Why Traditional Recruiting Tools Fail for Engineering Hiring
I worked for many startups before switching to building recruiting tools. During that time I watched every single engineering team struggle to hire. Not because good engineers don't exist. The tools were just bad.
Let me explain.
LinkedIn Recruiter is expensive and not built for this
LinkedIn Recruiter Lite runs about $170/month. The full version is closer to $800. For a 5-person recruiting team, that's $50K+ a year.
What do you get for that? 900M+ profiles. Most of them are sales reps, marketers, and people whose main skill is posting motivational quotes. The actual engineering talent is buried under all of that.
The filters don't help much either. You can't search by programming language. You can't see salary data. You can't tell if someone switched jobs last week or has been at the same place for 6 years. The "skills" section is whatever people typed in. I've seen "Microsoft Word" listed right next to "Kubernetes".
Engineers I know have dozens of unread recruiter messages on LinkedIn. Even a well-written InMail is competing with all of that noise.
The signals that actually predict a good hire
After talking to recruiters and hiring managers at about 20 different companies (mostly Series A through C), I kept hearing the same things. What matters for engineering hiring is fundamentally different from other roles.
What they build matters more than what they claim. A "React developer" who maintains an open source component library with 2K GitHub stars is very different from someone who just listed "React" as a skill. LinkedIn treats them the same. According to a 2024 Stack Overflow survey, 87% of professional developers use GitHub. That's a massive signal pool that LinkedIn completely ignores.
Timing predicts response rates. Someone who changed jobs in the last 30 days is almost never going to respond. Someone who's been in the same role for 3+ years and just updated their profile? Way more likely. In our early testing, targeting profiles with recent job changes (7-90 days) improved response rates by roughly 2.4x compared to cold outreach.
Engineers check salary data before they reply. They use levels.fyi, Glassdoor, Blind. If your offer range is off by $30K, they won't even take the call. Having salary benchmarks visible before outreach saves everyone time.
Career trajectory reveals fit. An engineer who went Google > 10-person startup > mid-stage company has a completely different risk profile than someone at the same bank for 12 years. Both can be great hires, but for very different roles.
What we built and why it's different
Candyfloss isn't trying to be "LinkedIn but better". We looked at what actually matters for technical hiring and built around those signals specifically.
Here's a real example. Last week I searched for "senior backend engineers, Rust or Go, Bay Area, changed jobs recently". On LinkedIn that query would give you maybe 40 noisy results after 10 minutes of filter tweaking. On Candyfloss it returned 847 matching profiles in 0.19 seconds, each with salary estimates, GitHub activity, and job change timeline attached.
The core differences:
- Job change signals - we track when people switch roles or update their profiles, in real-time. Not quarterly batch updates.
- Salary benchmarks - p25/median/p75 ranges pulled from market data. You see what the going rate is before you draft the outreach.
- GitHub depth - actual contribution history, languages used in production, repos maintained. Not just a link to an empty profile.
- Natural language search - type what you want like you'd tell a colleague. No boolean operators, no filter menus, no 15-click workflows.
Where we're at
We're early and we're not going to pretend otherwise. The index is growing every day, focused entirely on engineering and technical roles. Search is fast, usually under half a second. We're adding GitHub data, salary benchmarks, and job change signals as we go.
Try it yourself
I'm biased, obviously. I'm the one building this. But I also spent years on the other side watching good recruiters struggle with tools that weren't made for them. That's why this exists.
If you're curious, sign up and run a search. Free tier, no credit card. See if the results are better than what you're used to.