ASL INTRODUCTION

There's a time in your life when ASL means: Age, Sex, Location... (a sort of "Hi!" on the IRCs :)

But then you grow up, settle down and engage in OO programming practices that will override some of your initial methods. In our case, that's ASL which nowadays means: American Signing Language.

You might throw away those Baby Einstein DVDs, even if a few of them are quite interesting (i.e. "Meet the Orchestra"), but Signing Time is a keeper :-)

Plus, they're introducing this year the Sign of the Week: free flashcards for you to download (and print at home), short teaching videos for each sign. Thank You Rachel & co !!

The story behind the Signing Time program is moving, but most important are the results. Still, it makes you stop and wonder why the signing language is not standardized (worldwide) and the ones who need it most face another communication barrier. Yeah, the world we live in is (still) a jungle...

5 Minutes

(trying to find the reason why one would give a 5 minute test instead of a 30 minutes interview; it’s elementary Sherlock: your gut feeling doesn't need more than 30 seconds to make that first impression, all the remaining time is spent thereafter reinforcing the initial feeling and/or ignoring later feedback)

Now that we have framed the problem, lets look into the smaller details.

Humans are not adapting, otherwise we would have grown wings or keyboards; a successful product needs to blend in, be transparent - like water or air. Recruiting had always relied on messaging (letter, email, voice) to reach the parties, so maybe pouring some “water” on top of this old medium would prove to be a good start.

If you want to hire someone, (s)he must be well above average*. Yes, there’s good money to be made by hiring, selling/to idiots, but life is too short. “If you want to be a winner, hang around with winners!” (and pass losers to your enemies, they are in desperate need of it).

A 5 minute test is not guaranteed to work, but would skim the “milk” quite nicely.

In the grand picture of things, you always want to “delegate” the recruitment to someone else, someone who knows “a good guy/girl”, someone who could recommend someone, you get the picture. Why not “delegate” it to a bot? At least this one is impartial.

The world is becoming more connected. You have hundreds of “connections” that could recommend you hundreds of good matches. Do you really have time to veto/scan them all?

 in a startup you would need to hire people better than you. always.