Companies posting job openings on the internet are often inundated with thousands of low-quality responses, and it can be a challenge to sift through them to find potential hires. But a software company appears to have found a novel way to filter out the serious developers who apply to its jobs.
Web3 company Verbwire asks candidates to apply to its jobs through an API. Descriptions of technical roles at the company, such as Full Stack Engineer, Blockchain Developer and Developer Relations, end up a message saying “Apply by API”. API stands for Application Programming Interface, and provides the means through which two or more computer programs to communicate with each other.
“At Verbwire, we’re a culture of builders and problem solvers. Our API is at the center of everything we do. As such, we absolutely love when candidates send their applications as calls to our API,” the job board says. It then asks applicants to send a POST request to the endpoint provided, and include their details in the JSON in the request body.
The JSON includes information relevant to the application, including the candidate’s name, email, the job they’re applying for, a link to their resume in pdf format, their phone number, and links to their Github and other profiles.
This seems like a pretty clever method of collecting information about candidates. For starters, it automatically forces all candidates to give the same bits of information in the exact same format, so recruiters don’t have to manually reorganize the data to be able to use it. More importantly, inviting job applications through an API means that developers must use the API just to apply to the role, which is also a quick test of their technical skills. And since Verbwire’s API is unique, it’ll filter out applicants who send out the same resume to hundreds of jobs, and will result in an applicant pool that’s serious about working at Verbwire.
Verbwire isn’t the only company that’s looked to test candidates’ skills before they even apply for the role. In 2004, Google had put up job ads that simply said “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com”. Engineers who were able to solve the mathematical question ended up on the correct website, and then were able to apply to the company.
And this is trend that could catch on. Most companies devote large amounts of time going through all the resumes they receive, and adding on a bit of test — even before the application is sent — could be a great way to sift out relevant candidates. And as Verbwire has shown, getting applications sent through an API is an idea that could end up being implemented by many smaller startups that want to make sure their applicant pool is top-notch.