March 29, 2024

How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers

That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way. The concept is to focus less than recruiters might on traditional talent markers — a degree from M.I.T., a previous job at Google, a recommendation from a friend or colleague — and more on simple notions: How well does the person perform? What can the person do? And can it be quantified?

The technology is the product of Gild, the 18-month-old start-up company of which Mr. Bonmassar is a co-founder. His is one of a handful of young businesses aiming to automate the discovery of talented programmers — a group that is in enormous demand. These efforts fall in the category of Big Data, using computers to gather and crunch all kinds of information to perform many tasks, whether recommending books, putting targeted ads onto Web sites or predicting health care outcomes or stock prices.

Of late, growing numbers of academics and entrepreneurs are applying Big Data to human resources and the search for talent, creating a field called work-force science. Gild is trying to see whether these technologies can also be used to predict how well a programmer will perform in a job. The company scours the Internet for clues: Is his or her code well-regarded by other programmers? Does it get reused? How does the programmer communicate ideas? How does he or she relate on social media sites?

Gild’s method is very much in its infancy, an unproven twinkle of an idea. There is healthy skepticism about this idea, but also excitement, especially in industries where good talent can be hard to find.

The company expects to have about $2 million to $3 million in revenue this year and has raised around $10 million, including a chunk from Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist who invested early in LinkedIn. And Gild has big-name customers testing or using its technology to recruit, including Facebook, Amazon, Wal-Mart Stores, Google and Twitter.

Companies use Gild to mine for new candidates and to assess candidates they are already considering. Gild itself uses the technology, which was how the company, desperate for programming talent and unable to match the salaries offered by bigger tech concerns, found this guy named Jade outside of Los Angeles. Its algorithm had determined that he had the highest programming score in Southern California, a total that almost no one achieves. It was 100.

Who was Jade? Could he help the company? What does his story tell us about modern-day recruiting and hiring, about the concept of meritocracy?

PEOPLE in Silicon Valley tend to embrace certain assumptions: Progress, efficiency and speed are good. Technology can solve most things. Change is inevitable; disruption is not to be feared. And, maybe more than anything else, merit will prevail.

But Vivienne Ming, who since late in 2012 has been the chief scientist at Gild, says she doesn’t think Silicon Valley is as merit-based as people imagine. She thinks that talented people are ignored, misjudged or fall through the cracks all the time. She holds that belief in part because she has had some experience of it.

Dr. Ming was born male, christened Evan Campbell Smith. He was a good student and a great athlete — holding records at his high school in track and field in the triple jump and long jump. But he always felt a disconnect with his body. After high school, Evan experienced a full-blown identity crisis. He flopped at college, kicked around jobs, contemplated suicide, hit the proverbial bottom. But rather than getting stuck there, he bounced. At 27, he returned to school, got an undergraduate degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, and went on to receive a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in psychology and computational neuroscience.

During a fellowship at Stanford, he began gender transition, becoming, fully, Dr. Vivienne Ming in 2008.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/technology/how-big-data-is-playing-recruiter-for-specialized-workers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Farewell to Filene’s Basement

It was there, at the flagship of the now-defunct discount retailer, on Washington Street in Boston, that I scored my Madame X gown: black velvet with the one (rhinestone) shoulder strap, marked down to $19 and not only gorgeous, but from I. Magnin. That was a magical name, light-years removed from the Basement chain, which recently closed, sunk into bankruptcy.

My mother saw the dress first. She grabbed for it, microseconds ahead of another shopper (you had to move fast in Filene’s Basement), and I tried it on, right there on the floor.

Dressing rooms? Don’t be silly. You pulled it on over your clothes and elbowed your way to a sliver of mirror, just like everyone else. And if other women eyed you and hung around, jockeying for position just in case you weren’t buying it — that was when you knew you had a winner.

I wore that gown to my junior prom and my senior prom and a couple of Harvard proms. That rhinestone strap was mangled in the back seats of cars and mended each time to twinkle yet again, and when I graduated and came to New York to find a job, the Madame X came with me.

Even here it was a hit, and whenever anyone asked where I had bought it, I would say, in all truth, that it had come from I. Magnin.

The fever of Filene’s Basement! Once I was fighting for space at a rack filled with overstock from Saks Fifth Avenue, another magical name. A woman beside me pulled out a dress and shrieked, “My God, Mabel, look! It’s the same dress.”

She began falling backward in a faint, toward me, and I knew that I should try to catch her, but she was very fat, and I did not. It shames me still to recall that I stood by as she went down (she was unhurt; Mabel hoisted her up and away) and that I instantly pushed back into that trove of Saks dresses. Again I scored: Mollie Parnis, coatdress in black wool crepe; still works.

There was the annual one-day bridal-gown sale, only in the flagship store. Some marketing genius named it the Running of the Brides, which caused near riots and got great press coverage.

Three of us went with Bea, the first of our crowd to get engaged, to help her pick a dress. As soon as the doors opened and the madness descended, we pushed through and grabbed armloads of bridal gowns, holding them hostage for Bea to try on.

Her choice was awash in seed pearls. We stood admiring it. We swore we would all buy our wedding gowns in the Basement.

We were helping Bea out of the gown when a young woman said, “I saw it first,” and tugged at it. Bea tugged back. The tulle made a sickening sound as it ripped. Seed pearls scattered. The woman disappeared. Bea cried. She found another, and it was pretty enough, but she always mourned the one that got away.

By the time I was marrying, in the ’60s, I was gainfully employed in New York, at this newspaper in fact, and could have shopped anywhere I chose, but loyalty took me back to the Basement. (I found no wedding gown but did find what we used to call the Going-Away Dress: pink silk ombré; provenance: Saks; at $39, perfect.)

The great Basement innovation, but only at the flagship, was the automatic markdown system. Roughly every week, the price of unsold items was reduced by one-quarter. Anything unsold after a month went to charity. You would covet a jacket, and see on the sales tag that in two days it would be discounted.

The game then was to protect it from other shoppers, which you would do by shoving it stealthily onto, say, a maternity rack, or even under the rack.

You would arrive early the next two mornings to reposition your prey, if you could find it, and should you and it emerge together to close the deal at the lower price, what sweet triumph!

There was never anything that sweet at the chain’s branches, like my local one at 79th and Broadway, which was better than no Filene’s Basement but still a pallid enterprise (with dressing rooms; how pretentious) for a city where discount retail thrives.

Compared with New York, the Boston of my youth was a deeply dull town to live in. The blue laws were fierce. It sometimes felt as if anything that might be construed as fun would be reliably Banned in Boston.

But we had the Basement. That was fun. If you were a girl who loved clothes but grew up in homes where there were no dollars to spare, it was more than fun: It was heaven incarnate.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0e55e46959225e0cd10a2a922f78b849