Honeypot is joining the Xing family!
Product Emma Tracey
We are very excited to announce XING’s acquisition of Honeypot. Together, the two companies will work towards Honeypot’s vision of creating the world’s largest worklife community for technical candidates while empowering developers and other technical candidates to find jobs they love.
It’s important to remember two key points:
- Honeypot will retain its candidate-driven ethos: Since inception, Honeypot has been candidate-driven in everything we do. We plan to maintain our focus and support of the developer and broader technical community.
- Honeypot will operate independently: While XING will have ownership of Honeypot, we will continue to operate independently, with our headquarters in Berlin.
Before diving into our future outlook, we want to take some time to reflect on the last four years of huge growth.
History
We founded Honeypot in 2015. In our first months, we operated out of Kaya’s Prenzlauer Berg flat before moving close by to a small office on Schönhauser Allee. From the beginning, our perspective was candidate-driven: in a market where candidates are in such high demand, it made 100% sense to have them in focus. It’s been amazing to see how much that is appreciated by our users.
We grew Honeypot to profitability with less than €1.5 million of funding. We were cautious and lean in building the company because we knew the process of finding a job is very personal. We were focused on understanding the dynamics of how we could facilitate this, rather than pushing matches which were not right for either the candidate or the companies.
Currently, we have over 100,000 technical candidates on the platform and nearly 2000 companies. At the beginning, we focused solely on developers, but by 2017 we realized that finding a perfect job as a developer very often meant finding the perfect team. With that in mind we began to slowly open the platform to the broader engineering team. Today, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Data Scientists, UX Designers, as well as CTOs, Engineering Managers and others are all successfully finding jobs on Honeypot.
Community Ethos
Recruitment has a bad name among developers and other technical candidates. And it’s no surprise. Aside from the known issue of spammy headhunters, inefficiency is rife: multiple interviews, unclear timelines, and intransparent feedback on technical assessments can make the job process long and tedious. One of the first realizations we had was we can’t be associated with headhunters, we need to be and remain as close as possible to the developer community.
Florian, a former Talent Rep, and current Data Analyst, chatting with developers at GraphQL Conf 2018.
And that proximity to the developer community is part of why we love what we do. Every developer on Honeypot has a personal Talent Rep to guide them through the process. Over the years, our Talent Reps have helped many hundreds of developers find new jobs. Hearing personal success stories of users has become a daily feature of our internal Slack channel. Some of our team have even gone to Berghain with a developer or two!
Laura, Netherlands Country Lead, speaking at HR in Tech in the Netherlands.
We host a bunch of meetups across Germany and the Netherlands for recruiters and technical candidates. We started GraphQL Conf in 2017 in collaboration with Prisma. What began as a small meetup in Berlin, quickly grew to a full-blown conference, with hundreds of guests and world-renowned speakers. For this year’s edition we are expecting 800 guests. We also run HiveConf, which brings People Ops, HR and Talent Acquisition together with Technical Hiring Managers, like CTOS, VPs of Engineering and Team Leads, to understand how to build and scale tech teams. We are a social company at our core and love these opportunities to meet our users face to face.
Debbie, our Head of Talent Management, handing out our swag bags at GraphQL Conf 2018.
Another project which we are hugely proud of is our Open Source Documentary series. We work with the creators to tell the story of the evolution of these technologies, which power millions of platforms, websites, and apps around the world. Elixir, which we released in July last year, and Ember, released this February, were fun to make and well-received. Watch this space for more to come.
The Honeypot Team
We are a very diverse company, with equal female male leadership at a Heads and Team Lead level. We also recruit from all over the world and all of the developers were hired from Honeypot. Recent innovations in the company, like the Culture Circle, help us keep focused on our core - people. We also place a strong emphasis on traits, not values. A company is the sum of its people and the people we want to work with should be curious, have grit and be empathetic.
Currently we are close to 60 people and expect that to grow significantly over the coming years. For a full overview of our open position, you can check our careers page.
Most of the team at an offsite in 2018.
Our Future
Up to now, we feel we have only made a small mark on the job search experience for technical talent. Not everything has been easy: our industry is driven by people and people have diverse motivation, which isn’t always easy to understand. We don’t think the platform is perfect yet, but our ambitions are big and we do have a clear vision of where we want to go in the future:
- Open Europe to more international technical talent: We are firmly committed to growing European startups to compete globally: over the next three years we will enter 10 new markets. For European tech companies to compete globally, they need access to the best talent. For context, 70% of developers born in Silicon Valley are foreign born. That access to large pools of creative talent have made Silicon Valley what it is today. We want to make that happen here.
- Build a frictionless recruitment process driven by individual motivation: We believe in three core things to do with recruitment: 1.) sourcing should take just 30 minutes per week per recruiter 2.) candidates should only have to do one screening and this should work for all jobs 3.) motivation is the key to hiring and retaining great technical talent. Based on these beliefs, we are going to invest heavily in our technology to make recruitment as frictionless as possible.
- Build the world’s largest worklife community for technical talents: We believe that no platform is currently addressing the needs of technical candidates in building careers. We want to help candidates find jobs they love, but also lobby companies to develop open source programs, guide candidates in learning, development and mentorship, assist developers in finding freelance gigs and remote work, as well as with their relocation.
The team at HiveConf 2018.
We want to take this opportunity to thank our users, our clients, XING, our angels, family and friends - but most of all our team. We are very privileged to have worked with a bunch of people who are curious, driven, empathetic and a hell of a lot of fun. Here’s to what’s next guys! :)
Emma and Kaya
Emma and Kaya on the way to a team offsite.
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