This is a fair criticism. You kind of hit why we don't - established firms list them all. We're not established yet, we're a baby deer trying to take a few steps through the forest. I would like to say that "not actively calling attention to our weaknesses in a way that is detrimental to users on both sides" is different from lying, but I think you could reasonably think differently.
Since you asked: we have two roles currently hiring, and one with a contract out (although I think it's <50-50 to actually get signed, they've been extremely difficult to get responses from). We work primarily with engineers and roles in the US (both because that's where we are located and because that's where the revenue needed to make this model work can be found. However, we're not closed to engineers abroad. One of the roles hiring right now is open to remote in most of the world (they prefer not the EU for time-zone reasons), the other is in-office in New York City.
If your criterion is "I don't want to sign up for this unless it'll get me a lot of jobs right now", well...don't. It won't, not yet. The pitch right now is "if you want to see this thing exist and would like a job if we can find you one, give it a shot, you've got nothing to lose".
Well, okay, but turn it round: what do you have to lose by listing the jobs? Some people will be convinced to sign up without them, but if you list them, some additional people will sign because they are interested in those jobs.
Maybe some that would have given you their CV would be put off if they see only listings for jobs they don't match - but they don't match them, so they're not going to help your business any time soon anyway. So: the ones you gain by not listing don't help you, and the ones you lose are the ones that would.
Having only a couple of jobs just makes you look small, not weak. But there are many small recruiting forms that do well - for example, one guy who I've used, Mark Ashton, only listed a couple of roles on his website[1]. But when I was a hirer he was still a great recruiter who found candidates that were matches, because he knew the market. As an individual, I still go to his website to see if there's anything of interest. (Okay, he seems to have changed his website and it doesn't show any jobs, so not as good a piece of evidence as I thought. But probably that's because he doesn't have a client right now, rather than because he wouldn't list them).
Because that makes Otherbranch no different than an ordinary recruiting firm!
IE, when you're starting a business, not only is it important to be selective about what you do, it's also important to be selective about what you don't do.
What they don't do is cold approaches to candidates. Candidates applying to their website is - actually what they do. It sounds like they would probably do listings when they are big enough, so I don't see how it's a differentiator.
> Well, okay, but turn it round: what do you have to lose by listing the jobs?
Years ago, Triplebyte had a blog post on the front page of this very site where we mentioned, offhandedly, that we'd gotten jobs for "hundreds of engineers". That was true - the number was roughly 800 that we could track, probably into the low thousands counting ones we didn't - but there were extended threads analyzing that number to prove that we never actually got anyone jobs and our whole brand identity was a lie.
Had you done the numbers, you'd have found that 800 was totally consistent with TB's stage as a company. At 30k a placement, 800 placements would amount to 26m in revenue; at 10m or so of annual revenue and rapid growth that's a totally reasonable lifetime number. The complaint was, I think, totally unfounded. But that didn't stop it from being the top thread on that post (IIRC) for some hours.
That's the kind of thing that makes it hard to be transparent. As much as we want honesty from companies, we (or at least a lot of us) also want to go with the winners, and we often have unrealistic expectations of what "winning" looks like (because our intuitions are tuned on inflated numbers that are either lying or selected). In fact, just down this thread, you'll find someone arguing we can't really be serious about recruiting because our website was not made by a graphic designer.
> Maybe some that would have given you their CV would be put off if they see only listings for jobs they don't match - but they don't match them, so they're not going to help your business any time soon anyway. So: the ones you gain by not listing don't help you, and the ones you lose are the ones that would.
The problem is that, in the limit, this results in no one ever signing up for anything. Because candidates want us to already have the job they're a match for, and companies want us to already have the candidates they're looking for. And even if clients were willing to go for it even without candidates in the pool, it's not like candidates regularly check to see if new ones are posted on a small site. (If you did do that on your recruiters' site, I can tell you - with the backing of considerable data - that you are in a rare minority.)
One person we have at an onsite literally right now signed up a month ago when we had no roles for him. We had a role that was a fit come in a few weeks later, matched him with it and then with another, and now he's got a 50-50 or so shot to get a job in the next few days. Had he just bounced day one, that wouldn't have happened.
There's an analogy here in terms of chemistry. Trying to get both candidates and companies to both be around at the right moment is second-order kinetics, proportional both to the rate at which candidates check your site and to the rate at which companies have open roles they want you to fill. Trying to get one side to sign up provisionally - and it makes sense for that to be candidates, since job searches tend to last longer than open reccs and candidates aren't having to pay for it - is first-order kinetics, proportional only to the rate on the other side. Since at small scale n^2 is << n, it's really important for us to encourage the first-order state of affairs rather than the second-order one.
Of course, none of that gets at whether not posting all our open roles is consistent with honesty. But you're making a strategic argument here, and I think it's incorrect.
Okay, that's a good analysis. I'm too tired to work through the math bit right now, but you may be right.
One question in my mind, though, is why is it that that most recruiters solve the coordination issue the other way - first finding companies, and then hunting for candidates to match them. IE, there must be some reason why it's more effective for them to do it that way round, and theoretically this presents an obstacle for you. But perhaps Triplebyte already figured out the answer.
I only know of one established recruitment company which does it the other way round - they don't hunt for candidates - and that's ecm selection. They operate in science-heavy areas mainly, and the chip industry, where there's a particular need for the recruiter to have a good grip on what the role means, otherwise they end up flooding their client with inappropriate candidates. But they are probably not as scalable as you want to be.
Since you asked: we have two roles currently hiring, and one with a contract out (although I think it's <50-50 to actually get signed, they've been extremely difficult to get responses from). We work primarily with engineers and roles in the US (both because that's where we are located and because that's where the revenue needed to make this model work can be found. However, we're not closed to engineers abroad. One of the roles hiring right now is open to remote in most of the world (they prefer not the EU for time-zone reasons), the other is in-office in New York City.
If your criterion is "I don't want to sign up for this unless it'll get me a lot of jobs right now", well...don't. It won't, not yet. The pitch right now is "if you want to see this thing exist and would like a job if we can find you one, give it a shot, you've got nothing to lose".