Clearly I hadn't done my homework yesterday when I posted a status update on my Linked-In profile with www.geektastic.com embedded in the message. Which, coming from someone who used to run a 'Social / Real Money Casino on Facebook' is pretty embarrassing. As you can see the image is broken, the title was incorrect and the description was missing completely. Had I done my research I would have realised that our website needed three Open Graph tags in the code. I have added them below so you don't make the same mistake I did.
og:title - A title to describe the page or the content - should be less than 88 characters and should be attention grabbing as it comes up bold. og:image - The left hand side image. We opted for a logo for brand awareness (it was a toss up between brand awareness and click through - at this point, since we are still in our infancy, we wanted to generate awareness of Geektastic through our Logo) although we should really test different images (such as people) for different click through rates at some point soon. og:description - A more detailed description of your content. This will be seen in smaller text and not bold so you can get away with a deeper description. This is what the post should have looked like before I pushed the 'share' button now we have updated all the tags. Just got to make sure we use these tags on our blog now! Live and learn. As a team we've hired 100's of software engineers in our time, everyone uses their own process, but without fail anyone hiring a developer will use some form of 'technical evaluation' as part of their hiring flow.
From the hirer's perspective a CV alone doesn't paint the complete picture. A candidate's previous employment history might look impressive and of course, if the candidate has come via a recruiter he or she will be "the best rock-star coder of all time" but without taking a deep dive into their coding skills a hirer is taking a huge risk bringing them on board. Coding challenges can vary from a few multiple choice questions (which in our view is more of a tech screen than deep technical insight) to huge 'build me an entire app, plugged into these API's, we want full documentation and functional tests' - which could easily take a two week sprint (good luck getting real talent to give up that amount of time). It's no wonder candidates hate them, taking 10+ code challenges which can take anything between 30 mins to a whole weekend to complete, to land your next role doesn't sound like much fun (unless you have a sadistic love doing coding challenges). When we started Geektastic we wanted to make this whole process easier, both for candidates and for hirers. We want to reduce the number of tests a candidate takes to find their dream role. We want to provide hirers and recruiters with deep technical insight into their candidates that you can't get from a CV or resume to allow them to speed up their time to hire, but most of all we wholeheartedly believe in real humans doing the candidate assessing rather than a machine. A score is great, but if a candidate has given up 2 hours of their weekend it seems pretty disrespectful to reduce all that work to a percentage - how would you feel? |
AuthorRick Brownlow Archives
March 2017
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