See my other reply regarding past job experience.

The purpose of respectable credentials is to serve as a general quality cutoff point for filtering the candidate pool. Sure, we've all seen great workers without any credentials and terrible workers with plenty of respectable credentials, but those are exceptional anecdotes, not the rule. The group of candidates with respectable credentials are, as a group, much better on every dimension than those without. So it's practical to use respectable credentials as a filter to get the candidate pool to a manageable size.

For job positions which attract only few candidates, you can't and shouldn't use credentials as a filtering tool, obviously.

The problems with past job experience:

• * It's hard to verify and therefore heavily fudged. If you select using a heavily and easily fudged indicator, you're just fooling yourself.
• * Unless the job position is exactly the same as was previously occupied, which is rarely the case, the past experience may not be relevant and it usually isn't.
• * The fact that candidates have past job experience doesn't indicate whether they were any good at the job. They could have been terrible at the job and got fired, which is why they're now applying to your organization.
• * And finally and most importantly, requiring past job experience deters or outright rejects capable candidates. Those candidates can be just as capable as those with job experience and they're way cheaper (they're young and eager).

Personnel selection is an extremely hard problem. Sorting out people for jobs is one of the most important problems organizations face. It's almost always unrecognized in its complexity, and the majority of decision makers are unaware of the current process's inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

The solution the startup in the post offers is preposterous and obviously ineffective. It's also downright insulting to prospective employees. A degrading selection process will have a negative effect on the quality of the prospective candidate pool you'll have.

If you take into account current research findings and practicality, the best you can do today to select someone for a job is:

1. Only consider candidates with a respectable educational certificate (i.e. those with quality education, either academic or vocational).

2. Let candidates perform a sample of the job they're interviewing for. Score their performance objectively. Select the highest performers.

That's it. No interviews, assessment centers, theoretical exams, references, past job experience, resume screening, etc. They're all worthless and impractical.

we have about 10 people

You're not sure how many people work at your company?

It blows my mind to think just how much wasteful effort has gone into making the same applications work on the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and also for Chrome apps, regular webapps, now Facebook Apps, and next time it would be WinPhone apps.

Another freaking walled garden. Now we will have 3 major walled gardens (Apple's, Google's, and Facebook's) and soon Microsoft will join in as well. Is that what passes as "innovative" nowadays?

Apps are not the future. They are the past.

Webapps or just web pages, as we used to call them, are the future of software. You just enter an address or click a link and you get to the most up to date "app". No installation, no updates, no permissions, no specific OS or hardware or platform necessary. It works everywhere by everyone and all the time with no hassles.

The reason apps made a comeback is because you can charge for apps. An app is a defined thing and an installation is a chargeable privilege. So thank Apple and all the me-too followers for burdening us with software deployment and management just as we were about to escape those unnecessary activities.

Apps as platform is not driven by mobile OSes, browsers, social networking sites, or other modern technology. It is driven by capitalism.

So don't get sucked into yet another walled garden.

Apps are not the future. They are the past.

Shamelessly stolen from four years ago:

Google now has a full-blown case of the Microsoft Business Disaster Model. This model goes like this:

• Get a highly profitable monopoly.
• Watch gigantic sums of cash accumulate.
• Panic at the thought of actually distributing that cash to shareholders, as the law requires.
• Start throwing money at any additional product line you can think of, believing that because you got that first profitable monopoly (largely by luck), you are Really Smart, and therefore you can make money at anything.
• Watch with relief as stockholders don't notice how much of their money you are shoveling into the fire, because your core monopoly is still making huge profits.
• Spend years telling yourself that having divisions that lose gigantic sums of money for years means you are now a "long term" strategist.
• Drift slowly into decay like the Soviet Union, still powerful, still important, but internally depressing, wasteful, and decrepit.

The most profitable company this year (2008) was Exxon-Mobil. A company that has to get its hands dirty and actually move a physical product had higher profits than Microsoft, a company that just thinks up bits that it then distributes, largely electronically. Imagine the profits if Microsoft were to sell off all its huge money losers, retain only enough employees to maintain Windows and Office, and pay out all the profits as dividends. It would be the most incredible stock the market had ever seen.