Puzzle Hire - Monday

One of the more embarrassing experiences I've had during my career was interviewing a candidate that was unable to implement a loop to print out the numbers 1 to 100. I had read this person's resume, conducted a phone screen and recommended they be brought in for an interview loop. I also had to ask him to leave after the first round of the interview as this person clearly wasn't going to be able to perform the required job function. I vowed there and then that I was never going to let a candidate dupe me like that. I had to stop taking candidates with "2 years of shell and Perl scripting experience" at face value and verify it or distribute homework problems.

But there has to be a better way and that's where this week's project comes into play. What if you could verify coding ability, see code samples and contact an already existing set of job seekers? Or what if you are a job seeker looking for work, wouldn't it be great to complete a few coding puzzles, mark yourself as available for hire, and then get contacted by recruiters or companies looking for someone with your skills?

This particular project may be split later in the week and extended into a two-part project as the scope is fairly large at this point. In the meantime I'm also going to concentrate more on the core application and less on monetization right now.

Project Summary: Build a site where developers can complete puzzles similar to Google Code Jam or Ruby Quiz and companies can contact interested candidates and view code samples.

Planned Features:

• Large corpus of programming puzzles
• Input/Output data sets similar to google code jam
• Messaging system to protect user privacy from recruiters
• Github and Stack Overflow reputation integration
• Plagiarism Detection
• User Submittable Puzzles