

Ask HN: A solution for "How to recruit?" - jmcentire

How many startups, established companies, and prospective employees would be interested in a new way to evaluate/recruit talent?<p>LinkedIn fails due to the eBay problem.  You can't publish the connection graph or text-based recommendations and maintain any sense of reporting balance.  The results are always biased and too many people are attempting to game the system.<p>My proposal relies on a system similar to page rank as calculated over a set of hierarchically arranged skills.  The more highly regarded the reviewer's related skills, the more certain the system is that the reviewer is a real person, and the more similar their opinions to yours, the more weight their opinion carries.  Because it's based on skills, searching for contacts is easy; you simply select the requisite skills in order of importance and can determine a minimal value.  For instance, you can look for a software engineer that is skilled in PHP, PostgreSQL, and French whose French is at least fluent.<p>There are a number of analytics approaches I'm considering to limit the ability of individuals to game the system.  Further, the system seeks to incorporate a "humanness" factor.  That is, each user's identity is verified as much as possible.  For instance, by validating a credit card (and checking it's name against the user's name); the charge on the card would be used to send a certified, restricted-delivery letter via USPS with a  confirmation code.<p>The data would use the ZKDB (zero-knowledge database) design to ensure user privacy and security and no data associated with a user and their opinion of another would be stored on our system.  This should allow the user to be confident in their assessment of an individual as being private while allowing the system to rate the opinions of "guest" accounts very weakly.  Businesses would be similarly identified.<p>No reporting would be available for an individual until a certain criteria has been met (number of reviews, et cetera).  Thus a user can't easily track changes or attempt to deduce who provided what review to the system.  This would help alleviate the eBay problem wherein I'm above average, you're above average, and we're all above average.<p>Sophisticated analytics would be employed to identify mathematical oddities which indicate gaming attempts like disjoint sets and orbits.  To be responsive, the analysis would be done in a distributed fashion on a cloud and then stored in an easily-referenced fashion.  The incentive for people to add information is basic quid-pro-quo.  You all want an easier way to hire people; the cost is simple, you must evaluate coworkers and employees.  Because the system hinges upon aggregate opinions of people and since no one person or group can significantly impact the reputation of an individual, there should be no legal concerns with libel.  We're merely rating an individual's skills on a relative scale according to the analytic system of our software.  It's the same for everyone and thus cannot target an individual.
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famousactress
I appreciate the thought, but I'm not sure I buy it. For the content to be
reasonable, the user's need to opt-in. Your pitch is that the evaluation will
be fair.. ie: not everyone will be above average. What's the motivation for a
potential employee to use/stay-on your site if he doesn't like his ranking?

I just can't get behind a service that figures out how to solve everyone's
recruiting issues by assigning them a Better Number.

~~~
jmcentire
Excellent question.

He doesn't. But, of course, he doesn't control his ranking -- others do. So,
deleting his account doesn't do anything to remove his ranking. Perhaps people
who are below average will then drop off and the cultural relevance of a
rating of 5 out of 10 will adjust itself. I'm betting that enough will stay to
make the site worth while -- certainly anyone for whom the system works.
Also... not all companies want a 10-point programmer. Those cost money. Some
tasks only require a 5-point developer.

~~~
maxdemarzi
I have been looking at the HR problem too and FamousActress has a valid point.
The chicken and egg problem here is HUGE... and anything that can be a
"downer" or "demotivational" will not make it.

~~~
famousactress
Again, even the idea of a '10 point programmer' or a '5 point programmer' is
depressing, and I struggle to believe that it could accurately convey the
complexity of the value that different people have in different contexts.

Where I DO see some interesting numbers having values in this area are where
the numbers aren't rankings, but rather indications of participation, passion,
and relevance. For instance, I think Stack Overflow scores.. or maybe even HN
karma points, might both be really valuable indicators. If I got a resume from
someone with a Stack Overflow score attached to it, I'd know that this is a
person who participates, is a good communicator, and knows the answers to lots
of tough questions! Not only that, but I can go look at his or her posts.

I think this is where your project needs attention... What's in it for the
employee? If only '10 point' employees really like your service, then I think
you're wasting your time.. '10 point' employees don't have problems finding
work.

~~~
jmcentire
Interestingly enough, 10 point "employees" can and do have trouble
differentiating themselves. MIT Ph.D. admission, for instance, is rather
selective. There is much research available demonstrating that there is a huge
qualitative difference between consummate achievers and great minds.
Unfortunately, most businesses and schools have far too many applications for
employment and need some easy metric to reduce the set to something
approachable. I'm not suggesting a blind hire of the top guy. I'm trying to
provide a more relevant metric than current exists. Any other system I've seen
in play is easy to game -- or hard to game, but in gaming it, you're becoming
the opposite of what the company/school is seeking.

Further, "what's in it for the employee" doesn't enter into it. I could easily
say: famousactress is rated as 8.34 for her dramatic performances but only at
5.21 in comedic roles. That has nothing to do with your willing participation.
I agree that it's depressing to be considered sub-par. But, there are so many
people trying desperately to stand out that they're losing their way.

Google can't hire the right sort of people because every metric they have
attempted to date has resulted in honest, dependable, clean-cut, recently-
shaven, knowledgeable CS graduates from top universities. Sadly, they're
trying to expand a business built (like so many other startups) by the ideas
of college drop-outs (or similar), who were too busy doing something
interesting to go to class and get good grades. Those interesting things
aren't bragging rights (level 80 character in each class and each faction on
WoW appears on very few resumes).

If I attach my HN information, you might disagree with my positions and
opinions. I'd miss out on the job based upon personal bias -- maybe I should.
But, you'll notice my karma here is _very_ low. I suppose that seems justified
since you're not on board with this concept. But, is it? Reddit is commonly
gamed. If I had an outrageous karma score, would you think highly of me or
consider me a karma whore?

Well, you might say, you'd simply read my posts. Great! Now, consider you have
a highly coveted position and 10,000 applicants. You can only read the posts
of about 20 applicants. Do you take the top 20 highest scores? What if the
21st highest was actually the best fit? Well, then you blame your metric. The
reason you blame your metric is because people will game their karma scores to
reduce their competition to only 20 other people who were busily whoring karma
and not building necessary job skills. At the same time, you can't deal with
10,000 resumes. You need a metric that's not easily gamed and that's as
representative as possible of an individual's skills.

Just like I can tag you in a photo on Facebook without your consent, this site
would allow me to rate your skills as an actress and as a programmer. My
opinion of your acting skill is pretty much worthless (whether it's good or
bad); my opinion of your programming skill is more significant -- but I'm not
going to single-handedly make you or break you.

~~~
famousactress
So you want to build a FICO score for employees. Gotcha. I just think it
sounds very challenging (or impossible) to get a number to reflect someone's
fit for a position accurately.. and difficult to get adopted. It's complex
enough to attribute a number that represents someone's ability to pay back a
debt.. and that's based on fairly straightforward historical behaviors that
aren't up for much debate... someone's skill and past job performance are
subjective.. so you'll crowd-source it and hope that the score averages out,
but that requires participation. What's the motivation to rate people? The
whole thing sounds gross.

~~~
jmcentire
It does sound gross. I'll admit that. A friend of mine, after hearing about
all the gorey details, hated the idea. He said it was intrusive and ripe for
abuse. Every bit of that is true. Your reservations are accurate and
commendable. I'd have the very same objections.

But, I've got a few ideas about how to do some initial data mining to build a
useful-yet-niched database. I'll target a specific industry and, I'm guessing,
enough people will value their skills that they'll be happy to encourage their
friends and colleges to rate them. The hope is that this can be done quickly
enough to generate sufficiently many data points for accurate analysis without
the initial dataset.

Once that happens, I'm banking on the utility of the system. If it's as good
as I hope, it'll be adopted by other groups. If it's not, then it should fail.

As far as the grossness factor and potential for abuse goes; I'm protecting
user information as much as is humanly possible -- at least, to the limits of
my own ability. The system will be open sourced and as transparent as
possible. Unfortunately, I can only guarantee so much. I can't think of a way
for users to verify what code is actually running on the server -- but, they
can ensure that the data they are sending to the server is exactly what they
expect. But, there is no certainty that the server isn't recording their IP
and associating it with the input for future data analysis. Hm.

------
andrewstuart
You have to talk to people to find out what they are like.

~~~
jmcentire
That's great -- assuming your applicant pool is small. Some employers throw
out any application that's not printed on resume paper with the watermark
oriented appropriately and an attractive font/style, et cetera.

Are these metrics truly indicative of an individual's skills? No. In fact,
many applicants might print their application on hot pink A4 hoping to get
noticed (and hoping that attention is positive).

Even with this tool, I'm merely reducing your applicant pool -- not selecting
employees for you. My previous company used a few personality profile tests
that were very effective in identifying people who'd work well at the company
and with one another. That's not really the point, though. The point is
determining who is a good Java developer and who isn't. Most recruiters I've
dealt with know only buzz words and can't differentiate between well-qualified
candidates and those who "used Oracle 10g to port BSD to J2EE over XSLT."

If your preference for UI engineers leans one way or another, the system would
make appropriate corrections to the recommendations. Rather than getting a UI
engineer who needs to work closely with a back-end developer and visual
designer -- one who can pretty much only manage CSS and Flash work -- you can
get results that include people who are more comfortable with the MVC
framework, can handle templating in various languages, hates action script,
can sling javascript in their sleep, and has a keen eye for visual design.

I'm not offering a one-stop, all-inclusive solution. I'm merely suggesting a
method by which to intelligently and functionally reduce applicant pools to
something the HR department can handle.

