In a previous post, we discussed the possibility (apparently more than just a possibility) that employers would consider your score with a profiling “service” as part of the hiring process.  In that post we also noted that you have to participate in social media and give information about that participation to the profiler if you want a good score – and thus better employment prospects.

So basically that’s a tax you pay for a dubious advantage in your job search.  You pay with information instead of money.

Gild, Inc. also looks at social media participation as part of an overall evaluation of job candidates, but there is more to what they do.  Gild also looks at a person’s technical work as (what I think) is the primary component of a job candidate’s “Gild Score.”  They also use that same technique to locate candidates for employers.

Gild says it looks for information about a candidate’s:

… publicly available code from open source sites like GitHub, BitBucket, and Google Code, and their Q&A site contributions from Stack Exchange communities like Stack Overflow.

So that’s at least substantive and directly related to a relevant job skill, which is good.  However, there remains an element of required participation in some public forum, and to find the time to make some substantive technical contribution, in order to show up on the Gild radar.  I would anticipate that Gild’s position on this is that the enthusiasm driving that participation and contribution is considered relevant to a job candidate’s qualifications.  Maybe so.

But Gild does use a candidate’s social media participation as a means to help employers evaluate a candidate’s fit in the hiring company’s culture.  That’s better than the influence nonsense that Klout says it measures, but still a little bit too much of a participation requirement for us here at Big Data and the Law.

On the plus side, Gild might give non-traditional job candidates a shot at jobs they wouldn’t otherwise have a chance at getting.  A New York Times article about Gild starts with a story about one such person:

… an average student in high school and hadn’t bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough.

So that’s good.

I imagine that employers who consider such candidates are more open-minded and less credential bound.  I imagine as well that people have unusual backgrounds have a better than average chance to be good matches with such companies.

Good for them.

Gild says it is:

… bringing meritocracy to tech hiring through innovative recruiting technologies

Look at their website and decide for yourself.