
Show HN: Mighty Spring – Passive job search - ultimatedelman
https://www.mightyspring.com/
======
robert_tweed
Looks potentially interesting, but the fees seem awfully high for an automated
matching service compared to standard recruitment agencies. Which is to say,
ones with actual recruiters doing search, vetting and so on. Yes, there is
always the advertised "standard rate" that may be something crazy like 25-40%
of starting salary, but the actual negotiated rate is always much, much lower
than that. 15% generally gets you a very high standard of professional
recruitment services, not something that is basically monster.com without the
massive candidate-base.

The pay per interview rates seem much more sensible, but that's a model that
might be seen as high-risk, particularly if there is no pre-vetting of
candidates. That's not something the site mentions at all in either the
employer or candidate FAQ, but is a pretty important part of the recruitment
agency model.

Also, I'm in the UK and the site seems pretty US-centric with no information
about which regions are targeted or even supported. It should really be stated
pretty clearly up-front - is the focus just on Silicon Valley, or startups
anywhere in the world?

~~~
lumens
Hey Robert, good points here, but we're actually not entirely automated. We
still do some manual things (we're a small startup, after all), which keeps
the quality of folks seen by our employers high.

All of this said, we hope to not be in the contingency recruiting business
forever. We feel that there is a friendlier fee structure to implement (with
better incentives for companies and candidates alike), which we will do as our
marketplace grows.

RE: UK jobs, most of the companies who have signed up are in the Bay Area and
NYC right now, but there are no strict limitations to prevent UK companies
from participating. We do have candidates in the UK that have signed up, FYI.

~~~
robert_tweed
Thanks for the reply. FWIW, you might want to consider focusing on key regions
only during your early stages. I've seen problems with similar lack of
geographic focus on sites before. While it's tempting to just say "we're open
to everyone" it doesn't always work like that in practice.

If you are not getting enough traffic in a particular area, it can be
worthwhile to close it down completely - preferably temporarily - and then
come back to it with a targeted launch at some future time once the core
regions are self-sustaining.

So for instance, you could organise some UK-centric marketing, with some PPC,
etc., and maybe go speak at some UK events or something around the same time.
This will hopefully get you a critical mass of interest in a short period of
time, while in the meantime you get to focus on your core demographic.

Otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of time on stuff that isn't working for
anyone - if you don't have enough candidates and recruiters in the same place
at the same time, those people are potentially just going to go away with a
bad impression of the service, so in the long run you actually lose potential
clients.

If you can get that same number of people onto the site in a month instead of
over the course of a year, it'll work out much better. If you leave it
entirely to organic growth, that probably won't happen.

------
kstrauser
Thanks for giving the GitHub "Connect public account" higher visibility! I
still think it should be the default, though. I've got a stack of NDAs as high
as my client list and if I accidentally clicked through and approved the
"Connect full account" button, I'd be in a world of legal hurt.

I _do_ trust your good intentions! I don't think your goal in business is to
get full access to all of my clients' repos for nefarious purposes.
Nonetheless, legally that's not a judgement call I'm allowed to make.

~~~
lumens
Awesome! Glad you saw and liked the change. We're trying to iterate quickly to
address our users concerns, so keep the feedback coming — super helpful.

------
seivan
Holy shit, the UI is really impressive. Genuinely impressed with your front-
end engineering! It was insanely fluid, I kept thinking how much better it is
compared to most native iOS/Mac OS applications.

~~~
ultimatedelman
Thanks! Glad you like it :)

------
danielweber
I have achieved burnout on "find a job" sites. One time I spent an hour
registering and making a profile for a (different!) "find startups" site and
got told, after all that, that I'd have to indicate a willingness to relocate
to Boston, SF, or NYC if I wanted my profile to be searchable.

I'm sure their A/B metrics were better by waiting until the end for that
distracting information.

Again, that was a different site. That's probably unfair for this site. It's
just that I anticipate having my time wasted now.

 _EDIT_ I just tried to upload my .rtf resume and it said it wasn't an
acceptable format. "Word, PDF, text, and HTML only."

~~~
ultimatedelman
Good catch! I just updated the file extension list and that's pushing up the
pipe. Interestingly, I allowed it in the "accept" attribute on the file input,
but forgot in my upload code :)

Thanks for the feedback!

------
j_vantuyl
Oh, wow. Full account access? If I checked that it would violate all the NDAs.
I can't imagine how anybody that's ever signed an employment contract in the
Bay Area could do that without violating their employment agreement. That's
just a non-starter. Why do you need full access anyways?

~~~
ultimatedelman
GitHub accounts are a virtual pre-requisite for a developer at any startup
nowadays. Many developers are working on things in private repos and maybe
don't have a ton of public activity to display. We offer them the option to
connect their full account so that we can parse their activities to show that
they are, in fact, active and building things.

Note that we also offer the ability to connect to what is already publicly
visible via GitHub if you don't want to grant us full access.

~~~
ericd
>GitHub accounts are a virtual pre-requisite for a developer at any startup
nowadays.

I don't think this is true, and if it is, it shouldn't be. I certainly
wouldn't care if a candidate didn't have anything to share on GitHub.

~~~
ultimatedelman
It's definitely not always true, for sure, but in our experience and with the
companies we've worked with, almost unanimously their first comment was
always, "Man, it'd be cool if I could see a breakdown of their GitHub data,
too." (of course, before we implemented this feature). It's not for everyone
and definitely is not the end-all-be-all of what makes a good developer, but
many startups today like to see open-source contributions.

~~~
EarthLaunch
A GitHub focus on a job site attracts employers who rely on that. I've always
deliberately avoided GitHub, so job sites that give it focus aren't for me,
because the employers are looking at different metrics than what I have.

Your reasoning makes sense, and it's perfectly fine to do it the way you are.
I think people like me are just pointing out that this makes us self-exclude
ourselves from the site, in case you wanted us.

------
seanperryman
Hey guys; do you have any method of pointing out remote-only jobs?

~~~
iamthepieman
It would be nice if the "Browse Companies" section mentioned whether the
company considered remote or not.

~~~
seanperryman
I completely agree! I've been looking for remote work for a while now (kids
are in the middle of High School), and it doesn't seem like there are a ton of
places to look.

------
troels
I like the UI - It doesn't look the same as everything else and it works
really well. Maybe it's just the colours, but it reminds me quite a bit of New
Relic.

The company browser could do with some work - it's very bare bones for now
(But it looks like you're aware of this).

Also, I'll second robert_tweed - this appears very US centric. You should
either state clearly that you are US only, for the time being, or you should
make it a bit more international. Technically it's probably small changes, but
right now it gives an unwelcoming impression for me.

------
tomwritesjs
I've been using the service for a few weeks now. It was interesting that you
can set yourself as not actively seeking. It integrates smoothly with Git-HUb,
Linked-in, and Stack Overflow. Very clean and responsive design. I wish that
the whole app supported mobile as I tend to do most work on my career from my
phone. Their team has been very helpful and friendly. I'm personally looking
forward to seeing the results that I get.

------
zapshu
Is there any way to delete an account? I can't find any link / setting to do
that.

~~~
ultimatedelman
Send an email to info at mightyspring dot com and we'll take care of it for
you. Right now there's no button, but we should probably put one in!

------
elwell
> You'll receive one (1) Bitcoin each time a friend you invite gets a job
> through Mighty Spring!

$600?

------
donretag
What is the search radius for jobs? I live two hours away from San Francisco,
yet it matched me for a job there. Ummm, no thanks. I understand that there
will be no jobs in my area, but recommending something two hours away seems a
bit too much.

~~~
zcarter
MS backend dev here. Are you referring to the Mighty Spring position?

We are automagically matching new signups to our own open positions to both
dogfood our product and give users a sense of how the job match process works
when they don't have good organic matches.

Sorry if this was confusing.

------
peterjancelis
If your fee is $250 per interview or $15K per hire, does that mean you expect
employers to need 60 interviews with MightySpring leads to find a good
candidate? Or is there a reason for discounting the interview fees
comparatively?

------
mathattack
I like the idea of passive job searches, but what's this have to offer versus
similar services? (Like LinkedIn, Monster, etc)

~~~
lumens
Much better control of incoming opportunities, dramatically improving
signal/noise ratio seen on those sites.

Unlike those sites, your information is private on Mighty Spring, so as an
employed person you can be more transparent about your search criteria.

Also, hopefully, a much more enjoyable UX :)

~~~
mathattack
Thanks for sharing!

------
FLUX-YOU
Mighty spring has pinged me for feedback a few times. They're extremely quick
to fix things and will sometimes explain why something is a particular way at
the moment. I happily went out of my way to put together images and detailed
info for things I noticed because of how approachable they are.

Props, guys and gals.

~~~
lumens
Thanks for the kind words — and even more for your feedback. Couldn't have
built what we have so far without feedback from folks like yourself. Keep it
coming and we'll keep making the product better!

------
bshoemaker
This is actually pretty cool - just signed up and everything worked as
expected. No idea if it is effective past that but the interface makes sense
and asks relevant questions

------
varunv
the UI is fantastic. What type of job seekers are you focused on? It looks
like there's a technical focus to the listings and the "self" descriptions.

------
Ave
I tried this a few months ago and didn't have any luck at all with matches.
Maybe I was doing something wrong.

The team however was friendly and very responsive to feedback.

------
davyjones
I am honestly, honestly blown away by the user experience! Amazing walk
through; at no point did I feel anything as a chore.

Very well executed indeed. Kudos to the team.

------
scalesolved
Incredible UI, I signed up even though I'm based in Spain and it seems
targeted towards the US. Great fluid sign up experience!

------
opendais
Has anyone had success using MightySpring to find a job/find a candidate for a
job?

~~~
lumens
Hey, Mighty Spring CEO here: yes, we're making placements with the platform
and new people are interviewing every week.

While we're still early-stage and in beta, our candidate and employer base is
growing significantly on a weekly basis as well. As a marketplace, this is
obviously key to driving more interviews/hires.

------
megmeg
Are you planning on providing possibility to connect other accounts, e.g.
Bitbucket?

------
zakelfassi
I'm more interested in the tech-stack you're using - if willing to share!

~~~
ultimatedelman
On the backend we're using Python/Flask, MongoDB, Heroku, and AWS. We rolled
our own ORM called WhiskeyNode
([https://github.com/texuf/whiskeynode](https://github.com/texuf/whiskeynode))
and an event consumer called PyMonster
([https://github.com/texuf/pymonster](https://github.com/texuf/pymonster)).

On the front end, I rolled my own custom framework. I use Handlebars for
templating and various mini-libraries for some functionality (shout out to
Modernizr, Isotope, and Bespoke :) in addition to jQuery. For CSS I use
Compass/SASS. I actually wrote a blog post about it
([http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/58803131171/purposefully-a...](http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/58803131171/purposefully-
architecting-your-sass))

I think that covers it!

~~~
zakelfassi
That's pretty cool! Figured about Python (saw gunicorn in HTTP headers). What
blew me away, is the fact that you're using a custom framework for the user
on-boarding complex/heavily-ajaxified UX... I'd be willing to get updated
about how does that scale up!

~~~
ultimatedelman
To be honest, the onboarding experience is pretty silo'd in terms of
scripting, although we're thinking about using the same functionality (guided
walkthrough) for other parts of the experience, so I may refactor it for reuse
elsewhere :)

------
pramodbiligiri
Nice site and UI! Can you integrate with bitbucket?

~~~
ultimatedelman
It's definitely on the roadmap. Any site that helps a potential candidate
present themselves to a prospective employer makes sense to connect with.
Bitbucket is coming soon.

------
gtirloni
US only?

