I'm curious how this works out. My perception is that hiring is intrinsically hard, and whether you have engineers or HR doing the recruiting, it will remain hard. I would absolutely, totally love to be proven wrong on this though.
We fully acknowledge it's an open question. Hiring is intrinsically hard, but think of it this way: What are the odds that the status quo is the best we can do? That seems highly unlikely to us.
Your competition isn't really other recruiters, it's personal referrals from inside the company. Everybody knows that recruiters suck; that's why whenever possible, people try to find friends or former coworkers of their existing employees and bring them on-board.
Now, if you could devise a system that's as effective as having worked with a person for years and being able to convince them to join you, yet didn't require a personal connection that takes years to build up, that would be golden.
Yes, the gold standard is employee referrals. Pretty much every company we've spoken to has told us they're the best source of people, but they don't get enough of them.
Part of what makes them so good is that the person making the recommendation (i.e., the employee) knows both parties well. I think we have a good start to solving half this problem, since we're developing real relationships with the companies and being selective about whom we work with. The other half -- actually getting to know the people applying -- is probably the biggest challenge we face (next to meeting/finding people in the first place).
