Finding software developers is either hard or expensive. There is no reliable source of information an employer could search for skills, location and salary expectations to build a shortlist of suitable candidates.
On the other hand, developers with popular public profiles are bombarded with mostly irrelevant offers while many very capable developers are never even considered.
StackMuncher builds software developer profiles from the code they write and assembles them in a global directory which is much more objective and up to date than LinkedIn profiles or resume's.
Employers can search for developers with the exact skills they need and the developers can filter out offers not matching their interests or salary expectations. A connection is made when there is a match.
As a serial entrepreneur with 1 exit, 1 successful and several failed startups, I’ve been on both sides of the developer hiring process and found it wanting.
I started working on it because of the rapid changes in the IT job market:
- growing demand for software developers
- growing popularity of hiring globally
- inefficiency of the current candidate search tools in this new environment
I believe I have the skills and the passion to build a business that solves this problem.
Give us an idea of your traction to date. [Description: Do you have customers? How much revenue are you generating? If you don't have customers, what have you done to validate the idea you are solving?] (800 characters)*
50 or so conversations with recruiters and hiring managers confirmed the difficulty of finding suitable candidates with the existing tools. They see it as the hardest part of the recruitment process. A small number of them are on the MVP wait-list.
Results from an email poll of 200 developers:
- 178 didn't reply
- 5 said it was not a good idea
- 17 (8.5%) were interested in joining
The MVP is 4 weeks away from going live.
StackMuncher database has close to 1,000,000 developer profiles from GitHub with detailed analysis of their technology stack, expertise level and contact details.
Corporate recruiters (Xero, AWS, Google) confirmed larger businesses have to feed their hiring pipeline with new candidates just to maintain the headcount.
- UpWork: 880,000 users across 90 categories, an easy way to hire a freelancer, expensive (>10% fee), not for long-term roles
- LinkedIn: a good tool for outreach, but suffers from outdated profiles, inaccurate information, mostly ignored by developers
- CodersRank: very similar to StackMuncher, different business model, seems unsuccessful
- Recruitment agencies: expensive, reliant on internal candidate databases, social networks and outreach
- Job boards: noisy, only reach a small percentage of developers actively looking for work
- TopTal and the likes: expensive, limited range of skills, not for long-term roles
- Skill testing sites: employers want to evaluate developer skills early in the process, but developers are not willing to invest time into tests until much later and drop out
Our database already contains close to 1M developers profiles downloaded from GitHub and is expected to convert into 85,000 active members using a direct email campaign.
Some percentage of the 1M developers in our database will be in senior roles involved in hiring. It makes every developer we email a potential employer. This way we can grow supply and demand sides of the marketplace from the same pool of leads.
Recruiters can compliment the employer pool. They are easy to find and reach by email, LinkedIn and content marketing.
Depending on the initial response we may focus on:
- freelance, temp and contract market as it's most dynamic with very motivated players
- hard to find skills that are in demand, e.g. Rust + Crypto
- maximizing growth across the board
StackMuncher is a community-focused marketplace funded by employers paying for:
- inviting multiple shortlisted candidates to apply for their roles
- reaching out to developers with anonymous profiles
- alerting about new matching candidates
A high profile engineer working for Google would probably prefer an anonymous profile and employers would have to pay StackMuncher for that connection. On the other hand a freelancer may prefer direct contact with employers, which is free.
Giving developers the choice of being public or anonymous and not trying to "own" them will help build a strong community with enough critical mass to become the destination of choice for employers globally.