anonymous now and here we have
to take a bit more of a disruptive approach. Airbnb and Uber were both illegal
(As in literally breaking laws) and still scaled and ultimately succeeded
because they believed in the fundamental benefit of their service to the
world.

The Lobby is completely legal, just maybe against some company policies, but
we feel the benefits far outweigh the cons of some random company policy, even
for the company itself as described above."

~~~
karambahh
You're probably not going to launch very soon in Europe/France/Belgium but
please do pay attention to these issues on the other side of the pond (which
might still exist in the US, I guess you'd know better than me :-) )

The fact I anonymously revealed company information does not bring meany
immunity wrt my current contract. I can still be terminated if they find out.
Would I risk getting fired for $100? No way. If I don't want to take this
risk, I'm not going to be a "customer" of The Lobby and thus, you get the
chicken & egg problem others talked about.

I think I'm primarily "opposed" (for lack of a better word at 2AM, but you get
the idea) to your pitch for ethical & risk profile reasons. These reasons are
inherently personnal and the next guy over can be entitled to a very different
pov.

However I think that the legal risk for the employee and thus the
marketing/sourcing risk for The Lobby, still stand?

Wish you all the best :-)

~~~
dchhugani
Yes! See your points. We'll have to agree to disagree :). Good night!!!
Appreciate the candid feedback.

------
dchhugani
I know this isn't quite on topic, but this is the best possible crowd and I
can't resist mentioning. I'm looking for a technical partner/CTO for The Lobby
in NYC (I'm the founder/CEO of The Lobby to be clear):
[https://blog.usejournal.com/im-looking-for-a-technical-
partn...](https://blog.usejournal.com/im-looking-for-a-technical-partner-cto-
vp-of-engineering-cofounder-chief-hacker-or-whatever-6f5e8c63fc46)

~~~
vadym909
Advice: You could write a book "How I got into YC without a technical
cofounder" and sell a million copies to solo non-technical founders.

~~~
dchhugani
Haha will keep it in mind!! Thank you!

------
benmanbs
Just a quick note - your pricing page seems to have a mathematical error that
would turn me off as prospective buyer. The "Standard" package offers three
calls. The crossed out price ($190) should be equal to 3x the basic price
($60), or $180. Seeing sales pages with lies or mistakes around the savings
makes me worry that I'm getting cheated.

~~~
dchhugani
Hey benmanbs. Thanks for the kind words. We'll fix this, but this wasn't meant
to be misleading.

It's actually more because not every call costs $60. For example, ~90% of our
users buy calls that are in the $65-$70 range as one of their many calls.

We tried to convey that even in the 1 call option it's an "Average" price of
$60, but we still haven't done a good job of conveying this.

Assuming you choose 3 calls that are more than $65 or $70, the number is
actually even higher than $190, but we still discount it down to $170 no
matter who the 3 insiders are, to entice you to buy multiple calls.

Hope this makes sense and will work on improving how this is communicated.

~~~
benmanbs
Now that I've looked back, I noticed the "Average Price" bit. I understand the
model now, and would definitely recommend making that a bit clearer.

~~~
dchhugani
Will definitely make it clearer. Thanks for the candid feedback.

------
legohead
When I was job hunting about 10 years ago I came across a recruiting firm who
pitched me well enough to come in and bring my wife. Their pitch sounded
similar, in that they had "inside info" on companies, an extremely high
success rate, but they needed me to pay them money.

Being in high demand (tech/programming) I scoffed at them and found my own
job. I think they were asking for around $3-5k?

I think the only way this would work for me personally is if I was having
trouble finding a job, and if I paid them _after_ I got hired.

I need to somehow confirm this company's actual worth in the hiring process,
without feeling like I'm being given a sales pitch.

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks! Definitely, when you're in high demand your needs are very different
than the vast majority of people The Lobby helps today. Also - our cost is
much lower (calls range from $60 - $100), instead of the $3-$5k your recruiter
asked for.

Further - they are asking you for $3-$5k up front to get a job, so until they
deliver you said job, they're failing.

The Lobby asks you to pay for specific tactical things you do on a 30m call -
a mock interview, a resume critique, strategy & actionable tips to improve
your interview outcomes.

The value is delivered instantly.

------
foobaw
This is an awesome idea. Any plans to allow someone to pay for this based on
their success of landing a job? (taking a % of their future salary kind of
like Lambda School).

~~~
dchhugani
We've had people suggest it - but right now we're too far removed from the
actual moment someone gets hired to even consider it.

I think that's a very creative model with good alignment of incentives, but
frankly I don't know if it works well. A few friends who tried something
similar told me they felt that in that model, the people who end up getting
jobs the most are typically the ones who needed you the least and can make for
some very unhappy customers who don't know if it's worth paying you a % of
salary well into their jobs.

We'll consider it though :).

~~~
nwsm
>paying you a % of salary into their jobs

Wow, that's a very ambitious idea.

------
qz_
Are the insiders paid, and do their employers know they're working with you
guys?

~~~
dchhugani
Insiders are paid as individual advisors. We don't work with employers, so we
ask insiders to make sure this is OK with their company. In some cases, there
are employer policies against them doing this, and in those cases, we focus on
former employees.

Former employees still have the network and the knowledge on what it takes to
land the job, what the culture is like, and how to help someone prepare for
interviews.

~~~
marpstar
I'm helping build a similar service in a tangentially-related market. I hope
you don't mind a few questions:

Do you offer "insiders" a percentage cut of each service purchased?

How do you find "insiders"?

We're planning on paying our "insiders" via Stripe and letting "insiders" sign
up themselves and go through a short vetting process.

We're still about 3 months from being launch-ready, but I'm intrigued to see a
service that operates so similarly to our plans.

Best of luck!

------
Invictus0
Hi Deepak,

I met you at TreeHacks this year, where I was critical of your product. I saw
your post looking for a CTO and I feel compelled to warn you against pursuing
this idea, again. The lobby is a bad idea because:

1\. The careers space is crowded

2\. Your customers are not earning money and have a multitude of free
alternatives

3\. Your product is extremely expensive

4\. Your product is a liability for the supply side (it is a risk for
employees to advise outsiders about careers at their company)

5\. You overvalue the time of the customer and undervalue the time of your
business side users. Being the middleman in a low-volume business like this
makes no sense.

You seem like a nice guy and I don't want to see you fail. __This is a
terrible idea __. You don 't have product market fit and your CTO is going to
quickly burn through your capital. The people here seem optimistic but do you
really think you're going to make your million off of these interviews? I
advise you to pivot/restart as best you can.

If you still believe in the lobby, just put a phone number on the website and
handle everything yourself until you're up to your eyeballs in customers.

Best of luck.

~~~
dchhugani
Hello! Thanks for the candid feedback. Only time will tell :). best of luck

------
throwawayaway12
This seems pretty interesting and useful!

It does seem like the pricing structure does not incentivize people actually
getting jobs though. With a small pool of people (people looking for top
finance jobs) it seems like the way to make the most money is to perpetually
sell job seekers mock interviews, rather than prioritizing a job seeker to
find a position on the first go. Is this a fair reading of the situation?

~~~
dchhugani
Hello! Glad you see it's merits.

As discussed below, today we focus mainly on coaching & prep. We think that
it's a service that should exist no matter what for the reasons discussed in
the thread.

Beyond that - we are working on creating a structure where job seekers can get
"assessments" from these insiders and if they are above a certain threshold,
we can help them get noticed by employers.

If they do poorly on the calls, then at least they get real feedback on how to
improve. We've also learned that most employers have liability reasons that
prevent them from telling you why you didn't get hired, so here we also solve
for that in the "worst case scenario" which is that the insider didn't think
you are a good fit for the role today.

At least you'll know why and how to solve for it.

------
iblaine
First thing that comes to my mind is will any of these calls violate part of
an employment agreement.

Consider a tech company that has unique problems for candidates to solve. A
service like this could encourage an employee to get paid to release these
problems to the public. In theory you'd hope an NDA stops this type of thing,
but in practice a bit of money could incentivize people to do otherwise.

~~~
dchhugani
Definitely agree that this could be a problem.

Practically speaking - we keep identities anonymous and so employees are
protected.

Ethically speaking - if you have a buddy inside the company, they'll tell you
how to prep for these questions anyways.

It all comes back to our main point - if you don't have an inside connection,
you don't get the juicy insights someone with that advantage does. So your
odds of landing the job, let alone knowing what it takes to land it, are
always lower. We bridge that gap - everything else in our view is a solvable
problem because this engages current/former employees in the recruiting
process + helps companies discover more talent.

------
itschai
Hey Deepak - love the idea. I was fortunate enough to go to a "target" school
but still had a tough time doing finance recruiting without the help of some
very kind classmates. Your post brought back some memories of how much wasted
effort could have been redirected positively if I had some initial guidance
instead of learning everything the hard way.

One of my "side projects" when I was still in school was collating what I and
some other friends had learned about the recruiting process into a doc for
younger students to use. It was helpful for some, but The Lobby is doing it in
a much more democratized manner.

I'm a few years out of the finance game, but let me know if you'd be
interested in chatting as I'd love to help (no strings attached.)

~~~
dchhugani
Thank you! Glad to hear you saw the same problem and would have benefitted
from The Lobby. I was personally surprised by the amount of people we get from
"Target" schools using the service because it's also very competitive to get
the 5-10 spots every bank allocates for hundreds of applicants at those
schools. Feel free to email me at deepak@thelobby.io - would love to get you
involved!

------
twakefield
Many companies offer mid to low four figure referral bonuses for referring
candidates that are hired in hard to find fields like finance, engineering.

Perhaps you can pre-screen “long-tail”[1], high potential candidates and
connect them with insiders.

You could give a portion of the insider’s referral bonus to the candidate to
drive that side of the market.

Candidates don’t have to come out of pocket to incentivize training (if your
candidates have a good chance of getting hired) as the insider will get paid
by the company.

Different take on this idea. Maybe it already exists?

[1] edit: maybe not the right term of art here, but I mean under the radar
candidates (non-ivy, good grades, good work ethic, etc.).

~~~
dchhugani
hello! i like this idea - we'll keep it in mind.

again my only concern is when The Lobby does pre-screening without giving any
coaching, we again resort to arbitrary measures such as resume, good grades,
etc. instead of trying to be a source of coaching, insight, & improvement for
candidates.

For the candidates that reach a certain threshold on The Lobby (say, 3
insiders screened them over a call and see potential), then something like
this makes sense so they can make their money back. Vettery gives candidates a
$500 incentive to use them to get hired, which is a nice idea. Thank you!

------
seibelj
This is awesome! FYI - I entered my email at the top of the page and clicked
"Get Started", and nothing happened.[0]

Would love to know when the jobs expand to tech. Junior-level software
engineering positions are becoming more difficult to get as the number of CS
majors has exploded, and allowing them to practice with CS managers would be
very helpful.

[0] The javascript error in the console:

    
    
      Uncaught TypeError: window.fbq is not a function
          at HTMLFormElement.<anonymous> (custom.js:1)
          at HTMLFormElement.dispatch (jquery.min.js:3)
          at HTMLFormElement.r.handle (jquery.min.js:3)

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks for the kind words! Thanks also for the bug - we're working on fixing
it asap.

We want to move to tech later on - we think the right move is to win in one
industry and move onto others. Also, this is the industry we have more domain
expertise in and that has seen much less innovation than tech for example.

But we're definitely planning to expand soon!

------
michaelt
Do you also charge the companies?

Seems to me that would turn you into a regular, standard hiring website - but
it could be remunerative if you could capture the 20%-of-first-year-salary
companies will pay for recruiters.

~~~
dchhugani
Hello! Today we don't charge the companies. We only want to charge them later
on when we can just send them the candidates that did best on our calls (a.k.a
qualified candidates).

If we charge companies today, the only we could do that is to let them choose
who does these calls on their end, and that defeats the purpose because you
get company-filtered advice.

We're going for a more personalized version of Glassdoor. Does that make
sense?

------
jameslk
This sounds like a really interesting idea outside of just jobs. For example,
I would really love to use this service for market or industry research. I
tried to sign up, but there's a form that requires me to enter a bunch of info
related to job-seeking. I'm not sure why that's necessary if all I want to do
is pay to talk to people in companies?

Also a few nitpicks: The frontpage sign up didn't work for me on Firefox and
there's a 24 char max password length, which shouldn't be necessary if you're
hashing passwords.

~~~
dchhugani
Thank you! We are changing the onboarding flow to make it simpler to just book
a call and not have to give us all that data unless you're about to book it.
However, we are laser-focused on job hunting because otherwise we'll suffer
the same fate of everyone who's tried similar ideas: losing focus.

There are 1,000 things you can ask professionals inside companies - by
starting focused on careers it's easier to market and attract the right
audience and get our supply used to those kinds of interactions as well.
Industry & market research is more like GLG - and that can be much more
complex from a regulatory standpoint (i.e. insider trading).

~~~
jameslk
Makes sense regarding trying to focus on a niche and scale up. It's very hard
solving the chicken and egg problem for marketplaces, I've been there before.

As for regulatory concern, I'm not familiar with the laws, but is it really
your responsibility to prevent things like insider trading? It doesn't seem
like it would be any different from someone just waiting outside of a
company's office to approach its employees.

~~~
dchhugani
Exactly on chicken & egg - but we feel the hyper local approach is a really
actionable way to solve it, we're already seeing it work in our niche.

It's not really our responsibility at all, even to make sure people abide by
company policies or to prevent insider trading.

I still however answer all these questions because we think about the ethical
implications a lot and we thought through everything in detail before choosing
this model. I'm comfortable with the risks, I believe the rewards far outweigh
them. Thank you!

------
konschubert
[Slightly off-topic]

There are a lot of people here talking about how it is impossible to find a
job at one of the top investment banks without any connections.

Why do you need to have connections to land a job? Why aren't the best
candidates filtered from the job application pipeline like it happens at all
of the big tech companies?

By requiring connections to get in, Investment Bankers are biasing their
employee tool from "the best" to "the people that went to their school".

Maybe that's intentional...

~~~
gringoDan
[Slightly sarcastic, but my opinion based on working in banking for a 3 month
internship and then bailing to tech after graduating from college.]

At the lower levels, investment banking doesn't take much brainpower. Analysts
spend 95% of the day: making PowerPoint slides, doing research online, or un-
doing the changes they made the day before because the VP on the team didn't
like the changes the Associate wanted.

The most interesting part of the job (financial modeling) can be learned in a
couple of weeks. And then the Managing Director will just tell you what they
want the model to spit out and you fudge the numbers to make it happen.

There aren't really 10x investment banking analysts like there are 10x
engineers. In investment banking, once you know the basics of finance and get
your foot in the door, the hiring becomes very behavioral. I've found that
people want to hire other people they'd like to hang out with.

~~~
dchhugani
This is very insightful and perceptive, especially for just doing a 3 month
internship. I agree with pretty much all of it.

However - you'll find most people hate IB for the same reasons, but also know
their only way to more interesting roles like private equity, hedge funds, and
more is to do investment banking first.

Engineering is no doubt more challenging in many respects; IB after a certain
point becomes more about endurance, politics, and being good at repetition.
But it's still a high-paying job, a gateway to other more interesting careers,
and at least for me, a good way to develop a crazy disciplined work ethic.

I'm sure you can get many of those other ways too - just thought this was
worth mentioning.

~~~
gringoDan
Completely agree with your analysis. Wish you the best of luck with the
company, it seems like it could definitely add value in the space.

Sidenote - might be able to help you with some introductions on the technical
co-founder front. I'm NYC-based as well, contact info in my profile.

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks gringoDan! Reaching out to you now - really appreciate the help + kind
words.

------
jakemor
I really love this concept and hope it succeeds. Lowering the barrier to entry
to highly technical fields is a win-win for everyone. Congrats on your
progress so far!

My only question is how a highly productive individual at a top bank or
startup justifies taking the time out of their day to speak to a newbie. I
know they get paid, but I would imagine it's peanuts compared to their 6
figure salaries. What is their main motivation in scheduling calls?

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks for the kind words jakemor!

We're surprised at this ourselves - they seem to enjoy being in the "expert"
seat because most of them are junior level people who aren't traditionally
thought of as experts or people whose insights are worth money.

I think we're learning it's a powerful combo - get paid to talk about
yourself, show off how smart you are + help other people out who are
struggling to overcome what you already did.

~~~
jakemor
Very cool. Just signed up and will give it a try :)

~~~
dchhugani
If you have any questions whatsoever, email me at deepak@thelobby.io. let me
know what you think!

------
tfehring
You may want to reach out to the founders of HackerRank (S11) via bookface or
whatever if you haven't already. They started with what sounds like a similar
business model (and got turned down by YC) before pivoting to their current
model. I'm not affiliated with them in any way - I just happened to listen to
a YC podcast featuring one of the founders last week (and Baader-Meinhof has
been hitting me hard since then).

~~~
dchhugani
I heard this podcast too! I've also heard of people trying similar ideas. I
have many strong opinions on why it didn't work for them and others. The main
reason for Hacker Rank (And he says it in the podcast) is that in India the
money you make per session is insignificant to build a business on vs. the US
- and they didn't start focused enough on a few companies or an industry. It
was just "software engineers" at large.

It still might not work - like I say below, our guiding compass is happy users
+ growing numbers and we try not to bias ourselves with what others have /
haven't done. In true PG fashion I hope!

------
Fifer82
Great idea Deepak and all the best moving forward.

I am currently considering moving away from tech. When I started out, I had
dreams but absolutely no contacts. I am especially bad at bullshitting my way
through recruitment agencies and nothing has changed in 10 years. I am still
at the same job.

Somewhere along the line I wish a service like this existed as it would have
made all the difference.

~~~
dchhugani
Hey Fifer82! Really appreciate your kind words. It sounds fluffy, but this is
the kind of thing that inspired me to do The Lobby.

I went to a school where no one really gets the "top jobs" but a select few of
us figured out how to do it, and that expanded to over 50+ friends who now all
mentor their own networks to do the same.

I think these things have a crazy ripple effect and I think beyond what can be
measured from a few calls, the insights people get and the jobs they can land
thanks to them can have really exponential (positive) effects.

Thanks again!

------
dchhugani
OP here: Thanks so much to the HN community for all the amazing support +
critical feedback. Deeply appreciated! Apologies if I don't see / respond to
more comments, will try to check back and answer when I can. If you want to
keep chatting, please reach out here: deepak@thelobby.io.

------
koolba
How do you prevent companies from sending you fake applicants to find internal
leakers?

An anonymous person whose known to work at a particular can be easily
identified by the information to which they have access and possibly their
communication still itself.

~~~
dchhugani
definitely a concern. For something like this to happen, The Lobby has to have
already reached a very large mass (i.e. employers wouldn't care otherwise),
but we'll think of guard rails or measures to avoid this from happening. I
think something to verify the candidate's identity in the onboarding before
booking calls is a good way to do that - but haven't thought through it.

------
maxtynan
What a great idea, Deepak.

I went to a school where the big banks, consulting shops, and tech companies
didn’t come to recruit on campus.

Many, many of us went to schools like this. Thanks for championing this cause.

~~~
dchhugani
hey maxtynan! appreciate the kind words. I'm glad you see the problem we're
trying to solve, most of our users tell us the same thing and you'd be
surprised how many users even in target schools need more help.

This is the most important decision of your life at any given time (maybe
except for who you marry) and we still rely on generic forums, our own
networks, or spamming people on LinkedIn. We hope this makes it more efficient
& accessible.

------
LiamPa
Interesting idea but I left the site once I got to the pricing page as it goes
super thin and impossible to read on my iPad.

~~~
dchhugani
Thanks LiamPa - we'll look into that on iPad. I'll reach back out when it's
responsive there.

------
iguana
This is great!

One way to offset the cost for job seekers is to take some part up front, and
the rest in ~90 days when they get hired.

~~~
dchhugani
I like this! We'll consider it :).

------
FLUX-YOU
Low priority: On the blog, the newsletter popup is added to the browser's back
queue. A bit annoying.

~~~
dchhugani
Looking into this - thank you very much!

------
tmaly
Deepak, if a company in the Finance industry wanted to be added to the pool,
what is the process?

~~~
dchhugani
Please reach out at deepak@thelobby.io and I'll onboard you personally!

------
MarketingJason
Deepak, how are mock interviews performed?

~~~
dchhugani
In our process of booking a call, we ask you to specify your objectives, just
write "mock interview" there and any other relevant info (behavioral,
technical, etc.). Does that make sense?

~~~
MarketingJason
So, you are essentially paying for 30 min of time to do with whatever you want
- got it. Thanks Deepak

~~~
dchhugani
Yes! We are working on segmenting the calls but really up until a few months
ago, it was still all MVP and the different use cases helped us realize they
need to be segmented differently (and sometimes even priced) differently. For
example, having someone tell you about their job can probably be done in 15m
and at a lower cost than someone who goes through the trouble of prepping for
a mock interview. Working on it!

------
WhitneyLand
Deepak first let me say I choose to view this community as a group of people
who win together, therefore I want you to win, and sincerely wish success for
your team. Now let’s get to work on your feedback.

 _> >[It’s challenging to get everyone receptive to our new approach]_

This provides no information. It’s an entrepreneurial truism. Do you think a
large percentage of startups visit sand hill road and never get rejected? Even
most of the unicorns have their stories. Google, E-Bay (good luck selling
barbie dolls), etc.

Big caveat though: Listen carefully to every person who rejects you. Yes some
comments will be dumb, but in general you’re asking smart people and their
comments can often be uniquely invaluable.

 _> >[it's controversial to start a recruiting company charging job seekers
instead of hiring companies]_

Are you sure this is the controversial part? I see no inherent controversy in
the concept of applicants being customers, although if you mean there’s
limited precedent of success that makes it more difficult to get people’s buy
in, that makes sense. It can always can be a problem.

It’s also a signal to your team to reflect, and question yourselves regularly
on what’s so different about what your doing that hasn’t been tried before?
Why will you will be the ones to show it’s possible to disrupt conventional
wisdom? Why are you so sure it will ever happen? Don’t answer those, the
questions are rhetorical. I know you have your answers. The real point is I’m
suggesting you never stop trying to find flaws in those answers. Every flaw
you find makes you more powerful because you can harvest them to adapt, fine
tune, improve.

I’ll try to comment more directly on the model now. I try to keep an open mind
on these things, but haven’t heard enough (not that my opinion counts :) here
to get on board.

Ironically I was in a boat similar to the one you were in coming out of
school. Strong ambition to get into the hottest software company in the world,
which at the time was Microsoft, even if nowadays a lot of people think of
them as about as hot as IBM, or lesser so :).

The problem was I also was still too immature to not be lazy and spend all my
time with friends, and ended up earning my CS degree from Whatever University,
which for some reason was one MS was no too interested in recruiting at.

You would think being so irresponsible I didn’t have the chops anyway, but
it’s just been my thing forever and ironically I had a lot of projects under
my belt already to show people - if they would have ever responded to my
emails or resumes - which they never did, despite being clearly marked as from
a WU graduate.

If I were in finance, doesn’t it sound like a possible customer scenario for
you? Assuming it could be, how could someone have lived the scenario, but
still not be bought in the applicant customer concept?

Because today I believe there are already ways to solve the problems you are
trying to sell solutions to (and to my old problem), that are free yet not
necessarily any less effective.

As one example, a while back I suggested one possible path with specific steps
on how to do it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15096335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15096335)

It’s important note again, software development and finance are two different
things. However I know just a bit about finance from startup experiences, and
also from a best friend who’s a VP of finance and whenever we go out won’t
stop ranting about it while all I’m trying to do is hang out and enjoy my
beer. Do I mention algorithms to him? No, but I’m digressing...

The point is as different as the professions are, it seems like there are also
a fair amount of parallels w.r.t. getting a job.

Therefore I would be concerned that there may be some similar path to my
example above that allows a person a chance to show what they’ve got and land
a job at a top company, given the right talent and hard work on preparation,
and tailoring approaches to specific goals.

The Internet itself seems to be a big problem here. It’s just not that hard to
contact even executive level folks if you’re willing to put in the time to get
to them. Once in a while they even reply to your first LinkedIn request if
your intro note happens to interest them.

Then again, everything I have said could be wrong and I hope it is, so that
things can really take off big.

Good luck.

~~~
dchhugani
hello! firstly, thank you very much for the kind words on wanting to help win
+ the thoughtful response.

\- To your points on challenging & controversy:

understand it's ambiguous, was trying to be concise. Basically the point is
conventional wisdom is that in recruiting, companies pay, job seekers don't.
And if you charge job seekers, certain people think you are preying on the
vulnerable. We are continually tweaking our message to make sure people
understand this is quite the opposite - giving the outsiders an advantage or
at least a level playing field.

\- To your thoughts on the model 1\. It sounds like you described a perfect
scenario. You were immature, but had projects and other things to show you
were qualified. Still people wouldn't answer your emails or interview you.
Hindsight is 20.20 and it sounds like today you have a successful job, but
maybe it could've come much sooner if you would've landed some of those
interviews. What's the price you can put on that?

2\. It's easy to say finance, software, and others are fundamentally different
industries and that's why one will work better than the other. That's probably
true in some ways, but the core insight is the same - the best way to get a
job is to figure out what they're looking for and despite what you're saying -
that most definitely is not available online. You can google Glassdoor forums
and chats, but they become outdated only a few months after, and most of those
are not at the specific group or team-level, they're generic. I cannot think
of a better way to get timely, accurate, and personalized information than by
getting it from a human being who is / recently has been on the inside. can
you?

I am convinced that your advice is amazing - we have to continually ask
ourselves if we're working on the right thing, if we're the team to beat
conventional wisdom, etc. The best way I know how to do that is to see the
numbers grow and focus on our initial niche before expanding.

Thank you!

~~~
WhitneyLand
>What's the price you can put on that?

As you might guess, I would have paid anything. I did eventually find a way in
but that doesn’t change the point.

Let it commence then. Ramp this thing up and make it scale. Do it so well I’ll
want to brag about even trying to challenge your ideas. For real man, make it
so.

~~~
dchhugani
Thank you! On it :).

------
ronilan
> _it 's controversial to build a recruiting-focused company that charges job
> seekers instead of just the companies._

There is no controversy.

It’s just plain wrong.

~~~
gwbas1c
A phrase that often passes through these forums is, "if it's free, you are the
product!"

I encounter a lot of clowns when I work with recruiting firms. I'm open to new
ideas where I'm treated as a valuable customer instead of a product.

[Edit] This is because I'm finding that recruiting is turning into spamming.
Every recruiter gets lucky from the few candidates they place so they make a
decent income from their commission.

[Edit] If I pay to work with someone who handles a high volume, would it
streamline the process? Avoid the spam? I don't know, but I'm frustrated
enough with the process to keep an open mind.

~~~
eterm
If you read the privacy policy you'll realise you're _still_ the product:

"The Lobby may create co-branded webpages with our third-party partners or
contractors and in connection with these relationships we may pass your
personal information to these partners in order to offer these co-branded
Services."

~~~
dchhugani
Like 99% of startups, we didn't write up each section of our privacy policy in
an effort to be evil. We worked with templates and modified the parts that
seemed more specific to us. Please don't villanize us for the wording here -
it probably came recycled from others. We would never share important data
without user's consent, and in the case of recruiting, they're usually joining
because they want us to share certain data with employers (which we don't do
at all today yet).

------
mabynogy
We don't need recruiters nor resumes nor tests. Any programmer is able to
evaluate another programmer just by talking. All methods of recruitement are
biaised. They are harmful, unefficient and they alienate people (both the
recruiter and the candidate).

