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Comment by mmcconnell1618 | Hacker News Reader

If I'm a job seeker I want to present myself in the best possible light. Allowing a 3rd party to rate my "passion" and "respect" without any knowledge of the algorithm would keep me from using the service. If you did publish the algorithm it will be gamed just like search engines in a matter of hours. You might want to consider suggesting tags and keywords and allowing job seekers to select the ones they believe apply. I would consider dropping the "passion" and "respect" part as they may open you to future legal action.

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Right now, we aren't doing any kind of indexing. If you apply for a position through our service, you give whatever information you want about yourself, and we check out your public data on those networks. If you don't want to share your twitter or stack overflow, leave those fields blank.

We don't publish the details of the algorithm but in effects it would be fairly difficult to game. Either you have a solid history of consuming and contributing relevant content or you don't. If you are able to manufacture that fraudulently, well, chances are that you're somebody interesting to talk to.

I didn't actually see any way for me as a developer to use your service. Signing up for the beta looked like a way for an employer to sign up.

Right. Our current goals is to help employers with their existing candidates. I have a question - would you like to be able to get a profile on skills? If so, what would you do with it?

Thanks!

I'm more curious as to how it finds me. I guess these days everyone's various accounts are pretty interlinked, and you can mine 80% of data from github and twitter.

That's correct. We're a tool for employers.

We're thinking about allowing some form of "self indexing" but we aren't there yet.

Hey! I'm David, the other co-founder of Skills. We're been mulling over our scoring for a while, and at this point we don't consider it a fundamental part of the product. Within the next few weeks, we'll be canning 'passion' and 'respect' and replacing it with something much simpler. In the future, we might drop scoring all together.

Our mission it to extract the most meaningful data from someone's professional activity online, and we're currently exploring how to best do that. If you're a job seeker, it's our goal to show employers the best version of you.

Question: do you think your current activity online can make you look good to employers? If so, what would you most like to show them?

Thanks!

I think that online activity like contributions to forums, twitter and github could be good indicators of a quality employee. However, I know many really smart, productive people who just aren't participating online in a significant way. If you're hiring for a community liaison then online activity is a critical indicator. If you're hiring a network engineer who watches log files and traffic all day online activity may not represent their "best self."

Agree 100%. Our approach is "if a candidate has some data online, we'll help you make better sense of it. If they don't, there's nothing we can tell you."

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