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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That app is really bad for people like me.

I'm not on GitHub because I code for my employers. That work doesn't get put out there like that.

I don't tweet much at all about the languages I code in or cool bits of code I just wrote or any of that. I'm one of those weirdos that tweets pictures of my lunch and funny crap my 4yr old says.

I'm "on" StackOverflow since I have a log in... but I rarely comment on stuff and have never posted a question. I probably should I suppose but I don't.

I don't think my candidate brief on Skills would be a very accurate indicator of my actual skills.

View on HN

We know, and we're working hard at that problem. Here's two thoughts:

(1) It's not our goal to make candidates like you look bad, not at all. When candidates have professional stuff online, we think employers should be interested in getting a good view of it. That's all we try to do. We wouldn't give you a bad score - we'd give you no score at all. Essentially, we're telling employers: "we can't know anything about this candidate, you should look at other stuff".

(2) I checked out your HN profile, and you have a ton of comments up. So, you do interact professionally online, at least in some way. I'm curious to hear your thoughts - say you applied for a job, and we did our best (algorithmic) job to make your HN footprint interesting to employers - what would that do for your attractiveness as a candidate?

After rereading my comment I think maybe it may have come off harsher than I intended. But I see you understand my message. And I don't for a minute think you would intentionally try to make people look bad. But this type of assessment definitely favors a certain type of person. And as someone else pointed out is kin to tossing half the resumes straight to the trash. Maybe I'm more old school than others but I just don't see the need to have potential employers using my online interactions on forums (and whatever commenting on HN is viewed as) to asses my skill. My HN footprint is probably not something I would want included either. Not that I think it would show me in a bad way. I just don't think it adds anything about my ability to do the job. Just like I'd not really want them checking out my Facebook (also a quasi-hot issue recently). The fact that I had a debate the other day with someone here about my use of "have had" is pretty irrelevant to any job I would be looking at. I'm not sure how you could mine any useful or relevant info from my HN posts.

To be quite honest, if I found a job post that wanted me to go fill out a profile on Skills I would probably not do it unless I was getting desperate or I really wanted to work for that particular company. I would move on to the next job post.

One thing to consider: I read that you're geared to employers at the moment and that they would be funneling candidates to the site as a way to apply. I would be more inclined to fill something out if it was just me doing it as a way to make a summary of me disconnected from any particular job app. I don't know how your system works right now, but I would be hesitant to just fill in the info and hope the results are in my favor. I'd want to see my brief and have an opportunity to adjust it before letting employers see it. But I imagine that dilutes the meaningfulness of it. Obviously if a person entered all that info and found their Twitter presence is not as good as they thought it would be, they would just remove that. But you can probably see where I'm coming from.

I understand, and you raise important questions. We think about these things quite often, and we're very much prepared to feel our way to a product that works. The big question for us is - is online professional activity valuable for a large enough group of employers and candidates? We think the answer is yes, but we can't be sure until we (or someone else) builds a successful business around it.

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