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Comment by ksat | Hacker News Reader

Hi HNers, OP here. Cull.io is similar to top coder or interviewstreet but focussing just on recruiting web developers. It works by asking candidates to develop a web app on localhost instead of presenting a textarea where candidates types the code.

Advantages:

1) Candidates can virtually choose any language, framework, libraries or IDEs to solve the challenge. (Since they are developing on localhost with their own setup)

2) Because of 1) you need not limit your challenge to be overly algorithmic. You can for example ask questions like 'Pick the most popular article on hacker news today'

Disadvantages: Limited to candidates who can develop a web application

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This filtering signal works both ways. While you do avoid some of the worst developers, you also reduce your chances of getting some of the better developers who will not likely waste time jumping through hoops unless you're an extremely desirable company to work at.

I think that there's a market for this type of product for larger companies who receive too many resumes to easily sort through and want to hire a lot of developers that meet some minimum standard. However, I think that this is much less useful to startups who just want the best possible small team initially.

Given the makeup of HN, I think that most people here would not look at your product too favorably. I think that you should be looking at finding ways to reach out to companies that have an actual HR department and increasing your price dramatically for them.

At the risk of playing devil's advocate, I would argue that giving candidates the ability to use virtually any language or framework and develop on localhost is not necessarily an advantage.

When I'm looking to hire a Rails dev then I want to know as soon as possible in the interview process that they actually know some of the basics of Rails and MVC - not just if they can build a web app. Furthermore, by hiding the candidate's choice of language/framework (and code quality) behind localhost the benefits of assigning an arbitrary coding challenge are lost. I fear that the only solution would be for the candidate to submit the full source code.

However, as a very quick "can this candidate actually write code" filter, I think you're well on track.

Yes that's a valid point. We do ask the candidate to submit the source code once the they have solved the challenge. So employers who need only say "Rails" developers can mention it in the instructions and check the source later.

"However, as a very quick "can this candidate actually write code" filter, I think you're well on track."

Yes, that's exactly what I wanted this to be. Quickly filter out the 80% and move to the next stage where you can do much better justice reviewing the candidate's past work, working with the candidate on a project etc.

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