Pearl
An SMS hiring network for the startup world
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Tim Connors

Pearl - An SMS hiring network for the startup world

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For too long, early stage startups have been a walled garden, so we decided to build a door. 🚪
(1) Over text message, tell us what you're looking for
(2) We'll monitor for matching jobs
(3) We'll connect you with the founding team when there's a match

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Tim Connors
Maker
Hi Product Hunters! Thank you for checking out Pearl. We are super excited to launch on Product Hunt today 🚀 Recruiting tends to be a horrendous experience for everyone involved. For employers, it's a time-sucking, money burning endeavor that never ends. For candidates... well we all know how it is. This reality was pretty clear to me as an ambitious college student at UCLA. I'd done my fair share of job-seeking, as well as my fair share of hiring for various entrepreneurial pursuits. It didn't matter what side of the table I was sitting on, the experience sucked. For job-seekers, the challenge of recruiting is uniquely pernicious because it impacts everyday life in fundamental ways. Everything that's tricky about job hunting - trying to find the right opportunity, filling out long applications, getting ghosted by recruiters - it adds up into a thick glue that stops people from moving onwards and upwards. I've seen this happen to too many friends and family members. It pains me to see so many people I love lead lackluster careers for decades on end. It's absolute madness. It was with these thoughts in mind when I teamed up with my co-founder Alex to make things better. When we started on Pearl we thought to ourselves: "What's the lowest-friction method of moving people to a more exciting career?" I hope you enjoy it. And please follow along in our journey. This is just the beginning 😼 Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback from all of you! Tim 🥰 https://twitter.com/itstimconnors
Andrew Zhou
Congrats on the launch, this is super cool! Curious what made you choose SMS?
Tim Connors
Maker
@andrewthezhou 👉👉 In the future, we plan to be channel-agnostic, but we chose SMS to start because (1) it's (nearly) universally used by Americans (2) SMS APIs are mature and robust.
James Vaughan
This looks rad, congrats @tim_connors! Is there a way for job seekers to use this via web rather than SMS if they prefer?
Tim Connors
Maker
@tim_connors @jamesontheline Great question! Not yet. Our goal is to be channel-agnostic eventually (sms, email, whatsapp, messenger, slack, etc...) so stay tuned!
Arek Der-Sarkissian
Congrats @alec2435 and @tim_connors on the launch! Amazing to see how Pearl is changing the recruiting industry for the better 💪
Tim Connors
Maker
Alex Velikanov
Maker
Matt Mayberry
Congrats to @tim_connors and team on the launch of Pearl. Excited to see this out in the open knowing all the hard work you put into it. Lets goooooo!
Tim Connors
Maker
@tim_connors @mattmayberry Thanks so much Matt!! Excited to send some candidates your way
Jill Tiutan
Wow this looks convenient and easy on the jobseeker’s side seeing as it focuses on quality matching — personally wish I had this when I was job hunting. Out of curiosity, why did you guys choose to go with SMS over existing mobile apps (Messenger, LinkedIn chat, etc.)?
Tim Connors
Maker
@jilltiutan That's a great question! In the future, we plan to be channel-agnostic, but we chose SMS to start because (1) it's universally used by Americans (2) SMS APIs are mature and robust.
David Marr
My concerns with this is I can't remember the last time I sent an SMS and the only ones i get are from people who are at an age when retirement is their profession or from a delivery service telling me my order has been delivered. Can you do it on another messaging platforms as well? I love the back and forth that it gives and think that would work really well but just don't think SMS is the best platform as you miss a large population of people who would lap this up. The optics of someone in an office looking at their phone for long periods in a day may not play well in some larger organisations as well. At least with Whatsapp or Telegram this could be done on computer screen. Other concern for big organisations is would their data security people be comfortable with this sort of data being stored or distributed on personal devices?
Tim Connors
Maker
@david_marr interesting point, are you US-based or abroad? There were tradeoffs between all the messaging channels. In the future, we plan to be channel-agnostic, but we chose SMS to start because (1) it's (nearly) universally used by Americans (2) SMS APIs are mature and robust. To address the data security question - I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying the big companies would be uncomfortable knowing their employees are texting us about other jobs?
David Marr
@david_marr @tim_connors Yes I am in the UK. SMS does still seem to be popular in the US compared to here in Europe where things have moved on to the messengering apps. Integration with Slack would go down well also. My second part was a bit garbled as it was early here. What i was meaning was I think there is a big potential to take this more mainstream outside of startups to big corporates. My point was more around whether the data security and even legal people at say a Google, BP or even AT&T would be comfortable with their staff carrying out recruitment type activity on behalf of their companies on their own personal device. Having channels less reliant on a cell phone as well as the SMS route would be perfect to get that large corporate business as well as start ups.
Tim Connors
Maker
@david_marr @tim_connors Oh I see now! You're referring to when we connect the candidate to the team. Yes right now, that's SMS so the team would need to use their personal phones. In the future when we move beyond startups, we're going to offer an external web app for recruiters & hiring managers to have these conversations from their browser.
David Marr
@david_marr @tim_connors think there would be a lot of interest.
Nadin Krukovskaya
Well done
Tim Connors
Maker
@nadin_krukouskaya Thanks Nadin!
Sandra Lucille
really cool product. how does it work behind the scenes?
Tim Connors
Maker
@sandra_lucille good question :) behind the scenes is a team of robots + humans alike. We manage the conversations in a custom web app we built. Everyone starts off talking to a genuine human being. From there, your preferences are stored and used to match against our collection of jobs. When there's a match, we'll use an AI chatbot to offer the job to you and collect feedback on that recommendation (to improve over time). If the chatbot is every confused, it simply forwards the conversation thread to an available human agent on our team to continue.
Fernando Cordeiro
This... can become something. SMS has a very high penetration, robust API and a big margin for automation. But, from a business perspective, I love the idea of talking directly to the team. The HR filter is not only bad for candidates. As a manager, most of my hires were people they had previously discarded for stupid reasons. I also think is a good way to remove biases from hiring processes. Text-based hiring can potentially help against discriminating people by their gender, color or accent! ❤
Tim Connors
Maker
@mrcordeiro Good insights! Yea we feel the same. Especially in the world of startups, I know as a founder myself that I'd rather skip the formalities for the sake of speed
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