StrongIntro (YC W16) Boosts Employee Referrals for Finding and Hiring Engineers

by Y Combinator3/21/2016

Recruiting is hard, especially for technical employees. Everyone in the startup world knows that.

The
best way to tackle this problem is to tap into the personal networks of your existing team members.
In fact, employee referrals are often referred to as “hiring gold” because they
build culture, retention, and engagement, all at a cheaper cost and
faster-to-hire rate than alternative recruiting pipelines. The
problem is, most companies don’t have the bandwidth or resources
to create a robust referral program that competes with larger industry players.

StrongIntro is a company in our Winter 2016 class that wants to be a startup’s secret weapon, helping them bring in employee referrals and hire as effectively as top companies.

StrongIntro hosts a sourcing party at a startup’s office, and uses its software to parse staffers’ social connections to intelligently identify
engineers and enable
employees to easily recommend connections. This approach sources between 50 to 100 warm candidates for every five employees. StrongIntro
also provides a dedicated recruiter to help build the key components of a
successful referral program, including customized outreach, education of employees, and implementing best practices.

Using StrongIntro has zero upfront costs  — they only take a performance fee if one of their referrals is hired.

StrongIntro has funding from the Thiel Fellowship, YC
Fellowship, and YC Core, and has already helped companies like Segment,
Raise.me, and Teespring discover and engage hundreds of new candidates.
For more information or to book a sourcing session see http://www.strongintro.com.

Author

  • Y Combinator

    Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200). The startups move to Silicon