Comment by robert_tweed
11 years ago
Looks potentially interesting, but the fees seem awfully high for an automated matching service compared to standard recruitment agencies. Which is to say, ones with actual recruiters doing search, vetting and so on. Yes, there is always the advertised "standard rate" that may be something crazy like 25-40% of starting salary, but the actual negotiated rate is always much, much lower than that. 15% generally gets you a very high standard of professional recruitment services, not something that is basically monster.com without the massive candidate-base.
The pay per interview rates seem much more sensible, but that's a model that might be seen as high-risk, particularly if there is no pre-vetting of candidates. That's not something the site mentions at all in either the employer or candidate FAQ, but is a pretty important part of the recruitment agency model.
Also, I'm in the UK and the site seems pretty US-centric with no information about which regions are targeted or even supported. It should really be stated pretty clearly up-front - is the focus just on Silicon Valley, or startups anywhere in the world?
Hey Robert, good points here, but we're actually not entirely automated. We still do some manual things (we're a small startup, after all), which keeps the quality of folks seen by our employers high.
All of this said, we hope to not be in the contingency recruiting business forever. We feel that there is a friendlier fee structure to implement (with better incentives for companies and candidates alike), which we will do as our marketplace grows.
RE: UK jobs, most of the companies who have signed up are in the Bay Area and NYC right now, but there are no strict limitations to prevent UK companies from participating. We do have candidates in the UK that have signed up, FYI.
Thanks for the reply. FWIW, you might want to consider focusing on key regions only during your early stages. I've seen problems with similar lack of geographic focus on sites before. While it's tempting to just say "we're open to everyone" it doesn't always work like that in practice.
If you are not getting enough traffic in a particular area, it can be worthwhile to close it down completely - preferably temporarily - and then come back to it with a targeted launch at some future time once the core regions are self-sustaining.
So for instance, you could organise some UK-centric marketing, with some PPC, etc., and maybe go speak at some UK events or something around the same time. This will hopefully get you a critical mass of interest in a short period of time, while in the meantime you get to focus on your core demographic.
Otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of time on stuff that isn't working for anyone - if you don't have enough candidates and recruiters in the same place at the same time, those people are potentially just going to go away with a bad impression of the service, so in the long run you actually lose potential clients.
If you can get that same number of people onto the site in a month instead of over the course of a year, it'll work out much better. If you leave it entirely to organic growth, that probably won't happen.
Picky point (but one I hope is helpful): phone number validation (on the employer page https://www.mightyspring.com/employers/) is too strict for UK phone numbers, which might typically read something like
+44 (0) 111 1111 111
I had to enter 1111111111 to get past the validation.
As part of this, it can be useful to be able to specify where one would be willing to relocate. In my specific case, I'm not interested to moving to the USA, but UK would be fine. It also helps to frame the target compensation, since $60k are very different in the EU if compared to the Bay Area.