The Power of MTurk
I still have issues with the fact that Amazon calls one of it’s most fascinating products, “Mechnical Turk”. I get the story of it and stuff, but well, it has its weirdness.
More importantly, I think it’s a revolutionary concept, over and over again. Let me illustrate, again, how I saved myself a lot of money, time and work by investing an hour worth of time into this little genius.
My company, twentypeople.com (do us a favor and try it out, it’s absolutely free and it will give you a great overview of your skills), is currently preparing a product called Resume Analyzer. It automatically scans hundreds of resumes (CVs) in minutes and classifies (sort of “understands”) them. This is a tremendous help for larger companies, allowing to pre-categorize and file all the job applications they are receiving. Find out more here: http://www.twentypeople.com/api/
Now, the interesting thing is: We need a lot (A LOT) of real resumes to test and fine-tune our algorithms. Where to go for help? You could either partner with an HR firm and source a lot of resumes, at an insanely high price, or you could ask around the community, your users, Twitter, etc. for help. Both didn’t fit the bill or vision here, so I thought I’d try and see what MTurk can do for us.
Right now, a new resume is sent through our parsers every minute or 30 seconds. It just keeps going, at around 10 cents a pop. I am currently looking for around 100 resumes, so this will be $10 ($11 something with fees/taxes) spent for real-life, original resumes uploaded to the database. Plus, I added a little explanation that while the resume will be deleted after the scan, people can opt-in to leave the resume with us in case they are looking for a job. And one out of 5 or 6 seems to like that and decides to leave the CV with us. That’s fascinating! It even makes me wonder, how many companies are spiking their sign-up rates with this, it’s shocking. When I pay $0.50 - $0.60 cents a click on Facebook, for an ad-click-through, and I get to pay $0.10 for a full-blown activity cycle (like uploading a resume and actively using my site for the procedure) - there’s no question what’s more bang for the buck.
I’m super fascinated by it, highly happy with the high quality of the results and most thrilled by the execution speed of this project. Beware though, it’s always up to your design and flow of the task you create. If people don’t get it, they will make mistakes, or bypass it. I might post more on how to create a really nice and smooth task without any room for error soon, but for now, I’m just excited and keep watching our parsers. That’s a nerdy morning.
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