Collaborative Applicant Management with Startuply | Hacker News Reader

Collaborative Applicant Management with Startuply

startuply.com

27 pointsLukeG17 comments

I think the best way for Startuply to create value is to go through the academic literature and identify hiring best practices from organizational behavior and other fields. The site should then guide employers to hire using empirically proven best practices without requiring them to understand the theory behind the model or even realize that they are using one of these models. Trying to apply the the methods collaborative news filtering sites to hiring seems like a bad idea. (It sounds like you are trying to write an applicant quality predictor or something similar, unless you are just tracking the quality of applicants from different referral sources to optimize your advertising dollars.) Especially in this case, where showing an evaluator the judgments of previous evaluators creates an information cascade, which Surowiecki writes about in the Wisdom of Crowds.

Thanks Alex. I think this latest feature is much more basic than that; we're not implementing a collaborative filtering algorithm for applicants. We let startups rate everyone who applies for their job. We think this helps, as everytime they log in, they can see who their preferred applicants are. The "collaborative" part of this just refers to the fact that we make it easy for multiple people on their team to rate a resume.

A positive side effect of this is that we get data about how good our candidates are (or how good startups think they are, which is generally what counts here). This will let us focus our very limited resources much more accurately.

"Empirically proven best practices" are tough in HR, especially for small companies, because every startup has such a distinct personality. This idea of "fit" is huge, and it's something we're working to address, but we also think it's important for our process to be as transparent as possible in such murky territory.

Thanks, I think I see what you're getting at now.

See http://www.path101.com/explore/

Inntesting...thanks for this.

Are there any "empirically proven best practices" for hiring? In the end it comes down to a personal decision more than any statistical resume analysis can give you.

As far as we know, there aren't.

Startups are especially hard, too: smarter, crazier people; more pressure and responsibility (the average value of a startup team member is far beyond that of a Fortune 500 employee); long hours with a small team in confined spaces.

There are lots of pieces of advice from experienced entrepreneurs (e.g. http://bit.ly/2VMN10, http://bit.ly/3mgEBQ), most of which is interesting and valuable but decidedly unscientific. We'll keep adding resources like this to our blog & site, but automating it is another challenge altogether.

There is definitely a massive matching problem in the recruiting industry. I think that a big part of why this is so hard is that it takes a gnarly combination of technical & social engineering to fit these pieces (us) together. We like hard problems, though, and we're working on throwing some interesting stuff out there. Stay tuned.

I meant more like how does the richness of the interviewing medium affect the hiring outcome. For example, should interviews be conducted on the phone, in person, or via IM? I've read that most hiring decisions are made within a minute of first seeing the person, so the medium in which interviews are conducted almost certainly makes a difference. But how? Similarly, which yields better decisions, group interviews or interviews with multiple individuals?

Even though Startuply is upstream of the interviewing phase, the types of collaboration features they choose to implement can potentially affect the way the resumes are evaluated. I'm not sure how much research there is in this area, but it seems like something the company could potentially use to their advantage.

Yes. My employer requires us to take a course in how to interview candidates and there are practices that make a considerable difference in the interviewing process vs. how most people do it. It seemed like a total waste of time until I actually took the course and realized how much room for improvement there was.

I'm assuming this doesn't mean that my resume is now publicly accessible on Scribd, right?

Wait you didn't want it out there? Sht.

Ha no, your resume is not available - everything we upload to Scribd is private.

I think the interface is very aesthetically pleasing, and everything that I have used thus far seems to be quite intuitive. One issue worth looking at (not a priority) is that size of all the components you load, as the landing with all the market, js, and css is rather heavy.

what I would love to see is nice recommendation engine in the background which would notify all the job seekers and startup employers to get what they want.

It has to be accommodating enough to return varying results depending on the interest of the technology,location etc.

It is there in some of the existing job portals but some unique ways

1.which would be more effective even in case of huge data set.

2.To arouse interest in people who are registered there but not actively seeking jobs.

3.where people would like to get co-founders/collaborators.

I know it is easy to think but hard to implement and that too within fixed scope of time and motivation :)

Let me know your thoughts on this

This site is blocked by my companies firewall. It appears you've got yourself on some lists for "Spam Urls". I'm not sure what that reason actually means, but I know my employer buys the list of sites to block from some third party.

Thanks for letting us know - we're looking into this now.

This reminds me of http://www.razume.com

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