Candor helps job seekers make better career decisions by providing authentic takes on leadership, hiring managers, and co-workers at hiring technology companies.
Very excited to be on Product Hunt today sharing Candor, a product we've been building the last few months.
We created Candor to help top talent evaluate new startup opportunities by providing real feedback on future leaders, managers, and peers at hiring companies.
How can you confidently decide to work with people you only met once in an interview setting? How do you know their authentic work style? Your success and well-being at work is deeply intertwined with who you work with, yet there isn’t a good way to assess your compatibility with potential co-workers. Until now.
Enter Candor. After chatting with hundreds of startup employees we realized that most people in fact perform due diligence but behind the scenes, on private phone calls and in hush-hush meetings. Backchannel references are the norm. If you have a strong network you’re in better shape, but even then, in many cases you’ll get only one or two opinions if you’re lucky. Given the current state of affairs, every time you start at a new company there’s a high risk you’ll join a team that's a poor fit.
Candor’s objective is to make transparency and accountability the norm when it comes to deciding who to work with. Transparency shouldn't be limited by our networks, and it shouldn't be exclusive to private calls with first and second degree connections. Learning more about who you might be working with isn’t just a nice-to-have, it's a critical piece of the puzzle.
We're in our early days at Candor, but we'd love your take on current and former co-workers. Check us out at withcandor.co, browse reviews, and share your take on a teammate, manager, or leader that you've worked with.
Thanks for reading - excited to hear your feedback and questions!
Backchannels are a crucial part of recruiting — both for employees evaluating companies, and vice versa — but it can be hard to know who to backchannel to, and even harder if you don't already have a strong network.
Candor is solving this problem in quite an elegant way — verifying honest reviews of founders and leaders of companies. It's already a valuable resource for potential employees of many companies (they have 150+ verified reviews already), and I'm excited that they're launching today!
Love the idea behind this product @kelseycbishop! Glassdoor is only somewhat useful - after all, people leave managers not companies. Clean interface, great reviews already. What's your plan for soliciting constructive feedback vs angry rants?
@stephangoupille great question! I think there are a few parts to this - the structure of our review form, our approval process, and soliciting enough reviews to be representative of an individual's working style.
Our review form includes questions with predefined answer options which means that some of the feedback entails numerical scores on traits such as communication, respect, and feedback. We manually approve every review, so those from people that haven't worked at the same company or venture too close to harassment are not published.
We also try to gather multiple perspectives on a particular individual. One review is hardly comprehensive - we reach out to both prior and current colleagues to try to capture a variety of points of view and to be able to showcase areas of growth and development.
Love this idea! It’s really hard to get a sense of the manager / team / company you are joining through the interview process unless you know people that work there / have worked there before.
Curious if you can share more about what you are seeing resonating so far with your users and some things you all are excited to address going forward?
@stephensoward yes! Great to hear the problem resonates with you.
Our early users fall into two categories: candidates with a job offer and hiring managers conducting final round interviews. Candidates have a ton of anxiety when there's an offer on the table because they aren't sure if their future manager is the right fit. We've had so many of these folks say that Candor gave them the confidence they needed to make a more informed decision.
Hiring managers are using Candor to replace their current reference process because they can get references that are faster and less biased than traditional candidate-sourced references. One thing we're excited to build for hiring managers is the ability for them to ask follow up questions to the reviewer. A lot of hiring managers have told us that they want to ask more specific questions based on the role they're interviewing for, so we're excited to build that out soon.
This will be a game changer for every new grad trying to evaluate offers from different companies. The narrative should shift from picking the right company to picking the right manager especially at larger organizations. Hopeful Candor can drive that shift!
Kudos Makers!!! Accountability and transperency is often lacking when it comes to culture and “top management” in startups up-to 100 employees. By definition, such org systems are not yet formed in early stage startups — with founders not necessarily attuned to “managing people”. In a world where young talent is more motivated to work for startups, as opposed to corporates with such accountability structures may exist, there is a huuuge vulnerability gap. Huge need
Love to see it! Have seen too many super talented people join companies with way too little info on the people they're joining. Candor solves for this, particularly for anyone early in their careers without big networks to draw from. Excited to see them launch today!
There are few things more disappointing than going through the entire recruitment process, pitching yourself, and landing a job only to find out the culture is toxic, the org is poorly managed, or the leadership structure is opaque.
Candor empowers job seekers with honest information that is otherwise incredibly difficult to come by. I think Candor will ultimately generate greater innovation and creativity in the tech industry by keeping orgs accountable for their culture, and helping folks find great places to bring their great skills.
I’m really excited about Candor and the idea of having a platform dedicated to information gathering on one the the most consequential factors at any given organization, the people on its team. I’m hopeful that Candor can create more transparency for people making investments into organizations, whether it be their time, effort, or money.
As someone coming from a big tech company, this problem resonates with me. It’s so hard to understand what it’s like to work somewhere from Glassdoor when your company has 10s of thousands of employees. Really compelling idea to be able to learn more about the people you’re working for, not just the company.
What an interesting product! I can totally see myself using something like this to find the right start up for me…I’ve been struggling with that as of late, but it looks like this little blue elephant might be my ticket to the top!
Founder @kelseycbishop is a #rockstar and she is onto something big with Candor. There is nowhere else to find such honest data and/or reviews of potential managers and potential peers in the startup world at hiring companies. The professional world is ready for transparency and accountability in hiring and job searching...beginning with startups - Candor really addresses the void!
So excited for this launch! This will be so helpful to so many - I was looking for this exact type of comprehensive info a couple months ago. I’d expect this to be helpful beyond the startup stage as well. Looking forward to seeing this take off!
Very cool tool, @kelseycbishop !
needed in this marketspace! as someone who has both hired for startups and joined ongoing startups, this will be something I will use a LOT.
everyone is on their best behavior in an interview, but getting a real sense of the people you are looking to work with is tough- and I hope to see tools and scales on the tough-to-quantify stuff, like a scale that runs from "easy to get along with" up to "difficult to work with", and another scale for "how deals with problems, mistakes, errors". Maybe even a scale of "creates stress" up to "removes stress from stressful situations"...
Looking forward to this; Kelsey is a product genius, and knows how to build- good luck!!
I love this idea! Working at a start up is an extremely exciting opportunity, but it can sometimes be a little bit nerve wracking entering an environment that you know nothing about. I'm so excited that Candor is going to bring to life the true start up experience - the good, the bad, the culture, in a way that no other platform has before.
Love the product idea, can’t believe I didn’t find out about it sooner. Great practical application in the job market today will definitely be passing the name around to friends and co-workers
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