I want to welcome you to a blog where I will share my thoughts on modern-day recruiting tools and practices, share interesting things I learn while working on Meet, and provide behind-the-curtain insights on the development process.
I plan to focus most of January on content creation so if you are interested in remote interviewing, follow us on Twitter @meetrshq where we will post updates.
For this first post, I wanted to answer a few fair questions which I heard many times already, so they are an excellent way to start.
Why does anyone need Meet.rs?
There are A LOT of fantastic tools today available – some of them made by the biggest companies in the world investing millions of dollars in them, so why would you make another one?
Here are just some of them:
- Video calls: Zoom/Teams/Skype/Google Meet/…
- Coding editors: CodeSandbox, CoderPad, CodePen, VS Code Live, etc.
- Whiteboards: Excalidraw, Microsoft Whiteboard, CoderPad, Google Draw, etc.
- Scheduling: calendly, x.ai, Microsoft Bookings, etc.
- Existing interviewing solutions: codility, codesign, Haker Rank, etc.
As you can tell, just based on a few examples, it is a very saturated market where shabby upstarts like Meet seems to have zero chance to survive.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with that premise based on two fundamental hypotheses:
- A single specialized tool that does a very good job in all needed areas is more desirable than a plethora of different tools perfectly doing each separate job.
- A fresh upstart can focus on the simplicity and frictionless of that unified solution, where big enterprise solutions can’t afford due to the complexity convection they accumulate over time.
Both of these things are critically important due to the nature of interviewing, which is an ad-hoc activity between parties who don’t know each other.
In some ways, interviewing software is like a Starbucks disposable cup.
You don’t care how it looks and what features it has as once you are done drinking, you toss it to the trash bin and forget about it.
Why now?
A few years ago, a few of us on Skype decided to invest our own time and passion and created a “Skype Interviews” product even that was not our job at all. The product got a ton of attraction both inside of Microsoft and outside of Microsoft. It was also a very loved program – we asked participants to rate every interview with 1-5 stars and had insanely excellent ratings (~70% 5* ratings). We were getting emails where users were telling us, “I am totally enchanted with your app.”.
Funny enough, there were a few anecdotes where Microsoft execs talking with a group of non-MS people, the moment after they will mention being from Microsoft were asked: “Why Microsoft can’t do more products as cool as Skype Interviews?”
And what about when the CEO of Microsoft seeing the Tech Crunch article and sending an email to “who is who in Microsoft” saying that he really likes the idea and project?
Satya sending an email about something a few of us “renegades” did pretty much on our own? Can’t be much better than that in Microsoft 🙂
Still not convinced?
Rahul Vohra of Superhuman fame defined a way of measuring PMF by asking users what they will do if the superhuman app will be gone. The higher percentage of users who will be angry/disappointed, the bigger PMF.
In the case of Skype Interviews, it was not even a hypothetical question as we announced that we are shutting it down.
The number of emails we were getting for months from both Microsoft users and external users was staggering, with users being pissed, angry, expressing disbelief, asking if they pay for the service, that will help, etc.
I have never seen a product that users love more and which had a bigger PMF in my professional career, so when a final decision was made to be shut down, it broke little my heart and haunted me for years.
That’s why as soon as Outreach allowed me graciously to invest my free time in this area, I got involved, and voila – meet.rs is there with hopefully preserved spirit of Skype Interviews.
This took years, so I am aware that it is a bit (too) late but better late than never. 🙂
Why you?
As I described above, meet.rs is not a “just business” type of thing for me, and because of that, I am delighted to invest every single free moment I have in it. If you know me personally, you know that I am like a pitbull catching the bone when I am into something – never letting it go.
I’ve been working in front-end teams for the last seven years, so building React apps is something I am not afraid of. Part of that past experience is working on webrtc, extensibility, addons, platforms, remote code execution, etc. All of them are unique skills that can be obtained only by banging your head to the wall long enough, and boy, did I do that banging in the past 🙂
Luckily for Meet, before I become a front-end developer, I spent 12 years working as a backend developer and architect, and besides doing react apps, I know how to do cloud-scale cost-efficient Azure backends.
On top of that, I have a unique mixture of domain knowledge needed for this:
- 7 years in Monster.com Recruiter division learning about Recruiter business
- 7 years in Skype working on various Skype clients and Skype Interviews
I was in some parts of my career developer, solutions architect, manager, customer support, sales guy, startup owner, etc.
If not me, who else? 🙂
That’s it for the first post – need to go back now to Firefox weird microphone security model
Any other questions you want to be answered about Meet?