The VP of Engineering at Uklon Evgeniy Khyst created the list of 15+ anonymous job search services on LinkedIn back in the summer. The editorial team of Make it in Ukraine decided to check how they are doing today, went through the list, removed services not working at the time of the review and studied the main features of services. Let's take a closer look at the most interesting ones.

Why is this topic really relevant now?

Recently, the demand for experienced IT specialists has greatly increased, while the supply has not changed much. Newcomers are not in demand as much as they would like, so the imbalance still remains. This has led to increased interest in alternative channels for finding talent.

What's more, in 2021, especially in the summer, many recruiters experienced the “wrath” of LinkedIn’s significant activity restrictions. Normal activity and sending out invitations to candidates, without spamming (only relevant ones), often results in having the recruiters’ account blocked. And if there is no LinkedIn local office in a particular country, tech support probably won't help with unblocking and validating personal documents.

Thus, it is not surprising that recruiters and managers (as well as potential candidates themselves) are looking with curiosity at new convenient, loyal and, most importantly, specialized IT projects and aggregators in the field of job search.

One of the most telling cases is the Ukrainian IT ecosystem, where IT infrastructure and services are developing by leaps and bounds. We wrote several reports and reviews about it (see the selection of articles at the end of the article).

Therefore, the emergence and development of Djinni, a popular and focused only on IT job platform, was a logical result of this trend. We will talk about it and other useful HR Tech startups below.

Handy Tip

If you do decide to fight LinkedIn and want to improve your effectiveness on it and avoid being blocked, two great guides are helpful.

• Invitation Limits, SSI, And Account Warm-Up: How Do I Escape The LinkedIn Jail?
• How to get a LinkedIn account out of a ban. 9 tips from an experienced "offender" (the guide is in Russian, you'll need a translator - but it's worth it)

But let's go back to alternative career services. Especially since many of them allow a great deal of anonymity, which many LinkedIn users greatly lack.

Moreover, the recruiter's or hiring manager's attention is not distracted by reading colorful resumes overloaded with unnecessary information, including personal information. Just skills, experience, and nothing extra.

Disclaimer: This list is not a ranking, the numbering does not show the level of importance and is added only for ease of navigation.

1. Djinni

One of the most popular Ukrainian IT services, demanded by jobseekers. And also for the companies and startups who are looking for Ukrainian developers (because UA Devs are really great - see links at the end of the story).

The service has convenient sectioning, candidate privacy protection and shielding from intrusive attention from recruiters. Popular talents may have dozens or hundreds of inbound inquiries per day, often irrelevant ones.

In addition, IT people would not be IT people if they did not make a handy monitoring bot in Telegram.

The service is also famous for being one of the most authoritative and reliable analytical reports and databases of salaries for specific IT roles. To complete the picture, let's name the second service, which is used by those who are looking for developers in Ukraine. This is DOU analytics. However, Djinni's salary data is updated almost immediately, while DOU makes snapshots and surveys several times a year (similar to StackOverflow).

In any case, both of these links are a must-have for those who are going to hire experienced developers for their team.

2. Recruitika

Another Ukrainian service of anonymous job search. In fact, it is under the wing of the influential Ukrainian IT and business media AIN.

There is a filter by specialization in the context of technical and non-technical vacancies and candidates.

3. Skyworker

Skyworker started as an offline career consulting agency. Now it is a SaaS service in the field of HR and marketing, which helps IT companies to automatically form an online pool (community) of potential job candidates.

It is one of the most interesting Ukrainian startups. Its idea came to the favor of not only the talents themselves but also potential investors and potential B2B clients. That's why the project raised a round of investments in 2020. And the project itself was valued at $1.5 million.

The idea is simple - it's a gamification of the job search and hiring process for IT professionals, for which it's often called "Tinder with Jobs." The candidate similarly takes a swipe at the offers: "like it / don't like it" 

Everything brilliant is simple. This approach helped the creators of the app to get rid of the problems with intrusive spam on LinkedIn. Now nothing irritates the candidates, and according to the creators, the Response Rate has increased by 5 times.

4. Talantly

The principle is similar: minimalism and zero information overload. The candidate creates a profile, sets salary expectations, and responds to offers with one click - "Yes/No".

One of the general sourcing problems that recruiters can't get rid of yet when making an offer to a candidate is hiding the salary figures. As well as being tangibly counterproductive to success, it also doesn't make sense (and makes candidates terribly angry).

That's why Talantly job ads without providing details of the salary will simply be rejected.

The presence of strong names such as MacPaw, Preply, Genesis, Sigma Software, Innovecs, NIX Solutions, and others in the project partners, also helps this project.

5. Bonus.work

Primarily, this project is positioned as a referral recruitment service. For each successful recommendation of a candidate, companies pay a reward.

The platform brings employers and recruiting agencies together with candidates, and also allows anyone to participate in an affiliate program.

At the time of writing this review, our editorial team has found 280+ ads on the service from interested candidates.

6. Jobitt

A simple and minimalistic service. Candidates and jobs in IT, marketing, and design are found here most often.

7. Inco.works

"Inco" means "incognito." So, it's a free service for all participants.

• Applicants indicate the skills they have and fill in any additional information about themselves if they wish
• Jobseeker's contact information is hidden by default and does not appear anywhere
• Communication between employer and jobseeker is anonymous ‘till the moment of the invitation for the job interview or ‘till the moment when the candidate wishes to make his/her information public
• Employers specify the necessary skills of the candidate when creating a job post, and the system automatically selects suitable CVs

Basically, it's about the same as in the other resources from this list. The only disadvantage - the service is in Russian, and not yet very much promoted (although sometimes it's quite good).

8. Jobs.Dev.By

As well as the Ukrainian DOU, the cult among Belarusian developers media portal Dev By has a section where specialized vacancies are published.

Since the creators of the site respect people like them, the opportunities for IT candidates to manage their personal profile on the site are very good.

For registration, the candidate fills out a simple questionnaire with 4 fields (what he wants to work as, current specialization, salary wishes and experience). 

The service has a decent reputation. At the time of writing, 796 vacancies have been published there.

Language: Russian

9. Geekjob

A popular service among Russian IT people. Famous for its anonymity, in addition, more than 20 Telegram channels from this service are dedicated to various IT professions.

Now the site has 26382 candidates and more than 1000 vacancies. On average, 8 responses per job (according to the site). It is possible to switch to three languages, including English (at the bottom of the page).

10. Mirajobs

It's an international service where both talent and recruiters can be listed (free of charge for both parties).

The creators of the service are guided by the BATNA principle. The aim of the service seems to be to get rid of any distractions from the key professional criteria as much as possible.

The emphasis, as in other similar services, is shifted to the fact that it is not the candidate who applies for a vacancy, but the recruiter is in fact the applicant.

Jobseekers can register anonymously. There's a simplified option to sign up via LinkedIn or Google account, or classically via email.

In the FAQ section, the authors officially state that they are a non-profit project and are essentially volunteers. And it sounds appealing to all the participants.

11. Just Join IT

An interesting and offers saturated Polish service with a colorful and pleasant design. On the main dashboard, there is a map of current vacancies by region (not only Poland but the whole world).

The focus of the service is more on job openings than on the promotion of candidate profiles. In fact, it is positioned as a job board. There is a section with brand cards and a magazine for the IT community, Justgeek (in Polish).

12. Hireterra

This is a U.S. service (head office is registered in California), focused primarily on working with technical IT specialists from the USA.

The key message of this platform is 100% confidentiality of personal data and data about the candidate's current place of work from any requests of recruiters. As long as the candidate himself in a personal conversation with the recruiter does not decide to disclose these data.

13. GoGig

This service, too, comes from the United States (Florida). The platform looks like B2B + B2C (the term B2B2C seems to fit it), has a bright business connotation, and speaks of itself as "a venture-backed" project.

It's easy to spot the focus in the key areas pointed by the project's creators:

• Working with talent
• Working with corporate clients, including Enterprise, and addressing their issues with Internal Mobility
• Focus on educational institutions and helping graduates get jobs
• There is also a message to the government to collaborate in terms of economic development and local and statewide workforce development

The project seems to be quite small at the moment, with 17 employees on LinkedIn, but it looks promising. We think it is worth taking a closer look.

14. Interview.top

Let's return to Ukrainian services. One of the main features of this project is that candidates simply record a technical video interview (of course, anonymously), and then recruiters evaluate this recording. As a result, both save resources and time.

This platform gives more privileges to candidates than to recruiters.

While for recruiters there is a commission of 50% of the candidate's first salary in case of successful hiring, the service is absolutely free for the jobseekers. Moreover, if the applicant is hired, he is promised a 10% sign-on bonus. In general, not long ago such bonuses were something strange, but given the critical shortage of tech-savvy candidates and the overall "overheated" market, this is becoming an increasingly accepted practice.

15. Make it in Ukraine

Yes, we did not participate in the original list, but forgive us for our impudence: we could not resist the temptation to humbly mention our service at the end of the review as well. 😇 So we put our key points just in a nutshell.

For employers:

• Free Job Board
• A very useful (without false modesty) Job Post Builder, where you can use a neat template to create your compact and impactful Job Description. We went out with this project on ProductHunt and confirmed our initial hypothesis. Many companies even today have difficulties with how to describe the role properly and create a Job Description. But this is the really crucial starting point, on which a lot depends.
• Hiring: you have an effortless opportunity to get a free consultation on hiring an IT specialist.

As with the services on this list, the anonymity of our candidate pool (a large and relevant pool, by the way) is kept until he decides to communicate with you and tell you about himself.

Bottom line

As seen, some services accumulate talents from Ukraine, Belarus and CIS countries (however, some of them are international). This is great because these are the locations where you can find some of the most experienced IT candidates. So be sure to take note of these services.

You probably remember that there is another option that balances the "time/money" dilemma. We mean: you can delegate the function of searching and selecting relevant specialists to those who have been working in this field for a long time. For those, who have a good network of partners and talents, and understand what exactly they are doing.

So if this second option seems interesting to you, a quick 15-min call with us will help you make the final decision. Book this call, and you won't have to spend days, weeks, or months digging through a bunch of services and irrelevant jobseekers yourself.

We are always ready to advise and help with hiring. Let's stay in touch.

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