Visual Resume: Exploring developers' online contributions for hiring

摘要

Context: Recruiters and practitioners are increasingly relying on online activities of developers to find a suitable candidate. Past empirical studies have identified technical and soft skills that managers use in online peer production sites when making hiring decisions. However, finding candidates with relevant skills is a labor-intensive task for managers, due to the sheer amount of information online peer production sites contain. Objective: We designed a profile aggregation tool & mdash;Visual Resume & mdash;that aggregates contribution information across two types of peer production sites: a code hosting site (GitHub) and a technical Q&A forum (Stack Overflow). Visual Resume displays summaries of developers & rsquo; contributions and allows easy access to their contribution details. It also facilitates pairwise comparisons of candidates through a card-based design. We present the motivation for such a design and design guidelines for creating such recruitment tool. Methods: We performed a scenario-based evaluation to identify how participants use developers & rsquo; online contributions in peer production sites as well as how they used Visual Resume when making hiring decisions. Results: Our analysis helped in identifying the technical and soft skill cues that were most useful to our participants when making hiring decisions in online production sites. We also identified the information features that participants used and the ways the participants accessed that information to select a candidate. Conclusions: Our results suggest that Visual Resume helps in participants evaluate cues for technical and soft skills more efficiently as it presents an aggregated view of candidate & rsquo;s contributions, allows drill down to details about contributions, and allows easy comparison of candidates via movable cards that could be arranged to match participants & rsquo; needs.