GILD – Technical Recruiting Made Better
Sourcing and identifying the top technical resources is difficult enough. But if you’re in a hot bed of talent like San Francisco, you really need to do 2 things:
1. Identify high potentials (HIPO’s) that may be hidden in the local area
2. Attract HIPO’s from other areas that aren’t necessarily looking for a career
Companies like Facebook and Google are desperate to hire the best talent in the world never mind what university they attended, where the job seeker currently works, or how much experience they have. Simply put, there is just not enough of the top talent to go around.
So in comes Gild, a fairly new start up in San Fran that is focused on helping recruiters identify the really good software developers. As you can imagine, the likes of Facebook and Google are overwhelmed with people applying for these positions, but rarely if ever does a resume prove that this individual is a top software developer. And if you ever looked at a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, you would never find these hidden gems.
What Gild has done is access the open source libraries of Github where approximately 4M users (adding 300K new users a month) publish their code in a repository that showcases their expertise, lets others learn from their coding, shares code and lets people build additional code on top of their base code while doing other fundamental things such as managing version tracking. What is amazing is that Gild believes that this 4M users is 40% of the worldwide software developers. So how do you know that someone who “stores” their code on Gild is better than someone else on Gild? That is Gild Secret sauce. They themselves created a tool that evaluates the quality of that code looking at lines of code written, number of languages known, forking, how many people imbed/use their code and many other attributes to find the best possible talent.
Gild believes, rightly so, that recruiters are overwhelmed with resumes but struggle to find the best talent. Their solution helps with this.
In addition to helping identify the top coders based on Gild code, they also have a super LinkedIn API that enables you to connect directly to a potential candidate and email/call them directly.
A quick meeting with the Gild team indicates that they used their own tools to hire some awesome technical resources to accomplish achievements that were not even possible a few years ago, but also to do it in a way most software developers couldn’t even dream possible.
Gild is sold on a per seat basis per month per recruiter. They have been slow to hit the quick adopters (AKA the IT staffing firms) but have been focusing on the local employers in the bay area that are truly struggling to hire top talent. Next on the development road map: predictability, determining whether a candidate is good match or not, and of course localizing the platform for positions outside of Software development aka Truck Drivers.
