Prologue: This article is the first of a series focused on displaying the problems we identified in tech recruitment processes. Together they led us to create a movement that aims to improve the state of the industry, which you can join here.

It’s not funny, but it’s ironic: the tech recruitment industry has such a chronic shortage of professionals, still, the candidate experience is many times filled with underwhelming episodes, making both parts straight-up losing interest in each other.

A lot of times, it comes down to the speed processes that are (not) resolved.

Candidates we’re in contact with every day tell us that as processes take longer and longer, they start to seem “shady” and “suspicious”; the continuous delay in decision making shows a “lack of respect” for them and end up making them lose their motivation.

This slowness creates a lot of hate and frustration in everyone involved, and how to improve it is our topic for today.

“Gotta go fast” — Sonic the Hedgehog

The slowness of tech recruitment processes shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone: Glassdoor found that a Software Developer process takes on average 35 days to be closed (in the US); Workable found the time to wrap-up a process in an Information Technology / Design position is 56 days. At Landing.jobs, we use 45 days as a general rule-of-thumb.

The time to close a position depends mainly on a) complexity of evaluating the profile b) criticality of the position. As you know by now, tech profiles are both complex and critical. Hence, the big waiting time.

But now picture this: you walk into a store to buy a product, and you are faced with the information you could only buy it after 45 days, despite your shown interest. In a time of Amazon Prime 2-day shipping, this just doesn’t cut it.

So what should happen instead?

The more time candidates wait for a response, the more they will disengage and lose interest in the process. The best candidates will soon not be available, because of the number of alternatives available to them.

Being dynamic in your recruitment process becomes, in fact, your competitive advantage, your not so secret weapon.

Here are some tips we believe will help advance your processes quicker:

1. Have a clear process from the beginning: define what the process steps are and who needs to be involved in every moment. Define concrete decision criteria that can be applied after every interaction and make the process easier on yourself;
2. Set deadlines: both recruiters and candidates should have a clear date to communicate a decision, deliver an assignment or decide on a job proposal. Leaving things open leads to lack of decisions, disengagement and will probably result bad for both parts;
3. Don’t leave it for tomorrow: send that email response, evaluate that challenge, ping that stakeholder today. It’s easier to let things slip day-by-day, but at the end of a process that will accumulate to weeks of indecision.w

In conclusion

Here’s a simple truth: both recruiters and candidates really love what they do. They’re fired up and passionate in their craft. So all the hurdles in processes are demotivational and prevent everyone to actually do what they are great at.

Our goal with the “Make Tech Recruitment Better” manifesto is to help the industry improving its standards. Together we can do better.

Let’s start by making it faster,

Luís Pereira

Head of Operations @ Landing.jobs

PS: You can check the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Blog Post of this series here, here, and here respectively.

Long are the days where filling an application form with 30 questions was the only way to get a position at your dream company. Remember the feeling of sickness in your stomach every time you need to think about what to say on a Cover Letter or how to adapt your CV?

Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.

A major part of your network have probably found their current job either through a referral, an informal acquaintance or a company approach. And this phenomenon is even greater inside the tech realm, given the obvious gap between the demand of skilled talent and the number of tech professionals available.

The result is a change in the dynamics of the market, and a chance for companies like Landing.jobs to improve the job search experience of both employers and candidates.

The classical way to find a job

In a marketplace with a lot of candidates with similar skills, a few big household companies attracted the biggest slice of the labour market. This gave them the possibility to treat applicants as a commodity, cherrypicking the best ones.

The modern way to find a job

With the greater dissemination of the variety of career opportunities available for individuals, and the specificity of the skills needed to accomplish companies’ projects; we’re witnessing an inversion of the previous relationship.

Companies are now increasing their active reach to candidates which fit their very specific requirements. Since candidates are now in possession of both more information on the market and an interest signal from companies, they are in a much better negotiating position.

So what?

The shift in mentalities above is the reason Landing.jobs exists in the first place. “We’re on a mission to make tech recruitment a rewarding experience for everyone.” (it’s really on our site).

Observing these changes on the market, we understand it is necessary to offer both candidates and companies different ways to interact with each other. Candidate Search is the first step in that direction.

On it, our company users can search through a database of anonymised candidate profiles, and when they find someone fitting just “Request a Handshake” © (not really copyrighted).

Here’s a visual overview:

Or in a few short words: it’s Tinder for job search.

The product was in a MVP version for a while already, working under the radar with a few selected companies. Since it has proven its worth — leading candidates to be introduced and hired to companies which otherwise, we’re now ready to give it the spotlight it deserves!

Candidate Search changes the interactions available between our users: before, a candidate could only apply to a company with an open position; now, companies can apply to candidates who match their needs.

This accompanies the exact trend we’ve seen on the labour market. And it democratises the application process, since it is no longer a one-way relationship — candidates and companies mantain a balanced relationship.

Next Steps

1. If you’re a tech professional that wants to get applications from companies, sign up to Landing.jobs. If you already did, be sure you update your profile settings to be visible to our companies;
2. If you’re an employer interested in using Candidate Search, get in touch with us and we’ll make it happen.

A special thanks for everyone participating in the making of Candidate Search 1.0, especially Cristina Feijó and Pedro Rodrigues. You’re awesome!

Don’t forget to follow us on Medium to get the news of what we’ve been releasing (I promise I’ll try to write more). Oh, and give some applause if you like what we’re doing!

I had a special place in my heart for Quora.

It was where I learned how crazy someone’s mother is, why do planes don’t fly over Tibet, and that Satan may actually have a fair point.

There was a moment where I genuinely had an amount of answers that I would read daily [a Quora quota, you may say]. They made me feel smart in topics nobody really cared about.

But then something happened — I just stopped using it. It took me about 3 weeks to become aware of it, and when I did I found something pretty interesting:

Quora was a victim of the Exploration vs Exploitation dilemma.

A Little Concept Explaining

a. Exploration focus the problem solving in high risk, high reward hypothesis, aimed to produce qualitative leaps in value. These are often classified as visionary or disruptive.

b. Exploitation focus on improving an already good solution through small iterations, each one with relatively low risk but assured returns. These fine tuning is also referred to as incremental.

A clear example of this is Apple: during the Steve Jobs era, the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad were named as visionary, because of the leap of faith necessary to bet on these new product categories — exploration.

On the other end, the improvements made over time to both products, reveal a much higher focus on operational efficiency and profit generation. These incremental changes are a trademark of Tim Cook’s era— exploitation.

The exploration vs exploitation dilemma happens when there is a decision between sticking with what we got and improve on it, or dedicate resources into finding something new. And this takes us back to Quora.

Continuing the Story

As a network of highly specialised experts answering the most varied questions, Quora’s recommendation system faces a variation of the dilemma:

When generating content to provide to users, should I (A) go with things I know they’ll like, or (B) surprise them with something out of their radar?

— Quora’s Brain [non-official source]

And breaking it down, there’s a bit more things to consider than what catches the eye. Let’s see:

1. How sure am I users like the content I give them in (A)? Did they provide consistent signals of interaction with the content (e.g. upvotes, answers, shares)?
2. How long is my pipeline of truly interesting content if I restrict it to the topics in (A)? Will I repel users out of using the service because I’m not providing enough new material?
3. How much are individuals interested in (B)? Can I create categorising models representing individual’s preference between exploring and exploiting?

These (among other questions) should be addressed when deciding what content should appear on my feed and e-mail communications, for example. And this is where Quora disappointed me personally.

Because when I started drilling in the reasons behind my drop in Quora usage, one thing was apparent: the thrill was gone.

• Gone were the quirky scientific facts;
• Gone were the real experts sharing life experiences;
• Gone were the life lessons given by wise strangers.

These were the things that I really enjoyed, that made me come back over and over again.

And all that was left now were the same old authors, answering the same old questions, saying the same old things. That’s just sad.

Quora failed to identify me as a user keen on exploration, and thus couldn’t match their content with my personal preferences.

Lesson Learned: when building recommendation for your user, always be sure you got the most important dimensions figured out.

I guess the only thing left to do now is to start a Reddit account.

Liked what you read? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Want to read more? Here’s some other Notes on Product about things that either delight me or piss me off:

#1: Medium

Exploration vs Exploitation was originally published in Product Coalition on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re a regular here on Medium, you’ve probably notice by now on what is called Claps, the new interaction pattern with content on the platform.

But if it passed you by unnoticed, here’s the sum up: instead of a simple Heart, you can now Clap as many times as you want: one, two, ten. Darn it, you can give a freaking ovation, just stand up and frenetically click on the indicated button.

Of course the immediate reaction was of outcry, with the days following the release being filled with articles condemning the change and even demanding a fair exchange rate between Hearts and Claps.

On my end, I tried to figure out what this moves represented for Medium. And it took me awhile, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. And I’m here to tell you why.

Medium bases itself in two principles:

1. It wants to deliver you the content you’ll find the most useful to consume;
2. It aims to distribute payments among content-makers by the real value they’re producing for the network.

And Claps actually help achieve both these objectives. Don’t believe it?

Start by thinking on the impact the Like button had on the success of Facebook. Suddenly, every user of the network was signalling what content they enjoyed (or not, by omission).

Claps takes it to the next level: instead of a simple binary signal, you now have a scale of different signal strength.

As it is obvious, an article to which John gave ten claps is necessarily more interesting for him than another to which he gave only a couple.

This represents a quantitative signal that users send to the network — different from the qualitative signal used by Facebook on Reactions, for example. But it goes a step even further: users are sending a personalised quantitative signal. Why does this matter?

Janet and Xavier clap 10 times for the same post, but Janet never claps more than 3 times per article, while Xavier always claps 10 times for his favourite article every day.

These signals shouldn’t be handled equally by the network — and now they aren’t. Tracking these interactions, Medium can produce an intelligent model adapted to the interactions every user has with content.

And it will feed on their two principles:

1. Better understanding of what content to show you and your network;
2. Improved decision of which content-producers to reward and in what magnitude.

Claps is at the intersection between Design and Data Science, but ultimately is driven by Medium’s core values. When I see strategies like this being so well designed and executed, it puts a (sort of weird) smile on my face. And gives me the urge to go to work.

Well played, Medium. Well played.

Liked what you read? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Want to read more? Here’s some other Notes on Product about things that either delight me or piss me off:

#2: Quora

Dubrovnik

Right from the second you land, Dubrovnik gives you an absurd amount of hidden spots for swimming, diving or just admiring its natural beauty.

After spending enough time in the translucide water and catching some sun on the rocky shores*, you can stroll down to the Old City and check out some of the medieval architecture with a Renaissance twist.

*[Pro tip: get a foam mattress.]

Locals say an obscure TV series called Game of Thrones had some scenes recorded here. But since I’ve never heard of anything like that, I can’t really confirm.

Hvar

This island is famously known for its party life, with the combination [Sunset Party + Bar Crawl + Disco Island] being a visitor’s favourite.

But if you’re an elderly mind in a young body like myself [or any type of mind / body combination], you’ll rather rent a boat and spend your days anchoring the islands around Hvar, watching all the vessels go by.

Split

Not particularly photogenic, Split is the best place to feel the Croatian way of life, if you want to escape the touristic trail.

Really close by you’ll find an ancient castle, Tvrđava Klis. A worthy detour for what seems to be an almost abandoned landmark. Shame.

Plitvice Lakes

With water so desirable that it’s forbidden to dive, the things you’ll see here will seem almost too good to be true. A personal favourite, indeed.

You’ll soon be filled with an immense sense of calmness [Playlist included].

Zadar

One last stop before coming back home, with a weirdly attractive vibe.

It’s worth checking out the Sea Organ, were waves play sounds on a staircase; and the Sun Salutation, a light show produced by a solar panel during the night.

But staying a day by the pool was the most enjoyable part, if you can do that.

Extra: Adriatic Sea

If you find yourself traveling from one place to the other on a ferry, you have a pretty good chance of coming across with what Croatia best offers: incredibly pure, amazing locations.

Just sit back, relax and let the beauty pass on by.

And it’s done! Let me know what would you add here, and if I convinced you of visiting Croatia anytime soon. In the meanwhile, if you liked the pictures, follow me on Instagram to see more stuff!