
Please Poach Me - anto210
http://pleasepoach.me
======
joshhart
I work at LinkedIn, so I think I'm reasonably qualified to provide my opinion.
I'm certain that this won't work well. Charging $5 per profile view ($50 per
10) is simply outrageous. Most profiles will be junk or irrelevant -
recruiters work very hard to sift through the chaff. Even of those that ARE
relevant, there's a small chance they'll wind up working at your company.
You'd have to have an unprecedented algorithm here. It's unlikely that you do,
given we've had engineers working on optimizing search for recruiters for
years.

That said, LinkedIn doesn't do the best job of allowing employees to
anonymously signal that they are looking for a job. I think there's space for
you to make an impact, but I think your payment model will hold you back.

~~~
jonknee
LinkedIn likes to brag about how it's reasonably priced... Just $18 per
resume.

"The cost to obtain a qualified resume on LinkedIn was less than
CareerBuilder; $18.33 per resume versus $175.50."

[http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/cost-
per-r...](http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2009/12/cost-per-resume-
lower-with-linkedin-job-posts/)

I don't think pricing is going to be the problem here.

~~~
nl
That's not comparable at all. Or rather it is, but it makes LinkedIn look
exactly the same price, with a bigger candidate pool.

The $18 per resume there is after _human_ screening removed the bad resumes.
Pleasepoachme charges $10 per _match_ \- and as far as I can see all they do
is a text match on the requirements.

In the post you linked to, he had to review 39 LinkedIn resumes to get 11
qualified candidates. Based on the Pleasepoachme rates, looking at 40 resumes
would be $200. Assuming 11 candidates were found, that is $18 per qualified
candidate.

~~~
diminish
Opposed to how pleasepoachme works; here is a free experimental web site we
created; <http://www.jobrupt.com>. Jobrupt is for job seekers to initiate a
job application by asking publicly the companies to create or open a job
position for them by telling how they can add value and why they are the best
candidate. Could anyone provide me with some hints or ideas if jobrupt would
help anyone? Or is the idea too unrealistic?

------
davekinkead
I'm not trying to crush your startup dreams but you should stop right now and
immediately talk to 20+ recruiters or hiring managers about your app before
you invest any more time or money.

I built a prototype for a similar idea about 18 months ago - it imported your
linked in profile, your network could write skill specific references which
back-linked and allowed recruiters/employers to search for
skills/experience/geography/salary range they wanted to generate an anonymous
short list of candidates in seconds; they could browse shortlisted CVs, read
references and they only paid when a candidate agreed to release their details
to the recruiter. Great idea eh?

The problem was, just about all the recruiters & employers I talked to about
it (in Australia) weren't that positive. Their reasons were: * network effects
- it only becomes useful once plenty of candidates were in it. * many
recruiters already had their own database of candidates that they didn't want
to share or duplicate. * many recruiters needed near immediate response (they
had 48hrs to fill a role). Waiting for candidates to respond to a request was
a negative for them. * some recruiters saw it as a threat and didn't want to
support that kind of system. * Companies often wanted a full service solution
so while this could generate a quality shortlist for them, many wanted hand
holding.

HR is ripe for disruption but execution is everything. What does your app do
that paid access to searchable linkedin profiles doesn't?

------
ImprovedSilence
I like the idea, +1 for originality. Just some thoughts though: Not that I
have much experience from the employer standpoint, but the fact that I have to
keep paying (even if it's $50) each time, will always leave a constant
reminder that I'm spending money. That, coupled with the fact that I'm not
sure what quality of candidates you'll be showing me (and I KNOW how bad
headhunters can be trying to cram someone where they don't fit, just for that
commission) seems like you'd have trouble getting anyone to fork over $150+ on
this. Not that I have better specific suggestions, but trying to get one big
lump sum might work better, as it's easier to spend once, as opposed to
multiple times. And one last thing, I don't how long ago you launched, or if
you already did this, but i'd try to find as many alpha tester companies (give
it to em free) and candidates as possible, cuz if I just spent my third round
of $50, and I"m seeing the same people, kiss it GOODBYE, and I'll be sure to
warn my friends. Like I said though, you could be there already, I don't know,
it's just a thought that crossed my mind.

~~~
absconditus
$50 is really nothing for recruiting.

~~~
zavulon
Actually, in recruiting you pay nothing until one lump sump when you hire
someone. Here, you pay EACH TIME, and it adds up (even if it adds up to less
than 20% recruiting fee, it still feels like constantly paying)

~~~
cnxsoft
That's true but once an agency finds the right candidate you have to pay a lot
to hire him/her, like 3 months salary.

~~~
amorphid
I am a recruiter. My team and I charge by the hour.

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Maro
Some feedback:

1\. About the name: Non-native speakers may not know what "poach" means. I've
lived in California for four years in the past and I was confused.

2\. The cartoon fox looks like it's about to steal my mouse. It looks like
you're trying to sell me lockpicking tools...

3\. I think you should better explain what recruiters get out of this versus
what LinkedIn offers.

4\. Your landing page is really two landing pages: one for the people (they're
the product), and one for the recruiters (they're the customers). I think you
should better seperate the two, or just drop one of them altogether.

~~~
tchock23
Just curious about your fourth point above... Why do you think two landing
pages would be better?

I've seen this approach used on a number of other sites that are seemingly
successful, and am debating the single landing page approach for a project of
mine, so I would be interested to hear the pros and cons.

~~~
Maro
I'm not really an expert on landing pages, it just seems to me that coming up
with a good landing page for one set of users is hard enough...

This isn't that bad until the first horizontal line (except for the fox),
where it's clearly targeted at the users, with a smaller link for companies.
But I don't think it works below the line.

I think they should focus on the users and assume that the recruiters are
professionals willing to jump through more hoops.

~~~
diminish
We would love if you could also give some hints about www.jobrupt.com; a free
web tool - in beta, for people to initiate job applications. (pls excuses for
the design and language)

------
synnik
As a hiring manager, this does not make sense. Why should I pay $50 just to
make initial contact with one person, and then still have to do the full
recruiting and interviewing process?

Recruiters will do all that for me for free, and pre-screen everyone, so it is
the same net result to me, at least on the front-end of the hiring process.

FYI, answering this question here isn't the point - your site needs to clearly
tell hiring managers why it is better for THEM. You won't get a chance to open
a dialogue with them when they view your site.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
Good points, does the website charge for anything besides the connection? They
aren't that clear. A headhunter could cost 10% or more of whatever I'm going
to pay some guy (lets say cost would be ~10k) _edit: and have my hire_ , or I
could pony up $500 to meet some people and hopefully make a hire. I don't know
if that's how it's being run, but that's the advantage I see.

~~~
anto210
Also - you know people on pleasepoach.me want a new opportunity, increasing
the likelihood of finding someone interested in moving to a new company.

------
freerobby
I like the idea. Two implementation critiques:

1) Let recruiters see the value before making them pay (e.g. wait until people
want to reach out to somebody).

2) Come up with payment terms that don't discourage use. You want people to
pay you and then use your service religiously. Per-use pricing forces people
to ration the extent that they use your service which gets in the way of
maximizing the value you provide them.

~~~
mopoke
I agree. There's no way I'm giving over my credit card details and being pre-
billed when I have no idea if there is even anyone registered to be poached.

Take a lead from dating sites - tease and squeeze.

------
leif
I'd love "pleasestoptryingtopoach.me".

~~~
kloncks
I got a call from a recruiter recently. Turns out he thinks I'll be a great
candidate to be the new CEO of some algorithmic trading/financial services
company in New York City...given my decades of experience in the field. MBA
required.

I'm a 21-year-old who just took a leave of absence to concentrate on Kout.me ;
how is it that I'm even a target of these people yet?

~~~
angelbob
They're desperate, and they get paid a _lot_ if everything goes well. They
_could_ carefully screen each person for exact suitability, throw out bad
matches and bring in only a few good ones. Or they could throw huge numbers of
resumes and see if any stick.

If the recruiter doesn't have excellent technical judgement (few do), the
approaches basically pay the same.

~~~
leif
What I don't understand is: why don't the recruiters that _do_ carefully
screen people just wipe out those that don't? Are there enough companies that
are too clueless to hire a good one that the bad ones still get enough results
to keep doing it?

~~~
Michael_K
I believe the answer to that is the market segmentation. There are so many
different type of segments (by programming language, years of experience,
company size, industry etc.) that it is very hard for recruiters to spread
across too many different segments. So they stick with a few, work them for
years, build up a huge network and get really good in these few segments. But
of course there is still lots of room in other segments for less qualitative
focused recruiters to make a buck by just playing the numbers game.

------
arooni
I think this is brilliant. And I think that it will be successful as evidenced
from the _strong_ opinions in this thread. Strong opinions help products
spread. The fact that some people hate this app is only evidence that they'll
tell someone else how much they hate it; which can only help you. I'm a big
fan of polarizing products.

~~~
Michael_K
I agree, it is super polarizing. The fact that it was ranked at #1 at HN for
quite a while is proof of it. I am excited, that someone tries to tackle the
passive job seeking market. The market for active seekers with indeed.com,
simplyhired.com, monster.com, careerbuilder.com etc. is already pretty
crowded, but nobody has really cracked the passive job seeking market. Granted
that it's current form has its flaws (I assume it is just a first version),
but this could be huge.

------
jaredsohn
Pet peeve: Are these really "job offers"? (I've seen similar terminology used
when companies contact people due to their open source projects and that bugs
me, too.) I think a more proper way of describing this is that companies are
offering interview opportunities.

------
lpolovets
This is connected to an employee's LinkedIn profile, so why wouldn't an
employee just change their contact settings to "I am open to career
opportunities"? I know a lot of people that have that setting on, even if they
are very happy with their job, and I don't know of a single person who has
gotten flak for it from their employer.

~~~
angelbob
Unfortunately that's very error-prone from the potential employer side. It's
not a very strong signal that they're actually looking.

~~~
lpolovets
Very true. However, the impression I've gotten from recruiters emailing me is
that most of them are just sending uncustomized emails to a lot of people who
match some keywords. If that is the case, then contacting 100 people instead
of to 25 people means an extra hour of work. I don't think it's worth paying
$5/contact to avoid something that takes so little time.

~~~
vidarh
Conversely most e-mails from recruiters get ignored. I'd be far more likely to
take an e-mail that I know someone had to pay to get to me seriously, on the
assumption it'd likely be better targeted.

~~~
angelbob
That might be an argument for premium job sites like TheLadders advertised as
($100k+ jobs). It seems like they've backed off on that branding, though. So
maybe that doesn't work out well in practice?

------
sdfjkl
If I wanted to look for a job anonymously, the last thing I'd want to do would
be to sign in with my LinkedIn profile. I'd probably rather make an extra
email account somewhere and use that.

It seems way to easy to implement a third column to this offer: Companies!
Find out which of your rat bastard employees is about to abandon ship for only
$50 (per month). Get email notifications as soon as one of your employees logs
into our site and use our handy Word template to fire them automatically!

~~~
jurre
I think that goes completely against the whole point of the website, it's a
platform where you can let people know your interested in finding a new job
_without_ your employer finding out about it.

~~~
nodata
I think he was being sarcastic.

~~~
jurre
I feel so stupid, I didn't read the last sentence :/

------
brandonb
I went to sign up as an employer, but stopped since I didn't want to fork over
$50 before even seeing what quality of engineers you have. I'll bet you'd get
a lot more employer interest if you let people inspect the goods before
entering a credit card number.

------
munin
if you work for a small company (10-200), displaying the company name
basically destroys any anonymity. why display your current company name?

~~~
lambda
When you sign up, they have a question "does your company have less than 10
employees", which is presumably to deal with this issue. Of course, 10 is a
pretty low cutoff for this question.

~~~
theli0nheart
Yep. We hide the company name if you mark this as "Yes".

------
theli0nheart
We built this with the hope that people will find the jobs they truly want.
Let us know what your thoughts are.

Most importantly, have fun with it ;)

~~~
philco
Cool idea! The biggest risk of volunteering yourself to get poached is that
your company finds out BEFORE you get poached. Everyone loses :-(

If you block people at the same company, that could be a good way around it
for sure.

Do you think salary is the only thing that motivates people wanting to leave?
Ancillary benefits to the job may be greater motivators for current employees
to switch jobs, no?

~~~
theli0nheart
Since the emails are anonymous (e.g. q8XR1BB2TokDXslewseDlGc9E@pleasepoach.me)
and your name isn't provided, there's no way your company can find out if
you're on the site--unless it's just you and your co-founder :(

~~~
iam
Unless they happen to read your resume and see that your experience directly
lines up with what your company/team is working on?

~~~
Jach
Or they see requests to pleasepoach.me in their network logs, which depending
on their resolution can nail you to a wall pretty easily.

~~~
bobbles
Any company that punishes you for exploring your employment options probably
isnt worth working for anyway

------
alexlin
Putting aside all the costs of how much it costs to recruit a talented
engineer/designer, I think the current monetization model these guys are using
for the site is terrible for gaining traction.

When I first saw this on HN, I thought, "Sweet! If I can browse through the
candidates and only pay $50 per email, I think this could be manageable!" I
immediately started to look for where I could begin browsing before I realized
I needed to enter my CC #.... There wasn't even a free trial... It was
straight up, "Hey! You don't know how good/bad our candidates are, but give us
$50 and just trust us!"

My suggestion? Make it like the dating sites like many here have already
suggested. Let me browse your PF and see your qualifications. Why not set a
bidding system on the 5 emails sent out a week? That way you can even rank how
good each candidate is and what the demand for them are.

All in all, current model for me is no bueno. For all I know, you're grabbing
people off CL.

------
gukjoon
This is a great idea. The only feature I think you need is the ability to
block companies, specifically the one you're working for right now.

~~~
theli0nheart
Yep, we thought about that. We only provide a way for companies to contact you
through an anonymous email (similar to Craigslist) so we decided it wasn't a
key feature.

~~~
kennystone
Yeah, but I don't think it would be difficult to match experience and projects
to a person, especially if the company is small. I love the idea, though.

~~~
damncabbage
And given a lot of people use GitHub or their own blog as their primary method
of showcasing what they can do, the anonymity this provides doesn't seem as
useful as it might first appear.

------
brown9-2
As someone who would consider signing up to be poached, I would really want to
know more about these "high quality job offers" before giving you my personal
information.

------
harryh
FWIW, this isn't especially interesting to me as someone trying to hire
engineers. I can look at resumes on LinkedIn all day long for free. Why should
I pay you $50?

~~~
nandemo
Presumably because only a small percentage of people on LinkedIn are actively
looking for jobs; also, I think you need a premium account on LinkedIn if you
want to contact a lot of people who aren't on your network.

Besides, U$50 isn't much compared to the fees recruiters charge. Even if you
have to contact 20 candidates before hiring someone, $1000 is still cheap
compared to, say, 15% of $100k.

------
hrktb
Nitpicking: "Don't like your job?" feels too negative IMHO.

I think the concept is good, but reading this as the first words in the site
sparked a mental "I like my job, no thanks." response, and would have just
closed the tab if it wasn't a HN submission.

Wanting to get poached if there is a good opportunity doesn't mean hating
one's job. Instead if I hated my job I'd try to run away from it within three
months, and wouldn't expect to get poached within this timeframe.

------
Jayasimhan
To start with, let me tell you its an ingenious idea. but,

How do I know if this site is active or not? This site looks to me like a
proof of concept. I mean the creators are testing out if it would work based
on the number of registrations. May be they would be working on the actual
promise now. This could be a classic launch first and iterate example.

------
sunchild
You need to clean up the homepage copy. Multiple errors inbound:

"Pleasepoach.me is built to give people who don't like their job out an option
to transition quicker and easier. It's also build with the belief that
companies don't want people who don't want to work there - so this is better
for them!"

~~~
anto210
whoops.. thanks!

------
thenextcorner
As a hiring manager, why would I hire people who advertise themselves to be
poached? In a couple of months, I'm not really sure if they will still be
interested, or if they are already on the site again.

I guess that depends if you can keep them interested first.

~~~
msbarnett
Doesn't that logic apply to every potential hire who comes to you while
employed somewhere else?

------
suyash
As a developer I won't use this. I would rather charge myself for someone to
contact me with job offer considering the market right now.

------
seivan
Really fucked up (from a engineers point of view) that it only supports linked
in and not Github to begin with.

------
andrewflnr
It took me a while to figure out what I don't like about the design, but I
think it's just the yellow highlight on "anonymous": it the throws off the
colors and visual balance.

More importantly, though, it was quickly clear what exactly the site did and
how it worked. I'm impatient, so I appreciate that.

------
BadassFractal
Generally speaking the best jobs are given through word of mouth and knowing
the right people, so you'd still be far from getting the cream of the crop
positions. I think the HN crowd can be more ambitious than this.

Also, startups and small businesses most likely cannot afford this service.

------
vld
Great idea, bad name however. Also, might I suggest SSL for the "enter your
credit card number" part?

~~~
theli0nheart
We're moving the entire site over to SSL a little later tonight. :)

~~~
vld
Good. Now set DEBUG = False in your Django settings file. Seriously. You know,
private keys and stuff. For, you know, important stuff like stripe.

------
slackmeister
If the job market for the target audience is so great (which it is), a service
like this doesn't make sense. You'll only attract employees who are not
competitive. Also, grammar check your landing. Even the first sentence has an
error.

------
PhilipG
Great idea. Filtering linkedin contacts who'd like to be poached. I'd like to
sign up but I can't work out how! The login link doesn't take me to a register
link. The big red poach button seems to do nothing.

~~~
vld
It seems they put <a> inside of <button>, when it should be the other way
(<button> inside <a>)

------
mmt
I mistyped my e-mail address, so, presumably, the confirmation will bounce.
There's no mechanism I can see to change it, even though I can still get to
the Settings page.

~~~
theli0nheart
This is on the todo. Thanks!

------
atomicdog
Good idea, but saying "I work at X company doing Y" for most companies is
about as 'anonymous' as the average Facebook profile.

------
tedroden
You REALLY need to be able to limit your "browse" results to location.

------
Rickasaurus
$50 for one reference? Are you serious?

------
troels
Isn't this what linkedin is for?

------
grandalf
clever idea, but it sort of sounds like a way to find bad apples who any
company would be glad to have poached.

One idea: Offer a "honey pot" service to companies to see if their employees
are trying to be poached.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
Unless that's an "aggregate data only" service (you have 3 people trying to
get poached), it undermines the entire premise of the site. Even then, for
small companies, it can be easy to spot the guy who doesn't want to be there
anymore, if you know that someone is trying to leave.

