Claude Ritter

Recruiting in China – pitfalls ahead

Posted by claude - 11/03/08 at 05:03:44 pm

I think we all agree that hiring the right people is crucial for any company, especially startups. However, sometimes this is easier said than done. We are frequently hiring new talent and hiring in China seems to be a rather different story than it is in the US or in Europe.
I am planning to continue posting about hiring in China but here’s the first list of some of my findings and impressions so far:

• University != University. We often get applications from people who state to have been studying at a university. This often happens because Chinese CV’s are translated into English word by word while the Chinese work for college is the same as for university. So if you are looking for graduates, make sure the university really was one.
• English: advanced. If you are looking for people with some English skills, don’t let yourself fool with English certificates such as CET-4 (which might also be fake) or self assessments. Too often have we had applicants with “advanced” English skills and then it turned out that they don’t even understand even simple questions. Call applicants before inviting them for an interview.
• Work samples. I don’t know whether this is a special China thing but applicants often seem to overstate their role in their reference projects or simply show samples of someone else. Make sure you have some sort of check or test in place to verify the applicant’s abilities on the spot.
• Keyword stacking. Some applicants are very flexible adjusting their “proficient knowledge” by memorizing keywords depending on the job. Don’t just check whether people are familiar with common terms you maybe even included in the job advertisement. Same as above check the applicant and ask questions, which require further explanation.
• Ugly looking CV’s. We get tons of CV’s which are badly formatted, in some strange format, have typos all over and so on. 99% of these CV’s wouldn’t even make it trough the Spam filter of western companies. However, I learned that good-looking CV’s should not be the top criteria when going trough CV’s. We hired great guys who applied with a “me.txt” file but turned out to be great picks for our company.

Ok, that’s it for now. Happy recruiting!
(Image from madebytess)

Show me your friends, social graph visualization

Posted by claude - 04/03/08 at 05:03:02 pm

Creative visualization of data has always been something I was very interested. There are several examples on the web, which take interesting approaches to data visualization. One of the areas I am most interested in is the visualization of graphs, specifically the graphs of friends or related people (friend graph). Some developers or companies already worked on friend graph implementations but most of them just look good but aren’t really helpful. As we are currently working on a social networking website we wanted to have a look into this and see whether we could find a way to combine eye-candy with something useful.

Below, I’ve embedded a short video of our current version of the friend graph. Be aware that this is not a release version that contains debug output with test data.

Our graph currently features:
- Friends and friends of friends (FOAF)
- Connections between friends and friends of friends
- Filters (in development)
- Browsing history

(Sorry for the crappy quality)

This is the current status but we’re busy working on more features and a revamped interface (buttons etc.). We are currently focusing on the visualization of the friend graph within our network but due to Google’s Social Graph API and other initiatives there are almost endless possibilities when it comes to the visualization of friends or the complete social graph around a person.I will post updates as we progress.

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