Why we are releasing Gitsight for free to the world
At Remotely Works, we have the vision to level the playing field for talented developers wherever they are, so they can access the best job opportunities, remotely.
As we decided about the principles we wanted to follow as we built the company, we obviously decided we wanted to put the developer at the center. Why? we just wrote about it. We also decided we would automate as many of our services as possible. That's why we started building gitsight.com: to identify and vet technical talent based on their contribution to git repositories.
At first to make our jobs easier: we review hundreds of profiles every week. But later, it became obvious it could be helpful in other ways.
Helping bridge the cultural gap
Anything that helps our target developer audience, is good for us, even if we are not directly monetizing it. We believe that helping increase the intensity of the tailwinds that we benefit from is a good thing. That said, the main purpose of why we're releasing our Gitsight Chrome extension is to help bridge the cultural gap we see between US-based hiring managers and Software Developers abroad. What cultural gap? and why would a silly score help? glad you asked.
Over the last few months, we've come to appreciate a gap in how our customers evaluate talent. Oftentimes, we've seen great developers be ignored or discarded on paper merits only. We think that, in part, is due to a combination of factors that US-based recruiters have come to take as given:
there is an ideal career progression in the US: specific school names, specific company experiences. These may be only available in the US and, thus, any foreign candidate will have a "weird" CV. To add to that, it is often hard for a US-based hiring manager to know about the specific schools or companies that thrive elsewhere. Apple who?
technical evaluation is done differently everywhere: The US is very much into live coding exercises, these days. While it is a rare practice in LATAM, unaware software developers may be very talented, but they need to learn to play the game.
different social norms cue the wrong conclusions: it is expected of candidates to come prepared and ask interesting questions. The more poignant the question, it is inferred that the candidate is the most interested in joining the Company. That's not necessarily the case in LATAM, where asking "too many questions" may signal skepticism and come across as arrogant.
While we intend to help developers overcome this friction through a specific curriculum we've built, we are also helping grease the wheels with Gitsight.
Gitsight evaluates and globally stack ranks developers that have contributed to open source and validates how serious is someone's expertise based on their code. As a tool that literally makes github profiles usable to recruiters, we hope Gitsight will be used by US-based recruiters to evaluate US-based candidates. And the more they do that, the more Gitsight's score will become some sort of standard.
And as with any standard, it will enable comparing apples to apples, and level the playing field when those same US-based recruiters start looking at profiles in LATAM and the rest of the world.
Borrowing from Amazon
As we started remotely, we also thought about how we could become more of a platform, and less of a service provider. As such, we're trying to open the technology we build to other players in the space.
So as we continue to automate and improve on our operations, we hope to be able to release products that make the task of finding/hiring a software developer easier. That said, we're releasing the Gitsight Chrome Extension for free (so much for turning a cost center into a profit!).
As we sign-off from this post, we ask that you share on linkedin or twitter a link to our chrome extension and offer it to any technical recruiters you know that may be interested in using it!