

The Technical Debt of Hiring - idan
http://skillsapp.com/blog/2010/12/2/technical-debt-hiring/

======
jbermudes
Unfortunately it works both ways as well. I would love to tailor my resume to
highlight what makes me awesome for your company and particular
problem/domain, but so often I see job descriptions that are just lists of
buzzwords and some pathetic attempt to sound cool "we have ping pong! (read: I
swear we're hip)", "we're looking for a rock-star (read: slave)".

Then to top it off, when a hiring manager realizes that he doesn't have time
to deal with hiring, he passes it off to a recruiting agency -- something that
makes it even harder for me as a job seeker to help sell myself to the
company. Am I the only one that hates the secrecy that recruiters use in
describing their clients positions? They make it sound like I might possibly
be working for the CIA or something with their lack of details on what matters
(e.g. Company name so I can research their history and what they need) and
they give me an exhaustive list that nobody could ever possibly have had
experience with unless they had already worked at the company! No I don't have
10 years experience with $_OBSCURE_TESTING_PLATFORM, but give me a few hours
and Google and I can figure it out. But how can I relay that via a resume?
Especially one that will be filtered by either a computer or an HR drone that
knows nothing other than buzzword bingo.

This is an area that is ripe for someone to come in and revolutionize the
arena.

~~~
idan
We decided to focus on the employer side of things at launch, for several
reasons:

* We have to start somewhere

* Easier to ship a tightly-focused product, easier to build a message around it.

* Not sure where the revenue is on the candidate side.

* Honestly, it's just scratching our itch :)

We've given some thought to the candidate side, and hope to do something there
in the future, though. You're spot on about the recruiter firms.

~~~
digitallogic
As someone who is looking for a job, I'd be more than willing to shell out a
couple of bucks if I knew it would put me in contact with people I'd want to
work with.

Right now on the candidate side of things it's pretty much the same situation.
Go through job listings, send resumes to any that sound interesting, do about
4 phone interviews a week, pass on roughly 3 of them because they either
aren't working on something I find interesting, the position itself isn't
something I'd enjoy, or my gut tells me to walk away due to the impression I
got from the person I talked to. I will pay you to not have to deal with this.

------
rdl
If it is your startup, and if you're in the bay area, and even moderately
social, I don't understand why for your first ~50 employees you'd be posting
jobs to the general public at all (or at least, treating it as a very low
priority thing, like how VCs react to random bplans mailed to them without an
introduction).

If you as a founder don't actively go out and meet and recruit your core team
(maybe the first 20 people?), or meet them through referrals from other team
members, trusted friends, etc., you are doing it seriously wrong.

The only way I'd hire a random person is if it was for a specific role where I
didn't know anyone (say, CFO for a complex ad network, although I know plenty
of non-CFO accounting and finance people). Even then, I'd want references from
people I already trusted. Mining piles of resumes is not the efficient way to
find good people, and really, for a lot of roles, I want to know someone is at
least a B player, and would love an A; I'd rather a B than someone who may be
an A or may be a C. This is especially true for support, operations, etc., and
anything where I don't have domain expertise to evaluate competence directly.

If it's a specific domain, and you've exhausted all your 1-2 degree
connections, maybe find the internet nexus of discussion for that topic and
participate for a while until you can see who is great, then try to figure out
who is available. Pull, vs. push.

Maybe this is joshu's new secret startup :) (as speculated on Quora)

~~~
idan
As one of the founders, I readily admit that this product is not for every
hiring situation. That's fine! We stil think that there's a large use-
case/market here.

There are many startups, and many more that aren't "social". There are lots of
small technical shops that aren't startups at all, and don't have a deep
network of people from which to fish out hires.

Eventually, everybody's well runs dry. How to do hiring effectively when you
no longer have a trusted reference is a thorny problem. Even if we don't build
a perfect solution, there's lots of room to make things better.

And no, we're not Tasty Labs. :) Check our about page.

~~~
rdl
Ah! I didn't see a link to the main site at the top of the page so I didn't
check out the app description itself (I was not really that focused on it
either).

The actual solution you have looks like it should be interesting, and even if
you have a pretty broad and deep personal network, could still be useful.

I'd love it if you took outside assistance or some kind of social mechanic to
create skillsapps for domains outside your team's expertise. I'd be really
interested in crypto, security, protocol design, and satellite/rf network
engineering. Maybe partner with existing domain specific certification
entities?

~~~
idan
We are taking outside assistance; for any given topic we engage somebody
prominent in the field to write the exam.

"Somebody prominent" is somebody whose name is common knowledge for those
familiar with the langualge/framework/etc in question. Could be the inventor
(if we're lucky) or a popular developer who blogs on the subject.

If we limited Skills to testing subjects we know, it would be a very limited
app indeed. :)

~~~
btilly
How will Skills be different from <http://www.brainbench.com/>?

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madewulf
I can agree with the definition of the problem, but I am not convinced that
you can find a technical solution to it.

Currently the only information on the site is : "Skills is a tool for
identifying expertise and passion in developers."

I honestly doubt you can do that in an automated way, but hey, we'll see.

~~~
raganwald
_I honestly doubt you can do that in an automated way_

I have no idea whether they'll do it, but I am confident we can use software
to improve the process by an order of magnitude,and given the amount of money
sloshing around the process, I have great confidence someone is going to get
rich working on this problem.

~~~
idan
Bingo. Hopefully we're also the people you describe in the latter part. :)

~~~
JustAGeek
When I try to subscribe with my email, I get to this page here:
<http://skillsapp.com/subscribe/> which is blank, you might want to look into
that. :)

Happening with FF 3.6.12 and Ubuntu.

~~~
idan
Ugh, looking into it.

Do you have JS disabled?

~~~
JustAGeek
Yes, JS was disabled. With JS enabled there's no blank page. :)

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krosaen
True that interviewing is a resource hog and the post nicely articulates the
problem. But I don't think it really counts as a technical debt, if it were
you would gain something from it in the short run. For example, by not testing
your code you have a short term gain (faster deployment), but accrue long term
debt (slower development time as the % of new code vs existing functionality
becomes smaller).

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I think the point was that you accrue "hiring debt" as you stop reading
details in the resume so you can get through them faster (the benefit), then
stop being as detailed in the screens, again so you can get through them
faster. Each step, you are increasing the debt, because it moves on to the
development team to pay that debt by taking more time out for interviews.

Of course, in this case, all the benefit goes to the manager and all the pain
goes to the developers.

~~~
krosaen
I can see that... but kicking the can down the road is would be an obviously
bad form of debt, like a payday loan or something... Technical debt is a term
that to me is more interesting when you might have a payoff as described in
Eric Ries article: [http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/07/embrace-
technic...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/07/embrace-technical-
debt.html)

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grammaton
I'm really wondering how this is such a problem for them. I've seen my share
of tech resumes at this point, and I can't remember a single one focusing on
being a "motivated self-starter with a passion for solving problems" or any
such similar gobbledygook. One of the big benefits of a career in the tech
field is that you don't _have_ to resort to that sort of nebulous MBA-speak to
get across what you know and what you can do - and most developers out there
seem to be smart enough to take full advantage of this.

I'm wondering why they get so many bad resumes?

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Yrlec
I've been using codility.com to make the initial screening less cumbersome and
more scientific. It has worked aweseomly well so far! (I'm not affiliated with
them)

Resumés say very little about the applicant but seeing them in action through
actual programming tests says a whole lot!

~~~
AdamTReineke
I tried the demo problem and solved it in six minutes (missed only the integer
overflow issue). It seemed from the screenshots that time to solve wasn't very
prominent when comparing applicants. Is this an issue?

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roqetman
You know what? - We need something that's an amalgam of a dating site and a
resume site; take a look at okcupid sometime - they have a mass of questions
that users can add and answer that then provide a percentage match. Something
like this between employers/recruiters and prospective employees could trim
the dross, and help tailor the results for the specific job and individual.
Sounds like a startup idea to me.

~~~
raganwald
I agree this may be a good way of making money, but I'm not convinced that Q&A
is a good way of matching applicants with employers. This is as much a Game
Theory problem as it is a Classification problem. Candidates will write
whatever they think employers want to read.

<http://weblog.raganwald.com/2008/03/games-people-play.html>

