Y Combinator-backed Coderwall started out as a social site for developers to list their achievements and projects, but it has been moving into recruiting — first by allowing companies to build their own profiles and now with the launch of a new service called Pitchbox.
It’s a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they’d want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company.
Founder Matt Deiters said this has a number of advantages over the normal recruiting process. For one thing, it avoids the random spam that developers often receive (and ignore) from recruiters. For another, it puts people who aren’t actively looking for new jobs in a position where they can still hear about opportunities that they’d be genuinely excited about.