Terminal.io reviews
and alternatives

All you need to know before hiring your tech team with them. Read on to find out everything you need to know about Terminal.io, a platform of vetted tech talent, including its reviews, pros, cons, and Terminal.io alternatives!

If you’re reading this article, you’ve already decided to augment your team with remote or offshore talents.  

There are hundreds of companies in this field, but we would like to discuss Terminal.io as we’ve researched its background and reviews and collected many Terminal alternatives for you.

Let’s find out everything about hiring with Terminal!

What is Terminal.io?

Terminal.io is a platform for end-to-end remote team augmentation. From sourcing the tech talent to interviewing to onboarding them with a company, Terminal does it all. They help teams hire for a variety of tech roles, including QA specialists, Full-stack developers, Data Scientists, and Designers.
They’ve got an impressive portfolio of customers trusting them with their hiring decisions, including Skillz, Handshake, and Transfix. Finally, when all the agreements are signed and benefits are agreed upon, Terminal switches to improving teams’ retention by offering support of seasoned HR specialists, stipends, and instruments for a better, more effective collaboration.

Benefits of working with Terminal

With the shortage of local talent, Silicon Valley companies are in a constant search for strong candidates outside the USA. It’s no longer a secret that remote work can be effective. In fact, studies have shown that remote workers are slightly more effective than in-house workers. And don’t forget that they are also happier and enjoy a better work-life balance with hours saved on commuting.

Experienced devs abroad can cost a fraction of the cost of a developer with the same level of expertise in the US.

Terminal.io team did their research and decided to help connect US teams with specialists from those particular markets. Thus, right now, they’re offering engineers, QA specialists, and designers from Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Poland.

Terminal.io total funding of $27M was raised over three funding rounds.

Among its other benefits, Terminal website mentions the following:

  • They boast of having 90,000+ engineers in their pool. Thus, they’ve got choice and can fill even the hard-to-fill roles and positions
  • They’ve developed advanced AI technology to match clients with their perfect candidates. The algorithm identifies the tech stack and primary needs of a client and searches the base to find the most suitable engineer for the job
  • Terminal states that on average, their customers hire their perfect candidates within 45 days. Too good to be true? Might be, but stats don’t lie. Besides they offer the first candidate from a pool of pre-vetted engineers within 5 days. Now, that’s impressive!
  • Finally, Terminal is a platform for full-time engineering hires. They filter out the candidates only looking for a side gig and only accept the applications by those who are interested in a full-time commitment. Thus,
    a company can rest assured that they will have their chosen hire’s
    full attention

Terminal.io price starts at 5,000USD per month. The rate depends on the number of roles you’re hiring for, their seniority, and their tech stack.

Terminal hiring plans

Terminal hiring plan

Terminal reviews: is it legit?

Reviews mining for Terminal showed that while many of the customers enjoyed their experience of working with the Terminal company, it isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. But let’s start with the bright side first.

.

Terminal can get things done fast

1

As found on the Terminal website, they helped source and hire a geographically diverse team of engineers for Hims to help the company develop a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform.

And they did exactly that. Over the course of six weeks, Terminal helped Hims to hire three new employees, and then ensured a smooth onboarding process to help every candidate feel a part of the unique company culture.

They help with hiring in new markets

2

Entering new markets is tough. Understanding the challenges each market brings to the table is vital to making an informed decision. And since a bad hire can be rather costly (around 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings, study shows), it’s best to go with a trustworthy platform that knows the market and can offer you guidance and assistance along the way.

That’s exactly what Terminal.io did for Armory: they helped them hire outside the US. As a result, Armory got several new employees from Canada and Mexico, and they got them right the first time without learning the intricacies of hiring in these markets the hard way.

The company can help you land that core first tech hire

3

Hiring abroad means having to establish a team that would handle legal and organizational aspects for the employees from that area. And that might be more time and resource-consuming than one would think.Luckily, customers of Terminal don’t have to worry about this. Like in the case of Bluescape, the company set everything up in compliance with the local regulations.

So, Bluescape had that taken off their plate. Whew.

On the other hand, there are issues to consider when
choosing this platform for your hiring needs.

It’s not all that transparent

1

Several reviews on Terminal.io Glassdoor page stated that the company isn’t quite as transparent as one would want. Candidates aren’t happy with the poor feedback they receive, and employees are being let go with little to no explanation.

Such turnover can’t but affect the customer, too, both during the interviewing process and onboarding of the candidates.

They offer an overly generous benefits package

2

And while sounds terrific for a candidate (in fact, it is one of their unique selling points), it’s adding up to be quite expensive for the client. Among other things, Glassdoor reviews show that employees are getting full dental and health coverage, monthly mental health days, stipend for learning and wellness, remote setup, etc.

Is it healthy and beneficial to the employee? Yes. Is it slightly excessive (read “expensive”)? Again, yes.

Employees claim that management hires leaders that lack experience

3

One review reads, “when you pull back the curtain just a bit in ANY area, it is all smoke and mirrors.” Now that’s a serious accusation, and one we’d recommend keeping a close eye on.Management that lacks vision and can’t lead the team hurt team’s performance among other things.

This will show along the way. Thus, be careful for the sake of your business.

Now, are there other websites like Terminal in case you’d want
to look around and consider all of your options?
Most definitely. Let’s take a look at them.

Terminal.io alternatives

1. StartupSoft

The first Terminal alternative on our list
is StartupSoft, a company that connects Silicon Valley startups with seasoned remote developers. With offices in San Francisco, USA, and Lviv, Ukraine, the company connects the best of the two worlds – and makes hiring top tech specialists a breeze regardless of the industry and size of a company applying.

StartupSoft does all the job for their customers:
they check the developers’ soft and hard skills and analyze how well each candidate will fit in the culture of a specific team. As a result, out of all developers applying for a position, they would only hire top 5%. And while StartupSoft is doing the hiring, company owners can focus on marketing, business development, and other revenue-generating activities.

Terminal.io alternatives

Benefits of StartupSoft

Lower BURN RATE

StartupSoft boasts a 40% burn rate reduction for their clients. This is specifically crucial for early startups that have just raised funding and want to use the cash to build the company and reach positive cash flow.

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3x hiring faster

The company makes hiring 3x faster. How? By pre-vetting all the developers. They run a number of tests to check every candidate, filter out candidates that did poorly on those tests, add the top 5% into their pool, and introduce only the 100% vetted ones to the end customer.

HR service

The company offers HR services after your team is 100% staffed. They’ll introduce techniques to increase retention, strengthen loyalty, and reduce employee turnover.
- StartupSoft is trusted by WeWork, Namecheap, Samsung, and GoDaddy. So, if you’ll go with them, you’re in good company.

Flexibility

The company is small and quite flexible. Unlike its giant competitors, StartupSoft is light on its feet. The team is ready to accommodate your specific needs and source tech talent even for a hard-to-fill position. Their customers unanimously claim that the collaboration with StartupSoft despite their high expectations exceeded them.

When StartupSoft isn’t the way to go

If you aren’t ready to onboard the specialists the company will find for you. StartupSoft will deliver top-tier talent. However, since you communicate with the candidates directly once they’re hired, streamlining the communication is 100% on you. So, make sure you’ve got the processes in place to accommodate this transition.

If you don’t have a clear understanding of the tech specs of your project, maybe turning to StartupSoft is too soon. Since the hiring can, and most likely will, be swift, you need to do the groundwork and have your project description all figured out for this collaboration to be as effective as possible.

2. Hired

This is the name you’ve probably heard about. Hired is a platform that allows any company to get access to a pool of tech talent looking for their next big step. The company states that its technology and algorithms allow its clients to save 45 hours of sourcing time alone per position.

The platform is quite simple but we all know that beauty is in simple things. Jokes aside, the platform has proven to be rather effective. With a simple search by adding relevant sourcing filters, you can sort out candidates with the relevant experience, skillset, salary expectations, location, and expectations from the potential employer.

Terminal.io alternatives

Benefits of Hired

Plans for every budget

It has a bunch of plans for every budget. If you have a team of recruiters ready to fact-check resumes and conduct in-depth interviews to identify red flags, if any, you can go with the basic free plan. It’s quite limited, but it shares just enough data to get started. If you’d rather have access to all the information about a candidate and want to track hiring analytics along the way, you might want to consider their Basic, Plus, or Premium plans.

Modern vetting process

Hired offers live role-based assessments with live coding playback.
This truly is a unique feature for those companies that vet their developers through technical assignments. This isn’t just your old resume scanning. This is your chance to watch a candidate progress through the task.

Only "hot" candidates

4 out of 5 candidates reply to the initial message.
Now, with recruitment platforms, this is quite rare. Hired claims that they gather the most “hot” candidates, looking for their next career step right at this moment. This translates into a better response rate and a faster hiring process.

When Hired isn’t the way to go

When you’re looking for a company to do the job for you and only offer you a hand-picked candidate. Hired is rather a tool, not an ultimate solution. So, choose wisely!

When you don’t have an in-house recruitment department to process
the candidates suggested by the platform. Again, Hired isn’t a dedicated recruitment team doing the job for you. It’s a platform with access
to thousands of potential hires that you have to filter out and go through yourself.

3. Andela

Finally, last but not least of our Terminal alternatives, Andela is another marketplace of vetted tech candidates you might want to look into. From engineers to designers and product managers, Andela has a lot to offer to help you accelerate your company’s growth by growing its core tech team.

The hiring process with Andela consists of four steps: first, they gather all the specifications companies have for the project including soft and hard skills as well as industry regulations and preferred technologies. Then they identify what candidates from their pool of vetted specialists best fit these requirements and match companies with candidates for an interview. Finally, they help teams accommodate smooth onboarding and switch to providing HR services to improve retention and reduce turnover.

Terminal.io alternatives

Benefits of Andela

Smart skill matching

Andela team pride themselves on their machine learning algorithms that help match teams with great specialists for any role. Are these algorithms legit? We believe so given that 96% of placements by Andela are considered successful.

175K+ specialists in their tech pool

While the US market is experiencing an unheard-of shortage of talent, and there’s no end in sight, Andela boasts more than 175K specialists on its platform. This might now solve the problem on a national level, as we dare say not all of these technologists are actively looking for a job right now. But it definitely can help your company scale up fast.

70% faster onboarding

Recruiting doesn’t end with signing a contract. After that, there’s work to be done. That’s why Andela’s switch into HR gear after matching the company with the right candidate is ever so smart!

When Andela isn’t the way to go

When you can’t afford managing them every step of the way. Some customers complain that they had issues with Andela issuing invoices for the wrong amount month over month. Thus, if you don’t have the capacity to watch over their shoulder every step of yor collaboration, you better look for a different solution.

There seems to be a noticeable decrease in quality as reported by their clients. Therefore, beware that you’ll need to keep a close eye on the specialists you hire from them. Or look for an alternative you can full-heartedly trust.

Over to you

Now, we’ve explored what Terminal.io is, provided you with comprehensive Termimal.io
reviews, and offered alternatives to it in case you want to check out all of your options.

Shall we try?

If you’re looking for a reliable partner that would hand-pick top tech talent for you, we’d recommend checking out StartupSoft. We know we might
be biased, but we’re quite confident we’ll be able to make that perfect tech match for you.

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