Why we publish these
Most of our members never see the work that goes into the platform. That is fine. Software should feel invisible. But every once in a while we want to pull back the curtain and show what we have been building, because the platform you apply through this month is meaningfully better than the one you would have applied through last month. That is the point.
Here is what landed in the last twenty-four hours.
A smarter application form
When you apply to HiringFunnel today, the form asks for the basics: name, email, the role you are targeting, the salary range that would make a move worth it. We added one more thing this week — a short list of tangibles you can point to. Shipped features. Dashboards built. Revenue numbers. Talks given. Open source contributions.
Why? Because that is what hiring managers actually care about. A resume that says "led the team through a complex migration" is forgettable. A resume that says "led the migration of 40M user records from Postgres to Aurora with zero downtime" is interview bait. We want to know what you have, so we can help you tell that story before you ever talk to a recruiter.
The form is also smarter about compensation now. We pin every applicant to one of four bands — under $75K, $75K to $150K, $150K to $200K, or $200K plus — and the rest of the system knows how to route based on that. Members in the top two bands get one experience. Applicants who are earlier in their career get a different one tuned for where they actually are.
Faster member onboarding for coaches
Until this week, getting a new member into HiringFunnel meant a coach had to send a manual email with a login link, copy the right URL, hope the member clicked it, and then follow up if they did not. That is fine for one or two members a month. It does not scale.
We built a one-screen "add member" panel into the coach console. First name, email, click a button. The member gets a welcome email styled like our daily digest — same dark palette, same serif, same wordmark — with a magic link that lasts twenty-four hours. If the email gets caught in spam or the member never sees it, the coach can resend it from the member detail page in one click, or copy the magic link directly and paste it into Slack, iMessage, or wherever the conversation already lives.
Small detail that mattered: the old magic-link emails said the link expired in fifteen minutes. They actually lasted twenty-four hours. We fixed the copy to match reality. A member who saw "expires in 15 minutes" and could not log in immediately was getting a worse experience than the one who waited overnight and tried in the morning. The new copy reflects what the system actually does.
Behind the scenes: the start of continuous onboarding
The bigger thing we have been designing this week is the next version of the application flow itself. Today, you fill out one long form on /apply, hit submit, and wait to hear back. The version we are building splits that into a continuous flow. Step one is the basics. Step two is a ninety-second video from Jared on what to expect. Step three is the comp band selection. From there the flow forks: applicants in the higher comp bands self-book a fifteen-minute fit call directly on the site. Applicants earlier in their career get routed to a self-serve plan with a seven-day free trial.
Two design documents went into the repository this week — one for the user-facing flow, one for the file-by-file engineering plan. The schema migration that backs it shipped today. The seven step pages and the Stripe integration come next.
We are doing this because the current flow assumes everyone who applies is the same. They are not. An engineer at $220K with two years of FAANG experience needs a different conversation than someone trying to break in from a non-traditional background. The old flow gave both the same form. The new one meets each applicant where they actually are.
What is next
A few things on the queue:
• The seven step pages of the new continuous onboarding flow, plus Stripe checkout for the self-serve path
• Tighter integration between the daily digest email and the member inbox so a click on a digest takes you straight to the right row
• Bounce-webhook handling so we know in real time when an email never makes it to a member, instead of finding out three days later when nobody logged in
We will write another one of these in a week or so when the next round lands. Until then, if you are an engineer reading this and thinking about a move, the application form is open.