What Otherbranch is
This is the clean-plaintext version of what we do. If you want the nicer page, click here.
We're a technical recruiting firm for software engineers who want to work at startups. We're founded and operated by a team of former Triplebyte employees who liked what early Triplebyte was doing, and we're trying to rebuild something like it.
We are different from most recruiters because:
We start with an interview. We don't refer people based on their resume. We do a full 90-minute interview with a senior engineer before every referral.
We're highly technical. Otherbranch's founder led assessment development at Triplebyte (YC S15), where her assessments were used to screen hundreds of thousands of engineers. Our interviewers have conducted many thousands of interviews as well; the least experienced has done several hundred.
We keep signal-to-noise ratio high. Clients move forward with most candidates we refer to them (and we want to keep it that way), and when they complete an interview process, they make an offer about 1/4 of the time.
How hiring with us works
We'll start by asking you for a list of hard and soft requirements. We'll respect the hard requirements, but we encourage you to cast a broad net: the point of our process is to identify people who are good but who do not have obvious signals of being good.
We'll set up an external slack channel to which you can invite anyone who needs to be involved. From there, we'll begin reaching out to candidates who meet your hard requirements and whose goals you're a fit for. We'll interview those candidates, and if they pass, we'll send you a referral with:
Their resume (but we don't recommend using this the way you normally would),
Their results on our interview, including scores and notes from each section,
A brief human-readable profile of who they are and what they're looking for, and
A checklist of how they meet your hard and soft requirements.
From there, you proceed with your normal hiring process. We don't require this, but we recommend skipping some early steps of screening, since our interview is designed to cover the material you'd cover in e.g. a leetcode or short technical call. Most of our clients do skip steps.
You pay us a commission only if you make a hire, and we offer a money-back guarantee if they don't work out within the first 90 days.
FAQ
What's on your interview?
Our interview is 90 minutes long and covers three sections: coding, conceptual knowledge, and system design. You can find more detail on the interview content here. The interview is the same for all companies that hire through us. Our goal is to replace early screenings, not to replace onsites, and standardization makes the interview fairer, more reliable, and reusable so that engineers do less repetitive grind.
What's your pricing?
Standard contingency recruiting of 20% of first year's cash salary on hire. If you want to negotiate e.g. a flat rate instead, we may be open to that.
What kind of roles do you fill?
We're best at filling back-end, full-stack, and front-end product engineering roles, and we can make some (though less precise) claims about infra engineering, and low-level/systems programming. We don't directly assess ML or specialized fields, but you can still use us to screen for basic coding for those hires and then assess for ML-specific topics later.
