Hiring the Future

What does it look like to make history? Are their bands and movie cameras to mark the occasion? Most of these milestone events slip past our view only to be seen more clearly in our rearview mirrors as one speeds through life. These past weeks at CloudFactory history is being made for Nepal. It looks like this.

(download)
What began as a simple survey to gauge interest in the opportunity to do virtual work quickly turned into an interview process that attracted over 400 applicants.

Our goal was to find some of the best and brightest in Nepal and train them on our newly released platform for completing microwork tasks.
Seek and you shall find is how the old saying goes. We were amazed at the level of talent and excitement we discovered in this process. In fact, on our initial survey prospective candidates scolded us for not promoting the opportunity more intensely. “People need to hear about these opportunities!”

2012-03-14_13-22-07_190
What do interviews look like when you are social enterprise? We believe they should have a level of excellence but also be personable and relational enough to encourage those who are not selected. One candidate described that in her own blog post after the interview week.

I was fascinated with working environment there at CloudFactory, I was even more excited about the whole place (Awash Bhaisepati) You guys should visit it if possible coz its so peaceful with organized town planning, beautiful hills and surprisingly clean and green :).” Manika  

After several rounds of testing and the final interview process we painstakingly choose our final 25 pioneers.

The first week of orientation was not without its trials. Unveiling a new way to do work is bound to have some roadbumps along the way. Tuesday morning the office was a whirlwind of excited candidates and anxious developers hoping, praying that their years of work would pay off. It absolutely did. Within 24 hours, the first 2 groups of candidates were making great headway towards their predetermined limits for this trial. How did they do?

Sarwagya

“We’ve manually checked around 30% of the first completed tasks and all of them are perfect. Awesome!!.”                                                -Sarwagya Pandey Solutions Manager

You shouldn’t take our word alone. Look at some of the responses from these pioneers of CloudFactory.

It makes a massive difference. I am a student in 3rd year of Law Degree. I wouldn't say that my parents will not be able to afford my fees, however many additional expenses, besides colleges, for eg. moot courts and conferences and trainings require certain amount of money, which I hope to earn via this project. These trainings and additional activities are vital for my future career too. Moreover, one needs to start becoming capable, and it is a process which I think begins for me from this work.

- CloudWorker Trainee

2012-03-20_11-55-16_139

"I get very less pocket money from my parents, so yes, it'll definitely make a 'substantial' difference in my life. I may do some professional trainings with the money, like webpage designing, personality development workshops, etc. and I genuinely wish to buy my younger brother a drum kit, so that he can also teach me how to play :-)"

-CloudWorker Trainee

Meet the CloudFactory Cloud Workers

Business card apps compete and you win!

Apps like Bump or My Name is E are great when people have them, but the reality of many is that they get business cards exchanged every week and sometimes every day. To make turning those cards into contacts in your phone, you can find lots of business card reader apps on your iPhone or Android but all of them are not created equally. Here's a quick showdown of a few.

Test 1: Super Easy Card

Img_20120130_1024121

  BizcardArmy BizcardArmy ABBYY Reader CamCard ScanBizCards Evernote
Company Name dioxyportfolioRight dioxyportfolioRight -Wrong dioxypoMolioWrong **
First Name MerijnRight MehjnWrong MerljnWrong MU)oWrong
Last Name HoogeveenRight HoogeveenRight HoogeveenRight NoogeveenWrong
Work Phone 255 255 255Right 255 155 255 Wrong 255255255Right -Wrong
Mobile Phone 255 255 255Right 25525525Wrong 255255255Right -Wrong
Email info@dioxyportfolio.comRight info@dioKyportfolB.comWrong info@dioxyportfolio.comRight -Wrong
Title/Role Graphic DesignerRight Graptic DesignerWrong -Wrong -Wrong
Web URL www.dioxyportfolio.comRight wwwdkHyporTfoEio^omWrong -Wrong -Wrong

Test 2: Handwriting Style Card

(because not all cards are specifically designed to be super easy for scanners)

Handwritten_card

  BizcardArmy BizcardArmy ABBYY Reader CamCard ScanBizCards Evernote
First Name John Right -Wrong AcctWrong -Wrong **
Last Name SmithRight -Wrong MahagerWrong -Wrong
Work Phone (125)653-8971Right 025)653-697Wrong 125653,,897Wrong -Wrong
Email jsmith@abc-inc.comRight -Wrong -Wrong pclw@abc-in.comWrong
Title/Role Acct ManagerRight -Wrong -Wrong -_Acc'c Manage.r_-Wrong
Web URL www.abc-inc.comRight -Wrong -Wrong www.abc-mc.comWrong
Address 123 Pine Tree Court ,suite ERight f25 P^e Tree CourtSuite ^Wrong (23 Pine Tree Coc+rt, Suite EWrong -123 Pine T-Fc.TeTCourf, Suife.F7Wrong
  SpringfieldRight j.^m^fi&VJL 0(035-Wrong SpringfieldRight m.b9E..'_el.c1,JJ.2l_o.:.5Wrong
  ILRight -Wrong ILRight ((rZ5>eSr.-@974Wrong

01035Right -Wrong 01035Right -Wrong

** Evernote cannot determine any individual field or even text. It comes up with multiple possibilities for lots of pieces of text on image but can't tell you where it's pulling a company name from or even if the text it pulled was dioxyportfolio, dioxypoMolio, or blank.

BizcardArmy is a mobile/web app to let users just take a snapshots of their piles of business cards and have them turned into contacts in their phone, email system, or wherever they want these like LinkedIn or Salesforce.

BizcardArmy created contacts are hand-completed by real people so are actually usable! Just check out the findings -- even on an easy card, the next best competitor peaked at getting only 50% of the fields correct. 50%!  And then with just a slightly more difficult card, while many of the others dropped to close to 0% correct, BizcardArmy was 100% accurate!

OCR engines (the term for what BizcardArmy competitors use) employ misleading sales tactics for these quality measures and will tout figures close to, "We're over 90% accurate!" But when that's measured on a character-by-character level, how useful is a 10-digit phone number that got 9 of the 10 digits correct?

So what's BizcardArmy's secret sauce?  CloudFactory!

With CloudFactory, BizcardArmy has a scalable group of human workers they access on-demand that are transcribing the cards and just pay-as-they-go. CloudFactory gives them an API to access these workers seemlessly within their own app and build quality assurance features to ensure their users are getting the quality they need.

P.S. Someone once asked me how I thought BizcardArmy competed with an app like Evernote Business Card Manager which we both agree has great ability to search for text on images. My reply is that there is a reason in Evernote's app, that you still have to manually enter the phone number and details from the card yourself into your iPhone. They don't even attempt to be confident enough in automating this feature for you. Just check it out here... How they can seem so good at searching images but bad at direct OCR is a story for another post.

P.P.S. It could be argued that on Test 2, BizcardArmy had a lower case "s" for Suite in the street address field. One: case was not considered for any of the competitors on any of the fields so this doesn't impact the findings. And Two: In a fictitious world, if you mailed a letter to this fictitious address, it would still work.

*** In full disclosure, I pulled these test card images off public online images, so no worries about disclosing any private information.