Meaningful experience levels

[jace]

Hasjob needs a way to understand the different experience levels expected in job posts. We've avoided doing this by job title because titles are a matter of prestige for the receiver and therefore subject to grade inflation. "Years of experience" is even more meaningless for well known reasons.

Actual experience levels are a non-public property. All large companies have an internal "level" hierarchy, but these hierarchies are not standardised from company to company.

Hasjob needs to a (a) start collecting level charts from across companies (possibly under NDA), (b) normalise them across companies based on pay and -- if we can somehow get our hands on this -- movement of people between companies, and (c) find a way to match candidates to experience levels to filter the jobs they see.

[jace]

Nilenso's description: http://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2015/06/30/how-to-co-op-salaries-reviews/

[TheCodeArtist]

( just by 2cents... and more from a discussion earlier on slack today.)

One potential concern is that various companies aren't structured the same way; making it impossible/illogical to have a single standardised hierarchy.

Currently what is missing from job desc (and the entire hiring cycle currently) is a feel of how my day wud be at a new job?

• Will there be 4 bosses competing for my attention everyday?
  • Or am i expected to chart a path my next 6months
• Whom do i turn to for help when i'm stuck?
  • Or is it expected of me to figure out everything on my own? (forever?)
• Will i be a mercenary / army / police?
  • merc - move-fast, somehow get a PoC working, no long-term plan.
  • army - sustain the current growth, standardise arch/design, manage scale.
  • police - maintenance, bug-fixes, contain regression, further reduce tech-debt.

Also candidates applying for a particular job would be especially interested in learning the objective roles responsibilities expected of them. Presumably companies would prefer an individual who is willing/excited to be in the role the job requires.

Scouts/Managers in sports like football already have a wealth of pertinent information when they are looking for transfers (eg. http://imgur.com/jYfDMTI)

---

References:

1. workshape.io
   • a good list of technical stats.
   • lovely presentation (spider charts and graphs)
   • Appears to be focussing on the technical attributes only.
     Such objective stats/graph can be automatically cobbled-up by searching/counting occurrences of keywords in a subjective "job description"
2. decentworkcheck.org
   • A list of binary(yes/no) checks to assess the quality of a workplace.
   • Apparently derivate works not encouraged.

---

TODO:

1. Poll/Shortlist essential list of stats/attributes that companies are interested in.
2. Poll/Shortlist essential list of stats/attributes that individuals are interested in.
3. Watch and get inspired
   • http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1210166/
   • http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2223990
4. ...

[jace]

Here is an exercise we can do:

1. Make a list of large companies (100+ employees)
2. Find everyone who's worked at any of these companies on LinkedIn
3. Filter down to those who've made a career move to another of the companies in the list
4. Map previous and next job titles. These will imply a horizontal or upward move, but never downward

I'm aware of startups that have done this, analysing job titles at competitors to establish their own hierarchies. Once we have a bunch of pegs, they become reference points for evaluating other startups that have seen people to/from these companies.