But we're sourcing non-traditional candidates, and the --- you know what, I'm getting ahead of myself on a blog post I'm still tuning up.
In any case, that might explain what was so painful about the business for us: we had high frequency exposure to the worst part of it.
You also had cred with the hiring folks, so that was taken care of as well - hiring clients were going to be easy to identify without much effort.
The hard part would be scaling it to some degree - Patrick and you/Erin wouldn't be able to talk to every candidate if you were going to make serious $, and then you'd have to hire actual recruiters (who are wildly unpopular), and then you're starting to approach the problem of being like everyone else (other than the game) if the recruiters behave like...recruiters.
If you ever want to discuss recruiting stuff, I'm easy to find.
I always knew that if we continued to grow, that this part would go away, but I would have struggled to keep this going as long as I could. Even if it meant less serious $. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that had we grown to the point where hiring "actual recruiters," it would have been impossible to find ones with the same mindset.
Yeah you are. Do you use this same username everywhere?
The advantage Starfighter had was that the most painful rejections for recruiters aren't necessarily the "no offer" at the end of an interview, but the "no response" to outreach - even when highly targeted.
Starfighter was designed to have a pipeline of qualified candidates who would conceivably be much more approachable than those who are cold-called/emailed by agency recruiters, not to mention the benefit of the names. Getting approached by Patrick or Thomas & Erin is much different for a candidate than getting approached by a recruiter with no name recognition. Even recruiters with a bit of name recognition don't get high response rates all the time.
I was personally rooting for Starfighter for several reasons, most of which to try and take recruiting in a bit of a different direction. I still hope the idea can be salvaged in some way, and wish Patrick and Thomas & Erin the best in the new endeavors.