We employed a couple of fantastic developers a month or so ago. Part of our marketing strategy is to always try and pre qualify and de-market to those that won’t be a fit.
The guys came up with this advertisement which we ran … as is … and the response was 11 candidates, all great but two brilliant finds. Total cost about $120 for an advert on seek. If they couldn’t solve the code, they couldn’t apply … nothing else pointed to us.
What a great catch!
I’ve Tittered about “Kebab Friday” before … see if you can see the embedded humour :-)
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
i heard about this when i met the guys in the rot13(‘hx’). Great idea, and yes, I still miss that kebab shop at the top of the hill.
– rot13(‘pni’)
I’m quite disturbed by the fact that you had to be a brilliant or great VB coder to discover a simple ROT13 algorithm to decode the email. All of the brilliant guys I know won’t even bother with that since it’s just not a challenge, then again none of them are VB coders. Give them obfuscated C with a real problem in there and then maybe they’ll bite.
I’d hate to see the quality of the other coders. Then again I’ve never liked VB nor it’s proponents, and don’t give me that VB.net BS.
I’m quite disturbed by the fact that you had to be a brilliant or great VB coder to discover a simple ROT13 algorithm to decode the email. All of the brilliant guys I know won’t even bother with that since it’s just not a challenge, then again none of them are VB coders. Give them obfuscated C with a real problem in there and then maybe they’ll bite.
I’d hate to see the quality of the other coders. Then again I’ve never liked VB nor it’s proponents, and don’t give me that BS about how VB.net is just like C# – not in a million years.
i don’t think the argument is about what is better c#, vb, assembler, blah blah
Stephen is talking about marketing strategy. “Part of our marketing strategy is to always try and pre qualify and de-market to those that won’t be a fit.”
Note that they probably didn’t want a backroom coder with no “soft” skills. They wanted someone who’d fit into their team and this was their approach. And its seems to have paid dividends.
Thanks Eben, I’m not sure I said they needed to be a brilliant VB programmer to work out ROT13. What I said was this advert was effective in finding to great candidates.
Like Pavan suggested, there are a whole lot of criteria we review against, as well as there ability to code. What this stopped was the person that randomly sent out job requests without applying themselves.
And without wanting to cause offence … If you only wanted a job that involved complex C programming, then the “de marketing” worked perfectly … That’s not the job, this is a Visual Basic job … and no VB.net won’t work as we are developing a cross platform app.
Thanks for the comments everyone
Fair enough, I’ve always just emailed the “nerd heard” to get a good dev, usually one of them is looking for a job. They are generally extremely high calibre devs – I doubt they’d reply to an add like that though… maybe if they were bored…
I guess as long as they are up to the task!
I love seeing a person miss the point entirely.. actually I think I die a little more inside..
{ 1 trackback }