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Recruiting Humans with HTTP Headers (maxcdn.com)
24 points by bsiddiqui on March 14, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments


While we haven’t yet closed the loop and hired anyone from this method

That's the key measure. To be honest, this is such an old technique that it doesn't seem especially cool or interesting. We've found writing good blog content and working on open source to be effective at finding good people.


HN user randomdrake and I threw together a "standard" for this a few months ago and put it up here:

http://www.humanheaders.org/ and https://github.com/randomdrake/human-headers/

randomdrake actually built a few browser extensions that will read out the headers and show them to you if they exist, which is pretty cool.


I like it. Thanks for sharing @zrail


This was cool in 2008, maybe even earlier. It's not anything fancy anymore. I was able to view headers of pages when I was 15 and it is probably the worst way of getting applications. Instead, put up a few problems you had while development of your product and get solutions to your recruiting email. See if people can come up with similar or better things. This will make you find better engineers. Headers will get you script kiddies.


Don't be so negative. Recruiting is hard. For small things that like this that might get attention and are entirely harmless? Let it go.


How about an X-Human recruiting message with a LINK to some problems you have?

Very few people will see that link and it would be your onboarding process for new hires and it will save you time reading resumes and interviewing candidates.


Maybe what Google did[0], like:

X-Human: Work for us! {first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}@startup.com

[0] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3916173


I don't even need a computer for that, just use leading zeroes: 0000000002


Yay this! Another way to bounce off developers is through a humans.txt

http://higg.im/humans.txt

Mine is nothing special, just a simple quote. There is even a whole site that crawls these files.

http://humanstxt.org/Standard.html

Some of them are gold. Get ready to see lots of ASCII art :)


Seems like it would be less effective if everyone was doing it.


@zrail humanheaders looks cool. nice job!




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