Overview
Hrnow is a recruitment platform built on one sentence, the line on its sign-in screen: "Masa depan rekrutmen dan pencari kerja tanpa perantara". The future of recruiting and job seeking, without intermediaries. It connects companies and candidates directly.
I joined as CTO. I own the technical side of the product: the architecture, the stack and how it ships.
The challenge
Hiring in Indonesia often runs through agencies, intermediaries or slow internal HR pipelines. Companies wait weeks to fill a role. Candidates send applications into silence and never learn where they stand.
Hrnow's promise to each side is blunt. To companies: "Hire in hours, not a week." To candidates: "Get the job without HR." Promises like that put pressure on engineering. If sign-up is slow or the app feels heavy, the product contradicts its own pitch before anyone posts a job.
Approach
I split the stack on purpose, giving each surface the tool that fits its job.
- Astro for the public site. Landing and marketing pages need to load fast, rank in search and make a good first impression. Astro ships mostly static HTML, which is exactly that.
- React for the app. The recruiter and job seeker experience is interactive and stateful. That is React's home ground.
- FastAPI for the backend. Python with typed request models lets us iterate quickly on the API without losing track of the contract between front end and back end.
The trade-off is three codebases instead of one. I accepted it because the alternative, one framework stretched across a marketing site and a full app, tends to make both worse. Clear boundaries also make it easier to bring more people onto one part without them needing to learn all of it.
What I built
- The product architecture and stack, from the marketing site to the web app to the API.
- Sign-up and sign-in by email or with "Continue with Google", keeping onboarding to a few steps.
- The React web app for recruiters and job seekers.
- The FastAPI backend that serves it.
- The Astro public site for landing and marketing pages.
Onboarding is the product
For a two-sided marketplace, the first screen is where most people leave. That is why Google sign-in sits right next to email. Both a hiring manager and a candidate can be inside in seconds, which is the most literal version of "without intermediaries": nothing stands between a person and the product, not even a long form.
The CTO part
Writing code is a slice of the job. The rest is choosing what not to build yet, keeping the platform maintainable as features land, and making sure delivery keeps pace with what the business is promising its users. Most of my decisions on Hrnow are about keeping the system simple enough that it can keep moving fast.
Where it is now
Hrnow is live at hrnow.asia, with the public site, the app and the API running on the split stack described above. The work continues as the product grows.