Finding great colleagues in a pot of honey

The special thing about Honeypot is that it is not the applicants who contact the companies, but the companies who contact the applicants.

IT professionals (e.g. software developers, DevOps, testing engineers, engineering managers, data professionals or machine learning engineers) who are open to a new job create a personal profile in which they provide detailed information about themselves. In addition to the basics such as name, contact information, experience and skills, recruiters can also find out about salary expectations, preferred locations, contract types and desired roles. Most applicants also write a personal summary about themselves and sometimes provide links to work on GitHub, StackOverflow or similar.

In HR, we set the search filters so that the skills and requirements of the so-called “talents” match our expectations and look through the individual profiles. It is particularly helpful to be able to filter directly according to the tech stack we need and to select, for example, individual programming languages that applicants absolutely have to have mastered.

The first contact already includes an invitation to an interview and an indication of the possible salary. The latter in particular is rather unusual, but can save a lot of time for both sides. Apart from this, the “talents” can consult the Akquinet tech@spree company profile we have created to get an initial impression of the company.

Throughout the year, we were actively and cheerfully supported by our Client Success Manager Francine. She regularly exchanged information with us about the current status and even visited us in our office in Schöneberg! She also continually gave us recommendations with candidate profiles that matched our requirements. So it was partly thanks to Francine that we came across Ole’s incredibly likeable profile, contacted him and are now working with him at Akquinet tech@spree.

He works as a senior full-stack developer in the so-called “A-Team” and is held in high esteem all round. The same applies to a second colleague who we also got to know through Honeypot and who is now part of tech@spree as a front-end developer, especially for Angular.

How was the experience with Honeypot from their perspective?

How was your experience with Honeypot?

Ole: In the beginning the site works like any other site where you enter your profile. You click a lot of checkboxes with skills and fill in former employers and projects. I found it quite nice that the site also asked me about one or two personal things and which general conditions are important to me in an employer and my work.
Before the profile is published, an “agent” contacts you and makes sure that the profile is complete and offers you tips on how to improve it.
The profile is then activated for a short time – I found it positive that this is limited – and you receive inquiries from employers. I think my profile was online for 1 or 2 weeks and I had around 15 inquiries. The quality of the inquiries is very mixed. There were some who hadn’t looked at my profile at all (at least the personal part), but also – as from Mareike (our tech@spree recruiter) – super nice and individual ones. I accepted around 10 or 12 of the 15 inquiries, which led to a first interview. I have to say that with most companies you just slip into the normal application funnel. It happened often enough that I was asked why I had applied. I don’t want any special treatment, but I didn’t feel much of the “the company is applying to you”.
Contact was mostly made directly via email or other channels. We only used Honeypot for the initial messages and to exchange email addresses. However, I thought it was quite nicde that you had a good overview of the companies’ services and profiles. You could often see the salary range, company size, gender distribution and benefits. In addition, the sentence used by the companies to describe themselves was often very informative, or at least allowed conclusions to be drawn.

Second colleague: I had a very good experience in general. There was a counselor who helped me with my profile and my wishes. I also thought the questions and help prompts in the profile were very well worded, so I was able to describe my experience and skills well. Honeypot also has good help documents and statistics on the job market in their dev blog, where there is data on what dev jobs are in demand and what the salary averages are for each experience level.
My consultant was very friendly and helpful. The UX of the website was intuitive. I was able to break down my experience into different categories such as frontend, backend, fullstack, and the recruiters were able to see where my strengths and experience lie and where my weaknesses are.
However, it may not be the right platform for newcomers with very little experience. I applied there a long time ago when I had less than a year’s experience and was rejected.

Would you use Honeypot again?

Ole: It’s hard to say. On the one hand, most of the contacts with the companies were sobering and didn’t really benefit me. On the other hand, it was nice that I only had to update my profile once and could save myself a cover letter for the applications. It was also super exciting to get to know so many companies in more detail. I would never have come across Akquinet tech@spree in particular otherwise. If I were to use it again, I would definitely be more careful when choosing my contacts and would perhaps ask 1-2 more questions before going for the first interview.

Second colleague: I had a very positive experience with Honeypot and would recommend it to others. I think you shouldn’t use it as the only job search portal and you should also proactively search and apply at the same time to increase your chances.