7 ms·

A Plan for Résumé Spam

81 points by raganwald 16y ago

someone_here 16y ago
This has a chicken and egg problem. You can only get companies to use this if employees use it, and you can only get employees to use it if there are employers. Employees would not want to limit themselves for no reason, either.
- raganwald 16y ago
  One implementation would be a service where a job ads includes a submisison mailbox like Gu1D@planForresumespam.com. The service company collects statistics about who is spraying their email everywhere and provides employers with a "spray score" for each resume collected. No employee involvement would be required.
  - m_eiman 16y ago
    Don't use an external domain, just forward jobapplication@employer.com to incoming@applicantfilter.com and have it forward only the approved applications to hr@employer.com. Fully automated and transparent. Store the rejected applicants and send them an automated "thanks for your time" when the position is filled.
ig1 16y ago
An interesting idea (I'm sort of involved in this space), but I'd be a bit worried about the legalities involved. A few years back there was a case where a group of companies (I think in the construction sector) were prosecuted for operating a cartel because they co-operated in developing a blacklist of "trouble-maker" employees (as a do-not-hire list).
- raganwald 16y ago
  I have also thought of lots of problems with this business that need to be solved... But that's ok, that's why we always say the execution is more important than the idea: "Execution" is often a blanket term for "Negotiating all the hurdles and picking the right trade-offs and which problems to solve to make it a reality." One that would keep me up at night is an employer who 'tastes' their employee's resume by sending it to a fake job ad. If it has a positive spray score of any magnitude, they have just learned that the employee is job seeking. Bad!
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
colinprince 16y ago
/This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating married people/ Doesn't make that much sense, since we're all prolly gnna change jobs 5 maybe 10 times. I hope I don't get married 5 or 10 times. Maybe job applicants could put a note on their resumés saying what they want to be doing in 3 to 5 years.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Ok, this feels like we're quibbling. Would you accept a more liberal definition of marriage such as common law? This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating people who are living with someone else. Slightly more accurate but you know.... I'm going to claim poetic license. The underlying sentiment seems to be correct even if there is some room to argue the simile isn't 100% isomorphic to reality.
  - modoc 16y ago
    Great way to select people who can be lived with, aren't terrified of commitment, etc... Although there may be fidelity issues... :)
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - Periodic 16y ago
      I've heard people say, when speaking of potential partners, that there's nothing better than a widow/widower. They've already proven they aren't afraid of commitment, that they can get along with someone, and they are single through no fault of their own. The equivalent in this case would be people who did good work, but at a company that went under for reasons out of their control.
      - mkramlich 16y ago
        Therefore a two-time widow is even better. And a three-time widow. Wait, now I'm getting suspicious...
catch23 16y ago
how would it solve the problem of recruiters sending the same resume to a few hundred places? I know that there's a really old resume of mine that has been forever circulating from a firm I used years ago.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Most algorithms that work with real world data have a simple core but end up covered with warts and exceptions because of stuff like this. No doubt a company that does a good job with this has some special rule sor scoring weights for resumes sent out by recruiters.
- defen 16y ago
  Have it go through your facebook account & you have to click some sort of confirmation link in your email before your resume gets posted.
WillyF 16y ago
I think that a much simpler solution is to charge people to apply for jobs. That's what colleges do. There are certainly some complications that would come along with this, but there would be far fewer than with keeping a database of everyone who has ever applied for any job. I don't love the idea, and I know quite a few people have tried making it work unsuccessfully, but I still think it's far more realistic.
- raganwald 16y ago
  Clearly that has worked about as well as micro payments for email ;-) But seriously, there is an equivalent strategy, and that is putting up a small road block such as writing a test application. The problem is that many qualified people won't do it. Those who are currently employed are the least motivated to pay in time or money to submit an application.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Last I checked, theladders.com is still fairly successful (business model: pay $35/month for your job search).
- cj 16y ago
  Colleges charge fees more to make money than to screen candidates. We don't want to have the job market profiting from the unemployed. Stanford University, for example: $90 fee X 20,000 applicants = $1,800,000
  - pwim 16y ago
    The first goal of universities charging to cover their costs. Stanford isn't pocketing that 1.8 million.
    - cj 16y ago
      Maybe my opinions are a bit baised as a student who spent over $400 in fees applying to colleges. I would have assumed that my universities' costs would be offset by the $40,000 I'm paying every year for the next four years, rather than erroneous fees that aren't tallied in the advertised total cost of attendance.
harpastum 16y ago
What if someone set up an "almost hired" list? That is, after a company finishes its job search, it can send a few names (with applicant approval) to the service. Other employers can enter names from resumés they have received, and find out if that applicant made it to the final lap on any recent interviews. There's no direct benefit to companies putting the names in, but it could be seen as a 'pay it forward' sort of service -- if you benefitted from this, please put your finalists in after you choose your hire. One important distinction the service would have to make is not allow browsing of names, only specific name-lookup, so job-seekers can only be found by companies they're applying to.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  There are dicey and unpleasant issues involved in sharing information about your hiring process. ... especially if you're going to be talking to people who are presently employed...
tjmaxal 16y ago
Even though it's not perfect our current system has a lot of advantages over previous systems like hiring only relatives, or making everyone contract labor.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tptacek 16y ago
I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I interviewed with you, especially if it was on a formalized routinized basis and most especially if it was to drive some service that computed my value as a candidate. Things - 'tptacek - is - OK - with is a very poor measurement of how good an idea is or isn't (unless it involves Javascript crypto in which case I am right), but I thought you might want the data point. I like to think of myself as an A-player (or at least an A- player), and I'd skip talking to your company if I knew it did something like this. For what it's worth, I think a better way to supply talent to your team is not to depend on a steady inflow of resumes to begin with, but to actively recruit. We do classes, we give talks, and I yell at people on Hacker News; all of these things have outperformed job reqs for us on recruiting.
- oldgregg 16y ago
  Short of new data privacy laws there is an onward march that will result in everyone being rated for everything they do -- and you won't be able to do anything about it. This is already the case with credit bureaus, etc, but it's gonna get much worse.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Employers and quality prospects are a market. Trend or no trend, law or no law, unless the rest of the market overwhelmingly approves of "rating services" like this, I'm never going to interview with a company that threatens to do this to me. I'm suggesting that the market may correct for this solution to "resume spam". And, again: stop trying to hire people by reading resumes. Resumes are worthless.
- btilly 16y ago
  I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I interviewed with you... PARTICULARLY not if through those other people there is a reasonably high chance of it getting back to my employer. You could avoid that by having the service not provide any level of detail, just a "yes/no, this person passed threshold X requests in time T." But if that got popular then I guarantee that craptastic employers would get the bright idea of, after hiring people, having lots of fake companies report interviewing them. This would make their current employees have trouble getting interviewed elsewhere.
ismarc 16y ago
The main problem with hiring/resumes isn't just volume. Volume has become a problem with the ease of sending the resume. We removed a barrier(fax, mail, drop off) and naturally the flood started. Businesses compensated by listing arbitrary values for hard skills/experience, which in turn applicants sent resumes to places they were even more unqualified for on paper. The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person doing the job. The need for human interpretation is too ingrained in the current process, even with the filtering mechanisms in place
- cabalamat 16y ago
  > The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person doing the job. This varies according to job. E.g. for a programming job, the employer could ask applicants to solve a programming problem, such as FizzBuzz (or something harder).
  - ismarc 16y ago
    But even that doesn't provide any quantitative judgement of what the job requires or what the applicant can do. It says they can write code that does X. I've never been a part of or seen a job where the only real skills needed were syntax knowledge and basic familiarity with common algorithms. There's things like interpreting requirements, time/task/priority management, bug diagnosis, impact assessment, domain knowledge. How do you quantify "Can figure out why we keep getting kernel panics after the kernel upgrade on only some machines? Oh, the thing the machines have in common are they are the multi-core/multi-processor boxes. Is it a bug in our code or the kernel? Are they still acceptable for the position if they can't identify the problem, but can identify that rolling the kernel back is a viable short-term alternative?" The ideal scenario is the applicant mashes a button and gets a list of job they're truly qualified and a good fit for (as in, highly likely to get a phone screen on) and the hiring company can mash the same button. Everyone keeps trying to find new ways to invent or improve the button. No filter or screen is going to work until companies can definitively measure the quality of applicants between two postings for the same job (e.g., A/B test job position listings) and candidates determine if they are qualified based on that. There's a lot of problems to solve, but the biggest by far is the fact that 90% of the jobs out there have only "can breath, assistance to breath is ok" and "can show up" as the hard skills that are required. I'm not kidding, go spend a couple of hours on Monster, or Craigslist...at least programmer jobs have <arbitrary number of years> in <technology X>...most jobs don't.
riffer 16y ago
First off, I want to congratulate you, reg, on coming up with such a fantastic idea. With Joel's post, and the no-job-hoppers-wanted fracas from several weeks ago, this is something that was in the air, and you were able to pick up on that, and put it into words. Even better, you don't appear to be trying to figure it all out on your own in a vacuum. One approach to getting started would be to provide resume screening services to employers. I'm sure there are a bunch of service businesses like that today, but if you solve the problem like it is an NLP problem rather than an HR problem, that could be a differentiator. At a large enough enterprise, I'm sure there are people who are applying for a bunch of different positions over an extended period of time, and just being able to solve that problem intelligently for that one enterprise is something that must be useful for some big firm out there. So I don't think you need to have a bunch of employers on the system to get started. But that doesn't address the real challenge, which seems to be that your service provides clear benefits to the employer, but not for the employee. The employer gets better candidates, more efficiently, and almost every business that's hiring acknowledges that they have trouble finding enough good candidates. What about the potential employee? Why would they want to participate in this sort of system vs. the status quo? That seems like the challenge to me, more than legal issues, or the employer side of the equation. There is definitely terrific potential here, exactly because hiring is currently so inefficient: it'll be really interesting see how this idea develops.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
crux_ 16y ago
There's a bunch of obvious problems, off the top of my head: People should be able to to look for a job without necessarily tipping of their current employer. Ambition and hard work, unless expressed very carefully, could well become an endless trap. Those who work in industries with terrible unemployment will continue to be stigmatized even after they abandon their search in their old field and strike out into new ones. There's potential for abuse, e.g. Apple could falsely report all its current employees as submitting bajillions of resumes and thus prevent them finding other jobs. There's the problem of recruiters who submit resumes indiscriminately on a job seeker's behalf, sometimes without permission or even the seeker's knowledge.
brc 16y ago
Hiring and firing people means there are many laws implemented to protect the guilt and the innocent. Where there are laws, there are lawyers. There's also no clear place for monetisation. Avoid ye, for here be dragons.
strlen 16y ago
What exactly is wrong with Fizz-buzz as a 'spam reduction' technique? Raganwald's method has several issues: it's unfair to people who are very picky and are only looking for the best jobs themselves. Very often they're the best people, for whom the search for a position that will fully use their talent is much harder: they apply to companies that have a long hiring cycle and high "false negative" rates, while they will reject offers they dislike. Second, there's the obvious problem of privacy: it's a huge problem for passive candidates (again, who are often -- but not always -- best of the best) and a problem for candidates who apply for tough-to-get positions, have a bad day (or the person interviewing them has a bad day) and now become "damaged goods" by the virtue of a publicly known rejection (which could be no indication of their lack of competence).
- deleted 16y ago
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TeHCrAzY 16y ago
Couldn't a large proportion of resume spam be filtered just by asking the applicant for something specific, and ignoring anyone who doesn't comply? IE. Add a specific phrase to the subject of the email. You could embed this in the middle of the job spec; people whom don't read it carefully are likely not worth interviewing anyway.
edw519 16y ago
There's a huge inefficiency in the hiring market, and someone is going to make some money solving the problem. There are huge inefficiencies in everything. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. The only ones who think that hiring is a problem are those who haven't solved it. Think of it as a bell curve (what a surprise). Some companies suck. Most are mediocre. But a few have it figured out. I've been on both sides of this process more times than I can count and I've noticed that the companies that do it well have a lot in common: - They rely on up front third party aptitude and personality screening to eliminate 95% to 98%. They pay, but it's a bargain. - They use interview quantity (lots of them, by phone and in person). - They use interview quality (peers, supervisors, customers getting well below the "surface"). - They use variety (interviews, testing, get-togethers). - They check references without a canned checklist (logic path driven, in-depth). - They use HR primarily for formalities. - They take their time. - They "solve a long term problem" for all parties involved. I admire your desire to solve a problem that affects so many, but I wonder if your approach is the best way. Maybe it's better for the mediocre to do what already works by copying the excellent. Then they wouldn't have such a big problem to solve.
- riffer 16y ago
  This is an excellent outline of hiring best practices, each of these bullet points belongs here. And yet, for every firm that does this, there are at least 10 that don't. That means that there is a rich market for what reg is proposing, and it means that the solution merely has to be more attractive to the employer than moving to current best practices. I find myself often forgetting how dysfunctional a lot of organizations are, only to be spectacularly reminded of it, again and again. And there are people at those organizations who know they aren't going to be able to overhaul hiring, but they have a budget, and they have a problem, and there are not a lot of great options. Those are the target customers for something like this, not Google and Foursquare and AirBnB.
- btilly 16y ago
  Hmmm. When I interviewed at Google there was no third party aptitude and personality screening. There was also not an incredible amount of variety. And I don't know how the reference check went. But the rest of your list looks accurate. Even so, I guarantee that Google has not solved hiring by a country mile. The biggest single problem is that (for obvious reason) they are willing to settle for a lot more false negatives than false positives. But getting the false negative rate down would be huge if they could do it.
known 16y ago
In IT field, latest technology is still considered as greatest.
wglb 16y ago
Perhaps I am too much of a simple country boy to be fully into the social media online thing, but there is a whole aspect of job hunting/employee finding scenario that is missing from our thinking here. Quite after the fact, I realized that I had been an unconscious networker and that in my multi-decade career that there had been a very low number of non-networked job landings. The rest, including the consulting/contracting that I have done were from the network I had grown into from previous professional relationships. Being in a profession that automates things, we (self included) tend to try to automate things that don't automate well, or do things by remote control that should be done in person. One case in point was my son when he was in grade school. There was a lot of difficulty for all involved for him to focus on his homework. Finally, I hit on a pretty simple and essentially zero-technology solution. I would sit in his room with him, not supervising him so much as being there for him to ask whatever question he wanted. Many interesting questions came up, and some were even related to his homework, but his grades skyrocketed. This was about support and not about being the other room and loudly saying "get back to your homework". So if you have a mental bias towards automatability, this method sounds "inefficient", but perhaps that is a false efficiency. Similarly, successful hiring is forming a relationship. A relevant book is "Confessions of a Headhunter" in which the author tells of tracking executives for quite some time before an actual approach is made. Now that is particularly expensive as executives are a smaller percentage of a population than startup dudes and dudettes, but that seems to be a better direction to go than trying to do this by remote control. Incidentally, the introduction to that book tells of the author's sailing experience in which he nearly won a race against severely better boats, and failed to do so simply because he didn't happen to think that he could.

81 points by raganwald 16y ago

This has a chicken and egg problem. You can only get companies to use this if employees use it, and you can only get employees to use it if there are employers. Employees would not want to limit themselves for no reason, either.

raganwald 16y ago
One implementation would be a service where a job ads includes a submisison mailbox like Gu1D@planForresumespam.com. The service company collects statistics about who is spraying their email everywhere and provides employers with a "spray score" for each resume collected. No employee involvement would be required.
- m_eiman 16y ago
  Don't use an external domain, just forward jobapplication@employer.com to incoming@applicantfilter.com and have it forward only the approved applications to hr@employer.com. Fully automated and transparent. Store the rejected applicants and send them an automated "thanks for your time" when the position is filled.

ig1 16y ago

An interesting idea (I'm sort of involved in this space), but I'd be a bit worried about the legalities involved. A few years back there was a case where a group of companies (I think in the construction sector) were prosecuted for operating a cartel because they co-operated in developing a blacklist of "trouble-maker" employees (as a do-not-hire list).

raganwald 16y ago
I have also thought of lots of problems with this business that need to be solved... But that's ok, that's why we always say the execution is more important than the idea: "Execution" is often a blanket term for "Negotiating all the hurdles and picking the right trade-offs and which problems to solve to make it a reality." One that would keep me up at night is an employer who 'tastes' their employee's resume by sending it to a fake job ad. If it has a positive spray score of any magnitude, they have just learned that the employee is job seeking. Bad!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

colinprince 16y ago

/This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating married people/ Doesn't make that much sense, since we're all prolly gnna change jobs 5 maybe 10 times. I hope I don't get married 5 or 10 times. Maybe job applicants could put a note on their resumés saying what they want to be doing in 3 to 5 years.

raganwald 16y ago
Ok, this feels like we're quibbling. Would you accept a more liberal definition of marriage such as common law? This policy is, of course, roughly equivalent to only dating people who are living with someone else. Slightly more accurate but you know.... I'm going to claim poetic license. The underlying sentiment seems to be correct even if there is some room to argue the simile isn't 100% isomorphic to reality.
- modoc 16y ago
  Great way to select people who can be lived with, aren't terrified of commitment, etc... Although there may be fidelity issues... :)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - Periodic 16y ago
    I've heard people say, when speaking of potential partners, that there's nothing better than a widow/widower. They've already proven they aren't afraid of commitment, that they can get along with someone, and they are single through no fault of their own. The equivalent in this case would be people who did good work, but at a company that went under for reasons out of their control.
    - mkramlich 16y ago
      Therefore a two-time widow is even better. And a three-time widow. Wait, now I'm getting suspicious...

catch23 16y ago

how would it solve the problem of recruiters sending the same resume to a few hundred places? I know that there's a really old resume of mine that has been forever circulating from a firm I used years ago.

raganwald 16y ago
Most algorithms that work with real world data have a simple core but end up covered with warts and exceptions because of stuff like this. No doubt a company that does a good job with this has some special rule sor scoring weights for resumes sent out by recruiters.
defen 16y ago
Have it go through your facebook account & you have to click some sort of confirmation link in your email before your resume gets posted.

WillyF 16y ago

I think that a much simpler solution is to charge people to apply for jobs. That's what colleges do. There are certainly some complications that would come along with this, but there would be far fewer than with keeping a database of everyone who has ever applied for any job. I don't love the idea, and I know quite a few people have tried making it work unsuccessfully, but I still think it's far more realistic.

raganwald 16y ago
Clearly that has worked about as well as micro payments for email ;-) But seriously, there is an equivalent strategy, and that is putting up a small road block such as writing a test application. The problem is that many qualified people won't do it. Those who are currently employed are the least motivated to pay in time or money to submit an application.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Last I checked, theladders.com is still fairly successful (business model: pay $35/month for your job search).
cj 16y ago
Colleges charge fees more to make money than to screen candidates. We don't want to have the job market profiting from the unemployed. Stanford University, for example: $90 fee X 20,000 applicants = $1,800,000
- pwim 16y ago
  The first goal of universities charging to cover their costs. Stanford isn't pocketing that 1.8 million.
  - cj 16y ago
    Maybe my opinions are a bit baised as a student who spent over $400 in fees applying to colleges. I would have assumed that my universities' costs would be offset by the $40,000 I'm paying every year for the next four years, rather than erroneous fees that aren't tallied in the advertised total cost of attendance.

harpastum 16y ago

What if someone set up an "almost hired" list? That is, after a company finishes its job search, it can send a few names (with applicant approval) to the service. Other employers can enter names from resumés they have received, and find out if that applicant made it to the final lap on any recent interviews. There's no direct benefit to companies putting the names in, but it could be seen as a 'pay it forward' sort of service -- if you benefitted from this, please put your finalists in after you choose your hire. One important distinction the service would have to make is not allow browsing of names, only specific name-lookup, so job-seekers can only be found by companies they're applying to.

joe_the_user 16y ago
There are dicey and unpleasant issues involved in sharing information about your hiring process. ... especially if you're going to be talking to people who are presently employed...

tjmaxal 16y ago

Even though it's not perfect our current system has a lot of advantages over previous systems like hiring only relatives, or making everyone contract labor.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 16y ago

I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I interviewed with you, especially if it was on a formalized routinized basis and most especially if it was to drive some service that computed my value as a candidate. Things - 'tptacek - is - OK - with is a very poor measurement of how good an idea is or isn't (unless it involves Javascript crypto in which case I am right), but I thought you might want the data point. I like to think of myself as an A-player (or at least an A- player), and I'd skip talking to your company if I knew it did something like this. For what it's worth, I think a better way to supply talent to your team is not to depend on a steady inflow of resumes to begin with, but to actively recruit. We do classes, we give talks, and I yell at people on Hacker News; all of these things have outperformed job reqs for us on recruiting.

oldgregg 16y ago
Short of new data privacy laws there is an onward march that will result in everyone being rated for everything they do -- and you won't be able to do anything about it. This is already the case with credit bureaus, etc, but it's gonna get much worse.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Employers and quality prospects are a market. Trend or no trend, law or no law, unless the rest of the market overwhelmingly approves of "rating services" like this, I'm never going to interview with a company that threatens to do this to me. I'm suggesting that the market may correct for this solution to "resume spam". And, again: stop trying to hire people by reading resumes. Resumes are worthless.
btilly 16y ago
I wouldn't be OK with you sharing with other people the fact that I interviewed with you... PARTICULARLY not if through those other people there is a reasonably high chance of it getting back to my employer. You could avoid that by having the service not provide any level of detail, just a "yes/no, this person passed threshold X requests in time T." But if that got popular then I guarantee that craptastic employers would get the bright idea of, after hiring people, having lots of fake companies report interviewing them. This would make their current employees have trouble getting interviewed elsewhere.

ismarc 16y ago

The main problem with hiring/resumes isn't just volume. Volume has become a problem with the ease of sending the resume. We removed a barrier(fax, mail, drop off) and naturally the flood started. Businesses compensated by listing arbitrary values for hard skills/experience, which in turn applicants sent resumes to places they were even more unqualified for on paper. The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person doing the job. The need for human interpretation is too ingrained in the current process, even with the filtering mechanisms in place

cabalamat 16y ago
> The crux of the problem is that there isn't a way to directly quantify what is absolutely needed for a job position, and in turn, there isn't a way for an applicant to demonstrate they meet those qualifications, short of the person doing the job. This varies according to job. E.g. for a programming job, the employer could ask applicants to solve a programming problem, such as FizzBuzz (or something harder).
- ismarc 16y ago
  But even that doesn't provide any quantitative judgement of what the job requires or what the applicant can do. It says they can write code that does X. I've never been a part of or seen a job where the only real skills needed were syntax knowledge and basic familiarity with common algorithms. There's things like interpreting requirements, time/task/priority management, bug diagnosis, impact assessment, domain knowledge. How do you quantify "Can figure out why we keep getting kernel panics after the kernel upgrade on only some machines? Oh, the thing the machines have in common are they are the multi-core/multi-processor boxes. Is it a bug in our code or the kernel? Are they still acceptable for the position if they can't identify the problem, but can identify that rolling the kernel back is a viable short-term alternative?" The ideal scenario is the applicant mashes a button and gets a list of job they're truly qualified and a good fit for (as in, highly likely to get a phone screen on) and the hiring company can mash the same button. Everyone keeps trying to find new ways to invent or improve the button. No filter or screen is going to work until companies can definitively measure the quality of applicants between two postings for the same job (e.g., A/B test job position listings) and candidates determine if they are qualified based on that. There's a lot of problems to solve, but the biggest by far is the fact that 90% of the jobs out there have only "can breath, assistance to breath is ok" and "can show up" as the hard skills that are required. I'm not kidding, go spend a couple of hours on Monster, or Craigslist...at least programmer jobs have <arbitrary number of years> in <technology X>...most jobs don't.

riffer 16y ago

First off, I want to congratulate you, reg, on coming up with such a fantastic idea. With Joel's post, and the no-job-hoppers-wanted fracas from several weeks ago, this is something that was in the air, and you were able to pick up on that, and put it into words. Even better, you don't appear to be trying to figure it all out on your own in a vacuum. One approach to getting started would be to provide resume screening services to employers. I'm sure there are a bunch of service businesses like that today, but if you solve the problem like it is an NLP problem rather than an HR problem, that could be a differentiator. At a large enough enterprise, I'm sure there are people who are applying for a bunch of different positions over an extended period of time, and just being able to solve that problem intelligently for that one enterprise is something that must be useful for some big firm out there. So I don't think you need to have a bunch of employers on the system to get started. But that doesn't address the real challenge, which seems to be that your service provides clear benefits to the employer, but not for the employee. The employer gets better candidates, more efficiently, and almost every business that's hiring acknowledges that they have trouble finding enough good candidates. What about the potential employee? Why would they want to participate in this sort of system vs. the status quo? That seems like the challenge to me, more than legal issues, or the employer side of the equation. There is definitely terrific potential here, exactly because hiring is currently so inefficient: it'll be really interesting see how this idea develops.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

crux_ 16y ago

There's a bunch of obvious problems, off the top of my head: People should be able to to look for a job without necessarily tipping of their current employer. Ambition and hard work, unless expressed very carefully, could well become an endless trap. Those who work in industries with terrible unemployment will continue to be stigmatized even after they abandon their search in their old field and strike out into new ones. There's potential for abuse, e.g. Apple could falsely report all its current employees as submitting bajillions of resumes and thus prevent them finding other jobs. There's the problem of recruiters who submit resumes indiscriminately on a job seeker's behalf, sometimes without permission or even the seeker's knowledge.

brc 16y ago

Hiring and firing people means there are many laws implemented to protect the guilt and the innocent. Where there are laws, there are lawyers. There's also no clear place for monetisation. Avoid ye, for here be dragons.

strlen 16y ago

What exactly is wrong with Fizz-buzz as a 'spam reduction' technique? Raganwald's method has several issues: it's unfair to people who are very picky and are only looking for the best jobs themselves. Very often they're the best people, for whom the search for a position that will fully use their talent is much harder: they apply to companies that have a long hiring cycle and high "false negative" rates, while they will reject offers they dislike. Second, there's the obvious problem of privacy: it's a huge problem for passive candidates (again, who are often -- but not always -- best of the best) and a problem for candidates who apply for tough-to-get positions, have a bad day (or the person interviewing them has a bad day) and now become "damaged goods" by the virtue of a publicly known rejection (which could be no indication of their lack of competence).

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

TeHCrAzY 16y ago

Couldn't a large proportion of resume spam be filtered just by asking the applicant for something specific, and ignoring anyone who doesn't comply? IE. Add a specific phrase to the subject of the email. You could embed this in the middle of the job spec; people whom don't read it carefully are likely not worth interviewing anyway.

edw519 16y ago

There's a huge inefficiency in the hiring market, and someone is going to make some money solving the problem. There are huge inefficiencies in everything. That doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. The only ones who think that hiring is a problem are those who haven't solved it. Think of it as a bell curve (what a surprise). Some companies suck. Most are mediocre. But a few have it figured out. I've been on both sides of this process more times than I can count and I've noticed that the companies that do it well have a lot in common: - They rely on up front third party aptitude and personality screening to eliminate 95% to 98%. They pay, but it's a bargain. - They use interview quantity (lots of them, by phone and in person). - They use interview quality (peers, supervisors, customers getting well below the "surface"). - They use variety (interviews, testing, get-togethers). - They check references without a canned checklist (logic path driven, in-depth). - They use HR primarily for formalities. - They take their time. - They "solve a long term problem" for all parties involved. I admire your desire to solve a problem that affects so many, but I wonder if your approach is the best way. Maybe it's better for the mediocre to do what already works by copying the excellent. Then they wouldn't have such a big problem to solve.

riffer 16y ago
This is an excellent outline of hiring best practices, each of these bullet points belongs here. And yet, for every firm that does this, there are at least 10 that don't. That means that there is a rich market for what reg is proposing, and it means that the solution merely has to be more attractive to the employer than moving to current best practices. I find myself often forgetting how dysfunctional a lot of organizations are, only to be spectacularly reminded of it, again and again. And there are people at those organizations who know they aren't going to be able to overhaul hiring, but they have a budget, and they have a problem, and there are not a lot of great options. Those are the target customers for something like this, not Google and Foursquare and AirBnB.
btilly 16y ago
Hmmm. When I interviewed at Google there was no third party aptitude and personality screening. There was also not an incredible amount of variety. And I don't know how the reference check went. But the rest of your list looks accurate. Even so, I guarantee that Google has not solved hiring by a country mile. The biggest single problem is that (for obvious reason) they are willing to settle for a lot more false negatives than false positives. But getting the false negative rate down would be huge if they could do it.

known 16y ago

In IT field, latest technology is still considered as greatest.

wglb 16y ago

Perhaps I am too much of a simple country boy to be fully into the social media online thing, but there is a whole aspect of job hunting/employee finding scenario that is missing from our thinking here. Quite after the fact, I realized that I had been an unconscious networker and that in my multi-decade career that there had been a very low number of non-networked job landings. The rest, including the consulting/contracting that I have done were from the network I had grown into from previous professional relationships. Being in a profession that automates things, we (self included) tend to try to automate things that don't automate well, or do things by remote control that should be done in person. One case in point was my son when he was in grade school. There was a lot of difficulty for all involved for him to focus on his homework. Finally, I hit on a pretty simple and essentially zero-technology solution. I would sit in his room with him, not supervising him so much as being there for him to ask whatever question he wanted. Many interesting questions came up, and some were even related to his homework, but his grades skyrocketed. This was about support and not about being the other room and loudly saying "get back to your homework". So if you have a mental bias towards automatability, this method sounds "inefficient", but perhaps that is a false efficiency. Similarly, successful hiring is forming a relationship. A relevant book is "Confessions of a Headhunter" in which the author tells of tracking executives for quite some time before an actual approach is made. Now that is particularly expensive as executives are a smaller percentage of a population than startup dudes and dudettes, but that seems to be a better direction to go than trying to do this by remote control. Incidentally, the introduction to that book tells of the author's sailing experience in which he nearly won a race against severely better boats, and failed to do so simply because he didn't happen to think that he could.