The Right Sort
We intelligently engage and recruit the sort of software engineering team talent preferred by elite product teams.
We intelligently engage and recruit the sort of software engineering team talent preferred by elite product teams.
SortIQ's personality is more closer in proximity to developer than recruiter becasue we are developers who recruit. Hiring teams and candidadates can expect a fast, fluid conversations, and a candidate funnel that elevates the sort of your people you need prefer so you can scale faster, and on the right terms so they'll be motivated to stick, be a part of your team, and on the same mission. While we can't overcome the odds of a compensation advantage if you are going up against a better funded team, we can help you connect with people who would rather work with you and experience suggests our approach is better than throwing more money at the problem.
We spend at least one day a week on site as a part of your team. This enables candidate engagement from an internal team member's perspective, enhanced recruiting and screening calibration, higher quality feedback loops, and fast recruitment efforts. We also spend more time getting to know candidates and team members leading to sustained and stronger candidate interest, better matching, and faster hires owing to less catch up and closing effort on the backend of a recruiting conversation.
Our market tested research and community engagement methodology using software tools and both sourcing and recruiting techniques developed internally over 19 years. We belive recruiting is a get out of your own way problem so we pull out all the stops by tearing down the medieval castle style fortifications, drain the moat, update the screening and interview guantlet, pick up the phone and talk to candidates, and focus on an enticing conversation focused on helping canddiates see themselves as a part of a team they want to be a part of. Not every candidate is a hire, but they have friends and treat people well which lends itself to referrals. Our biggest issue is that the sort of people we recruit stick around for a really long time so there isn't as much demand for our services later on. That hasn't stopped CEO's who know our work from calling us back and telling their friends about us years and even decades after they we last helped them. In many cases, our clients utilize our consulting services beyond recruiting because we don't just recruit...we build software, offer community engagement, and have a growing frontier talent and AI focused practice area for companies looking to embrace and better utilize frontier models in their software engineering and business efforts.
Recruiting is a business challenge that kept me up at night as a founder. I also enjoy that it blends my experience writing software, working as a director of statewide and Congressional get out the vote campaigns and of Congressional finance and fundraising, and competing in, coaching and judging speech and debate events.
As a developer, I have enjoyed writing software and coaching teams of developers who are much better coders than myself. As a recruiter, there is something else going on entirely. I enjoy the research, the conversational variety, and the satisfaction of watching the individual contributors I place on teams as well as the larger teams compete. Being based in the Washington, DC Metro, the teams I work with are often in direct competion with Bay Area startups with vast resources by comparison. So there is a bonus when I can equip a smaller team with the right people to go effectively up against those often better funded players.
SortIQ is my third company, two being software companies and one being version 1.0 of what I am doing now. My first software startup failed because I recruited the wrong team. The second and third companies were profitable and contributed software and services that helped the founders of nearly a dozen other startups achive exits and boosted the careers and lives of the people I recruited for those teams.
Something that often goes unsaid when it comes to recruiting is that recruiting is like sales. Recruiters work closest to the dollar and it turns the mindset into something more like sales than matchmaking. It isn't about hiring the right sort of person for the job, it is just about the spread. With SortIQ, we take a different approach that ensures we are invested in every outcome just like the team we support is. We only work on a retained basis, so there is no commission or spread to influence the outcome or our team cutlure.
SortIQ is inspired by these challenges and lessons. The challenge of having great conversations and making really good teams into great ones is what inspires me every day.
-Robert Neelbauer
Selected organizations across software, higher education, and services.
