One of the biggest drivers for me picking google hire over Lever or Workable or one of the alternatives was the pricing model. By charging based on the size of the company and not the number of job slots it removed one of the biggest pains we had which was the constant juggling of putting specs live and archiving some as the priorities changed. £300 p/month for essentially unlimited slots was unbeatable.
What is the feedback and calendaring integrations like with Lever and gSuite?
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-...
Hi Nate. I've recently launched a service for managing coding challenges for recruitment through git (https://candidatecode.com).
I'm keen to start offering some lightweight integrations for a few ATS - is there anyone you can point me to in Lever that might be able to kick off that discussion?
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.
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.
> and vertical enterprise software (even in huge markets) isn't aligned well with Google's core business.
That's exactly the point that everyone who says "Don't use google products" is missing. Anything horizontal (eg GSuite basics, docs/sheets, mail, calendar) are relatively safe.
Anything vertical isn't going to move the needle in Google's view of their finances.
MS and Oracle have had issues with their "verticals" in the past, but they weren't actually big enough that they could kill them off, given their reliance on enterprise customers for their income.
FAANG (except Netflix obv) aren't dependent on enterprise customers. Facebook and Apple don't really offer enterprise products and AWS/Google have, basically Workspaces/Workdocs for AWS and GSuite from Google.
Both Facebook and Google are "vertical" in that they sell ads on the internet, or, more accurately, they provide access to their users to advertisers. Everything else is noise.
So the general rule is "Don't buy vertical services from a horizontal company".
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 for ShareDB! Funny thing, I was looking for a self-hosted real-time collaborative editor myself just a week ago, and landed exactly on Quill.js backed by ShareDB. (I also considered SharedDB-backed Monaco, but it doesn’t seem to support OT out of the box, whereas Quill is literally plug and play. Of course one can write a translation layer between Monaco’s change events and OT.)
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.
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.
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!
Will any of that $30M go towards making Lever's website even remotely accessible to screen readers and such? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, try visiting your website with Safari and VoiceOver enabled and watch it crash the browser (or put it into a perpetual loading state). If I see your website linked in a job listing I just skip it altogether. I don't ask for much, just don't kill my screen reader.
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 [email protected] so we can track this and are sure we get the issue resolved? Thank you!
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.
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.
This article mentions that you all are focusing on identifying potential hires that aren't even looking for jobs. Given that this turns traditional hiring on its head, can you share any thoughts/predictions of what the hiring environment will look like in 5-10 years if this is successful?
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.
Thanks for replying! That last point is quite interesting. So if I'm understanding correctly, companies would develop relationships with an employee potentially months or years before an actual job or application is on the table? If that's correct, what do you envision taking it from a casual relationship to an actual job getting offered?
For example, is it about getting in touch with prospective employees who are content in their current role but may be interested down the road when their circumstances change? Or perhaps about identifying people who seem promising, but aren't ready for the job yet, and maintaining the relationship as they develop? I'm curious because I've thought a bit about the latter option, of companies giving potentially promising candidates insight into how they can develop to become competitive for a role, and have wondered why that doesn't take place more often.
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!
Very interesting stuff! I've wondered quite a bit what this would look like in the future, so it's cool to see that companies are thinking about how to change the current state into something that is more effective in the long term. Thanks again!
Hi Nate,
Wanted to give you a heads up that I'm seeing a blank screen your "Our story" page. Chrome. No console errors. There is markup in source. https://www.lever.co/our-story
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!
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. :-)
Hey, Nate. I'm a marketing consultant that specializes in B2B (I have a couple other YC clients right now). What's the most challenging part of your marketing stack? Getting initial leads, getting them from lead to interest, or from interest to closed?
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.
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.
"Reserving the conversation around pricing until after you are in contact with a sales person is often helpful" -> such a BS. Everyone in the world knows the reason behind that is charging differently for the same product according to a given company budget.
"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."
Which you can easily list, with the prices next to them.
Look, I have never, ever, ever found it more helpful to talk to a sales person than to see an actual price sheet. Never. If I don't like the price, but it's just outside my budget, I can call you and see what you can do. If it's so far outside of my budget, then talking to you is a waste of both your time and mine.
You know far more about your needs and are able to evaluate how well software would solve them, and the salespeople you've talked to haven't been worth the time....and that's not normal.
You'd be shocked how bad most people are at evaluating software, especially when it's highly technical. Most people don't even know what a reasonable budget is, what their biggest problems are, what would fix them, and what software is actually doing -- so they rely on cheap self-service products or just take marketing speak at face-value and hope for the best.
And a good salesperson is worth their weight in gold. If you're one of those buyers, salespeople should be much closer to an interviewer or consultant for them: approaching sales calls like research to uncover needs you didn't know you had, introducing you to best practices, and tailoring advice to your specific situation. Their goal is to find a mutual fit and stand by the quality of their solution (and should recommend competitors' products if you wouldn't be happy with it)
> And a good salesperson is worth their weight in gold.
Yes, they absolutely are, for both the client and the company. But you have no way of knowing if $randomNewSaas you're looking at has good sales staff or not. A bad sales guy can screw both. Recently we've had an experience with one Name Brand Vendor where the sales guy is promising things that the company doesn't really deliver; for example, we purchased an old bundle at his suggestion and then get sent automated demands to reduce our capacity because we're in excess of what we pay for (even though it's within the capacity of the old bundle).
Good sales staff are excellent value-adders, but far from all sales staff are good.
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.
Let me know how I can help if anyone has questions! We're a great alternative to Google Hire.