The future of recruiting in the technology industry
If you spend any time hanging around founder and CEO types and ask them what their biggest problem is, you’ll hear “recruiting developers, engineers and UX/UI designers”. It’s the complaint that lead us to tackle the problem with the founding of DeveloperAuction.
The fact is, since LinkedIn was created (90% of revenue is from the recruiters sending solicitation emails, to the point where the average Silicon Valley developer gets 100+ recruiter emails per year), nothing new has come along in the recruitment space.
Sure, there’s a bunch of companies that help you filter applicants, manage the “jobs” section of your website, do video interviews or code tests. But none of them really solve the fundamental problem of “not enough quality applicants”.
The job board sites — Monster.com, Dice.com, CrunchBoard, AuthenticJobs, StackOverflow Careers — and frequent “Hiring” threads on Hackernews only help fill 19% of job openings in the current market.
The fact is, none of these really help developers cut through the noise of opportunities. These days, many postings are attracting almost no qualified applicants at all and some companies are resorting to giving away iPods to developers who agree to just come in for an interview. At the same time, signing bonuses have jumped from $0 to $5,000, $10,000 and even $25,000 in some cases. If you’re currently hiring, you’re also competing against Google’s army of 900 (!) recruiters.
The fact is, the vast majority of people are happy with their current job. They aren’t spending hours browsing through opportunities on Naval Ravikant’s Angel.co or Startuply. And if they do have a profile on LinkedIn, they get such a volume of inbound email, that it’s impossible for them to really chase down all the leads and find out which ones are interesting and which ones are not. LinkedIn has been the victim of its own success – to the point where many people are removing their profiles as a way of beating the spam.
Over the past year I’ve watched more than a dozen different start-ups tackle the online recruitment space, and despite analyzing and monitoring their approach I didn’t feel like anyone of them just “nailed” it.
I asked myself, “As a developer, what would get my attention and cause me to investigate an opportunity further?”.
A number.
While salary and compensation are still a bit of a taboo subject, with most job ads advertising “compensation commensurate with experience”, the fact is that not every employer can pay the same. And when you’re getting pinged 100 times per year via LinkedIn, it’d be really helpful to know which opportunities were really a leg up vs. a huge pay-cut, without having to invest yourself in the time-consuming interview process or jumping through hoops with recruiters who represent clients that you might have absolutely no interest working for.
The solution is to reverse the funnel. Flipping the traditional model on its head and allowing highly qualified developers to receive multiple offers in a competitive environment so they can weed out the good opportunities from the bad ones. By creating an open bidding process we can also change the dynamic range of salaries for talented engineers. In an industry where the difference between “great” and “average” is 25x (according to Steve Jobs), the salaries paid should more accurately reflect the value delivered.
By showing employers a small list of highly vetted engineers who are actively seeking new opportunities, we stop them from having to send hundreds or thousands of unsolicited emails in hopes of finding the needle in the haystack and allowing them to focus on pitching themselves to a select group of talent where the odds are in their favour. At the same time, we can create a super-efficient way for engineers to get exposed to new opportunities in a rapid-fire fashion, without having to fill out multiple applications, do numerous code challenges, and write countless cover letters – only to frequently never even hear back from the employer.
Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Employers Banned From Asking For Social Media Passwords In California
A newly signed California law forbids employers and universities from asking employees and applicants for their social media passwords. The law was hastily developed in response to a string of reports last spring of employers coercing applicants to “voluntarily” allow businesses to snoop through their Facebook accounts as part of the interviewing process. The United States House of Representatives failed in an attempt to ratify a Federal ban, paving the way for states to take up the responsibility.
Universities and scholarships were also found with sophisticated procedures around monitoring current athletes and student applicants. The University of North Carolina handbook for sports explained, “Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings.”
Facebook responded to the media frenzy by reminding schools, governments, and businesses that giving away passwords was expressly forbidden by their security rules.
Hoping to help Facebook end the practice, the bill will go into effect January 1.
[Via Reuters]
Original post: Employers Banned From Asking For Social Media Passwords In California
The battle for .app: Google, Amazon and 11 other companies apply for hottest TLD
Earlier today at an event in London, domain name regulator ICANN revealed the list of generic top level domains (gTLDs). While most of the focus is on securing brand names and trademarks, it’s the .app suffix that is the most contested.
ICANN said that it received 1930 applications from 60 countries around the world, many of which were registered by tech companies – Amazon (.amazon, .zappos), Google (.google, .youtube, .android), Apple (.apple) and Yahoo (.yahoo) — but no less than thirteen companies are vying for the coveted .app domain.
While many of the organisations applying for the domain are actual domain name registries, two tech heavyweights also looking to reserve rights over the name and use it to promote their own app stores: and they are Amazon and Google.
Apple, pioneers of the App Store (which is now home to 650,000 apps), decided not to try and register the .app domain, choosing to stick with its single .apple registration.
Other hotly contested domains include:
- .cloud – Amazon, Symantec and Google have applied.
- .game – Amazon and Google are two of five organisations applying.
- .home – GoDaddy, Google and a whole host of other domain registrars want this one.
- .inc – Google is one of eleven.
- .movie – Amazon, Google and the Dish Network.
- .music – Google and Amazon again.
- .play – You guessed it – Google and Amazon.
Put simply, Google and Amazon went wild, registering 101 and 76 top level domains respectively.
As smartphone and tablet sales continue to grow, controlling the .app domain would allow the registrant to provide apps with their own unique domain, expanding downloads beyond a physical store on the Web.
Of course, they could also sell domains back to interested companies.
However, nobody knows how the domains will be used, the process is still only at its preliminary stages.
Now, the evaluation process begins. A 60-day comment and objections period now starts today, during which anyone can submit their opinions on the applications, or file a formal objection – for example, if an application infringes on a trademark.
From July 12th, independent review panels will review both the applicants and the proposed TLDs themselves. Applicants need both the finances and the technical capability to run a domain name registry, and domain names must be check to ensure they don’t disrupt DNS. Domains are expected to go live from the first quarter of 2013.
[Image Credit: Flickr - Veni Markovski]
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