YesGraph — Discover more qualified, more responsive candidates

Yo, @ikirigin! Love what you're doing. Early at PlayHaven, about half the team were former coworkers of me and our CEO, Andy Yang. It's hard to know who will be a good fit until you've worked with them before. Previously you were at Dropbox. What inspired you to take the leap and found YesGraph?

Interesting product. As founder in Amsterdam, I made hiring a team sport. Growth often comes in bursts: when you're hiring you have a hard time to find the best candidates, when you're not hiring tons of great people pop up on your radar. I teamed up with some other startups to share those leads, informally. I'd be interested in products that allow me to keep track of 'past' interest and share leads (things like LinkedIN etc suck).

@ikirigin looks cool. Interesting that it (appears) to start with the role over the people. I have sort of wanted a tool to help maintain a list of people I would love to hire (regardless of open role) and look for signals on when to reach out/touchbase. The window of opportunity is small. Any thoughts on letting me intelligently track people separate from filling a specific position?

Hmm, no questions yet so I'll write a bit about YesGraph. It helps you scale referrals by engaging your team. There are lots of interesting parts to this: matching your network to a given job, making a simple one-click referral system, design collaboration, etc. Probably the most interesting bit is that you might think publishing out messages on social media is a great way to get help with referrals. It turns out that closer affinity matters more than spread because people actually do the minimal work when they know you. Company social tools are really under appreciated.

I like running a startup. Also, the idea came from Dropbox. I wrote a bit about it here: http://blog.yesgraph.com/searchl... YesGraph is about taking a manual process that was effective at Dropbox and moving it online where it can get 100X faster because of all the data available.

@rrhoover, your point about *knowing* there is a fit is key. I like to think that when sourcing candidates, there are a bunch of tools that range in needed time and money. Agencies can solve your problems... for 20% of a hire's first year's salary. That's crazy expensive. Your jobs page has applicants from the open internet, so the average quality is far lower. You can find good people, but it takes a lot more time. Referrals are awesome because you have someone saying "I've worked with her before, I want to work with her again". That is both a talent and cultural filter that makes the signal to noise far, far better. YesGraph doesn't want to get in the way of this. We want to make it so much easier that referrals dominate your sources of hiring.

@graysky You can create a role called "awesome people" and go through the list. Also, you need to get aggressive when recruiting: reach out to everyone on your list every 2-3 months. If you wait too long, or hope for public signals, you'll miss the process of becoming discontent, searching, and leaving. There are other tools just for helping with this process, but not for identifying candidates. I think Entelo does those recommendations. Also I think Lever.co does the passive candidate tracking. YesGraph focuses on referrals because they are far more immediately actionable, plus, like I said, you should just get aggressive. You should also get your whole team involved in recruiting. Chances are your team is connected to people that they'd recommend that are not passive. You can create a new team here: https://www.yesgraph.com/job/#/n...

I founded YesGraph AMA