Endorse.ly — Connect Your Twitter Followers With Career Opportunities

Hiring is a massive challenge for startups. At my company we are very active and creative in our outbound efforts as we grow the team because we're committed to hiring top 0.1% talent.

Recently we built a site called Endorsely. We wanted to leverage Twitter to reach a large audience of hackers by asking our friends, advisors, and investors to send out personalized job endorsements.

We built a prototype in a few hours that let us create a listing that describes why you should join BackType and point our friends to a page where they can share it on Twitter. Potential candidates see these tweets that link to the page with the job description and a bunch of endorsements. They can then apply or pass the job on to their network. The whole thing ties back into our analytics back-end so we know which tweets (or series of tweets) ultimately lead to applications and hires. This means we could offer a referral bonus and know exactly who to dish it out to.

Here are a few screenshots or you can check out the live product:

(download)

After the site went live our listing received 63 tweets and reached up to 1.3M users on Twitter. Through the product we received about a dozen applications and outside of it several others mentioned endorse.ly in their initial e-mail or interview. Despite having a low conversion endorse.ly was worth the few hours we put into it. Engineers don't take notice of a company until they see it multiple times. Endorse.ly has since come up in many conversations during hiring and one of the tweets actually helped us meet one of our new investors.

If you want to try endorse.ly at your company e-mail me or contact me on Twitter.