Ask HN: Stopping YC backed business from advertizing fake jobs at my company
I have no plans to hire anyone, not least in the roles that they applied for, and feel sorry that the candidates have wasted their time. Sending a spam application would put them on my blacklist anyway.
I am hesitant to reply to the emails as I thought they were some sort of phishing scam at first and would just mark me as a positive responder, resulting in more phishing / spam. Though I signed up with a fake email and it seems that they are actually trying to build a job site business at www.featurii.com.
The site asks users to connect their Gmail account then appears to spam me as the user, meaning that I can't just block the domain. I am also concerned about supposed mistreatment of candidates damaging my business image.
How would you approach getting them to stop?
Long-term, you need to go scorched earth. Review-bomb them on x, googlereviews, fb, alternativeto, etc. If you do it enough times you will get a VP's attention, and they will come to the negotiating table.
Also, worth a shot to report the issue to Google to investigate Gmail account misuse. Maybe even contact Customer Service directly if they have one, an underling may just want to care. Heck , most effective, have a lawyer friend lend you a company letterhead and have GPT send a fax/email to their registered agent or legal@ , with a cease and desist demanding they stop. Friends & vendors will put your script on letterhead free of charge.
From a whois, it seems they are hosted by cloudflare and namecheap too, so I may write to them incase the site goes against any of their content / usage policies
They claim to be backed by several major investors, but I can't find them in YC's startup directory [1] or Antler's portfolio page [2]. Their website also doesn't have any of the details you would typically expect from a legitimate business, such as an about us page, a description of their corporate history, or an office or mailing address.
1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies 2: https://www.antler.co/portfolio
Agree about the lack of info
Have you tried contacting the company directly and asking them to remove your company details from their platform?
People here seem to be relatively smart and clued up on the whole, and could suggest some things that I hadn't considered yet / create an interesting discussion for others to read.
The proliferation of these types of services is to make the job-application process essentially useless.
Just some Vietnamese spam site, who knows the motives. Setup email filters and move on.
Posting here to see if anyone else had encountered them before seemed a reasonable first step.
If not, send all the candidates a message saying you do not hire through unsolicited recruitment. Or set an autoresponder saying the same to any unsolicited message about an open position.
Even if they aren't actually YC-backed, I think YC should know.
Suspect they know now.
Good luck.