
Ask HN: Which companies are improving recruiting? - datadoggo
What has your experience been with companies like Triplebyte, Hired, AngelList &#x2F; A-List, Vettery, etc.? Have they helped you find candidates as a recruiter or find jobs as a candidate?<p>What companies are actually &quot;fixing hiring&quot; and what are the largest problems you still see in recruiting today?
======
lynnetye
I was a software engineer looking for full-time jobs a couple of years ago and
it blew my mind how terrible the process was.

There are _many_ problems in recruiting, but three things really bothered me
during my search:

1\. Information asymmetry. Job seekers should know more about the people at
and day-to-day practices of a company _before_ committing to their long and
exhausting interview process. Often times this information is buried under
cover letters, applications, phone screens, take-home tests, and hours of
onsite interviews. The amount of time/energy it takes for a job seeker to get
to the most important information means that they can only really "get to
know" a handful of companies.

2\. Incentive misalignment. Another big problem in recruiting is having
placement fees. If a recruiter's goal is to get me to join a company just long
enough to hit the 90-day mark (when they get paid) but it's actually a bad
fit, I lose and so does my employer. The incentives are misaligned between
(third-party) recruiters, candidates, and employers when there are contingency
fees.

3\. Lack of exposure to options. When you don't know what your options are,
it's easy to settle. It often takes people 3, 4, 5 jobs to figure out what it
is they really care about and want from their employer / team / work.
Unfortunately, this can take _years_ to figure out for yourself. Not knowing
what you want means that you'll do a worser job of choosing the right company
to join. We would all do better if we had more exposure to the different ways
different teams operate.

I ended up too frustrated w/ my job search to actually get a job. I instead
founded Key Values ([https://www.keyvalues.com](https://www.keyvalues.com))
which solves for the three issues above and provides a way for software
engineers to find teams that share their values.

The most talented and competent people will still perform poorly if they're
unhappy / uninspired. That junior dev that you took a chance on will blossom
if they have the right support and environment.

Value alignment is everything.

~~~
hashhar
I have to say that I find keyvalues.com interesting and solving a problem
which i have faced often. There's also a lot of other comments praising your
work.

------
dasil003
I've tried all manner of things, on both sides of the equation. In the end I
don't think a big company can do it, and I don't think a small company can
scale it. It's a classic market for lemons problem on both sides. And to make
matters worse you now have massive cargo culting of Google's hiring practice
across the board, leading to job interviews turning into a hugely expensive,
time sucking endeavour and the signal from that style of interview steadily
being eroded by massive study efforts on the part of candidates.

If you're just coming out of college then I think Triplebyte is a decent value
to get your foot in the door someplace popular that looks good on a resume,
but once you have some experience you run into the same problem that you get
with all recruiters which is that they don't truly understand either the
candidate or the role, resulting in miscommunication on both sides.

Personally I think unless you are a name brand with dozens to hundreds of
applications coming in for every role every day, there is no substitute for
rolling up your sleeves and doing the recruiting yourself. When candidates
talk to hiring managers directly, the signal to noise ratio is an order of
magnitude higher for both sides. As an engineering leader, doing hands-on
sourcing is a super power with huge opportunity for arbitrage in a massively
competitive market.

~~~
rgoulter
"market for lemons" is a great term, just in case people aren't aware of it.

I was introduced to it by this good piece on Medium:
[https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-
all...](https://medium.com/@thogge/one-mental-model-to-rule-them-
all-6cf1ec9e6889) (I'd appreciate if anyone posted links they like better).

I'm not sure I understand it applying in this case. Bad candidates are always
looking for a job, but good candidates rarely need to look for a job. (So, job
applicants are largely lemons). Good companies have lower turnover, so rarely
need the positions filled?

~~~
plasticchris
I think it dates back to Joel, here's another good take on it:
[https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/](https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/)

~~~
otras
From the article you linked, it looks like the term dates to George Akerlof's
paper, _The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism_
(Nobel prize winning 1970 paper).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)

~~~
plasticchris
The term does, but not it's application to software hiring...

~~~
otras
I misread your pronoun. Thanks for clarifying!

------
fnwx17
The current issue is that most of the effort is done by humans right at the
beginning of the process: CV screening & first calls.

If you're a recruiter, by the time you actually get to talk to a candidate,
you're tired of screening and most of the time you do a half-assed call.

Plus it boggles my mind how very very few companies train the recruiters in
understanding the technologies they have in their stack.

There are a lot of factors that add an incredible amount of friction and make
it a very asymmetric process (as other have said above):

• plain human error • job specifications with boilerplate text not being clear
on what the role actually does • often times the people doing the first
screening don’t have a technical background • resumes come in all shapes and
formats, so it’s difficult to efficiently read them

And because of that asymmetry and supply-demand ratio, it’s actually quite
hard to hire software developers that are suited to a company, tech
environment & business needs.

(disclaimer, I work at WorksHub)

The way we're trying to solve the issue at WorksHub is by trying to get
companies to open-source same part of their code-base so that a developer
could submit a few PRs during the interviewing process.

This solves the issue of irrelevant technical interviews, gives an idea of how
your coding environment will be right off the bat.

Basically the thing is to do as much of the process as possible using only
tech and then leave the last part for the actual human interaction.

------
csallen
I'm a huge fan of the approach KeyValues.com is taking to help engineers find
companies they'd actually like to work at. A lot of sites are focused on
helping companies cut through the noise to find qualified developers, which
means forcing developers to "prove" themselves through various tests etc.
That's useful and makes sense.

But I like the idea of the opposite approach — forcing companies to qualify
themselves to shed some light on what it'd be like to work there without
having to go through the whole interview process first.

~~~
isthisnagee
Also a huge fan of keyvalues.com. Found the company I'm currently working at
through there.

I'd like to ad that As a new grad, the website helped me a lot: it gave names
to ideas I had floating in my head about what I was looking for, and it made
me more confident in telling companies what I wanted.

------
01100011
Now that I've been hired I want to know which companies are improving their
_onboarding_ process. I got hired and was basically thrown to the wolves.
Maybe I'm just lazy or stupid, but I feel like too many companies hire senior
people and expect them to just start making major architectural changes day
one without any ramp-up.

Just give me some bugs to fix for the first month or two. I need to learn your
code and technologies involved, all while setting up my HR/benefits, learning
the team and the facilities... You can ask me hard questions, but keep in mind
my knowledge of your code is weak. I'm not ready to make proposals when I
don't even know what your problems are or what is important to the
stakeholders.

Also, I think I messed up and failed to fully vet the job I signed up for. I
was so focused on getting a job in the valley that I let my standards drop.
Now I'm at a job where I feel I am a poor fit. I'm not sure I'll last a
year(my choice, I think), and after having just worked another job for a year,
I think it's not going to look great when I try to find a new job. I'm
thinking of just going back to contracting. I'm not cut out for big company
politics. I just want to make cool shit.

~~~
collyw
I think every new job involves a bit of imposter syndrome.

------
nathell
Being employed is ultimately a human relationship, and hiring is about
starting that relationship and ensuring it works for both parties. That means
listening to and understanding the needs of both; and in the IT world, some of
these needs are very much about tech. As obvious as it may sound, many
recruitment agencies don't understand it. I'd even go so far as to say that
recruiters who don't know shit about the tech that is fundamental to the jobs
they recruit for are a sad norm.

Disclaimer: I work at works-hub.com. I don't want to make a sales pitch, but
I'll just say I think we're an exception to that norm.

------
chroem-
Hiring is broken because employees and employers have asymmetric bargaining
power, which leads to unrealistic expectations. No amount of improved
candidate screening will solve that.

~~~
Zaheer
What specific information do employees not have? I'm co-founder of
[https://www.Levels.fyi](https://www.Levels.fyi) /
[https://www.Comp.fyi](https://www.Comp.fyi) which we built specifically to
tackle information asymmetry in the job-seeking process. Would love to get
feedback on how we can expand information we collect: hello <at> levels <dot>
fyi

~~~
Boxxed
Personally, I never really trust any of these sites because the _all_ claim to
have good data, and yet they all report pretty wildly different salary ranges
for similar jobs. I have absolutely no idea if I'm actually being paid a
reasonable salary, but honestly it's something that's important to me at my
current stage in my career.

~~~
mikekchar
Out of curiosity (I'm not hiring :-) ), what does "reasonable salary" mean to
you? Also, how do you evaluate the similarity of jobs? I'm asking because if I
were looking to decide if I'm making a reasonable salary, I don't really even
know where to start. I mean junior/intermediate/senior developer mean
completely different things in different companies. The role of lead developer
might be completely different as well. And given those different
responsibilities, what is worth more or less money? Knowledge of certain
skills (more rare is worth more? probably, but by how much?) Same thing for
things like remote vs co-located (how much of a hit should I expect for
remote?). Inventions agreement vs. my side projects are my own? The likelihood
of a lot of overtime? The current health of the company (high risk company
means more pay, I would think???)

Not taking a go at you. These are seriously things I think about and was
wondering if you had thought about them too :-)

~~~
Boxxed
"Reasonable" here means "roughly market rate". But salary survey sites always
have such a wide range as to be useless.

I mostly evaluate similarity in terms of responsibility (both tech-wise and
human-wise), which yes, is very difficult to compare across jobs. Especially
considering that jobs often morph pretty quickly after day one.

In the end, I go for the jobs that sound interesting and do my best to
negotiate.

------
iandanforth
I'll reiterate a desire for someone to actually make an OkCupid for Hiring.
Both sides answer questions and get matched. (If this exists please let me
know)

~~~
aries1980
We tried at Intern Avenue, hammered it for 5 years. IA was a startup which
created a self-service platform to find an ideal early-stage talents (interns
and graduates) for businesses, using machine-learning. We had a good success
and high retention rate at smaller size businesses, especially in non-STEM
sectors, such as marketeers or journalists.

We made many mistakes, but the biggest one was to assume that the recruitment
decision makers in medium-size businesses are interested in the hiring
process. That's not the case. We had to realise, for these internal recruiters
hiring is a pain, an extra mile above their day-to-day responsibilities. Hence
they hire recruiters. You can't apply ML on the behaviour and preference of
the recruiter and expect an optimal output for someone else.

~~~
iandanforth
Could you say more? (If there's a post-mortem post on this I'd love to read
it.)

When I'm in a lead role or participate in hiring I'm definitely interested in
the hiring process. I'm not sure how setting up a job profile (i.e. answering
qualitative questions about what I value, what the team values, etc) would be
much more work than writing the job description in the first place. I suspect
I'm not fully understanding your statement though.

------
ben_jones
Recruiting is a human resources intensive industry where the quality of a
firm's output is dependent on the quality of the individual(s) handling your
account. Companies like Triplybyte and Hired who raised gobs of VC with the
promise of shaking the recruiting business (with their like totally amazing
algorithms and "innovative" testing processes) haven't really done much and
IMO are reverting to more traditional models while they leverage their
resources to build walled gardens of data with hopes that machine learning
will carry them into the sunset sometime soon.

In my view the only companies that are innovating are smaller firms and solo
recruiters/consultants who have built up a high level of domain knowledge.
This isn't so much innovation as just working well and consistently providing
good results.

This isn't to say all small recruiting firms are wonderkins. But the good ones
will not only find you good candidates but help consult and guide you where
appropriate (this is especially important for startups).

Source: SWE at a small SF based recruiting co. which focuses exclusively on
Start-up sales positions. Have been working on modernizing our software stack
and have done a lot of competitive analysis over the past year. The people I
work with will routinely school me on startups (i'll attempt to show them a
new product after reading about its launch on HN and they'll tell me they knew
about it two weeks ago).

~~~
itronitron
I feel like Triplebyte and Hired are playing the same numbers game that
everyone else is, they are just taking on some of the vetting work on behalf
of the hiring manager. That results in a safe-bet candidate pool that conforms
to certain technical biases (just read some of TB's blogs for examples) and
favors professional job-seekers which are not necessarily the best long-term
hires.

------
Adamantcheese
I've used Triplebyte and Hired in the past as a candidate. Triplebyte is good
only for web development positions (front or back), and Hired seems completely
useless. Every time I get emails begging me to submit my resume and then
immediately get rejected. Makes no sense at all.

From what other people comment here and my own opinion, the filtering that
most job boards use are complete garbage. Sometimes I want to search for a
keyword, but I have never seen a single search where I can exclude a keyword.
Or some implied tags just aren't used to help expand or narrow search results.
And also PDF resumes just aren't able to be parsed correctly, even in very
simple formats. But I would never be able to tell if it was parsed correctly
as an applicant for some ATS systems because there's no feedback. As far as
I'm aware, digital resumes should be in more use, but every ATS requires a new
account and inputting the same information. Even when the company board
listing is provided by the same company as another board listing! Workday is
one example of that and it's infuriating!

And then there's the whole problem of HR people putting out the job listings.
The horrible inaccuracy of some of them makes it really confusing as to what a
company is actually looking for and if I would be a good fit.

Basically, I can't find what I want, I don't know what's happening, and I
don't know what you want. And the best way to solve all of those is to 1) make
better search tools, 2) give me more feedback and tell me when things go wrong
instead of rejecting me outright for a software error, and 3) have the person
in charge of a position write the job listing or talk to the candidate.

------
blizkreeg
For the past few years, I've mostly been on the employer side of this,
recruiting engineers in my teams with a brief period where I had to find a
job. It plain sucks.

As the hiring manager, I wish I didn't have to deal with recruiters and their
20% fee. But sourcing candidates and reaching out to them is painful too. OTOH
there is too much noise in applications that come through your job
board/career page links. Using any of these platforms is a full-time job in
itself. Sifting through dozens of profiles and reaching out individually is
extremely time consuming.

As someone who had to look for a job, that sucked too. You either go to a
recruiter who forces you into a bunch of interviews, or you apply cold.

Referrals definitely make it easier on both sides but you can't always rely on
just that one channel.

What can materially improve the discovery process, on both the hired and
hiring sides? I think about this often. How can talent find roles suited to it
and vice versa? Wasn't technology going to make this a breeze?

~~~
lykr0n
I've had quite a few friends go though Indeed Prime
([https://www.indeed.com/prime](https://www.indeed.com/prime)) with success. I
think it's a start in trying to make hiring better

~~~
RhodesianHunter
Having tried both I much prefer Hired.com on both the hiring and seeking
sides.

------
prattl
I work for a company in the legal recruiting industry
([https://hireanesquire.com/](https://hireanesquire.com/)) and we've been
trying to tackle some of the biggest issues with recruiting -- albeit
specifically for the legal industry.

At the end of the day, our goal is to create successful job placements. We've
learned that there is surprisingly a lot of science in I/O psychology behind
predicting job performance based on personality traits [0]. We've been
developing an assessment system with a behavioral psychologist to measure
personality traits that could predict a successful job outcome. To be honest,
I'm surprised this hasn't caught on with the recruiting industry already. It's
been working out well for us and I would expect to see more of this across
different industries in the future.

[0]
[http://jwalkonline.org/docs/Grad%20Classes/Fall%2007/Org%20P...](http://jwalkonline.org/docs/Grad%20Classes/Fall%2007/Org%20Psy/big%205%20and%20job%20perf.pdf)

------
vthallam
Well, my favorite domain. As the standard saying goes, recruiting is hard. It
mostly about matching candidates and company's expectation and they tend to
wildly fluctuate.

Hired, A-List, Vettery, Indeed Prime all fit in the same category. A market
place for pre-filtered candidates with known expectations(salary range), Why
more than one of these exist, I have no idea. There is nothing innovative in
all these companies, just a fancy recruiting firm.

Triplebyte on the other hand definitely trying to change the Status Quo by
letting candidates avoid multiple phone interviews. But while it works for
limited set of candidates, scaling interviews while still maintaining quality
is super tough. Beyond these, there are standard job boards and of course,
LinkedIn for networking.

I see the traditional recruiting domain as the following parts: 1\. Job
discovery(job boards, search engine, distributions(aka zip recruiter). 2\.
ATS(Applicant tracking systems) which help companies manage interview process.
3\. Screening and Preparation(Hackerrank, Leetcode etc)

A lot could be done in each of the following areas, but there's not much
innovation so far.

~~~
AznHisoka
What could be done in innovation for job boards?

~~~
vthallam
For a start, showing the most relevant details. Tech stack, whether they
support Visa/Relocation, % of the people who heard back when they have
applied(is it worth candidates time to even look at it). Also better filtering
with multiple parameters, more personalization(beyond tags)

~~~
itronitron
also showing past history of job postings from an employer and whether they
were filled or just reposted every few months... in other words is the job
posting real or just a fishing expedition?

------
siliconsenthil
We (getsimpl.com) use geektrust.in for developer hiring.

Developers create their profile, solve problems and earn badges. GeekTrust
ensures companies have to engage with only people who are good at coding and
solving problems. Companies pitch to candidates and if both matches, the next
level of interviews are done by the company. It's great for companies as it
improves the top-of-the-funnel with high-quality candidates.

For candidates, it's using their core skills to market themselves, at their
pace. There're people who slowly build their profile. They submit code, get
helpful reviews to go further.

The difference between GeekTrust and other coding platforms is that they
handle things well beyond just plain problem-solving. Things like great
design, documenting etc.

As mentioned by others, we use HackerRank also to evaluate different aspects.

------
Kagerjay
Related,

But I've had to do a lot of hiring over the years for low skill labor work
(think warehouse type jobs) using indeed.com, which constitutes a large
majority of out-of-house hiring (about ~50% global average). I've been doing
UX/UI case/workflow studies for years as the employer. At my current job, I've
funneled and optimized the entire process using copy-paste templates and
calendly links. What took me several hours takes a few minutes now.

On the other end I started to slowly transition into full time development.
I've been running an experiment with linkedin on lead generation. My
hypothesis is that linkedin's algorithm for showing which candidates show up
on recruiter's pages is exactly the same as SEO. If anyone is interested I can
provide more information.

------
uberswe
In Europe or more specifically Germany we have Honeypot.io. They are different
because the companies apply to candidates. They have assistants that help both
the companies and candidates and tries to guide them to a better hiring
process.

I have been on both sides using it for both recruiting and finding a job and I
like it. The main problem as a candidate is that some companies still seem
like they don't really care and just spam everyone with copy/paste templates
but it was really nice to have some interesting companies apply to me.

As a recruiter I love it because it is easy to contact candidates but the main
issue is lack of candidates. We have a shortage of developers to fill
positions which is why Honeypot was started in the first place I believe.

------
dluan
I've just made a job board for scientists, though it's not launched yet. It's
called Research Pizza ([http://research.pizza](http://research.pizza)).

~~~
dluan
OK, but an actual response. For science/research jobs, it's all still word of
mouth and recommendations from close network friends. For tech, I've used
various job boards and services for my company. HN posts still do really well.
Also, I had a great experience using Lambda School for hiring their program
participants.

------
rajacombinator
Recruiting is pretty easy. 1) pay more, and 2) be capable of recognizing good
talent. (Which requires being good yourself.) Unfortunately, the tech industry
fails brutally on both counts. Due to a combination of business guys
suppressing wages, techies lacking courage to get better wages, and techies
lacking confidence in their own abilities, hence their ability to discriminate
correctly when hiring. This leads to the hoop jumping exercises that are
common in tech interviews.

------
lassej
We've been working on a new video-interviewing tool for about a year now:
[https://hireflix.com/](https://hireflix.com/) One of our main goals is to
improve the remote interview experience for both recruiter and recruitee. Feel
free to request access to the beta at the site! Would be great to have some
people from HN testing our platform.

------
bunny9
We use
[https://www.interviewbit.com/hire/](https://www.interviewbit.com/hire/) for
hiring developers. InterviewBit stands out compared to other traditional
agencies by providing coding exercises to the candidates to test their coding
skills and understand their level of experience.

~~~
collyw
> InterviewBit stands out compared to other traditional agencies by providing
> coding exercises to the candidates to test their coding skills and
> understand their level of experience

How does using candidates time for coding exercises make them stand out"?

------
theklr
None so far as a candidate. They’ve in most cases just removed the
headhunter/recruiter person interaction. Nothing different yet, which I find
tragic. The slight upside is since it’s new shiny tech, new shiny companies
are usually on them. But the process is still the same.

------
nixebastian
Most companies who are trying to 'improve' recruitment are coming from outside
the industry and are tackling it with an engineering mindset. It's an easy
trap to fall into, as it seems like a simple two sided marketplace, however
that is not the case. It needs to be approached more like legal tech, with
experienced recruitment professionals working alongside engineers. The
complexities, nuances and psychological factors need to be understood. There's
a reason recruiters are so expensive after all. All the companies you have
mentioned above just quickly built a simple marketplace and then advertised
them like crazy to gain users, they never actually solved the inherent
problems within recruiting.

------
smarri
[https://weeve.co](https://weeve.co) \- they're doing video screening for the
application process

------
apr35
I’m in recruiting, have been for a while. I’ve also been part of the team
that’s built one of these newer solutions that you may have heard of, so I
have some perspective.

A lot of different products that you’ll see, that focus attention on sourcing
candidates (or, solving “top of funnel” problems), are likely going to run
into some of the same walls we always have. As appealing as these platforms
might be, that offer a slightly more modern way of matching skills to jobs, at
the end of the day they will still struggle to get things much better, for a
couple of reasons:

1) We’re dealing with a finite pool of candidates, and a fairly limited pool
of really qualified candidates (of course, this is subjective based on your
company). So, all the awesome skills matching AI/Machine Learning, etc. in the
world, isn’t going to create more people - you’ll likely still end up short.
2) Often, the very best candidates are well employed, or move from one job to
another without ever hitting the open market, because they are well known and
get recruited among their network. So, these platforms will often have a
larger representation of less experience job seekers.

With all that said, we have had success with Hired! I think they have a high
quality reputation with candidates and recruiters, and that goes a long way.
Another product we’ve liked is Drafted - this looks at your employee’s
networks, and then suggests people to your employees that they can refer. It’s
just a nudge to encourage a referral - it’s been good.

I think that really, the most gains can come further into the process.
Applying to a job (as candidate) and reviewing an application (as company) is
fairly relatively easy and cheap (i.e. neither party has invested much time or
attention). As you get further in the recruiting process, you’re investing
more of yourself (as is the company), so it’s more important to get it right.
Once you do find candidates that seem to be a strong potential fit, it’s even
more crucial that the rest of the process is transparent, grounded in logic,
and actually assures the the right match is being made.

We’ve chose to focus on designing a better technical interview at Karat,
because of this. We do first round technical screens on behalf of companies,
and we’ve built the infrastructure to support a more fair and data-driven
process. The companies we work with realize that getting interviewing right
takes a lot of time - and then having your engineers do all first rounds (on
top of final rounds), also takes a lot of time. So, we build all the interview
content in house, and then as candidates go from Karat, to the final round
interviews at these companies, we track what happens closely - this allows us
to more accurately assess who is likely to be a good fit in final rounds, and
then we just continue calibrating that fit over time.

Why we think we’re “fixing” recruiting, is because we see the incredible
amount of time lost, and poor matches made, when interviewing is done more
arbitrarily, or in an ad hoc manner. By just applying consistent
infrastructure, it cleans up a lot of things, and makes the process less
painful for all involved. Finally, because our full focus is interviewing -
we’re able to do things like offer interviews 24/7, give you the chance to
redo your interview if the first one sucked, and invest in a ton of training
for interviewers to provide a really great experience.

So - that's my thought - it's tough to fix a lot of these things through
sourcing - the parts of the process where you’re developing a deeper
relationship and investing more time are crucial to get right.

------
ryanchartrand
I lead one of the companies in this space and it always makes me smile when I
see "solving recruiting through machine learning" :D

I think we can all honestly agree that recruiting/hiring will never be
"solved", it will always be a laborious task if it's done right and that's
simply because we're dealing with people, not data. No algorithm should ever
direct your decisions about a human being, we're all too wildly unpredictable
for that. No algorithm would have ever given Steve Jobs or Elon Musk a shot.

Sure, we can use tech to help us improve filtering, sourcing, automating,
interviewing...to an extent.

At X-Team (my company), we've chosen to not only focus on using tech to
improve all of those to help us be more efficient, but I think most
importantly we've focused on the one thing no one really talks about: what
happens _after_ the hire.

Anyone can start one of these companies, make some decent tech to filter
applicants, and then hand off a person to a company for a fee. Easy.

But providing people that will actually stick around after the handoff?
Another beast entirely. We're providing X-Teamers, not people spit out of an
algorithm on top of a database.

We're providing people who all share the same "keep moving forward" attitude,
beliefs, values, people who are all motivated and rallied behind the same
energy thanks to our engaging and energizing community experience
(x-team.com/join for more on that). When your talent pool is unified and
energized, you've changed the game because now it's not just about providing
people quickly and accurately, it's about providing consistency among every
hire, and you can only achieve that by continuing to invest in those people
after the hire.

One example is how we give them all $2,500/year to spend on their passions and
growth. TripleByte chucks them out the door and wishes them luck. We hang on
to them, we send them around the world to our hackerhouse (x-outpost.com), we
challenge them and motivate them
([https://youtu.be/Th80vOGFvUE](https://youtu.be/Th80vOGFvUE)), we become
their support arm that unifies them around meaning and energy.

As one client said: "I feel like X-Team shows a lot of love and in turn that
gets brought back to our company. I think that they create this ecosystem of
growth for the developers that as a company we can't really do."

So we think shaking up hiring isn't just about creating tech that increases
efficiency. It's also about providing consistency, ensuring you can get the
same level of quality every time you turn on the hiring machine and need a new
hire; and since humans aren't machines, that's the biggest challenge of them
all and the one we want to keep tackling. :)

