Mighty Spring

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Introducing the All-New Mighty Spring

We’re thrilled to announce a brand new site for Mighty Spring users — welcome to the new and improved Mighty Spring!

These major changes are inspired by direct feedback from our early users like you. Thanks for your help. :-)

Things you’ll immediately notice:

New branding and a beautiful redesign to our website

New full and anonymous profile layouts

A ton of new startups for you to check out!

We also have a new model for hiring on Mighty Spring. Startups are now much more actively looking at anonymous profiles and requesting introductions to our users. Some of you may have experienced this process already! Please note: if you would like to receive intros to startups on Mighty Spring, you’ll need to make sure your profile is complete and good to go. Login now to checkout your profile status.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on our new site! Feel free to email us with any feedback you may have.

Thanks for reading and for using Mighty Spring!

- The Mighty Spring Team

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Stop What You're Doing and Lazy Load Your Assets

Given that lazy loading assets speeds up browser rendering by only loading the files you need when you need them, it stands to reason that lazy loading should be standard practice. So why isn't it? Most front-end developers know about it, and there is no shortage of articles on how to do it, but to be honest, many developers don't because they're, well, lazy.

Ok, not lazy lazy. More lazy in the sense that they won't add it until it's necessary. Lazy loading is one of those enhancements you put off while you're in build mode because it isn't particularly necessary. And it's true — you shouldn't worry about it at first, especially if you only have one Javascript file.

However, there comes a point in your project where it becomes complex enough (and complete enough) where you will want to break up that main file and start looking for ways to speed up page load. A few months ago, we reached that point here at Mighty Spring, and this article will talk a bit about how we tackled this problem.

Fortunately, it's not terribly difficult to retrofit lazy loading if you know what you're doing, and you've been structuring your code with the idea that you will eventually get around to lazy loading. However, even if you haven't been structuring your code this way (or don't know what you're doing), taking the time to update your code for lazy loading is still worth the time and effort and is pretty easy to do.

So how should you structure your code? One way is to write each model, view, what-have-you in a modular, very loosely-coupled separate file, namespaced, and wrapped in an IIFE. Assuming your namespace is MS (as Mighty Spring's is), your code can look something like this:

//wrap in IIFE (function(window, $) { /* ensure your namespace exists so your code can function and be acccessed from outside this file. */ window.MS = window.MS || {}; //access locally without namespace, externally with namespace var MyAwesomeThing = MS.MyAwesomeThing = { init: function() { //cool stuff here } }; //place private functions outside your object function myPrivateFunction() { } })(window, jQuery);

Of course this assumes you're using jQuery, but jQuery is not required.

This structure has many benefits:

You don't have to worry about other files (third-party or not) interfering with your functionality. You're essentially shielded from other code that may exist.

You can easily create private helper functions that are only necessary for and accessible by this object.

You aren't polluting the global namespace with functions, variables, objects, etc. because everything lives under your namespace, which means...

This object is accessible anywhere via MS.MyAwesomeThing, so long as it's been loaded.

The "so long as it's been loaded" is the key behind conditional lazy loading. This is the sole negative to this method, since if the file hasn't been loaded yet, the functionality does not exist and you'll throw errors. However, this is easily mitigated. There are several libraries that will load assets for you, but lately, in some browsers, they've developed a fatal flaw where they will fire their complete() function before the file is actually loaded. Big problem. A workaround can be achieved with a very simple poll utility that tests to see if your object exists before initializing it.

To see this in action, pull up your browser console and log in to (or sign up for!) Mighty Spring. Assuming you're using Chrome, go to the "Network" tab, and filter by "Scripts." Once you've completed onboarding (or your profile has loaded if you're already signed up), click on any of the links on the sidebar, and then look at your network console. You should see a file (or more than one) load. If you click anywhere else and come back, you'll notice that the file won't try to load again because the system knows it's there already.

A full lazy loading implementation might look something like this (assume Modernizr with yepnope.js):

Modernizr.load({ test: !!MS.MyAwesomeThing //is it here? , nope: '/js/myawesomething.js' //if not, load it , complete: function() { //either way, run this code now or when it's loaded waitAndDo({ //is it REALLY here? test: function() { return !!MS.MyAwesomeThing; } , do: MS.MyAwesomeThing.init }); } });

While it looks repetitive and potentially like overkill, without the waitAndDo() function, the lazy loading complete() function will inevitably fire too early sometimes and result in errors.

Conclusion

When used correctly, conditional lazy loading of Javascript files speeds up page loads and prevents unnecessary transfer of bytes for unused code. It's easy to set up and maintain, plus it encourages the good practice of writing decoupled code.

Jason Edelman is a co-founder of Mighty Spring and resident front-end guy. He likes dipping his grilled cheese in tomato soup and has an unreturnable ping-pong serve. He can be found on Twitter @jasonedelman.

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Don't Break Referral Hiring

A recent post on the First Round Capital blog promoted “referral hiring” as the go-to form of talent sourcing for young companies and provided ammunition for generating greater numbers of referrals from existing employees.

It seemed obvious while reading this post that using the suggested tactics would improve raw referral numbers, but degrade referral quality. There was little mention of the introduction of misaligned incentives and the downside risks associated with those new incentives.

Comments on the post from the popular startup community, Hacker News, seemed to indicate that many employees have an intuitive grasp of the risks and incentive problems that come with trying to juice referral-based candidate lead generation — more so, perhaps, than employers who are narrowly focused on trying maximize their referral numbers.

Today, with the help of comments from the Hacker News community on the aforementioned FRC post, we’ll attempt to present a fuller picture of referral hiring.

The Importance of Incentive-less Referrals

Offering a referral bonus to employees for referring friends who get hired is common practice, but is it necessary?

By offering bonuses in this way, companies essentially turn their employees into part-time contingency recruiters who now face the same bad incentives of their full-time counterparts.

With $5,000 or more potentially on the line, a given employee is likely to be more lenient with their referral standards than if there were no financial reward at stake. Meanwhile, employees who truly love their jobs naturally gush about work and try to get their talented friends involved.

In the Hacker News discussion, user Conorgil145 made a comment to this exact effect, “If I love my job, then you better believe that all of my developer friends are going to hear about it until I am blue in the face.”

To drive a significant volume of meaningful referrals, focus on a feedback loop with your employees that address their root concerns — the reasons that they’re not already gushing to their talented friends about how much they love their company. If you want your employees to gush to their friends, ask them directly, “What can we do as a company to improve the likelihood of you recommending us to those in your network as a place to work?”

Requesting referrals from employees who have fundamental concerns about their workplace lowers the likelihood of them referring their most talented friends. Instead, you’ likely to hear about their buddy who “really needs a job”.

Once you’ve nipped the real issues in the bud, keep your hiring needs in the forefront of employees’ minds by mentioning them at regular intervals. Make your workplace somewhere people really do want to work, and the word of mouth will take care of itself.

If you insist on using referral bonuses, consider tying them to the long-term success of the hire instead of positioning them as a quick buck. Fast cash actually lowers the standard of who your employees will refer. Try, for example, referrals bonuses (cash or equity) that vest based on the hire’s performance over the first year.

Your Hiring Process (is a Problem)

Companies don’t like to admit it, but many have hiring processes that treat candidates who are early in the hiring funnel as expendable, interchangeable, and disposable. This incentivizes employees to not refer their friends for fear of mistreatment.

Angersock notes,

“What's really annoying is when you try to bring in talented engineers from your network, and your company drops the ball: either by not getting in touch with them, or low-balling them, or refusing decent equity.

If I'm referring somebody from my network to you, I want to make sure you treat them well and with promptness--disrespecting them is a sign of disrespect to me as well, and makes me look like an ass to them.”

It doesn’t take much to turn a good candidate off with your hiring process. Slow contact at important junctures, overly-vague explanations of how the hiring process works, what to expect from a given interviewer, and poor transparency into decision making criteria are all big annoyances for candidates (though most companies consider them to be a given in hiring).

In a world where “hire the best, no questions” is considered foundational behavior for success, isn’t your hiring process your most important product? What if the only product your company produced was your hiring process? How would it change from your approach today?

First impressions don’t fade easily. You may get a candidate who has been through a poor hiring process to accept an offer, but they’ll remember how they were treated. Even if they chalk their experience up to chance, they still may still be concerned about subjecting their friends to the same treatment.

The Hacker News crowd expounds on the troubles with the middle of the hiring funnel, and the resulting effects:

Tptacek writes,

“My sense of it is that the valley believes recruiting to be a ‘top of the funnel’ problem. My experience says that it isn't. My hypothesis is that the inefficiency is in qualifying candidates (deeper in the funnel), and that if you can fix that problem, the top of the funnel can sort itself out without much effort.”

InclinedPlane writes,

“I've seen too many examples of poor interviewing process, too many bad hires made, and too many good hires passed over to not put most of the onus on the middle of the funnel. Most interviewers are just not good at understanding the fragility of the process, or in having sufficient empathy to understand the difficulty of getting good data on a candidate.”

From GVIrish,

“By putting all of my contacts in the hands of the HR dept I no longer have any control over how or when the company contacts them. That company can easily break the trust I have with my contacts. I wouldn't be comfortable doing that, referral bonus or no referral bonus.”

Proxies Will Fail You

Referral hiring can seem like a panacea, especially compared to low conversion rates from alternatives, but that attitude masks the real problem: you’re likely bad at evaluating cold leads.

Like focusing on candidates from top-tier schools, seeking out friends of existing employees is nothing more than a proxy for independently-determined quality. This approach leaves you with an insulated pool of candidates, and a statistical evaluation will tell you that focusing too narrowly on referrals virtually assures that you’re missing out on the best talent in the market.

Tptacek points out the dangers here:

“Network hiring unavoidably personalizes the hiring process: candidates come in the door with sponsors. It's hard to hire objectively, staying as close to apple-apples as possible, when your candidates are friends of employees who have significant bonuses riding on the selection.”

If You Want More Referrals, Align Incentives For Success

Consider paying for your employees’ contact lists, not the hires that come from them. By doing so, you put the incentive to conduct a high-quality and thorough interview process on the people doing the hiring. Traditional recruiting fee structures are broken and standard employee referral fees are an equally broken extension of that model.

Poorly-aligned incentives are ultimately bad for you, the company, even though they look like they reduce risk in the short term. A better, more efficient hiring funnel will provide outsized returns over many, many hires, and aligning incentives in candidate sourcing is the best thing you can do to jumpstart the necessary change.

Colliding Worlds

Right now companies are only asking to mine your LinkedIn and Facebook connections. But what’s next? Does anyone want to connect their Snapchat account? Soon they’ll want family trees and the posts from your Secret account.

From edandersen on the subject,

“My personal network is not yours to ‘mine’. If an HR person at my company contacts a friend of mine to pitch a job at the company I work at, trying to use my name as an ‘in’, that is seriously unprofessional.”

More from pnathan:

“I'm not going to want to sit down with you and let you chew through my social networks for recruiting leads.”

Conclusion

Well-executed referral hiring has exceptional value, but not all referral hiring is well-executed. Incentivized referrals have inherent risk, and pressing current employees to offer up a marginal referral potentially alienates the referrer and likely generates a worse-fitting candidate than one who is organically recommended.

If you’d like to augment your current candidate acquisition efforts with high-quality, non-referral-based leads, check out Mighty Spring. We provide a curated short-list of candidates who are both qualified for, and interested in, your company’s open job.

TL;DR: Optimize your hiring process and candidate lead generation strategy end-to-end with referrals as one element. Consider ways to drive referrals that are not based in financial incentives. If you must use financial incentives, align them with long-term organizational goals. Use Mighty Spring as another way to see great candidates :)

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, the easiest way to find startup opportunities. He prefers his pie from Una Pizza Napoletana and his popsicles directly from the freezer. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen.

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Mighty Spring & Heartbleed

Mighty Spring, along with half of the internet, was affected by Heartbleed, the flaw in the OpenSSL library that allows an attacker to steal 64k of random memory from your server over and over in hopes of retrieving private data like passwords... or the secret keys to your SSL certificates that can be used to decrypt your current and past data or impersonate your web services -- all without leaving a trace. 

This is done by sending the server a message with a payload that is very small, say one byte, but telling the server that the payload is much larger, say 64k. When the server returns the payload to you it copies its own memory starting at the place where it wrote your one byte, plus the size that you specified, which contains whatever memory was recently freed.

Upon learning this, everyone who had ever written more than a few lines of C let out a collective sigh. Always check your buffer length, people! If you lost 20 hours of Final Fantasy progress in 1994 to a corrupted memory card error, you probably experienced a symptom of a very similar bug.

You can read all about the heartbleed bug at heartbleed.com. if you want to know what exactly is going on, check out this video made by Zulfikar Ramzan:

At Mighty Spring we use Heroku and Amazon for hosting, who recently blogged about the problem. After the actions taken by Heroku, Mighty Spring is no longer affected by the Heartbleed vulnerability.

As recommended, we have revoked our SSL certificate and issued a new one, and we've changed our passwords to our services and databases, ensuring that if anyone obtained access to our private keys before Heroku addressed the issue, our data will now be protected. 

We use startssl.com for our certificates because they have received good recommendations, they have a free option for individuals wishing to implement SSL (we're on a professional plan), and when navigating their site it's obvious that they are focused solely on security. UX and UI are of no concern to these people.

You can find online tutorials on how to navigate StartSSL's UI as well as how to set up SSL on Heroku.

Revoking and renewing a certificate is pretty easy once you know where to go. After logging into StartSSL, you can visit the Control Panel and open the Tool Box. From there you can issue a revocation request which will cost $24.90.

After that you can create a new key and certificate in the certificates wizard. Follow all the instructions and remember to save your key in a safe place! You can then download your certificate from the menu in the toolbox.

All the explanations about how to "chain your certificates" are pretty obtuse, but if you used startssl.com you will have four files and you will need to run three commands:

Austin is a Backend Engineer at Mighty Spring. He has shipped code for console games, social games, web experiences, and a virtual world. Austin likes oranges, quiet places, and any food that can topped with parmesan cheese.

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Negotiating Startup Job Offers

Negotiating compensation may not be most people's idea of a good time, but it doesn’t have to be a painful experience either. As a recruiter at recruitment agencies both big (Robert Half, Kforce) and small (VonChurch), I helped countless people negotiate with their prospective employers.

While we make ourselves available to help every user of Mighty Spring negotiate their incoming job offers, in this post I’ll outline the “hows” and “whats” of a good negotiation for everyone else, too.

Build the Relationship

A good interview process sets the stage for an enjoyable and and fulfilling working relationship, with only one pitfall-laiden obstacle in the way: the negotiation. Your goal is to navigate this discussion nimbly and start your employment off on the right foot.

Negotiating obnoxiously can send negative signals to your prospective employer, but a smart, graceful negotiation can further solidify the employer’s decision to hire you.

The negotiation is a reflection of how you conduct business in general, and therefore, how the employer can expect you to conduct business on their behalf. Do you consider all of the details at hand and seek a favorable, but fair, result? Or do you focus foolishly on optimizing relatively unimportant details?

Remember, though you’re on opposite sides of the negotiating table, you’re working together to define a compensation structure that works for both of you. A successful negotiation marks the start of a long-term relationship, so neither side wants the other to walk away feeling like they got a raw deal. Start building a good work relationship early by negotiating intelligently.

Understand the Lasting Impact

Negotiation performance compounds over many years, as salary increases (both inside an organization from a raise and outside via a job change), are often defined as a percentage increase over your most recent year’s wages.

For this reason, it’s generally better to seek a salary increase instead of a lump-sum performance or signing bonus whenever possible — salary increases raise the baseline for future compensation conversations, lump-sum bonuses don’t.

Know Yourself (and Your Situation)

The best way to strengthen your position in a negotiation (and ensure an outcome that you’re happy with) is to be as clear as possible with yourself about your needs and wants.

Know answers to questions like, “How badly do I want this job versus my alternatives?” and, “What is my walk-away minimum salary?” before you enter a negotiation. This will help you address the toughest parts of the conversation with confidence.

Answering with a clear, unwavering, “No,” when presented with an offer that is below your minimum is the most powerful way to point things back in the right direction when a negotiation is going south. However, don’t try to fake this — if your opposition finds out that “no” actually means, “probably not”, you lose a lot of leverage!

On the point of losing the impact of your word: any party you negotiate with is likely to remember your behavior forever. So, if you find yourself across the table from someone for a second time addressing the possibility of a raise, your performance during your previous negotiation may leave you wanting for a few more dollars!

Know the Market

Once you’ve come to terms with your personal circumstances, it’s time to understand the market.

Your goal is to have clarity about the high-end, low-end, and mid-range compensation packages that are being offered for your prospective position across multiple companies, preferably competitors. If you are dealing with a position and company in which equity is part of the package, you should also understand the equity ranges that the market supports.

Equity tends to be a tricky subject, as Restricted Stock Units, Common Stock, Stock Options etc, all differ. Regardless of type, it’s important to understand the real value of the equity offered. To do this, you must be able to answer questions like:

What percentage of the company today does this equity represent?

(Offered Shares/Total Issued Shares)

What fully-diluted percentage of the company does this equity represent?

(Offered Shares/Total Authorized Shares)

What is today’s value of the offered equity?

(Per-Share-Price X Offered Shares)

How long does it take for me to earn the equity?

(4 year vesting/1 year cliff is standard)

Does my equity come with voting rights?

(Stock can have different classes; some have voting rights)

This said, equity is really only worth worrying about if it makes up a significant portion of your compensation. If you’ve been offered market-rate salary plus some equity, then that equity stake probably isn’t worth quibbling over.

On the other hand, if you’ve been asked to accept less-than-market salary, or the company is yet-unproven (ie, you are taking on occupational risk that exceeds the market average — as is often the case in very early-stage companies), with the expectation that the equity offered makes up for it, it’s vital to understand the details of the equity package.

Focus your negotiation energies on what’s really important. When equity is important, make sure you clearly understand the economics and financial structure of the company before negotiating.

Recognize the Unique Circumstances

No two companies are exactly alike. Because of this, it’s important to balance market norms with the unique characteristics of your prospective employer and offer:

Are they very early-stage with an exceptional team full of experienced leaders? Perhaps less than market-rate salary is reasonable if the equity figure is appropriate.

Or are you requesting remote-work privileges every other week, while everyone else on the team is full-time on-site? Your pay may be slightly reduced in exchange for this flexibility.

Always consider what is unique about the particular situation – both yours and the company’s – before opening the negotiation.

Leverage Solid Tactics

Entire books have been written about negotiation tactics, but here are three of the most useful tips that you can put to good use immediately:

Set the framework

When possible, you want provide the basic framework that both sides will use for their calculations. For example, “Can we agree that salary should be a function of an individual’s capabilities, their impact on the businesses bottom line, and cost of living in their city?”

If you set the framework, you have the chance to include or exclude the elements that you foresee being vital points of leverage later on in the discussion. If the other side moves to set the framework first, make sure all of your decision-making criteria are also included in the framework before moving on to individual points.

Bring everything to the table

If you bring a lot of elements into the discussion, you have more chips to bargain with. You may be able to exchange three or four things of relative unimportance for one item on your opponent's side that you care about quite dearly.

If you are going to have to give up something at some point, it might as well be something you care little about.

Leverage an outside decision-maker

Sometimes it’s good not to be the final decision-maker. Imagine saying, “Well, this sounds like a great offer, but I don’t think my spouse will let me take a job with fewer than three weeks of vacation time.” This line helps you to create a “good cop, bad cop” dynamic, leaving your opposition to negotiate against someone who isn’t even there!

Conclusion

If you’re reading this because you have a salary negotiation in the near future, congratulations! These things usually turn out well if you follow the above lessons.

Remember, you are working with someone else to reach a fair agreement, not trying to “win.” Being transparent and honest in your communication will go a long way to achieving that goal.

Finally, if you’re interested in receiving more offers and more help in the job search process, sign up for Mighty Spring!

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, the easiest way to find startup opportunities. He is a master of the smoothie, a slave to El Metate, and a cable select to good popsicles. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen.

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Adventures in Dogfooding: Engineers as Recruiters

Living the Startup Wisdom

Observe your local startup community long enough, and you’re bound to hear this wisdom: “Make something people want”, “Solve a problem you have yourself”, and “Do things that don’t scale”.

At Mighty Spring, we try to live each of these lessons. And, like all startups, we’re in the business of moving fast. Recently, with the sneaking suspicion that we still weren’t moving fast enough, we decided to change our diet as well... to dog food.

Turning Engineers Into Recruiters

Our goal is to help companies easily browse qualified candidates, see more information than is traditionally included in a resume or LinkedIn profile, and make it trivial to request interviews with candidates they find appealing. This value proposition is, unsurprisingly, very similar to what traditional recruiters provide today.

For us, dogfooding meant taking on the role of a traditional recruiter. We know our product isn’t yet at a point where it can completely replace a recruiter’s function, but it should make a recruiter’s job quite a bit easier.

We started by sending an email to a number of companies:

Hi [Hiring Manager],

We’re conducting a dogfooding experiment over the next week at Mighty Spring. Everyone on our team, including engineers, will be a full-time recruiter for the next 7 days.

I want to know if you’d like to be involved. Do you have open roles you need help filling?

Responses poured back. Companies were thrilled by the prospect of having engineers recruit for them, and best of all, the very first day of our experiment caused an internal change. Suddenly the Mighty Spring engineering team started to ask themselves new questions:

“Why is it so hard for me to browse candidates? How can I get more information on this person? How can it possibly be so tough to arrange an interview with someone?!!”

Over lunch, Zach, one of the engineers on our team, revealed, “I have a newfound respect for the complexity of the problem we're solving.”

The Grind

Recruiting is tough work. External sourcing (working as a third party to help other companies fill their talent needs) has all of the highs and lows of a traditional sales role, but with an added twist: your product (a great candidate for a well-suited role) has a mind of its own and sometimes makes unpredictable decisions.

Our engineers-turned-recruiters sent cold emails, screened incoming candidates, and pitched jobs to users we thought our clients would love.

After a full week of feeding at the recruiter trough, Zach composed this gem:

“The next time you get a cold email from a recruiter, step back from the frustration and rationally comfort yourself by repeating the following phrase: ‘This is the best functional and most advanced solution that the talent marketplace currently has on offer to solve my employment problems.’

Unfortunately, after a few repetitions, the next logical jump is to wonder, ‘GOOD GOD! WHAT F***ING YEAR IS THIS?!?’"

Well, unfortunately it’s 2014 and recruiting still largely looks like it’s 1995.

Moving Forward

After a week on the recruiting trail, our engineering team became keenly aware of a number of urgently needed product improvements. They couldn’t wait to fix them, but I had to tell them something first: they were great recruiters.

Our interview pipeline was brimming with talented folks, our clients were happy to see good candidate coverage for their open jobs, and the responses to cold emails sent by engineers were far better than what I’d ever seen from traditional recruiters.

However, we’re not in this to be a traditional recruiting agency; we want to fix this problem with scalable software. Moving forward, we’ve decided on a path that helps us build product while continuing to eat our own dog food: one day each week will be devoted to full team recruiting. We’ll identify new problems, fill our recruiting pipeline with a slew of new activity, and keep our clients super happy.

Final Advice

If you’re a tech startup, you should spend as much time as possible as a real user of your own product.

If you’re hiring engineering talent, try getting your existing engineers to send some emails for you — it works! Or let Mighty Spring do it for you.

If you’re interested in working at a startup and would like a better search experience, Mighty Spring is definitely for you. Sign up today!

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, the easiest way to find startup opportunities. He is working on becoming a morning person, making it to the gym before 7am in the process, and avoiding the everlasting seduction of the midnight hour. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen​.

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Bias in Hiring: Bad For Everyone

Bad news: Bias in your hiring process is leading you to overlook the best candidates for your open jobs. Unfortunately, the outmoded candidate sourcing practices you’ve been using lead to poor outcomes, often missing the best person for the job.

Calling shenanigans? We’ll explain exactly how this happens and what can be done to reduce unfair biases in hiring.

Socially Acceptable Bias, Suboptimal Outcomes

Let’s focus on one of the most socially tolerated and endemic sources of bias in hiring: school of graduation.

You won’t hear any company bragging, “We prefer candidates from Some Religious College”, yet, as a recruiting marketplace, we often hear companies boast, “We only interview candidates from Ivy League schools.” This sort of statement is the hallmark of a lackluster hiring process.

Think logically about this bias for a moment:

If you segment your applicant pool by institution of graduation, the Ivy League graduates bin may have a higher percentage of “well qualified” candidates than any other groupings of schools.

However, if you segment your applicant pool by candidates who are “well qualified”, only a small percentage of “well qualified” applicants will come from Ivy League schools by virtue of there being fewer of them.

School of graduation is only a reasonable filter when you are unable to deeply analyze information about your applicant pool. If you strictly screen on school of graduation (not just attempting to cross brand your company with highly regarded institutions), you are essentially admitting incompetence.

The Self Fulfilling Prophecy of Biased Hiring

This “Ivy League bias” can become a self-fulfilling prophecy once employed, using a decision variable, attended an Ivy League, as evidence of that same variable’s efficacy. The thinking goes: We only hire Ivy League candidates (having only interviewed Ivy League candidates), they must therefore be the best!

How this Works in Practice

To evaluate how this plays out in practice, let’s examine the initial screening process for Generic Large Company (GLC). GLC receives a ton of applications. A team of reviewers parse these resumes and give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Thumbs up candidates are passed to the appropriate hiring manager for further review. Each reviewer tries to pass along candidates that will end up getting hired — reviewers are incentivized and rewarded based their hire percentage.

Only candidates passed along to hiring managers have their skillsets evaluated and verified. Discarded candidates are not evaluated, so hiring managers don’t confirm reviewers’ exclusion decisions are justified.

It’s Easier (for Reviewers) This Way

There is a Keynesian Beauty Contest dynamic at play here. First-line resume reviewers at GLC do not choose the candidates they personally believe are best for the job; instead they choose the candidates they think their hiring manager will prefer. In the case of engineering hiring, for example, most organizations’ first-line resume reviewers have a mere cursory understanding of engineering.

The combination of expecting bias in hiring managers, and low domain specific knowledge, lead reviewers to lean on decision frameworks that are simple and easy. The incentive structures make it more beneficial to fail traditionally than to fail unconventionally.

This filtering strategy is not only bad for candidates who are unfairly screened out of the job they want (and could thrive in), it is bad for GLC because they are likely missing the most talented candidates.

A good takeaway for companies hoping to improve their hiring process: interview a portion of candidates discarded by high level screens, who still meet your other hiring criteria. In other words, minimize your Type II errors by measuring them. This could confirm that your screening process is working as intended but is more likely to expose some missed gems.

How Can You Reduce Hiring Bias?

The good news is that employers are not actively seeking new ways to degrade their hiring processes. No one wants to miss out on the best candidates. Unfortunately, most available hiring tools reinforce extant biases in practice through automation.

At Mighty Spring, we’re harnessing the power of anonymity to help companies overcome this challenge. We first match candidates to companies based on the full spectrum of information they share about their backgrounds (more than they make public), but when companies view the candidates, they see an anonymous presentation of the candidate.

Employers eventually see LinkedIn profiles and resumes, but delaying their introduction in the process also delays the introduction of biases long enough to help some truly great candidates get the chance they need to impress prospective employers.

Want to check it out for yourself? Sign up today as either a candidate or employer!

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Small Companies - Big Perks

Large tech companies in the Bay Area are known for the long lists of perks they offer their employees - but even smaller tech startups are finding creative ways to make their employees feel valued. Here is a small sample of a range of companies hiring on Mighty Spring and the fantastic amenities they offer:

* Clever, a small company making large improvements in EdTech, offers free lunches, generous vacation and holiday time, and unlimited Amazon credits for continued learning.

* Thumbtack, building a better way to hire service professionals, offers free lunch cooked by their in-house chef every day, a yearly $1,500 learning credit, and a monthly $150 credit to hire service professionals using their service.

* Chartboost  is a platform for mobile game developers, providing tools and services to help them acquire new users, monetize, and make better data-driven decisions. They have free breakfast every Monday, free lunch on Tuesday, and free dinner every day in addition to regular company sponsored getaways and retreats.

* Lumosity, an app helping people take advantage of new research around brain elasticity, offers catered lunches, a full pantry, and Bi-Rite meals in the fridge. In addition, they offer unlimited paid time off, a well-stocked game room, and a full Culture team planning regular events and outings.

* AppDirect, recently named a Forbes “Most Promising Company,” offers a Developer Incubator Program - teaching people the skills to launch their own startups. Employment perks also include gym membership, a fully-stocked kitchen, and weekend ski trips to Tahoe.

Let us know if any of these opportunities look tempting. We’d love to connect you!

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"Job-Hopping" in Silicon Valley

My father spent a decade working at Mariani, beginning in their finance department and working his way up through the organization to become the Chief Financial Officer. They make dried fruit and I grew up knowing more about food processing and Just In Time manufacturing practices than any of the other kids in my class. When talking to him about my career path, he wonders why I don’t ever stay with the same company for more than a few years.

While previous generations expected a long tenure in the same place with regularly-spaced rungs bringing them higher up the corporate ladder, that is often no longer the case. Shorter tenures and horizontal moves have become the new normal.

This post will discuss the relative costs and benefits of both approaches - along with how to mitigate the difficulties associated with each.

First - what are the benefits and disadvantages of a long tenure and vertical career movement?

Working at the same company for at least 4 years gives you the opportunity to experience the long-term effects of business and development decisions made early on. This puts you in a better position for mentorship and acquiring a deep domain knowledge.

With longer tenure also comes the expectation of promotion. While this can be a good thing, promotion can take you out of your skill strength. The Peter Principle, a management theory which suggests that organizations risk filling management roles with people who are incompetent if they promote those who are performing well, was initially introduced as a joke but has been proven to be true. Studies have shown that promoting individuals within a company completely at random results in greater organizational efficiency. Pursue a shift from individual contributor to management because you want to manage - not just because that’s what you feel you should probably be doing next.

So, what about shorter stints and lateral career moves?

Lateral movements have their own unique benefits: building breadth of experience, being able to identify the commonalities between seemingly unconnected spaces, and a better understanding of a broader range of possible markets and users. You end up working with different teams of people, experiencing different management styles, and different approaches to a wider variety of problems.

You may be concerned that lateral movement can look like job-hopping, but “job-hopping” isn’t uncommon in the San Francisco Bay Area. A study by MIT found “higher rates of job-hopping for college-educated men in Silicon Valley's computer industry than in computer clusters located out of the state.” How are shorter tenures interpreted by the people reviewing resumes?

“Context is everything. Silicon Valley isn't the only place with unstable employers; somebody who likes working for startups is going to bounce around a lot between stable gigs. Look at the employers: staying no more than six months at, say, Apple, Bank of America, and Carnegie-Melon University is far more ominous than brief stays at Frank's ConsultantTeria, BadlyExecutedIdea.com, and OurInvestorsBonedUs.org.” BlairHippo

The startup lifecycle can be brief - and even if a startup does well different kinds of people are needed in the early stages of quick builds and grand ideas than in the later stages of small tweaks and optimizations.

“Most of us have grown up assuming that career success is vertical. [...] The problem with this powerful paradigm is that today’s work is no longer divided up into small tasks that require higher and higher layers of management to put together. Instead most work is accomplished through horizontal processes that cut across different functions, geographies, and specialties. Therefore real success comes less from controlling people that report to you, and more from the ability to align stakeholders who surround you.”

“Your Career Needs to be Horizontal,” Harvard Business Review

Mighty Spring is building tools to help you map your career path, whatever direction you decide to take it.

Sahra Santosha - User Advocate, Mighty Spring

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Battling Outside Forces in Employment

PandoDaily’s recent article on wage suppression in Silicon Valley highlights the lack of transparency in the employment market. Mighty Spring offers services to help people make informed career decisions and we have strong opinions about transparency in recruiting. This is a major issue: making the right choices for your career depends on solid market information. 

Professionals largely operate in their careers without solid market information, tacitly accepting this status quo. Unfortunately, discriminatory pay is far more commonplace than most would like to believe.

The recently passed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act points to ongoing wage-related improprieties, and itself is only a small step in the right direction. An economics-minded person may ask themselves, “Is the current engineering shortage tied to wage market manipulation and price suppression?”

Wage suppression through collusion is just one obstacle that people must overcome as they navigate the complicated employment market. Wage suppression through self-imposed ignorance is both common and universally harmful.

In PandoDaily’s post, we read about Google’s not pursuing even the most desirable, highly-demanded engineers due to corrupt practices. If top-tier talent is facing employment market issues, then it’s not a reach to imagine that almost everyone could benefit from a better approach to employment market management.

In this post, we’ll examine the things you can do to mitigate the risks associated with obstacles like these, improving your position in the market.

Know Who is Withholding Information

PandoDaily referenced anticompetitive hiring tactics used by tech giants, but “non-poach” agreements exist in other places as well — specifically in agency recruiters’ offices.

When someone leaves a job for greener pastures at another company, details about where they went and how they got there tend to get around their old office pretty quickly. If the “how” is through a recruiting agency, and said employer also works with that agency to find new talent, that recruiter’s contract is probably headed to the circular file via the local paper shredder.

Agency recruiters know they can’t poach talent from their clients, unless they do it super stealthily. Recruiting firms have “do not call” lists strictly enforced among their recruiters.

Of course, recruiters don’t proactively tell candidates, “No, we don’t recruit for company X — we recruit from them instead.” This information can only be exposed by asking some pointed questions.

Next time a recruiter presents you with an opportunity say, “Sounds interesting! I’m also intrigued by other companies in this space like [competitor 1] and [competitor 2]. Do you work with them also?” If the answer is no, ask the natural follow-up, “Why not?” Your goal is to find out which firms the recruiter is unwilling to show you due to a conflict of interest.

Outside entities in the employment market cannot be trusted as transparent sources of information.

Search While You Look Your Best

Towards the end of the piece, PandoDaily references Google’s desire to source “passive” candidates:

“Google placed the highest premium on ‘passive’ talent that they cold-called because ‘passively sourced candidates offer[ed] the highest yield.’”

The takeaway here is that you look most appealing to employers if you are currently employed. It’s a catch-22 for unemployed job-seekers, but that doesn’t mean that employed people shouldn’t leverage this bias to their advantage.

Uncovering new opportunities can be a daunting and time-consuming task, so some people consider quitting their current job before going on the hunt. Unfortunately, this line of thinking is contradictory to employers’ desire to hire passive, employed folks. You are better off moving from your current job to a new job without an unemployment gap.

If you’d like a month off you can usually negotiate a delayed start-date with your new employer. Then you can have a stress-free adventure, knowing that your new gig will be ready upon your return!

Ways to Avoid Information Asymmetry

It’s important to know as much about the state of the market as you can. Without sufficient data, it’s nearly impossible to tell a special opportunity from an average one.

Good things to know include:

Which employers want to speak with you 

How much they are willing to offer

Which of your skillsets they consider most valuable

If you are being considered for a growth role or promotion

Traditionally the best way to get this information is to talk to a lot of people: chat up co-workers, ask friends in similar roles, talk to recruiters, and even go on some interviews just to gather market intelligence.

This traditional approach has its problems, however. Talking to all of those people can be time-consuming (to say the least), and if word gets out to the wrong person, your current job could be at risk. Luckily for you, there’s a better solution out there...

Conclusion

Use Mighty Spring! We help you safely and passively gather job market information and test the waters with new employers.

On Mighty Spring, your profile includes an anonymous version of your background for employers to browse. If an employer is interested, you receive an interview request with an associated open position, including details like required skills and skill-levels, how much the role pays, and the option to accept the request with a single click and reveal your identity.

It’s quick, easy, safe, and it’s the future of career management. Know the demand for you!

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, an anonymous, passive job search platform. He spends his free time playing winning chess, playing losing chess, and working on improving his chess. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen​.

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Mighty Spring's Guide to Making the Right Hire

Last week we presented our guide on how to get the right job. This week we're detailing how companies can structure their search and interview process to make the right hires.

Why Every Job Description You've Ever Written Sucks - What's the first thing most companies do when they realize they need to hire someone? They write a job description. Here's how to write one that brings the candidates you want to see.

How to Properly Conduct an Interview - You've screened candidates and now it's time for the interview. Make it as productive and informative as possible.

Hiring Diamonds in the Rough - This advice is particularly useful for small companies and early startups: never settle for a low quality candidate, but keep your search as general as possible. By staying skills-agnostic you can skim the top of a much larger pool.

6 Reasons Employers Don't Hire the Best Available Candidate - Once you've broadened your search, here is how to screen for quality and potential.

Recruiting Contract Pitfalls - Clear discussion about the pitfalls of differentiation; something to consider when researching recruiting options.

Mighty Spring is dedicated to connecting companies with the right people. Request an invite and let us help you find the best.

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Mighty Spring's Guide to Getting the Right Job

Most people do not spend every hour of every day thinking about job search. We do. Making a smooth transition from one job to the next is something that requires know-how.

Our CEO, Lumen, is a seasoned recruiter who has helped hundreds of people transition from the jobs they have to the jobs they want, and has written extensively on how to do it well. We've collected his advice here: our guide to job search best practices.

When is it Too Early to Start Looking?  - Never. Have the job you want when you want it by always planning for your next move. Visit company happy hours. Network with people you'd like to work with.

How to Shift Your Career - Are you interested in a more senior role, or in starting a new career entirely? How to position yourself as a natural choice for the job you want.

3 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Resume - Once you've identified the companies you're interested in, and decided on the job you want, how do you craft the resume that will get you there?

The Power of Anonymity in Career Development - Anonymous job search is obviously the right choice for someone currently employed. Here’s why everyone else should be considering anonymous search, too.

5 Ways to Ace Your Next Phone Interview - Your resume has gotten you a phone screen. Congratulations! Here’s how to impress your interviewer.

5 Tips to Negotiate Your Best Salary - You have written your resume, you have interviewed, and you are close to landing the job. Last step - salary negotiation. What to research and how to prepare.

Join Mighty Spring. We’re working to help you advance your career.

Be Mighty!

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Hacking the New Year’s Resolution: Microtasking and Social Accountability

Originally posted on Medium.

This year was different. I just started a new job that I am incredibly happy in. I have a comfortable self-care routine — both physical and mental. I recently celebrated the first year of a fulfilling relationship. I am near completion of an art project that has dragged on for almost three years. I have accomplished more of my resolutions in 2013 than in previous years through a combination of careful goal construction, regular tracking, and social accountability.

I’ve heard that the way you choose to spend the moment the year changes says something about how you will choose to spend your year. I planned for this year to be one of growth, intention, and personal progress. So, instead of the usual loud music and blinky lights, I wanted to clear the mental slate. I spent the evening of December 31st at the Center for Transformative Change. As midnight approached, I sat in meditation with a diverse group of people focusing on what we wanted to release from the year we were about to leave behind.

I had already made plans with a close friend to map out goals together on New Year’s Day. Matt Bell is a person I admire. He has launched two computer vision startups, is committed to personal development, and has a strong history of follow through.

We spent an hour writing out what we wanted to accomplish for the year. After deciding on goals, I grouped each under one of three categories:Personal, Interpersonal/Social, and Professional. After organizing, I tasked myself with breaking each goal down into microtasks, and noted everything in a Google spreadsheet. To avoid overload, I assigned myself to hit at least three of these microtasks a week in each supercategory and note how it was completed. In addition to being effective tracking mechanism, it felt good to read through all the entries and see the regular progress I was making.

Creating these microtasks was key. Goals are big and can be overly general. For example, one of my goals was to be more social. “To be more social” is a worthy goal, but vague and poorly defined. What is “more social?” How do I know if I have succeeded? I decided the best way to track and measure success was to first analyze my underlying intentions around increased social activity, and then construct discrete microtasks that could be completed on a weekly basis that clearly supported what I hoped to accomplish:

I wanted to increase my social network — so I tasked myself with attending at least one event per week where I did not know at least 50% of the attendees. I attended salons and learned about Effective Altruism. I attended the BIL Conference and met people building hackerspaces in conflict zones.

I wanted to be a better support to my friends — so I tasked myself with actively helping at least two people every week. Now, instead of scrolling through News Feed looking at pictures of what my friends were having for dinner I found myself hunting for opportunities to help so I could meet my weekly quota. I helped a friend launch her social media career, leading to her increased financial stability. I registered as a volunteer doula. I colored hair. I moved a lot of furniture.

Once I had all of my goals mapped, microtasks created, and everything set up for tracking, I shared spreadsheet access with Matt. This kept me honest and on track. Quarterly, in-person status updates were scheduled to assess progress. We collaboratively restructured and reassigned microtasks as improvements became habits and priorities shifted. Check-ins helped to maintain motivation to make the most of the entire year.

My goals for 2013 were intentionally modest: take better care of myself, connect more with people around me, and work towards professional growth. Now that this has worked, I plan for 2014 to be much more ambitious.

If you need help with the career part of your new year’s resolutions, let me know. The new job? It’s with Mighty Spring, a company focused on helping people figure out the next step of their career path, and I’d love to help.

Sahra Santosha, User Advocate at Mighty Spring

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Happy New Year from Mighty Spring!

2013 has been a banner year for Mighty Spring. We started with the vision of creating a service that not only made job search easier, but helped people figure out the next step to advance their career - whether they are looking for careers in engineering, sales, marketing, or operations.

We launched the first version of our web application and quickly made our first placements. People who found jobs using Mighty Spring had a lot of good things to say:

"Easiest and coolest job search I’ve ever gone through"

"Removed the pain point of working with recruiters altogether"

"Didn’t have to interview twice - once with a recruiter, once with the client. Instead, I had a career conversation about what i was looking for with someone who actually understood"

"More of a ‘journalistic interview’—Mighty Spring worked to understand my goals and me as a person"

"Recruiters were talking about getting me my same job; Mighty Spring helped me get my next job. They showed me real growth opportunities"

Since launching, we moved from our local coffee shop to a real office, shared with fantastic office-mates: Sweat Guru. Our team has grown from the four pictured below to include five people (welcome Sahra!) and two dogs.

We’re grateful for all the support we’ve gotten from our users throughout the year. 2014 will see us bring even more value to professionals of all levels as they develop their careers.

We pledge to:

Continue to help people discover new opportunities.

Build tools for companies to connect quickly with the right people for their open roles.

Provide job seekers with relevant, useful market information to help them make great career choices.

Expand our service to include an ever broader selection of great companies. (What employers would you love to see on Mighty Spring? Let us know!)

Never lose our commitment to build a career-building service focused entirely on you.

Where do you want your career to go? Join Mighty Spring. We’d love to help you get there.

Be Mighty!

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The Power of Anonymity in Career Development

Anonymity differentiates Mighty Spring from other career-oriented sites. Employers browse user profiles that don’t have personally-revealing information, creating interesting benefits for users of our service.

Why did we make anonymity a core component of our platform? Here are four key ways anonymity can benefit your career development:

1. Avoid Employer Biases

Employer biases – preferred schools or previous employers, for example – serve as an easy-to-implement first filter to reduce a large number of candidates down to a more easily manageable pool. Deeply analyzing the resumes of every potential candidate is too resource-intensive for most employers, so they fall back on these biases as a crutch.

By saving employers time in other ways, like providing intelligent, algorithmic matching and by creating candidate profiles that highlight the attributes employers care about most, we can delay the introduction these biases and possibly eliminate them completely.

Bottom line? Anonymity helps protect you against negative biases at the earliest stages of the hiring process, before you have a chance to showcase your best attributes to employers.

2. A/B Testing for Your Qualifications

The concept of “A/B Testing” is common in web development. Because it’s hard to understand, for instance, how to design a website that will be maximally effective in converting first-time visitors to repeat users, web developers show different visitors alternate versions of the same site to see which variations are most effective.

Your profile on Mighty Spring is anonymous, so it’s easy to try different versions of your personal “pitch” to see which resonates most with employers. When your identity is tied to your profile, it’s hard to shake employers’ previous impressions of what they did and didn’t like about your background, even once you’ve changed elements of your profile.

3. Explore Multiple Paths

While A/B Testing is good for figuring out how best to present your qualifications to different employers for a specific role, anonymity can also help you gauge interest from employers for distinctly different kinds of positions.

For instance, let’s say that you’ve been a software engineer and are now considering both new software engineering positions and product management roles. You’ll probably want to highlight different elements of your past experience depending on which role an employer is hiring for.

Today people handle this by writing multiple resumes – a lot of work – and then are tasked with managing which employers see which version.

Mighty Spring automates this by showing employers the pieces of your background that are relevant for their open position, giving you a focused narrative that optimizes the chances of you getting interviews for the positions you want.

4. “Always On” Job Search

As we’ve written about before, the odds are pretty low that you stumble across the perfect job while you’re in active “job-searching” mode. Most people spend much more of their time employed and relatively “passive” than they do as active job seekers. Exceptional opportunities don’t obey your schedule — they often present themselves unexpectedly. To optimize your professional development, it’s important to put yourself in a position to happen upon these opportunities.

It’s a professional faux pas to openly seek new opportunities right after taking a new position, and everyone knows how time-consuming job search can be. However, an anonymous posting about your professional interests and qualifications can exist publicly without putting you at risk, even immediately after you’ve taken a new position.

Anonymity creates a barrier between job search and social visibility. Becoming more active on LinkedIn may generate more inbound opportunities, but it also alerts your current employer that you are active in the job market.

This “always on” method is also a much less time-intensive approach to job search. Employers request to speak to you based on your anonymous profile, making them the seeker, not you. Instead, you simply filter the incoming interview requests and only accept if you find the opportunity appealing.

Conclusion

If you’d like to see anonymous job search in action, request an invite to join Mighty Spring’s beta! We send out invitations regularly. New employers and candidates join every day and our matching algorithm makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, whether it’s a great new opportunity or new, star hire. Request an invite to see more!

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, an anonymous, passive job search platform. He spends his free time exploring San Francisco, shooting a mean game of pool, and playing a much nicer game of ping pong. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen​.

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When is it Too Early to Start Looking?

Dilbert author Scott Adams recently wrote an interesting essay for the Wall Street Journal about the role failure plays in success. In this piece was a mention about career strategy:

“[A successful CEO] offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you   won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal.”

Scott and his CEO friend are exactly right. However, Scott glosses over a major challenge with this approach: it’s difficult to efficiently maintain an awareness of available opportunities.

You could constantly apply for jobs, but while safe, that’s an inefficient time-suck for an employed person. Alternatively, you could post a public notice of your career interests and goals, but you’ll run the risk of your current employer seeing it.

Recruiters also fill this gap. They find people who aren’t “job seeking” in the traditional sense (in fact, recruiters rarely contact unemployed people) and show them something interesting. However the recruiting model is rife with misaligned incentives and agency problems. Additionally, individual recruiters have a limited view of all available opportunities and working with multiple recruiters is a good way to lose all of your currently productive work-time.

Leveraging technology to solve this passive search problem is Mighty Spring’s value proposition for candidates. We make it easy and safe, utilizing anonymity, to publicly market yourself for opportunities that you would consider as a next career step. Employers browse these anonymous candidate profiles and send interview requests to candidates whose skills and interests are aligned with their needs. You manage the whole process, at your convenience, through a simple web interface.

This is truly passive job search and the transparent future of the employment market. Come see how it works!

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Hiring Diamonds in the Rough

We've got some bad news for you: your company's hiring process is woefully inefficient and has been since you hired your first employee. The good news is that you've got plenty of room to grow.

Mighty Spring to the rescue!

What are “diamonds in the rough”?

There are generally two forms of competition that exist in the employment market. The first is the no-holds-barred, money-is-no-object fight for the most elite candidates who have self-evidently appealing resumes and backgrounds.

The second form of competition is to find exceptional candidates who are also great deals. Think Moneyball for hiring. This competition is for diamonds in the rough—candidates that your competitors undervalue in the market.

Why do your competitors undervalue these people? Because the resumes of these candidates don’t look like they were reverse-engineered from the job description that interests them. These are individuals who are trying to transition from other industries or career paths, or are looking to take on more responsibility.

Diamonds in the rough are excited about your open position, capable of excelling, and are willing to take less money than their more immediately-appealing peers to do your job.

Why do diamonds in the rough exist?

When screening candidates for an open job, people generally try to put each resume into one of two buckets: “move forward to next step” and “no thanks”.

Not every candidate fits neatly into one of these buckets. In fact, most candidates are going to fall into a grey, middle area—after all, people exist on a spectrum. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good process for handling these grey-area candidates. They seek to minimize time spent at the top of the hiring funnel and quickly drop these candidates into one of the two buckets and move on.

On paper, diamonds in the rough don’t look the way you expect a high-performer to look and, more often than not, end up in the “no thanks” bucket.

Do you do this? Of course—everyone does it.

How can you beat your competitors at hiring?

Identify and hire more diamonds in the rough. How? The long answer is to develop a better process for screening the candidates that currently end up in your “no thanks” bucket.

The key, in a way, is to be less picky than your competitors, not more. Of course, this doesn’t mean you are less picky when it comes to the quality of the person you actually hire, but less picky at the top of your hiring funnel. In order to do this efficiently, you may first need to streamline your initial interview and improve your sourcing strategy.

The short answer is to use Mighty Spring! We give employers insight into candidate traits that tend to be associated with diamonds in the rough, like what a given candidate is most enthusiastic about learning more about in the near future. We also help employers define an effective and efficient interviewing process that helps them hire with ease.

Interested in trying it out? Join our private beta! We send out invites regularly.

Lumen Sivitz is a former technical recruiter and CEO of Mighty Spring, an online service that provides the best benefits of working with a recruiter without the hassle. He spends his free time juggling sports, games, music, and learning how to juggle. You can follow him on Twitter @lumen​.