A few months ago I bumped into Tyba co-founder Eiso Kant at an artificial intelligence conference in London. Why was a recruitment startup interested in A.I., I asked? He said he couldn’t tell me but would reveal all soon.
Well, ‘soon’ has become ‘now’ as Tyba launches a fascinating new business today called Sourced (or ‘source{d}’ as they prefer to present it). Focused on recruitment and professional development for software developers, it scans code submitted to repositories on services such as GitHub and Bitbucket, and builds a database of the skills and experience of each coder.
The system looks at the style, syntax and semantics exhibited in their commits, and the tools, languages, libraries and frameworks they work with. From there it matches them with what employers are looking for.
Smart, eh? A very developer-centric response to developer-related problem.
To help make sure developers feel good about Sourced, traditional recruitment consultants are taken out of the equation entirely. Instead, sourced has a team of 10 software developers whose entire job is to talk to people who have been identified as a good fit for a job.
What’s more, Kant sees Sourced as not just about making recruitment more efficient but also helping developers reach their maximum potential. He says that a system is being built to identify the best time for a coder to change jobs or learn new skills so that they stay ahead in the job market.
Like some of the best startup ideas out there, Tyba (a TNW Conference alum) built Sourced as an experimental side project to help with its own recruitment difficulties. It worked so well that the side project is becoming the company’s main business. The Tyba-branded service, which focuses on helping people interested in jobs at startups find out more about companies’ cultures and office spaces, will be spun out as a separate operation.
Kant says that Sourced’s approach to recruitment has been working really well so far, with the company’s team connecting with an average of three developers per minute. The company says it has analyzed more than 4.6 million developers across 14.4 million projects and 742 million code commits.
Of course, there will be some coders who would prefer not to be contacted, so Sourced identifies and respects the ‘do not contact’ flag on their code contributions and open source profiles.
Although not every developer currently contributes to online repositories, Sourced’s research leads it to estimate that by the second quarter of next year, 90 percent of the world’s software developers will be using GitHub. If that hypothesis is correct, Sourced is building an incredibly smart business here.
Sadly, this approach wouldn’t really work for other fields of work. There’s no ‘GitHub for surgeons,’ for example (a ‘GutHub’ if you will), but we’ll watch with interest to see how Sourced fares against traditional recruiters now it’s out in the wild.
➤ Sourced
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