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

How many startups, established companies, and prospective employees would be interested in a new way to evaluate/recruit talent?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.