amitsy

This is awesome! There are so many gems here that even if pick up 50% of it and deliver on it, we would be golden. This is probably the most nuanced advise I have received on the sector/our approach and I would have spoken to 100+ VCs and other people doing recruitment. HN is great

Thanks for that feedback. Yeah, that's one of the major aspects we are focusing on (we are not 100% there). Especially since we work with early-age startups and founders directly in most cases we theoretically can do that. It might take sometime to build that trust though

Interesting. So instead of recommending your friends, you would be recommending best-suited companies to your friends? I have seen a few of my friends do that when they are helping someone with a job switch.

Thanks for the feedback. We will fix it right away :)

It is an excellent point and very similar to the experience we had seen when we first started with this approach. We have seen that once financial incentives and limits on no of people whom you can recommend, were introduced, people were not just praising anybody and everybody.

Another interesting phenomenon we see is that people don't generally recommend people from their current emplpoyer, they generally do from previous ones or their college friends.

Thank you so much! Yeah, Memer was our previous startup where we figured out the extent of difficulty of tech hiring.

Very legit point! That is a concern that some of our prospective users do share. What they do in that case is vouch for ones who they know are looking out or can benefit from vouching (eg. folks who struggle at DS/algo interviews etc).

On the "no recruiter mails", I just realised that it might be confusing. What I meant that just because you vouch for someone, it doesn't mean that they will get bombarded with spammy recruiter mails. I think that means object is the person you are voucher for and subject is contingency and in-house recruiters at tech companies.

Sorry about that. I understand that it's a big friction point. We would be piloting a web app as well soon to solve for that :)

Yeah. That does happen to be an inherent problem with a recommendation/referral based system. We do see that people recommend engineers very similar to them in profile/demographic. We try to solve it by seeding with a diverse base of scouts.

We also have a different plan where it's completely success-based. You pay only if you hire any of our vouched engineers. We charge 15% of annual base salary in that case though.

Can you check now? It should be available. We do have 1 canadian company who is hiring for engineers in both US and Canada. We had not opened it till now but have just done that.

Awesome! Looking forward to have you as a user :)

Thank you so much Leonard for the support and wishes :)

Great. On 2, we are currently live in US and India so are available in that geography. We couldn't do much about recommendations coming from other geographies (as we don't have many partner companies there) so have put that limit. On 1, yeah, we do make exceptions there. we have not yet decided if we want to keep it a hard limit but we are sure that we would want recommendations from people that would have definitely worked directly with software engineers.

Yeah, that's how most current recommendations work (when one understands the needs of both sides). But we feel that it puts too much friction to recommend.

"It sounds like once I as a scout refer my top 10, you prospect them for all of your companies, not just one. Is that right?" - yes

"Also curious about pjam15's question about whether the people you recommend know that we were the ones that recommended them" - you can choose to make yourself anonymous selectively. for example, for people you know very well, you could choose to have your name mentioned. for acquaintances, you could choose to be anonymous

"Also, how do you know if my (or any other scout) has recommendations that are any good?" - Well, this is a little bit tricky. We currently just pass on the information while internally maintaining a score of how many of your recommendations have received how much interest from companies and what the interview experience was.

Yes, there is that danger but we have not seen that happening as of yet.

Users are only asked for positive reviews

You can choose to remove your name from the outreach if you want to

Great question. It is something which we ourselves asked quite a bit. Currently we don't vet the person who recommends. We leave that decision on to the companies we work with. We have found that credentials of the person who recommends ends up being important to the companies. We also score the recommender if any of their recommendations ends up getting interviewed. Wrt seeding, it's currently with a combination of personal networks and launches within niche communities. Regarding growing, we have seen that a bunch of people who are recommended end up giving recommendations as well

Thanks OJFord. Under education, I tried to highlight a few short term opportunities for indian startups to focus on. From K 12 education to college education, all technology solutions have been built only for English speaking users.

There is no mobile based learning app for students to learn Math in Hindi language. No test prep platform in Hindi/Bengali or any other language (there are tons of test prep apps in English) No employee training or certification providers provide their online platform in any regional language. Not even an LMS exits (to be fair not many regional language medium institutions would be willing to pay for one) There is no Khan Academy in Hindi language.

As per the second point, yes I believe that should be true. Its not necessarily true that these non-english speakers don't have propensity to pay.

Completely agree with you on this one. The situation is much more worse than what we living in a bubble imagine. The video really touches your heart. Reminds me of a couple of my friends in my college, and the struggle they went through - Shifting from one language to another.

I don't think its the responsibility of the state. It is of the startups to move out of their english speaking bubble and realise the potential of non-english speaking india.

Great points you made. Agree with the fact that Swarachakra is too crowded and huge scope of improvement there. Also agree that the root of problem lie with education and state policies. But even with the huge push that english gets in this country, the reality is more than billion people don't understand it. This might still become 500 million is a decade but still half the country is being denied of internet.

Didn't know about Sailfish. Will check it out.

So, are you saying in the long run Devanagari as a script will die but Hindi as a language shall remain. Pretty interesting point. Seems like this is the direction we are going as well.

Agree with the fact that automated translation is making progress but not fast enough. It is very hard to understand context still. The efforts are being to made to bring these 500 million users online now, and an english internet is being shoved on them.

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficult to type in it.

As per using hindi words in english alpbhabets, my argument is - majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? A lot of your friends do that because Hindi input is very hard and we need better tools.