petekazanjy

Totally right! Goal of this was not to say "don't hire them" but instead "authenticate the acumen."

Also, the non-abridged chapter for the book talks about exactly this:

"But there is a caveat when it comes to more junior staff. Many of these industry bellwethers have the infrastructure to support solid sales training programs and to instrument good sales behaviors, like high calling and emailing activity. So looking there for junior sales staff, like market development reps, who are ready to move on to a closing role could make sense. Just be cautious that the potential hire hits your other requirements, as many of these larger organizations have a lower bar for other important criteria."

Great point!

This is actually one of the use cases we're most proud about on Unvarnished ( Community-powered professional reviews http://www.getunvarnished.com ): the ability for information about hiring managers to float as well as information about employees.

So if a boss has high turnover rates under him, the idea would be that the reason why could float on his Unvarnished profile, such that would-be employees can get this information from the market before signing up to work for him.

Awesome hiring managers should get credit for being awesome. Bad hiring managers should not be able to hide behind information asymmetries. So too with employees.

Information liquidity is a powerful thing!

Actually not. Because we can see, in the backend, the reviewing patterns, along with a variety of other tools, it's possible to discern when folks who have likely not worked with each other are reviewing each other.

Also, the site is only for people 21+ years of age. Very good point.

Well, this is the sort of thing that we believe persistent identity and review graph analysis will help us prevent. We are committed to ensuring that the content on the site is not spam or shilling, and that it remains a place for productive conversation about professional reputation.

Correction to your point: On Yelp, you or I can add a restaurant, doctor, dentist, whatever, to the site in order to review them.

Again, people can speak about me without my permission.

And no one's reputation is being held ransom. Individuals can claim their profiles if they like, or ignore it if they like.

Yes. That is extremely important to provide balance to the conversation. While I can't infringe your right to express your opinion about me, I certainly do have a right to add my voice to the conversation. Unvarnished allows profile owners to claim their profile, respond inline to review, request more reviews from their network, and so on.

You're right on the money about 'focal point'. Right now, reputation conversations already happen, but they're sprayed all over the web. I don't know who's saying what about me on what blog or what twitter stream. Moreover, I don't know how authoritative that blogger / twitterer is, when I'm reading claims they make about someone else.

On Unvarnished, the interests of the three sides of this conversation are balanced: the profile owner, the reviewers, and the review readers. No one's interests trump, but there is a framework and rules for the discussion.

Correct. You can speak about me without my permission. We do it all the time offline, and we do it all the time online.

Why do you find that amusing? The cut out the second part of that sentence which was "everyone would take their profile down in the case they get a negative review."

Your desire to 100% control your image does not trump the rights of free speech that others have. For example, I can't remove any of the comments here on this site making reputation claims about me, because it would be censoring you. And it would injure the rights of others to consume that information.

Just because I have an interest in making everyone think that I am 100% A+ 99th percentile doesn't mean I can censor you.

Private information that is not business related will be deleted from the site, and get the reviewer banned. (and not just kicked off the site. Ban his FBUID forever, such that he'll have to invest in a whole new FB identity that passes our threshold of "humanness" before he's let in again.)

So yeah, it's not a good idea to engage in behavior that violates community guidelines.

The site is actually full of awesome content of a very productive, professional nature. TechCrunch's headline was hysterical and designed to draw pageviews. Mission accomplished! The conversation on Unvarnished is more akin to what you find on HackerNews than on, say, 4chan.

Again, that sort of thing will be tough to do based on what we've built. You can't just spin up new account programattically. You have to use a verified Facebook account with a sufficient level of activity to prove humanness.

We're committed to implementing countermeasures that prevent bad content from coming onto the site. In similar fashion to how Reddit Karma and other reputation systems moderate content and kick off bad actors.

Hey folks. Sorry for being so late to the conversation. It's been wild with the amount of media coverage we've been getting. I'll try to respond to comments.