We mostly just got fed up with spending hours on interviews where recruiters showed up late or just ghosted only to realize nothing materialized.
"Here's my booking link"
Edit: I just remembered the title of the thread :), I guess not?
Each person can do it however they see fit. I tend to use it as a way to get the critical info needed (company name, salary, remote or not). Recruiters who send me messages with enough info don't get a link from me. If you're still reluctant to give me enough info to make a decision can book at $100/hr, and about 5% of those book.
It's up to you, if you're getting shitty recruiters, send me them the link.
I'm using Brave, and I couldn't right-click to "Suggest a Strong Password" in your signup field. I've never had that happen with any other site before. No adblock or Shields up.
Also I can't seem to confirm my membership.
We're mostly developer focused so that email/password signup is really for non-github users. I'll check it out.
I see your account is created and ready to roll.
Last year I created a prototype of something very similar, the key difference was that the idea was to auto pre screen recruiters instead of ask for pay.
It's profitable enough to cover hosting but honestly we built the features we wanted out a product we wanted and it went from there.
Went back to 1st page and tried again. No GH login prompt, white page with coloured progress bar at top, ended up back on initial page with message "Unable to establish a connection with the popup. It may have been blocked by the browser".
Firefox on Android. (Btw, perhaps it's on purpose, but I can't select and copy text on that page.)
Gonna check this out and see what's wrong.
Premise: Recruiters spam left and right, so we decided to create a website just so they could get a familiar calendar-like interface but asked them to pay for your time. As soon as we exposed the external version with the URL, we decided to make an automated template ("Great. Please book a slot on my calendar and we can chat more about this. You'll receive my resume upon confirmation of the booking. https://bk.poachme.dev/Lazaro"). After that we ended up creating a virtual business card service so that could easily create a web presence without going through a different service (https://bk.poachme.dev/kBMf).
Availability: Web
Price: $0
Cost: Nearly nothing, it just sits with my other hosted services.
Why do it? Honestly, asking someone to pay for your time is the easiest way to see who values your time. The cost to send a single spam message to thousands of developers is nearly zero and it takes time to sort through the messages to see if there's anything good. I have had experiences going from blackmail all the way to people disclosing the actual salary for the position without any money exchanging hands which proves that when your time has value it's suddenly possible for the pay bracket for a position to appear.