It's funny how the answer to not getting enough interest from qualified candidates is to make it more troublesome and time consuming to apply so that only unemployed people will bother.
It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK to require, at least according to this article.
Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.
It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of hamburger.
Not to mention that I don't hae a twitter account, linked in profile of note, or really any meaningful web presence. I'm kind of busy actually making things.
Union Square Ventures is not looking for someone who likes to make things. They're looking for someone who likes networking and getting noticed. Or to put it another way, they're looking for someone who can find someone else who's making things.
This. I think instead of spending your time online being a blowhard on twitter or your blog or wherever, you should be making things. Github, twitter, a blog, whatever should just be artifacts created as a by-product of making things.
The ideal employer who doesn't want resumes should be able to tell the difference between these two things.
Better still to spend most of your time making amazing things and then just enough time promoting them so as to generate a bit of notoriety.
Jeremy Ashkenas, Yehuda Katz, and Zed Shaw each build great things and give them away to the community. They also blog about these great things and they show up here on Hacker News to encourage discussion of their work.
But pretty much anything anybody makes these days has a web presence. In the case of most hobby projects, there are at least pictures on flickr. Commercial projects have web presences. For me, I could say "I did version 1.0 of the software for this: http://www.lumenera.com/products/surveillance-cameras/le175c...
But pretty much anything anybody makes these days has a web presence.
I'm not sure that is true. My new years resolution of sorts was to build a web presence for things I build, because historically I have not put them out in the public eye at all, even though there probably are some interesting things in there.
Publishing isn't nearly is fun as building, so I can imagine a lot of developers are in a similar boat.
That sounds like a rather knee-jerk reaction. Career-wise, having and promoting a personal brand can be very valuable. Have you done a basic cost/benefit analysis? Making stuff and promoting that stuff is not mutually exclusive.
It's often heard that 3 page CVs are an abomination since no one has time to trawl through all that. But now, doing a video interview just to apply is OK to require, at least according to this article.
Where I work, CVs with cover letters are fine, links to web presences are fine, if someone wants to send a DVD or link to a private youtube exhortation that's also fine. Whatever works for the candidate we'll look at it.
It can be tedious to sort through all these CVs, assuming your company is able to get any relevant applications at all. But that's the price of acquiring talented people. Hiring someone for a creative job like development is as tricky as selecting a spouse to get married. It's a long term commitment that will affect both of you profoundly. It's not the same as buying a pound of hamburger.