Triplebyte Review: Is Triplebyte Worth It for Hiring?
Jason Quey
Updated:
January 22, 2021
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Triplebyte is a software engineering job search platform that can put entrepreneurs and business owners in touch with freelancers and developers looking for employment opportunities. Although they’re a fairly new company, having launched in 2015, they have already raised over $50 million in capital through two private funding rounds.
Clearly, Triplebyte is a job search platform that’s on the rise. With so many freelancing platform reviews already out there, we figured we would turn our attention to a newer platform dedicated to software engineers, computer scientists, and technologists.
In this Triplebyte review, you will find a full review of their services, customer support, pricing structure, and more. This way, you can make an educated purchasing decision when deciding whether to turn to their services.
Triplebyte is a recruiting and screening platform designed for technology companies and engineers who want to show their skill set in a tech-oriented environment.
The service was founded in 2015 in the San Francisco Bay Area by Harjeet Taggar, Guillaume Luccisano, and Ammon Bartram. An early-stage venture, Triplebyte is one of the fastest-growing tech recruiting companies in the world.
Triplebyte brand itself as a “hiring marketplace” not unlike platforms such as Guru, CodeMentor, and Codeable. However, the platform sets itself apart from the competition by offering an extensive, technically-intensive screening process that weeds out inexperienced or unqualified job seekers. Therefore, customers have a more likely chance of finding part-time and full-time help on Triplebyte.
There are many steps to Triplebyte’s talent screening process. Unlike platforms like Fiverr, Triplebyte doesn’t let anyone use their services. Instead, they provide a screening process that a recruiter uses and begins with a 20-question online quiz, a phone screen, and an online coding challenge.
The online coding challenge component of the screening process entails, for most applicants, a test in which the engineer must design a simple game using a command line. There are also networking questions and system design questions that help ensure that only the most well-rounded engineers make it through the final interview.
From there, companies can sign up for Triplebyte’s services which operates like a regular job board. However, all of the job seekers on the board are software engineers, who you can sort by specialty, such as:
To get started, companies and small businesses can request a demo of Triplebyte’s platform, which can help determine whether Triplebyte is the right fit for your company. Technically, any small or medium-sized business can join Triplebyte, but their services tend to skew toward larger firms that have the resources to employ top talent.
Triplebyte is often praised for “fast-tracking” the hiring process of elite talent worthy of a Silicon Valley multinational. As a business owner, you get a streamlined user experience in which you can easily sort through hundreds, if not thousands, of qualified job candidates all vying for a position at your firm.
Unlike some other freelancing and hiring platforms, Triplebyte carefully vets candidates to ensure they meet the highest industry standards. There are many anecdotal reports floating around online written by job seekers who have undergone the Triplebyte interview process. The consensus is clear: Triplebyte’s technical interview and examination process is difficult and is comparable to the Big Four tech firms in Silicon Valley: Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google.
Another benefit that Triplebyte is often praised for is its elimination of unconscious bias from the hiring process. Unlike a hiring manager, when you use Triplebyte to hire a job candidate, they use an algorithm so that factors such as gender, race, or socioeconomic class do not have an adverse effect on your hiring practices.
Triplebyte helps business owners find the best candidates for the job based purely on their skills and qualifications.
According to Triplebyte’s Glassdoor profile, the company offers compensation packages and benefits to their employees that rival that of much larger firms in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Although this might seem insignificant to you as a business owner, it isn’t. The fact that Triplebyte has a strong reputation among its employees attests to its position as a stable growth company that will likely remain competitive in the job market of tomorrow.
Small and medium-sized business owners shouldn’t overlook Triplebyte for sourcing engineers in the long-term. If you see your company growing into a position where you may need to onboard several engineers in the years to come, then Triplebyte may be a stable solution that can fulfill your needs.
By some estimates, hiring a software engineer can cost up to $50,000. This figure doesn’t include the salary and benefits for the employee, of course, but rather the investment associated with hiring and onboarding a new engineer into a company.
According to Triplebyte themselves, it can cost up to $50,000 to hire a software engineer without the aid of a professional recruiting firm. Therefore, a percentage-based fee of between $17,000 and $32,000 seems like a significant bargain in comparison.
Triplebyte, on the other hand, offers a competitively-priced subscription model that allows business owners to hire elite talent for as little as $7,000 per hire. For this reason, Triplebyte is often sought after as a cost-saving tool for growth companies looking to hire new engineers at a low cost and with minimal disruptions to their existing team.
One of the problems with other services, such as LinkedIn, is that customers aren’t assigned an account manager to help them navigate the platform and find job seekers that pair well with them.
Fortunately, Triplebyte puts every customer in close contact with a dedicated account manager to help streamline the hiring process and eliminate hassles and headaches.
The account manager serves as your first point of contact whenever anything goes wrong or if you need help using their platform. Often, the account manager responds within minutes or hours (not days), which provides peace of mind if you’re looking for a quick solution to a problem you may be encountering.
Beyond that, Triplebyte features other unique perks such as applicant tracking system (ATS) integration so you can stay on top of applicant profile updates in real-time. Additionally, you can narrow down your search by using advanced filtering tools so that you only browse the candidates that are well-suited for your opening.
Like any job board or freelancing platform, Triplebyte is not without its share of criticisms and complaints. However, Triplebyte complaints and cons pale in comparison to their many excellent features and perks. In any event, below you can find more information about what some customers wish Triplebyte did better.
A somewhat common complaint about Triplebyte is that its vetting structure is too selective. In other words, Triplebyte tends to only allow top talent (i.e., think the top 1%, rather than the top 10%), which usually results in high expectations among the engineers using the service.
For instance, a qualified Triplebyte engineer is more likely to expect the compensation and prestige of working in the Big Four tech industry than that of a small or medium-sized business.
By allowing a large pool of engineers to join Triplebyte, more businesses could take advantage of their services. As it stands, it is somewhat difficult for many smaller businesses to compete with the resources and pulling power of the unicorns and tech giants in Silicon Valley.
Another complaint that is often lodged against Triplebyte is that they tend to appeal to technology companies that are situated in the Bay Area or New York City. Often, this excludes smaller firms that may not have the resources to employ engineers that are competing for coveted positions in large coastal firms.
Check out our list of Triplebyte alternatives.
Triplebyte is not transparent about their pricing structure. To find out what Triplebyte charges customers for their services, you have to input your personal information on their pricing page. After a short waiting period, an Account Manager will contact you and offer you a free quote depending on your company’s size and needs.
According to some sources, such as Y Combinator, Triplebyte’s revenue model is based on taking a cut of the engineer’s base salary for their first year. Taking a percentage of the employee’s salary is a customary business model in the recruiting and staffing space, so it’s not surprising to find out that Triplebyte has adopted this model themselves.
It may be surprising, however, to find that Triplebyte takes a 25 percent cut of the employee’s first-year base salary. In some cases, standard recruiting firms take up to 20 percent of the employee’s pre-tax earnings in their first year.
Triplebyte’s 25 percent fee structure is somewhat steep compared to other firms.
According to one source, Triplebyte is flexible when it comes to working with startups and early-stage growth companies. If a company does not have the resources to pay 25 percent of an engineer’s annual salary upfront, they can work with their Account Manager to find a monthly payment scheme that works for both parties (e.g., 2% monthly over 12 months).
To get a sense of whether Triplebyte’s services are worth it for your company’s needs, it’s important that you don’t overemphasize the cost of their services. Instead, one should focus on the value of their services.
Although Triplebyte doesn’t offer a flat rate for their services, it’s important to bear in mind that they take a sizable percentage of an employee’s first-year salary. According to Glassdoor, the median first-year salary for a junior software engineer in the United States is a little over $70,000. Therefore, if Triplebyte were to take 25 percent of a junior software engineer’s salary they would receive approximately $17,500 for their services.
For senior software engineers, Glassdoor reports that the median salary in the US is $127,000. In this case, Triplebyte would be owed roughly $31,750 for their services. However, it’s important to note that these metrics only hold true if the 25 percent cut is factually correct. As it stands, Triplebyte does not make public their pricing structure so no figures can be confirmed with 100% confidence.
We’re often asked by our readers, “Is Triplebyte worth it for hiring?” The answer, of course, is that it depends. For most companies, yes, Triplebyte provides excellent value that can save you tens of thousands of dollars on sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding new engineers.
There are 28.8 million small businesses in the United States. To make yours stand out, you need to attract top talent that gives your company a competitive edge. With Triplebyte, you can reduce the astronomically high cost to hire top software engineers in the world.
Hiring elite tech talent at a discount is Triplebyte’s raison d’etre and the reason why it’s quickly becoming one of the best-known Y Combinator alumni to emerge in the past few years.