Beyond the resume: our progress so far

As some of you know, Bastille Agency has recently taken a new path. We’ve teamed up with Karthik Senthil to build a technical assessment that we give to the candidates before they chat with clients.

Our motivation is threefold:

• To give candidates the opportunity to showcase their skills outside of their resume, and the chance to practice technical interviewing in a low-pressure environment while receiving actual feedback.
• To give employers the ability to easily evaluate somebody outside of their resume, potentially uncovering talent that would otherwise be passed over.
• To give both parties the chance to have a deeper tech conversation off the bat, instead of the usual fizz-buzz or generalist filter questions.

If you want to read more about our approach, check out Karthik’s piece here.

An inefficient market

Recruiters are middlemen, and middlemen need to provide value in the marketplace they serve. Often, that value is just in knowing that something exists or bringing somebody to the table. Think craigslist or real estate agents. Recruiters fall into this category as well.

The thing is, we don’t really know how good these people actually are. Like our clients, we are operating off a resume which is generally a poor signal of quality. As such, everybody wastes an incredible amount of time looking at the wrong candidates.

The candidates tend to fall into two main groups: the people who look good on paper. And the others.

People who look good “on paper” get contacted endlessly by agencies and companies. The classic profile is a guy who graduated from a good school with a CS degree, has done few years at a well known company, and who ticks all the boxes. The likelihood of any one company hiring them is low. The price to get him is high.

The others are a random mix of folks who who got into this world through the small and endless paths that careers can take: the self taught programmers, the code-schoolers, the older candidates who got started with Pascal or Fortran, the foreign candidates who went to schools that Americans have never heard of…and the list goes on. Some of these people are great. Some of them not so much. That is what we are trying to uncover.

This takes us to the crux of why we are doing this. There is a plethora of talented and diverse candidates out there in the world. A workplace is more effective and a business stronger when staffed with folks from all walks of life. Yet so many can’t get past the resume selection process. We hope to be that leveler — the standard that lets anybody shine regardless of background.

The results so far

Convincing companies is a slow process. As much as our premise sounds awesome, companies are understandably scared to make the jump. Internal recruiters are incentivized to bring in people who look great on paper, and probably won’t get chided too much if they are not hired. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and no recruiter has gotten fired for reaching out to MIT grads.

That said, the results for the companies who have made the jump have been nothing short of remarkable. Decisions that would be made after a 1-hour phone screen are now being done in 5 minutes. We are getting way more involved in the hiring process beyond sending the resume. As we’ve demoed the assessment to clients, we noticed how much of a need exists in uncovering talent as efficiently as possible. It’s rewarding work.

On the candidate side, having an upfront ask for candidates has allowed us to filter out people who are serious about a job. By not being “just another recruiter” who calls in every few days, we’re able to build a much tighter relationship with each one — thus making it easier to advise and help them.

Candidates are remarkably appreciative of the technical feedback that we give them. It’s amazing how little support and feedback they get from clients during the tech interview. They’ll often dedicate hours to white-boarding, code-pairing, and assignments — all to receive a cold and uninformative “pass” from a company. We give every candidate a full feedback session. We feel there is some real value in this part of our service and will be pursuing it further.

We are just getting started, and plan on changing the way engineers are hired for the better.

And we are happy to announce a new referral program. For any successfully placed candidate, we will give you $1000. Help a friend find a great job, and make yourself some cash in the process. It’s a no-brainer.

Feel free to reach out to me at georges@bastilleagency.com