Catch the Best got a mention in the Working Podcast, a great resource for career advice.
On a related note, StandoutJobs is getting a ton of coverage by virtue of being at DEMO, not to mention getting a $2 million investment. That should bring some welcome attention to the space addressed by hiring management tools like Catch the Best. :)
Since I’m building a very focused piece of HR software that hiring managers and recruiters can use to manage sourcing of resumes and other recruiting activities, I’ve been watching the various vendors like LongJump and Coghead, who promise a software silver bullet: delivering software without the expense of developing it. I’m not convinced they are going to deliver on that promise.
In some respects, I’m sure the applications they will help their clients build will be fine—they’ll do one thing (perhaps even doing it well), and cost very little to build, and everybody will be happy. In other ways, though, I think those applications will fall short, simply because the thought, the planning, and the refinement that go into a software application built by designers, developers, and domain experts working together with their respective skill sets just won’t be there.
As I’ve been working on Catch the Best, I’ve been reminded how an idea for an application can start out very small, but the deeper you dig into it, the more complicated it gets. Of course, this is one reason why trying to preserve simplicity in software is so hard. But on the flip side, your application can’t be so simple it isn’t useful. This can be a fine line to walk in order to deliver excellent software, and just handing someone some building blocks and saying “go build it yourself” will have mixed results.
In other words, sometimes the just-add-water brownie mix gets the job done. If you want the best brownies, though, it needs a little more effort than that. :)
I opened up my recruiting software project to alpha testers on Monday. I really wanted to know how people would react to it, particularly to see if I’m on the right track with it. Frankly, I have been blown away by the overwhelmingly positive feedback I’ve gotten.
A recurring comment has been how cool it will be to use Catch the Best to keep from getting buried by a ton of emails when you post a job opening on a job board. One of the primary features of CTB is to provide anonymous email addresses (with source tracking!) for you to use as the destination address when creating a listing at a job board. Instead of getting all those resumes sent to your inbox, now you can send them directly to a tool built especially for managing them. If you’ve ever posted a job on Craigslist and then dealt with a flood of applicants, you’ll realize how cool this is.
In case you can’t tell, I’m darned excited about this product. :)
Do you have a resume? Do you like to send emails? Then do me a favor, and send your resume to me at one of the email addresses below. The applicant tracking and ranking system I’m building has support for receiving and parsing emails with attached resumes, and I need some testing content as I work on the resume parsing and search. If you send your resume to my resume catcher, you’ll also be helping me write my next blog post on searching data in your Rails application using Sphinx.
I have three “open positions” to which you can “apply”. I’m looking for resumes from web developers, web designers, and system administrators, so I can get a variety of source data for my tests. Here are the email addresses for the positions:
Thanks for your help!
Early this morning I pushed out a new site for CatchTheBest that reveals some basic information about what the product will be.
Check out the new site for info on the best yet-to-be-released applicant tracking system in the world. :)
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