Riphyak

We put together a bundle, mostly engineering soft: https://resources.youteam.io/bfcm-bundle-deals-youteam

Hm.. Interestingly enough we haven't tried linkedIn outreach to the employers'. We did LinkedIn ads though - with pretty much zero result.

Thanks for pointing our those details.

https://greenlight.jobs/ - is the candidates' website: we're sending access codes to candidates individually via LinkedIn or Email.

UPDATE:

Thanks for your amazing feedback, everyone! One more time I see how incredible Hacker News is.

Summarizing what I learned from your comments, there are 3 key hypotheses to check:

H1: We have overestimated the problem. Time-to-hire isn't really a big concern and companies in the US aren't experiencing any major issues with hiring engineers.

H2: We have overestimated our solution. The employer's aren't prepared to pay US-level salaries to offshore devs and/or are quite happy working with recruiters.

H3: We have chosen wrong marketing channels and/or ICP to target.

Probably the truth is a combination of all the above, but it is important to understand which cause is has the strongest impact.

Back in my cave to do my homework and book some calls with the customers :).

Thanks for this! Indeed, I may have overestimated the problem and our solution.

Good point, thanks. And a useful thinking framework indeed.

Looking at the funnel, it looks like the problem is at the very top. Further conversions seem to be OK-ish - if you can draw any statistically significant conclusions from 6 total conversions of course.

IOW, I feel like it is mostly that they don't want the solution.

And yes - I'm hoping to have enough intellectual courage to seek the actual truth, not a comforting story.

Wow, I didn't really think about it from this perspective. You are absolutely right! This is an extremely noisy space.

Do you think the fact that you're not going to pay a margin to outsourcing firm, but instead employ the offshore developer directly, doesn't compensate for the additional hassle?

That makes a lot of sense, thanks. What I was hoping for was that we can hit some early adopters - and pass without social proof (unless your moral is flexible enough to fake it, this is not an option at inception stage anyway) and multi-touch outreach.

Thanks for that.

We're investing a lot in expansion in LatAm at my other company - and one thing I learned about Argetina's job market is that you have 2 tiers of developers: one working mainly for internal market and the other - for US customers. The salaries may differ by the factor of 3 or even more.

Here is a great piece of research about similar situation in Europe: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

Actually, the idea of Greenlight has a lot to do with this salary gap phenomenon. I see this as a big potential for a win-win.

Thanks for that!

I'm lucky enough to know both Rob and Julian personally, but this definitely doesn't serve as an excuse not to re-read the Mom's Test.

Very good point about the ICP. We were targeting startup companies 20-250 ppl, that raised their last round in the last 6 months, sector agnostic. However we weren't sure about the right decision-maker. The three options are CTO, CEO and HR manager.

So far we had more top-of-the-funnel conversions on Linkedin ads from CEOs and HRs, but more actual sign-ups from CTO.

Ah, this is indeed helpful. English isn't my first language - so such subtleties are definitely beyond my linguistic perception. I did use someones help to proof-read the content, but it looks like there is always room for improvement.

This is a very good point. Actually, the arrival of LinkedIn disrupted the way recruiters worked. Before LinkedIn the core of their job was indeed building the relationship with candidates. LinkedIn provided them with the opportunity to mass-message the candidates - which is more efficient from recruiter's ROI perspective, but also creates a lot of noise and eventually discourages candidates.

Love this, thanks!

Wow, thanks for spotting that typo, man!

Thanks, that makes sense.

Yes, I understand that hiring is always a big decision - which means you need to build trust. This would explain the low % of end conversions, but the question of low interest at top of the funnel (e.g. conversions from HN of PH) still remains.

Thanks!

The only channel we used for candidates has been LinkedIn. Got 30%+ conversion with very little effort.

Thank you.

I assume the information in their profile preview wasn't enough for you to do the initial screening.

What would be the crucial bits missing then?|

Hey hackers,

Yura here - I'm the co-founder of Greenlight. Greenlight is the new kind of job platform - where companies discover 'hidden' engineering candidates across multiple geographies. 'Hidden' means these engineers are not actively applying for vacancies, but at the same time are open to new remote opportunities.

Traditional job portal model emerged 20+ years ago, when 99% of job opportunities were inside your zip code and employers were the ones setting the rules. As a result, most job portals are limited to their local market and rely on the "candidates apply to vacancy" paradigm.

However the reality is: both of these things have changed. The market for software engineers is one example: demand exceeds supply and now it looks like most of us prefer the flexibility of remote work.

Greenlight is an attempt to reflect this new reality: here companies apply to interview engineers, not vice versa. And this happens across multiple geographies.

Also, for the founders this is personal. Both of us are immigrants to the United States. We both went through a 3-year long visa marathon, spending hours of each week struggling with complex bureaucracies in order to be able to move our families to the US. The process was long, confusing, costly, and stressful.

We also previously built a successful business in outsourcing - an industry whose very existence is made possible by the striking differences in what people with the same skills are paid for the same work, depending only on where they were born.

One of the greatest achievements of the Internet era is that it helped level the playing field for those who weren't been born into privilege - no matter social class, wealth, or nationality. We believe this is just the beginning of what actually can be achieved - and that geographic work permissions are a barrier that can be torn down easier and faster than others.

With Greenlight, we want to help build a world without borders, a world where every human being has equal access to career opportunities - no matter where she or he was born. In our world, access to work is globalized: every company has a portion of its workforce working remotely from other geographies, and every job is global by default.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.