If you're new to the tech industry, let me give you a recent example of when I was trying to break into the industry.

A little over a year ago, I was going through one of the most annoying experiences of my life: applying for jobs in the tech industry. I remember working through applications on Indeed, Monster, and Dice - altering my resume and cover letter specifically for each company.

I did tons of research on each company I applied to, and made sure to give my due diligence and make sure I was a good fit for each position. (You know, just like everyone says.)

Doing hard work doesn't bother me as long as there is some sort of result, but the nail in the coffin is when you get back that generic rejection email:

Dear [candidate] Thanks for taking the time to meet with our team about the [role title] at [company name]! It was nice to read about your skills and accomplishments. Unfortunately our team did not select you for further consideration. We will keep your resume on file for future openings. Regards, [recruiter]

I even once received an email from a recruiter where they didn't even bother changing out the template and left the fields in the email...

Kill me.

There are several startups that are trying to fix that exact problem. Here are three new startups that are trying to fix the tech hiring problem!

Please note that these are in no specific order!

Triplebyte

How it works: Employers and engineers of all skill levels are matched with companies. You take a quiz, then do a two-hour interview. Based on performance, you're put on their marketplace.

My experience: Was very close to making it to the next stage, the interviewer was very friendly and made the interview process very simple.

Rating: 9/10 Although I didn't make it, Triplebyte's process feels like what recruitment should be. Very helpful feedback as well. I'll get more into details later.

The first job site on the chopping block is Triplebyte, a company founded on the belief that the current technical hiring process doesn't do enough to help engineers show their strengths. Their goal is to help people find great jobs by assessing their abilities without relying on things like the "years of experience" on their resume.

They actually have a whole manifesto on their view of hiring.

With support from some of the best angel investors in the tech startup scene, including Drew Houston the CEO of Dropbox, Sam Altman: President at YCombinator and Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, they have made a pretty big disruption in the tech recruiting space.

Things I like

Here's how their process is different and why I highly recommend them for recent to 1-year grads:

1. They want to see what you do, and what you're good at.
2. You get PERSONALIZED feedback and are encouraged to reapply every 4 months if rejected.
3. They take your feedback seriously and iterate on suggestions to improve the platform

I went through their process six months ago, so here's a sum of their steps:

1. You take a quiz depending on what your interests are: front end, back end, dev ops, software engineering generalist

They have several different "paths" that you can take, and the questions are all related to that "path." Naturally, I chose the front end path where I received a bunch of questions covering:

• HTML and CSS
• JavaScript concepts like hoisting and the this keyword
• ReactJS core concepts and principles

If you do well, you go on to the next step:

2. Get called to set up a two-hour interview where they go over several different topics

This is a very in-depth interview, where the first hour is spent doing a coding challenge, and the second hour is spent answering a bunch of technical questions about web development in general. For my coding challenge, I had to make a kanban board based on a set of rules and restrictions they gave me.

I was still relatively new to React at this point, so I struggled with this part of the interview, but the interviewer made me feel comfortable about the whole situation.

The next hour was spent going over several different topics:

• JavaScript: HTTP, local caching
• CSS: CSS sprites, difference between classes and IDs, CSS specificity rules, building a responsive site
• Security: Bloom Filters, XSS, CSRF

I felt I did a lot better on this section, as I read blog posts on a bunch of these topics. After a few days, although I got rejected, I got probably the most detailed feedback from an interview I had ever gotten. Here's the feedback they gave me, maybe it will help you prepare for your interview:

Hey Malik!

Unfortunately, we're not going to move forward with your application right now. Interviewing is a messy process, and we know that we'll inevitably make mistakes as we iron out our process. We also believe in giving the people we interview honest feedback.

You talked well about CSS. And you were friendly and we enjoyed talking to you.

Here are the areas where we thought you could improve. You didn't make much progress on the Kanban project. You had a lot of trouble with small-scale coding in Javascript. Your code was occasionally unidiomatic or inelegant. We didn't see the depth of knowledge that we look for in front end programmers: you didn't show very deep knowledge of Javascript, HTTP, security, and data structures.

To move forward with candidates who don't have much industry experience, we need to see exceptional strength. You did well in many parts of the interview, but we didn't see the exceptional strength in an area that we require.

Here's our advice.

You'll do better in front-end focused interviews if you're more productive at quickly implementing front-end features. You already know how to do this, but practicing it more will help you get faster and better at it. It makes sense to both practice building out small apps (so that you’re comfortable with how the basics of your framework works) and also try building out more complicated features.

Practicing small scale programming will be useful. On several occasions in the programming problem, you got stuck on minor programming bugs that aren’t directly related to front end development. To get better at this, you could try practicing small problems from sources like LeetCode. It’s particularly useful to read how other people solved particular problems after you solve them—often other people spotted cool solutions that you didn’t think of. This kind of practice is useful for your programming in general and particularly useful in the context of interviews.

We recommend you study algorithms more deeply. If you want to study algorithms some more, The Algorithm Design Manual is a particularly good and practically-oriented algorithms textbook, and it's freely available on the internet. Reading the third chapter, which is about how to think about data structures, would be really helpful. There are also many algorithms MOOCs: doing one of these would be good practice. You also might enjoy the advice about studying algorithms on this page. In particular, you should know the runtimes for all the methods on the collections classes available in your language.

And again, we know this isn't a perfect process and we'd love to hear your honest feedback on how we might have improved it. We're also happy to hear any other questions you have.

Best, Triplebyte Team

It's... it's beautiful.

Things I don't like

Ther wasn't much to dislike. The only thing that was mildly displeasing was that the two hour interview was a bit long for my taste, but I know several people that didn't really mind.

There's not much more you could ask for an interview. If all of the above sounds even slightly interesting to you, definitely give it a try.

Up next, we have a company you may have heard of already, Hired.

Hired

How it works: Experienced engineers are matched with companies. There are "auctions", and employers bid on you.

My experience: Didn't make it to the auction stage, but I have friends with more experience that have gone through it, and received a few on-site interviews

Rating: 8/10 They have a few things I don't like, I'll go over them below.

Please note that they're not the best platform for inexperienced engineers!

Hired is an opportunity network that intelligently matches experienced engineers to fulltime and contract opportunities at innovative companies. Located in San Francisco, they have matched tons of engineers with new and exciting companies and opportunities. Since 2012, they have expanded to a bunch of different locations including:

• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• Seattle
• Denver
• Austin
• Chicago
• New York (represent!)
• Boston
• Washington D.C.

They also plan to expand internationally, placing candidates in a bunch of other locations like:

• Paris
• London
• Sydney, Australia
• Melbourne, Australia
• Toronto

So basically, tons of options - especially if you're looking to relocate.

Their timeline can take up to seven days to get you approved.

The way it works is you create a profile that gives a strong outline of your career experience and your skill set. (Make sure you're specific with that!) Once you've done that Hired will review your profile, and if you are accepted they will place you in their "marketplace."

Since I haven't made it past the auction phase, you can check out this blog post for a more detailed description of what it's like.

Things I don't like:

1. They don't give a good reason to why you are rejected. No feedback can suck if you're not sure how you could do better.
2. Some of the companies are kind of boring and try to low ball you.
3. You're still assigned a "recruiter", who manages all your interviews accordingly.

Things I like:

1. Companies that are interested in you are really interested in you.
2. Salary offers are amazing, ranging from $100k - $125k
3. If you get hired, you get a bonus (who doesn't like money?)

If you're a developer with at least a year or two under your belt, you should definitely try out Hired.

There are a whole bunch of other resources that are available like Woo.io, underdog.io, or WhiteTruffle. However, from my time interviewing for jobs, the aforementioned services really stood out to me as awesome, and all shared a common goal.

If you've applied through one of these services before, please share a comment below! I'd love to hear about different people's experiences with these platforms.

See you in the next blog post.