Joppy, the Tinder for tech recruitment

TLTR: This post is about Joppy, a new service I'm working on that tries to eliminate the pain currently exists in the communication among recruiters and tech professionals. Let me describe you the current scenario in the recruitment world and, please, any feedback will be welcome.

Tech professionals: Wherever I wrote tech professionals I mean any kind of role related with tech companies: software engineers, developers or programmers, manager, product owners, QA, designers, ...

It all starts...

...taken a beer and asking your friends: How many connection requests do you receive per week from LinkedIn? All three (two developers and a UI/UX designer) answer the same enough to be annoying. Every tech professional want to have his/her CV updated in LinkedIn, it is a great service, but no one agrees with the myriad of emails asking for connections from recruiters that has awesome job offers from awesome companies.

Do you think the job of a recruiter is easy? Well, let me say you are completely wrong. It is not an easy job and often ungrateful. If you think in a more or less important city with many tech companies you can image the competition existing among companies to get tech professional.

Currently there are two main things recruiters can do to arrive to candidates:

1. Publish offers in some kind of board and wait candidates applies (we all have in mind web sites that crawls and shows tons of job offers)
2. Make an active search of potential candidates. Recruiters need to use services like LinkedIn, where they can search techies in a given geographical area, that know about X, Y, Z skills and many other options. Once filtered they need to contact each of them where, probably, most of them are not interested in a change or in the position the recruiter is offering.

The problem

So, with the previous in mind you can see the problem:

• From the side of techies they are bored of the need to accept connections to know about new opportunities and, many times, that connections do not represent a new challenge for them.

• From the side of the recruiters they are required to make an active search of candidates, most of times contacting with people not interested in the position or in a change.

Our solution: Joppy !

If tech professionals are the ones who better knows what are their best skills and preferences (I mean salary, kind of company, etc) and companies requires professionals with a given set of skills, why not create a service where: users will be only notified of jobs that matches their skills and preferences. And all this completely anonymous for the candidate !!!

If you don't see the benefit for the two sides here are some points:

• Candidates are never burnt. They only see job offers for jobs that matches their skills and preferences (location, salary, company size, etc).
• Recruiters don't lose their time contacting people not interested or trying to convince anybody.
• Recruiters can't contact candidates directly. Only when a candidate indicates it is interested in a job offer a chat is created among them to start communication.
• Candidates are by default anonymous, although they can share their real profile in a chat for a given job and recruiter.
• Anonymity, not only protects already working candidates, but brings equal opportunity for talent regarding of their genders, race or age.

Features

We have worked hard to make Joppy something really simple and focus on its goal: put in contact recruiters and techies without pain for both sides.

For tech professional, Joppy offers the perfect tool to avoid bothering them but that allows be up to date of new challenges:

• Registration is extremely short and simple: say your preferences (salary, location, ...), choose the speciality/ies you master, indicate the years if experience and, finally, the skills (per experience) you are really good at. With this we avoid people setting a long list of not so useful skills or a super awesome job title. At the end, the important is to know what you are good at.
• Only notify you on job offers that match your preferences: Joppy is not a board of job posts neither a tool to make active search of jobs and candidates. Joppy is like Tinder. Simply register and set your preferences. When a company publish a job that match you we will notify so you can decide if you are interested.
• Real time chat: Once you indicate you are interested in a job offer we will create a chat between company's recruiter and you. Real time and direct communication is best way to know about the position.

• Anonymous by default: No one can see you real data. When you are interested in a job the chat will show always your anonymous profile. No one will know who you are or where are you currently working. If you feel comfortable in a chat conversation you can make visible your real profile to that recruiter for that only job.

And for recruiters, Joppy is a new tool that completes their toolbox:

• Reach unreachable candidates: Joppy is not only for active searching candidates. Everybody can be registered because we only notify them of new opportunities that match their preferences.
• Increase answer ratio: Forget the time needed to search and contact with candidates to finally do not receive answer or, in the best case, receive a negative. In Joppy you publish a job offer and each new chat means an interested candidate in the position.

What's the future?

Nobody knows but what is for sure is the recruitment model requires an update and Joppy here to work in that direction. The IT industry has needs completely different from other industries so do not expect the same model that works for others works for IT too.

The offer and demand of jobs and candidates in IT is something unique and we need tools that adapt to that new scenario.