Friday 25 March 2011

Hot Skills or Not Skills?

A colleague sent me an intriguing email last week - Mixtent is a hot-or-not? website in the style of Mark Zuckerberg's first foray into social networking, as seen at the start of The Social Network.


Except Mixtent is aimed at rating your professional colleagues (via LinkedIn's API) on certain skillsets. It asks you to compare two of your LinkedIn connections based on a certain skill (e.g. Java Development), and then repeats the comparison process about twenty times.


The really clever bit is the Google PageRank-style weighting that is placed on each survey participant, based on how they have been rated against others. This elegant twist makes good common sense and should hopefully prevent the system from being "gamed" by "bots" or rooms full of 10c-a-click fleshbots.


I'll be keeping an eye on this great idea - as a "global top 5%" Java developer I'll also be looking out for recruiters eager to utilise a potentially-outstanding new tool!

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