Would there be interest in a TalentRoulette type of service for tech recruiting?
Tech recruiters get pretty significant referral fees. I'm inclined to think this could be community powered, and I know the HN crowd can poke holes in it or validate it.
A lot of companies have little “tests” they give applicants to help validate knowledge/domain expertise.
Community members (individuals or companies) could post these little quizzes/logic tests/tasks and the individual can take them. It would need safeguards to protect it from being gamed.
As a person claiming technical proficiency in a particular area, they can login and ask for a “task” to be completed. Webcam fires up and records said user while completing the task. The task is completed online. As said user is completing the task, the author of the task is watching. The system is recording the audio/video, the time to completion, etc... and storing it on the server for later review. Upon completion, the contributor of the task verifies that they witnessed completion. The task can have time limits such that if it isn't completed within x time, it's automatically expired and marked as incomplete and session is terminated. Everything is anonymous while tasks are being witnessed and completed (i.e. task taker isn't aware of task author and task author isn't aware of task taker).
As the person claiming technical proficiency, I don't get to select the task given to me. Instead, I select subjects of interest (CSS/JavaScript/HTML/Ruby/etc...) and the system pairs me up with a random task and task contributor that's available to witness my completion of it.
My userid/handle is able to store a history of my tasks for employers seeking talent in those areas. Every time a user is engaged/contacted by a potential employer, the contributor is paid a royalty of some sort.
With sufficient questions/contributors and randomness of tasks and task verification, it seems the gaming of the system could be minimized.
Task Takers may not be actively seeking employment – they may do it for the challenge. But they can also put in their profile (again, anonymous) that they would be interested in new job opportunities given x conditions. When an employer reaches out to said individual, they can accept or reject request (protecting their anonymity in event employer is known to them or currently employing them).
Would this be a service anyone would use? Problems/features not mentioned/thoughts?