The competition for engineering talent in Silicon Valley is fierce. Perks typically include signing bonuses, stock options, free meals, and more. In that environment, tech workers are always looking for the next best thing. But using a job-seeking portal like LinkedIn or GitHub won't do the trick here. Many employees fear that their boss or co-worker will stumble upon their profile and assume they are job hunting because they are dissatisfied with their job.

Enter Woo, a new startup pitching itself as an anonymous recruitment portal. The service, designed exclusively for tech workers, allows professionals to test out their "what if" scenarios with employers without dishing their name out. "While most tech professionals are happily employed, we all have ambitions for different things that we are curious to know if we can achieve. Woo helps people understand their market demand and the possibilities available to them, while remaining completely anonymous," said Woo CEO Liran Kotzer, in the company’s press release.

You can create your Woo profile from scratch or import data from the likes of LinkedIn, GitHub, and Stack Overflow. Woo will then strip off all personal identifiers. Viola, an anonymous profile is ready! The profile retains a basic description of a user’s skills — a backend engineer or mobile developer with five years of experience — but strips away identifying pieces of their current position.

Play the field without tipping your hand

When describing what they look for in a job, users create their own wish list: relocation, opportunity for promotion, desired technologies to work on, salary, ability to work from home, and type and size of company. The job seeker is then able to put their ideal preferences out to hundreds of tech companies — Woo claims that its network already includes leading tech giants like Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo!, and AOL.

When a company can meet the user's terms, Woo will send details on the position and the company to the tech worker, including information about the team, culture, and more. After a user decides to act on an offer from an employer, Woo will finally expose the individual's full identity to the company so the employer can make direct contact. The service if free of cost for job seekers. A company is charged with 10 percent of the actual compensation, but only if they hire a worker. Starting today, Woo is available on an invite-only basis to tech professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can request an invite by going to their website.