nateps

As many of the news articles have talked about, Google Hire's origin was the acquisition of Bebop. Some discussion on this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839516

In this case, I know that Diane Greene advocated for her team to have the opportunity to launch their product, which they had been developing in stealth from 2012-2016.

I haven't worked there for some time now, but Google has historically supported teams in launching into the market through experiments, labs, new product launches, etc. However, Google's current scale makes it very difficult for a new product to be worth improving and maintaining. They must make billions in revenue directly or indirectly to show up in a meaningful way. In most cases, products are given a few years, tested for impact, and ultimately the most likely outcome is that a product will fail when that is the bar. It is not entirely different from the reality of a startup—the majority of startups don't last either.

Sure thing. Send me a note and I can forward

Lever charges on company employee size as well! You can have as many job postings as makes most sense for your talent marketing / candidate experience.

Lever's G Suite integration for both calendaring and email is quite extensive. In addition, we have a feature called Easy Book that enables candidates to book their own interview times, especially useful for phone screens. Here's more with some screenshots: https://help.lever.co/hc/en-us/articles/360025622851-How-to-...

Thank you! I appreciate the support. Means a lot.

Send me a note, <first name>@lever.co, and we'll take it from there!

I'm the founder and CTO of Lever, YC S12. I also worked at Google as a PM prior to founding Lever.

Let me know how I can help if anyone has questions! We're a great alternative to Google Hire.

I'm the founder and CTO of Lever (https://www.lever.co), a similar product and part of YC S12. I recommend you check us out!

I was also a PM at Google from 2007-2011. A big part of why I left and founded Lever is that I'm super passionate about enterprise software, and vertical enterprise software (even in huge markets) isn't aligned well with Google's core business.

Glad to hear! I'm the Founder and CTO of Lever. Anything I can do to help?

That's awesome! Let us know how it goes.

Hey houshuang! Thanks for mentioning this. I do think that replay and the potential to invert operations (including some operations and not others) is a very interesting feature of OT and we use it at Lever quite often. It is incredibly useful when doing enterprise customer support in addition to something that you can build user-facing features around.

Thanks for the shoutout! We are actively developing on ShareDB (https://github.com/share/sharedb) and if anyone is really interested in this, please reach out to me (https://github.com/nateps). Also, Lever is looking to hire someone to work full time on our internal + open source frameworks including ShareDB.

Thanks, Eric for writing this fantastic overview! It covers why we have made some key technology choices, both building off well established technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and AWS as well as some areas in which we've made outside of the box choices. It's been a fun adventure!

I think that this particular and special combination of leveraging open source and finding ways we can innovate technically makes being an engineer at Lever a fun and exciting challenge. I also think it comes through in our product, which stands out in a software category with many choices, but few of them innovative.

So much to do! We believe that talent acquisition is the most important thing that each company needs to master in order to be successful at its core purpose. This might sound obvious now, but it is pretty new! Thus, most companies are still figuring a lot out when it comes to recruiting.

I'm sure we have a lot to learn as well, and what we've learned so far is years in the making. Lever Nurture (https://www.lever.co/nurture) is our most innovative product to date, which we released a bit less than a year ago. There is a lot more we can do to make this new product even better, and we have some other tricks up our sleeves. :-)

Yes, I think both scenarios you outlined are what the companies that are most successful in the changing world of employment will do. They will both get to know people far in advance so that when the timing is right, they are able to get the best of both worlds—highly qualified talent when needed.

In addition, companies will look ahead to anticipate which talent might be a strong fit in the future and keep tabs on them as they develop in their careers. I think the honest truth as to why it is not happening more today is that it is so difficult! One part of the solution is building software that has this model for hiring as key part of it works, and that is Lever's focus.

Thanks for asking such a great question and offering your commentary as well!

Yes! This does in fact turn hiring on its head. Our vision for Lever is "Connect human potential to meaningful work." What we mean by that is that if we are able to help organize talent a bit better so that human potential is realized and the most meaningful work is done by talent that is the best fit for it, the world will collectively produce more value and people will be have a better experience of work itself.

Already, Lever believes that the talent acquisition is everyone in the company's job. This idea will become even more mainstream. While recruiters are only getting more valuable as hiring becomes more important, everyone in the company will think of the suite of hiring products as part of the tools that they use to do their job, not as the recruiting team's tool. Just like every knowledge worker in a company thinks of email or calendar as a tool to help them do their job, we believe hiring will be so much a part of everyone's job that they think Lever is a tool for them.

As well, we predict that 5 years from now, every company will be developing long standing relationships with potential, current, and future employees at scale. Talent acquisition will be about predicting attrition and strategically modeling future hiring for a company, anticipating pipeline development well in advance. There is a great model for this—sales is a function that has mastered this already. It will be a revolution in the strategic importance of talent acquisition into a key operational function at every company.

Here’s a text description of the GIF, for anyone who relies entirely on a screen reader (compared to using it together with a magnifier).

A user has www.lever.co open in Safari, with the VoiceOver narration popup open at the bottom. They type jobs.lever.co/lever into the address bar. On that page, they navigate down to the Backend Engineer position and go to the job description page for that position, where they then hit the Apply button. On the application form, they quickly go through the form fields, all the way down to the Submit Application button. The GIF ends there.

Lever's products are quite different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with sourcing, referrals, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.

We recently posted a piece describing how the Shopify team has used Lever to grow from a a few hundred to over 1900 employees. Sourcing was a key part of their strategy. https://www.lever.co/blog/how-shopify-revolutionized-proacti...

Thanks, we just fixed it. There is a new about page now that this now redirects to

Looks like an issue with the template on that page. You can actually scroll down and the content is below actually. I'll ping the marketing team.

Thanks!

Thank you so much!

Brian is not currently with the team. I'm personally grateful that I had to the opportunity to work with Brian as my partner before Lever on our open source efforts (http://derbyjs.com/ and https://github.com/share/sharedb), taking part in YC, and in the founding and early days of Lever.

Unfortunately we were not able to reproduce: https://github.com/nateps/assets/blob/master/lever-jobs-safa...

Do you remember when this last was that you encountered this or what specific job site you were using? Might be best we take this offline. Could you please email support@lever.co so we can track this and are sure we get the issue resolved? Thank you!

Thanks for the tip! I do know that one of our engineers did verify that our public job postings sites for compatibility with screen readers before. I'm not sure we tried Safari with VoiceOver specifically. Will report back.

I think it is a best practice to avoid commenting on specific competitors publicly. In addition, I'm a former Googler (2007-2011), so best I sit this conversation out. :-)

Happy to talk about our vision for Lever, hiring practices, what it is like to start a startup in YC and grow to 120 employees and many other topics!

Hey all!

I'm Nate, Founder and CTO of Lever. We are excited to announce this key milestone. We're a lot more excited to continue creating new innovative products, features, and technology that every company needs to finally master their talent acquisition challenges.

I'd love to answer any questions you might have, Lever customers and people interested in YC startups alike!

Hi there! I'm Nate, Founder and CTO of Lever.

Appreciate your feedback! As you've discovered, many B2B companies that primarily sell via inside or field sales do not post their pricing directly. Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful, because these products do have very different capabilities. We provide a consultative sales approach, listening carefully to what a prospect is looking to achieve with their talent acquisition strategy.

Lever's products are different. We believe that in order predictably master your hiring goals, you must go beyond applicants and get in front of the best candidates for your company. You must go outbound with referrals, sourcing, and more—speaking to the people that are the very best fit for your team's needs. Applicants are a vital piece of the puzzle, and Lever absolutely provides all of the features that applicant focused products provide. However, those features are seamlessly integrated into Lever Hire, which is a full CRM for job candidates + an applicant tracking system.

We recently posted a piece describing how the Shopify team has used Lever to grow from a a few hundred to over 1900 employees. Sourcing was a key part of their strategy. https://www.lever.co/blog/how-shopify-revolutionized-proacti...

Yep. We had a great chat! Should catch up again.

I agree with Raph that OT and CRDT are closer in concept than many people currently think. Each have some interesting advantages. If we find a good way to combine them, perhaps it would be possible to engineer a system that has a different combination of advantages than today's OT or CRDTs provide.

If anyone is interested in a role working on OT, I'd love to hear from you! https://jobs.lever.co/lever/517c90b8-3519-48ee-b848-33282796...

We have designed interview formats that specifically test for them. This actually isn't that revolutionary, as manager interviews have always weighted heavily on evaluating soft skills. We took some inspiration from interview formats used to evaluate managers and we also added a project interview that is about how people get work done in teams. By creating detailed interview guides with expectations and evaluation criteria, this skill is absolutely teachable. It does require significant investment in interviewer training.

As they begin to scale, startups also hire many of their highly paid workers, especially experienced executives. Our executive and management teams also have a roughly equal number of women.

"Raise the bar" is one of our values at Lever, and it applies to the work we do, our own personal growth, and hiring.

Just 4 years in, we are far from done building our culture and achieving our values. In truth, we will never be done; there will always be more room to improve and grow.

Yes, we currently have many younger workers. However, we already do take steps to welcome all workers, such as healthcare plans that include dependant coverage, maternity and paternity leave, and clearly defined work expectations. We also increase opportunity for experienced candidates to demonstrate what they can bring to the team with bar raising interview formats like our engineering project interview and career trajectory interview.

Yes, diversity of opinion is valued where it leads to better decision making. However, our focus on diversity and inclusion has more to do with employee engagement and making sure that individuals are able to bring their full selves to work and be their most effective.

We do not ask employees about their political affiliations.