Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (Part 6)

Sramana: Tell me a bit more about the value proposition of DeveloperAuction.

Matt Mickiewicz: We are a two-sided marketplace for hiring full-time engineering talent in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. The basic premise is that we curate a pool of 150 engineers every single month who went to the top computer science schools and worked at Google, Facebook, Twitter or who have notable open source contributions. On the flip side, we curate a pool of 450 venture-backed companies that are interested in recruiting engineers.

We put them into a timed, two-week auction where the companies can request interviews with any of the engineers on our platform. Along with their interview request they submit full compensation information, including base salary, signing bonus, equity, annual bonus and benefits packages. Engineers on our platform have anywhere from five to 20 job offers or interview request from well known, venture backed companies. They can choose which companies they want to interview with, knowing all of the opportunity details before they even step through the door.

Employers get benefits from us as well. We curate a pool an engineers from the thousands who apply on our platform. They are not wasting their time reading through a pile of worthless resumes. They are also only targeting people who are actively seeking interviews and new job opportunities. They can get a dozen or more interviews in a single day. That is nearly impossible with any other platform. They are also saving money over any other recruiting agency while introducing massive efficiencies in the process.

Sramana: What do employers pay to use your service?

Matt Mickiewicz: We charge 15% of the first year base salary.

Sramana: It is, roughly speaking, a contingency recruiters fee.

Matt Mickiewicz: A bit cheaper, but yes. We also rebate a portion of our fees back to the engineers when they get hired through DeveloperAuction. When an engineer accepts a job through DeveloperAuction we will write them a check for $4,000 or $6,000 dollars. We also send them huge bottle of Don Pérignon and a gift basket.

We are trying to rethink the hiring process and make it a lot more pleasant for both sides of the equation. When we have candidates flying in from San Francisco from out of town to interview with companies we set them up with limos or private drivers. We really go out of our way to break the status quo. The status quo relies on hunting for a needle in a haystack.

Sramana: In a way, you have a talent agency type of model. You are working for the talent and making it a pleasant experience for the talent.

Matt Mickiewicz: Exactly. We have an entire team in our company called the Talent Advocate Group whose sole purpose is to represent the engineers best interest in the process. They act as a go-between. We have even gone so far as to remove certain employers from our platform because they were providing a poor experience to candidate who were interviewing with them.

It is a very fragmented industry, and we are trying to rethink the model. The average recruiter provides a sub-par experience to both company and candidate. The model has not changed much in 30 years. It has gotten to the point that if you are an engineer with Stanford on your LinkedIn profile you get 50 to 100 recruitment messages a month. One recruiter I know is sending text messages to their cell phone numbers. It is an unpleasant experience.

Even though we are trying to take on the recruiting industry and we are running a successful recruiting marketplace, I still get random resumes sent to me by recruiters. I don’t think that behavior is sustainable in the long term.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Cool and Creative Serial Entrepreneurship: 99Designs and DeveloperAuction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz
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