While doing anything serious, or anything at all, Lincoln’s advice is spot on. He once (in extremely trying circumstances) said:

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what’s said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

These are really powerful words. They resonate with you every time you are at the helm and you are disappointed. Perhaps not so surprisingly, like other walks of life, these words apply to entrepreneurship. While doing the things you do, there are challenging moments and keeping such a “being with the end in the mind” approach helps.

We are excited to announce that we are experimenting with a robust new feature for JyMob. This is related to providing a quantifiable assessment of a candidate’s relevance to a given job.

Yes, our machine learning algorithms now do a great deal in trying to find out the match between job descriptions and candidate resumes. Of course, we know that a lot gets lost in translation when it comes to job descriptions and resumes, but a robust candidate assessment service should have a way to quickly sort candidates based on their overall relevance to the given job. This is especially useful in high volume cases.

We plan to tweak the matching algorithm in coming weeks and months. If you want to participate in helping us perform better, we request you to take a look and provide some feedback. Seasoned recruiters, hiring managers and engineers are extremely good at deciding the match amidst imprecise data (like job descriptions and resumes), and we want to improve our algorithms to become reliable in deciding a match.

The feature integrates nicely with the list of candidates and is available when the candidates show off their skills on our tests. You should really try it out yourself, but here is what it looks like:

The candidates are nicely sorted on the score and when you click on a particular score, you get the details that went into determining the score:

Nice, isn’t it?

But wait, that’s not all. We encourage you to form the hiring team for your jobs and we also calculate the hiring team sentiment based on how candidate has performed on the display of their skills! Here’s what it looks like:

We hope this helps you in making an informed decision about whether to invite a candidate or to archive his/her job application (which is also a feature I will talk about soon).

If you haven’t already, give JyMob a try. It’s well worth your time :-).

Building a startup is hard like so many well-written articles and personal experiences will tell you. But you don’t have to give up what you love (in addition to doing your startup) while doing it. Agreed, the best way to do many things is to do them one at a time: you can’t be building a startup, learning to cook Italian recipes, learning to improve your chess Elo rating from 1800s to 2100s, get really good at math or a new language all at once. Prioritize.

But doing little things you always wanted to do is welcome. It stimulates your way back into your startup struggle and reinvigorates you.

I like explaining things I think I have understood well to others. In that process, I learn a lot myself. Recently, I started dabbling with the Ruby programming language. I wrote some introductory text about understanding Ruby’s classes and objects. It has received a reasonably good feedback on the Ruby-talk mailing list.

Hope you enjoy some Ruby fun!

It is imperative that you test the job candidates to your satisfaction. If they are technically competent, you should make sure that there is a cultural fit. In general, humans are great at deciding whether another person is nice to work with. Simply put, if you are reasonably sure about technical prowess/competence of a person you are trying to hire, all there’s in the personal interviews is to ensure that s/he is not a jerk. Recently, Lisa Quast wrote about this and put a special emphasis of testing active job seekers.

Now, to be sure of one’s technical competence is hard. Doing it using the computers is even more so. In these days of fast search engines, testing for the sake of it is utterly meaningless. Hiring is a complex process. Making it even more complex by having a “technical test” appears unnecessary. And it is, if the test is testing nothing specific and if the problems are “googleable”. Granted, we all use Google, Quora, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, the Internet and our tools to solve the problems we face in professional career. Amidst such a resourceful environment however, it is possible for humans to pose/create problems that are interesting and really test if someone knows the stuff s/he claims. Asking such questions/problems also gives the candidates a glimpse of what you/your company/a particular group is working on.

And then, it is not about just the set of problems or questions in a database. It’s about the testing models. A question can be a carefully crafted multiple choice problem, a puzzle, fixing a (purposely) botched computer in the cloud, a piece of source code in an open source project, a picture in the form of attachments and so on! This is what the JyMob Problem Database is all about. As you know, the core value proposition of JyMob is in creating a test by choosing relevant problems from this growing problem database. Here is what is different about our problems/questions:

1. It is created and curated by humans. We are constantly looking for experts who love creating innovative problems for us :-). Nothing is as effective as asking experts to contribute real-life problems to our database.

2. As employers, you have access to all the public problems in the database.

3. You can create your own problems and not share them with others. What this means is that you can define all your problems and use them for your own jobs.

4. The problems are of various kinds. We intend to provide you with an infrastructure that is useful for you to test a particular skill. In some cases, asking moderate-to-hard programming problems with varying algorithmic complexity is required. In other cases, you want to find out how good the sense of a user’s sense of “user experience” is. In some other cases, you want to find out whether the candidate applying for a QA position knows about how testable some code is or how to write testable code.

5. The problems are easily searchable by keywords. You can choose your own problems and generate a test on your own. Every candidate applying for your job(s) can get the exact same test comprising of the problems you choose. If you want to make the tests less predictable (gameable), you should rely on our matching algorithm, however.

The entire treasure trove of problems is available to you when you post your job(s). Once the candidates submit the solutions, you can create discussion threads where you can ask for clarifications and improvements. This keeps an entire record of discussion you have had with the candidate. Going ahead, there will be a possibility of scheduling interactive chat session with one button click.

Such an infrastructure is both job-specific and job-agnostic. This means you can use it to test a sales engineer, a tech support person, a software engineer, a devops candidate etc. In other words, it is not just for coders.

The JyMob Problem Database is thus versatile, growing, dynamic and worthwhile. It helps you find the best people with confidence. It is JyMob’s core IP.

And yes, if you are an expert or know of any expert(s) who loves to compose and pose the problems ;), please let us know.

Now that the first JyMob Demo Day is over, I decided to make sure that I resume some targeted blogging so that we can make our customers aware of some of the key things that we have.

Of course, it is not about the feature list and the ugly competition that emerges as a result. Most of the features of a product should work in concert, like a well-made movie. Any time there is a mismatch, the feature should not make its way into the product. Maybe those other features should define another product or another service integrated into your flagship product.

To that effect, this blog post is going to be constantly upgraded as it is a list (or matrix, like Evan Miller suggests) of features JyMob has. Every time I write about a feature, I will link to it from here.

Before I begin, I just want to reiterate that JyMob is a service to transform the human resources function step-by-step. We want to beautify the career pages the companies have and help them attract the talent they need. At the same time, it is an avenue for job seekers to demonstrate their effectiveness. Beautifying career pages of companies has deep connotations and we believe that we will slowly unravel the magical products/services to do that …

So, here we go:

1. The JyMob Problem Database.
2. Deciding Relevance of candidates to jobs.
3. The JyMob Machine Learning Algorithm.
4. The Power of the JyMob Badge.
5. Automated Assessment and the Hiring Committee.
6. Versatile Test Environment.

In the (early) life of a startup, a specific day has a special meaning and importance. This day, fondly referred to as the “Demo Day” is the time when the startup founders show off their product to potential investors and others. Of course, the venerable Y Combinator has made this term very popular.

We at JyMob have been very excited about this day. About 6 months ago, we were admitted into the first batch of Alchemist Accelerator and our first ever demo day is set for tomorrow, Thursday, January 17, 2013.

Firstly, like the name says, it’s time to “demo” your product in about eight minutes. Yes, that’s right – you get 08 minutes to explain your vision, your mission and your message. Fortunately, for us, our product is our message. It is in a pretty good shape and that gives Deepa, a lot of confidence. Good luck, Deepa.

Of course, the ultimate power lies with you guys, the users of our service. But personally, I take demo day as a validation avenue. If I have really understood the product, its positioning and relevance, I should be able to generate enough interest in potential investors. Independent of whether my startup is accepting or should accept external money, the positive frame of mind should be whether I can explain my product to someone (who I don’t know) in a short amount of time. After all, someone is coming there and investing his or her precious time in listening to me. I have got to do my best in delivering the message. Period.

As for the product, yeah, like I said, we had been busy doing some really cool things with respect to making JyMob’s distribution easy. New features, new look of the website is refreshing for all of us here. If you haven’t tried it already, give JyMob a try, now!

One of the many interesting things you get to do while doing a startup is run into other startups that do noteworthy stuff. We just ran into one – Teespring. It’s a cool place to design your custom T-shirt and run campaigns. Check it out at Teespring.

We designed a simple JyMob T-shirt and we are running a campaign. If you like JyMob (we are sure you do) you should order your JyMob T-shirt and wear it. I can guarantee you that it will be a good quality T-shirt and as a side-effect, you’d end up helping JyMob.

Here is the campaign.

Thank You!

I often tend to learn from the so-called conventional wisdom, but I don’t get this one:

Usually, hiring happens by referrals.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the motivation. It is obvious that you would start with your own contacts, but in a way, you are unnecessarily limiting your scope. When you have a job or two, you should have a large (enough) sample space to choose candidates from. If you always hired only from the pool of people you already knew, the world would be small (and boring), wouldn’t it?

In general, hiring the right candidate is a problem, some say it is a big problem. And it is true. It is a matter of luck. If you are starting off, this is even more important. But if you are a middle-aged company, the nature of hiring is slightly different. You are mostly looking for a reasonably smart candidate who is a good fit. Of course, you’d want to hire someone who gives his or her heart and soul to the job, but in a startup, you are almost creating a cult, which is not the case in a larger company.

With technical jobs however, you don’t know if a certain candidate is capable of doing the job(s) you have however strong s/he looks on paper (i.e. resume) and/or how strongly s/he is recommended on say LinkedIn. You want to know beforehand if you should spend more time applying human intelligence (which is very reliable) judging this candidate. And yes, when you judge, you are also being judged.

But to reach this stage, you need to define your core requirements rather objectively. Job descriptions have consistently failed to do that. That is where JyMob looks promising. It makes you think hard to define your jobs objectively. Rather than getting the candidate to solve the problems whose solutions are available off-the-search-engine, you are free to be creative and design the problems that are themselves search-engine-defying! You can create quick challenges and you get a nicely formatted report of how well the candidates did. Being able to pose interesting problems uniformly may also lure candidates or create their interest in your company/department. Many engineers for example, are interested in solving interesting problems and seek a reasonably good growth and salary.

Many candidates are perhaps turned off by screening services like JyMob. But at JyMob, we try hard not to get in their way. Our test interface is quite intuitive, forgiving and pleasant to work with. You can attach any number of files along with your solutions, add clarifying notes when you are asked (i.e. create a full-fledged discussion thread within your solution!) and you even get reminded of the time left if the test is a timed one.

With such a tool at your disposal, you can make more informed decision about your prospective hires without having to spend increasingly more time. If you are working on “Internet Time”, this becomes all the more important because you spend time only on the candidates that are screened by the system that you designed.

Job seekers are also not at a disadvantage because they know that it is only fair to initially employ interesting screening techniques on job providers’ part. This opens up a wide array of candidates for job providers to choose from. They get a platform to show-case the nature of problems they are trying to solve and get to be innovative about creating such problems. And what’s more, they get to choose from a versatile JyMob problem database where we use strength of human network that helps create those problems!

So, yes, go ahead, when you want to hire, start with the widest landscape possible and tune services like JyMob to your satisfaction.

After making it a goal of life for a few weeks, we have finally been able to release JyMob. It is available here. Try it out and let us know by sending feedback.

For any software engineer, the following should be true:

The goal of any development should be to put the thing being developed in production (ASAP).

You would be surprised to know that the bug that was preventing me from releasing this was that in Action Mailer. If you are seeing this rather cryptic message in the sender’s inbox when using exim as your sendmail replacement (as MTA):

A message that you sent using the -t command line option contained no addresses that were not also on the command line, and were therefore suppressed. This left no recipient addresses, and so no delivery could be attempted.

A workaround consists of the following:

1. In exim’s configuration (typically, /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/some_cfg) add extract_addresses_remove_arguments = false
2. In Action Mailer’s configuration, set:

 config.action_mailer.sendmail_settings = {
  :arguments => "-i"
  }

Hope Google indexes this article soon. Read more about this at GitHub page. (Thanks to petemc on exim’s IRC channel).

Hoping to hear some feedback from you guys!

When I told my son that there are 66 million children who go to school hungry every day, he was nervous. It is possible that providing such facts is not necessarily good parenting, but I just felt like doing that, without expecting any returns from it. Not that he is not eating well or craves junk food, but I felt that it may help him keep things in perspective.

Hunger is a delicate subject and something that has lasting impact on me. Hungry children is a sad reality.

But Free Rice is a great initiative and I can’t praise it enough. It has such a nice model:

• Visit the site.
• Choose your language of interest (I guess more are on the way).
• Start improving your vocabulary by playing the word game(s). For each correct guess (for the meaning of a given word) they donate 10 grains of rice through WFP.

This is such a win-win strategy! Even if you forget the cause and play for improving your word power, you are going to do something good to others as a side-effect, a positive side-effect. I really like the simplicity of this model and hope that it thrives. I am hooked on to their site and hope you all do the same. Come on, give it a try!

I must say that I am in no way related to the website (other than being a user and player) and I do understand that there has to be a business model behind this kind of philanthropy, but hey, it’s okay to be ignorant in certain cases, especially if it is done for pure bliss.