New Tool for Hiring Techies Works a Little Too Well
GitHire identifies top programmers — but finds there aren't enough of them to go around
When Brandon Bickford was helping to hire software developers to fill Minted.com’s office, he and his colleagues had to divert attention away from an expensive and time-consuming process of sifting through dozens or hundreds of résumés and then sending tests to the best applicants in the stack.
Finding the best software developers in the hotly competitive Bay Area is “a full-time job,” said Bickford, 31, one of the first developers at Yelp and, until last November, the chief software architect of Minted.com.
Competition for software talent is so fierce that some companies have resorted to buying smaller start-ups in order to absorb their best employees. But buying entire companies to get a handful of talented programmers is a pipe dream for most Bay Area start-ups, so a new class of job sites is emerging to help companies identify the best candidates.
“One bad hire can really cripple a small business,” said Krista Canfield, senior manager of corporate communications at LinkedIn.
GitHire is one of a few tech-job sites that home in on talent by analyzing a programmer’s code available on the Internet and online presence and then assigning a rank relative to his or her peers. The goal is to find “diamonds in the rough,” said Rhett Creighton, who co-founded the site with Dane Jensen — talented but obscure candidates an employer might never otherwise discover.
When GitHire, based in Austin, Tex., began operations three weeks ago, it did so with a bold promise: it would find five talented programmers, who could be interviewed by phone — for a $1,000 fee.
Instantly, it was flooded with more orders than it could handle and raised the fee to tamp down interest.
“They’re hoping we are the answer to finding talent easier,” Creighton said of his clients.
If GitHire’s rankings gain a reputation for being reliable, they could have an impact similar to a credit score’s effect on lending decisions, Creighton said. But for now the scores are based primarily on a simple metric: popularity. In a method that is similar to the way Google originally ranked websites, GitHire elevates a programmer’s status based on the attention that other developers are paying to his or her profile.
Because of the high demand for its services, GitHire has run into a snag on delivering on its five-qualified-candidate promise in the Bay Area because of a dearth of specialized programmers here.
According to data from the California Employment Development Department, more than 8,000 developer jobs have been added in the Bay Area since April 2009, bringing the total to nearly 40,000 — a pace not seen since the dot-com bubble.
But the tech industry’s top companies are still hungry for qualified candidates to fill a surplus of vacancies.
GitHire did not exist when Bickford was in need of programmers at Minted.com. But he appreciates the need for its services and its novel approach to finding talent.
“Top programmers are like a race car,” he said. “Once you get them you don’t want to lose them and you want to get as many as you can.”
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
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Frank DeFelice
It might be useful if we knew what you meant by a top programmer. Which languages can he program? How many lines of code a day? Can he write scientific algorithms, or code for operating systems? Mobile apps? Most programmers go to work late, and don't appear (in my experience) to be very productive.
S Hinton
At first I was excited - wow, automatically analyze programmer code to find overlooked talent - what a substantial improvement over asking someone to cough up instant solutions to artificial conundrums during the interview proces, although I'll admit that the difficulty of automatically analyzing the code excited me more than that someone might get hired. (Aside: I was once asked to explain shifting colors seen in a doo-hicky on a desk. Having a visual art background, unusual for programmers, I said 'It's refracting and reflecting shifting colors of objects around it' and the guy nearly fell off his chair because, in years, no one ever actually explained it and this guy had judged interviewees based on their ability to state their case.) Then I saw that the company "home<s> in on talent by analyzing a programmer’s code available on the Internet and online presence and then assigning a rank relative to his or her peers." Ha, ha, ha, ha, ROFL. This is just another way to find (good) 'popularity,' not a way to find "overlooked" talent! Congratulations, in a Dilbert kind of way, to GitHire for finding the *same* well known and popular programming talent that everybody else finds, thereby not only resulting in driving up wages but also giving themselves a cut!