On the hiring space + reputation.
(Warning! Late night/random thoughts so apologies for any incoherence.)
The developer/designer hiring space is getting more crowded by the second. (Or maybe it always was?) Tons of job boards — GitHub Jobs, StackOverflow Careers, Authentic Jobs, 37signals — (and Forrst’s, too), plus services taking a more hands-on approach (Whitetruffle, Hackruiter), not to mention the hybrid/curated stuff like Tinyproj (disclaimer: I made it), Grouptalent, etc., plus professional networks like Path.to, Zerply, or LinkedIn. I think this is a great thing — IMO it’s never been a better time to be a “ninja rockstar guru best-of-breed”* developer or designer. Tons of smart people are trying to solve the holy grail of finding and hiring great developer and designer talent and this is taking a variety of forms. For instance, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the high-touch services (and I have no doubt they’ll do very well).
I think one of the more tricky/fascinating problems to think about is the idea of “one reputation to rule them all”. (Like Klout, but for you as a programmer/engineer/designer/whatever but actually meaningful). Posting “fatigue” is coming (if it hasn’t already). So, what will make your service one of the few any given job is listed on? In order of importance: results, results, results, painless for the company to use (e.g. deliver talent to them, but, don’t try to replace their vetting process fully), quality talent eager to work on meaningful problems, makes sense pricing-wise (save that $20k for a rainy day).
On the talent side, I think status needs to get more attention; applicants should be able to get instant feedback: application unread/read/replied to/ignored for [reason]. Make it effortless to get inbound jobs/gigs. Avoid the traditional recruiter problem and share jobs that are truly relevant to people, not just a spray-and-pray, buzzword bingo fiasco.
Ultimately, though, the concept of aggregating reputation across services is quite interesting to me. In a way, Forrst is just a reputation layer. Purely in the context of hiring, so are Stack, Dribbble, GitHub, and any other place we devs and designers are sharing/interacting. What if the reputation layer were interchangeable? Every interaction, positive or otherwise, affected this reputation score. The score could be used as one of many signals to surface great talent (and in fact, I don’t think reputation could/should be the most important factor — rather, looking at interests, cultural desires, etc. of a candidate should far outrank some arbitrary scoring system). However, in terms of the hiring space, the services that win out will be the ones which figure out how to curate a network of great people looking for work in a way that doesn’t rely on any one provider of reputation (this is one of the things I’m thinking about in relation to Forrst).
The other interesting thing to think about is a service where actual work is factored in to a candidate’s rank (much more relevant for freelance gigs since they’re back in the pool in a few weeks/months) — work outcome (e.g. would you work with this company/service provider again?) serves as another meaningful signal around your reputation.
One could even take this a step further and factor in other things like great projects I’ve created myself (and do they create real value?), peer ratings/endorsements, and so forth:
Rep = (sum of all my interactions on relevant sites [github, forrst, dribbble, etc.]) + (net outcome of all projects I've done/positions I've held) + (verified peer ratings) + (what value have I created?) + (scores/results from sites like Codecademy + Treehouse)
Any platform trying to surface talent could feasibly factor in any or all of the above. Ultimately the more context we can provide companies around who’s applying, and conversely, the more targeted we can be about what jobs we’re sending out to talent, the better for everyone.
To sum up, it’s going to be an interesting next few years. More and more companies are looking for great talent, and the hiring space is going to be heating up even more. Whether it’s a straight job board play or a more targeted system, we’ve all got our work cut out for us.
* Okay, just kidding. Those words should be illegal to even think about.
