Making Your Job Search Suck Less: My New Startup, int18
From 2011 to 2016 I ran a consulting software development business, building web applications for clients, primarily startups. By the end of 2015 I had decided it was a terrible business, stressful and difficult to make money. I shut it down.
My thought at the time was: “I’ll just get a job. Surely I’ve got to be insanely marketable at this point. My tech career stretches back to the 90s, and I’ve managed tech departments at top-shelf digital agencies. Also, all of this entrepreneurial experience has got to count for something.”
Job Search Hell
What followed was a fairly dreadful experience that was both unique yet relatable, like all job searches. There were recruiters that treated me like a piece of meat, interviews with companies that were clearly a poor cultural fit for me, or where the business skills that I had developed over years of running my own company were not valued. Then there was the black hole into which my job applications would go and disappear: their status a shadowy mystery.
My biggest pet peeve was the stupid, time-wasting calls with recruiters who clearly didn’t understand how to read my resume, and who couldn’t begin to match me to a position. Dealing with them felt like an enormous waste of my time.
How could any of this lead to a good hire? The entire process seemed so absent of the factors that would have actually contributed to my success, that it would be sheer luck if I could find the right job in a company that was a good match for me.
I began to wonder if there was a better way.
Hiring Is Broken
Here’s something you might not know, job seekers. The process sucks for the hiring managers as well. I’ve probably hired over 100 developers in my career, and finding good candidates is difficult, and extremely time consuming. The technical hiring manager’s problem is finding the candidates worth interviewing.
So hiring is, at best, a pain in the ass for both candidates and hiring managers. It is failing both sides of the market. What was the cause of this malaise, I wondered?
Eventually, I arrived at three insights:
- Most recruiters and HR staff can’t read a technical resume. They simply don’t have the background. They would never be able to catch that, for instance, MariaDB and MySQL are mostly the same thing, or that knowing Django pretty much implies that you know Python. They can’t properly evaluate technical candidates, which means that the job of screening falls on technical staff.
- Every single tech hiring manager I’ve ever known is extremely busy. They have enough on their plate managing the staff they’ve already hired and the last thing they want to do is sift through a pile of resumes of dubious quality, as handed to them by HR.
- For job-seekers, looking for work just takes too much time. Applying for work typically involves jumping through hoops, while largely providing the same information over and over. How many of us have experienced the “I hate my job, but I’m too busy to look for a new one” dilemma?
When you have both buyers and sellers unable to execute trades well, it is the sign of an inefficient market. When you compare the employment market to say, financial markets, you can see how ridiculously cumbersome and manual it is. The entire process of looking for work and hiring needs a refresh. With this in mind, I decided to start a new company, to make hiring, especially of technical staff, better for everyone.
I call it int18.
WTF is int18?
About the name: there are two origin stories about it.
The first is about Joel Spolsky. Spolsky, the sage of hiring developers, argues that the primary qualities of good hires are smart and gets stuff done. He posits that if an employee has these essential qualities, most other things can be taught.
The second part is about D&D. I spent an impressively large amount of time with pencil and paper desktop roleplaying games in my youth, and a lot of time was spent devising systems to capture and model ephemeral qualities like charisma into quantified values that could then be processed by the game system.
I realized that the process of building a hiring recommendation system involved a lot of the same types of quantification (although now involving machine learning and big data). In many roleplaying games, attributes are determined with a role of three six-sided dice, making 18 the maximum value. Therefore, an intelligence of 18, or int18, would be very smart indeed, and a most desirable employee.
Boy was I a nerd.
Building A Better Hiring Process
I started by considering what actually makes a successful hire, and generally it comes down to three things: job skills (the actual, hard skills for which you’re ostensibly being hired), soft skills (how you deal with other humans, including things like communication skills and your work ethic) and finally, cultural fit (how well do your values sync up with those of the hiring company). The recommendation engine at the core of int18 would consider all three kinds of criteria when matching candidates and positions.
Wrangling all this data is a good job for machine learning. In the interest of taking care of their careers (and for employers, getting suitable candidates for their open positions) there is a lot of information to be had about the capabilities of individual candidates, or the requirements of jobs. Machine learning would provide the insights into the factors that led to an employee’s success or failure in a job.
Job Skills
For job skill matching, I decided the system needed to be a lot smarter than what I’d seen out there so far. It’s the lack of domain expertise in recruiting and HR that leads to the tragic but laughable situations that occur when the non-technical try to evaluate technical candidates. When we read stories about recruiters saying “we need 15 years of Node.js” and “I see you know MySQL, but we need someone who knows SQL”, it’s because they don’t understand the context of these skills. A job skill matching system couldn’t just be matching acronyms. Instead, it needed to actually understand the subject matter.
Soft Skills
For soft skills, I wanted the system to consider the sort of qualities identified by myself and other hiring managers that determine people’s success in their jobs. Some of these, such as communication skills, are pretty obvious: when you work with other people you need to be able to communicate with them well.
However, some are less obvious. I, and many other managers I know, place a premium on curiosity in employees. A curious mind tends to translate into a more adaptable, effective developer. Someone whose job is essentially solving problems all day long is greatly assisted by a genuine desire to find the solution, to learn about new things, and to improve themselves for their own benefit, rather than just doing their job because they’re being paid.
Culture Fit
Finally, there is the question of cultural fit. This can be a delicate subject, because there’s usually a difference between the aspirational values of a company and their real culture, which is what determines what gets someone promoted or fired.
This is a deep topic, but for now I decided simply to ask everyone (candidates and hiring organizations) to force rank nine cultural values: competitiveness, loyalty, artisanship, innovation, creativity, consensus, efficiency, mission and tradition. They all sound pretty good, but everyone in the int18 system needs to state just how important each one of these is relative to each other. Cultural matching is looking for the closest match between the value prioritization of the candidate and the hiring organization.
Job Search On Your Terms
The average email inbox is a cesspool under normal conditions, but conducting a job search typically makes it far worse. Signing up for your average job board puts you on a “jobs for you” email blast, usually containing jobs that are entirely unsuitable for you. Picking the important emails out of the deluge becomes part of your new part-time job as a candidate.
To combat this, I decided that int18 should deliver information to users the way they want it: email, SMS, Slack, Twitter…whatever. You dictate how news of new job recommendations, interview requests, offers and so on, reaches you. This lets a job-seeker lift their (critically important) job search out of the same river of information telling them there’s a sale on underwear.
Secondly, there is too much redundant effort spent in job search. Each job application represents significant work for the candidate, often including presenting the same information multiple times. This is part of what drives the dilemma of not having time to search for a new job. int18 provides tools to speed up applying for a job, and makes it easy to see the status of a job application.
Kick Our Tires
So now we’re taking this thing out of the garage. If you’d like to try it out, just follow us on Twitter, or sign up at our website, and we’ll send you an invite code as soon as we’re ready for you.
Overall, there’s a lot of room for improvement in job search and hiring, and I hope that int18 can play its part in making it suck just a little bit less.
