Hey, it’s 2010. Why do we still need recruiters?!

This is a question that I asked a few years ago. With the advances in machine learning, data mining, and pattern recognition during the last decade, recruiting seems like a function that could, and should be automated.

Why then do we still need recruiters? Why is Wildcog, a new company, so focused on recruiting and improvements in the recruiting process?

In short, recruiting (and hiring) is all about people. It’s about emotion. It’s about communication. It is not at all about keyword matching ratios.

I don’t believe this is a task that machines are good at yet. This is mainly because matching a resume with a job is actually a lot more qualitative than it is quantitative. Resumes are terrible things. Resumes try to distill a human being down two a few pages. They often fail miserably.

The devil is in the details and there is an arms race of sorts between job seekers and hiring managers. Call it the buzzword war; Managers tend to write job descriptions that are inaccurate because they contain a “wish list” of skills and experience. In response to this, sharp resume writers learned to stuff their resumes full of keywords so that pattern matchers (carbon or silicon based) would select their resume more frequently as a fit!

This is why companies like Google have armies of flesh-and-blood recruiters. The signal is weak and very noisy. This is why we are here. Trying to make it less lame.

He likes to have his “cigar” in while presenting…

We lost one but gained 4! Heidi, Courtney, Christian and Kirill! We’re exited that our small team is growing and stronger than ever!

Before she left, Ashley brought us Heidi Armstrong… she’s like Neil Armstrong… BAD ASS. Heidi is coming up to speed fast. She’s a natural born recruiter. Loves to talk to people and has a keen eye for talent. Heidi is already thriving here at Wildcog, soaking up technical information like a sponge! In her spare time, Heidi farms kittens. Go Heidi!

Next came Courtney. Court was once a competitor. We’ve been after her for a while now. We would run into her at tech events and see her walk away with 50+ cards in 2 hours (no kidding). She’s a networking, head-hunting, friend-making, connection machine. She was being recruited by LinkedIn but decided to join the Wild Ones instead! As I write this Courtney has 3 people interviewing at some great companies… powerhouse! Go Court!

Christian Perry, our East Cost Emissary and West Cost Startup Ambassador has joined Wildcog in a sales role. To most tech people in SF Christian needs no introduction. He’s the wizard behind SF BETA, the preeminent SF Tech Social, as well as Snap Summit. He also co-founded geekSessions with Shon! Christian is splitting time between Boston and SF so he’s attacking both fronts and spearheading Wildcog’s effort to bring the magic to our friends on the East Coast. Christian just brought in Context Optional as a new client! Awww Yeah!

Our most recent Addition is Kirill. Kirill brings many years of HR/Management experience to the team. He turned down a plush Director Level Postion to come here and we’re glad he did! Most recruiting companies are founded and run by HR people. We were raised by engineers. Kirill brings balance to the team with a twist. He’s also a celebrated underground drum-n-bass DJ here in SF, he’s been an event promotor and has played at Love Parade and many of the city’s great parties. Kirill is doing both sales and recruiting at Wildcog. Rock on Kirill!

One of Wildcog’s founding recruiters, Ashley, has accepted a position with Google on the SRE recruiting team. We’ll miss Ashley but she will always be a cog at heart. The SRE team at Google has some of the best engineers on the planet.

Ashley is laid back and has a genuine love for geeky things and people. We took that love and helped her hone it into a razor-sharp head-hunting weapon. We’re sad to see her go but proud to see her join a great company and a great team.

Cheers Ash!

Including coffee. Shon and Ashley are about to swig their fresh Bacon Maple Lattes from Pirate Radio Cafe. MMMMmm… BACON!

Up and to the right!

Scale is a big thing these days. Web applications operating at “net scale”. Hard, interesting problems. Changes that effect hundreds of millions or billions of users instantly. Neat, very demanding stuff.

Speaking of scale,  Wildcog is now recruiting for 1 of the top 10 most-hit-highest-traffic-most-unique-and-repeat-vistors sites in the world. In fact top 10 is being modest…

Got scale? hit us up

When you work in recruiting you get to see a lot of hiring. Hiring generates data. Data should generate intelligence…. in a perfect world. Wildcog brings you “the 30 day cliff”. It’s a statistical point of no return. Sort of like a recruiting event-horizon. Basically after 30 days “in process” the likelihood that a candidate will accept an offer plunges dramatically. The model isn’t perfect and there are exceptions, such as executive positions, but in general we find the cliff to be a real, observable, recruiting  phenomena.

Something is going on here. In passive candidates we think that initial interviews peak their interest in leaving their position and they begin to interview more. In any case, the window to hire someone good seems to be narrow.

Languages would be bands:

1. Scala:         Only for the cooooolest companies and projects.
2. Erlang:       Pretty damned cool but not as cool as Scala.
3. Python:      Cool but getting too mainstream for anyone really indie.
4. Ruby:         Ruby is pretty and her friend Rails is easy.
5. PHP:          Way too popular to be cool.
6. Java:          It makes business people happy.
7. C++:           Cool because only the 31337 can avoid buffer overflows.
8. C#:             A great language for people who use Windows.

Not included in the list are more front-endy type languages which are usually paired with one of the above. These include (in order of coolness):

1. Unity (for when the web really turns in to the Metaverse)
2. ActionScript 3
3. Javascript
4. Objective-C

Here’s Tangie during her tax presentation to Wildcog board members: