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Last week we began recruiting for a new Director of Communications. The person we hire must be an outstanding writer, thus we’ve already spent hours combing through writing samples from applicants. Candidates have submitted a surprisingly diverse range of samples; we’ve received academic papers, articles in student newspapers, email pitches, and press releases. How can we compare these writing samples against one another, apples-to-apples? Moreover, which of these are accurate proxies for the type of content our Director of Communications will be producing?

We’re interested in stretching the bounds of the traditional hiring processes. For example, in order to apply to be a web developer at SeatGeek, an applicant must “hack” into our backend to drop their resume. As a result, we don’t get distracted by unqualified candidates and can thus spend more time on the strongest coders.

Introducing WorkAtSeatGeek.com

This morning we realized that our screening process for the Director of Communications job was broken. We brainstormed what we hope is a better solution: WorkAtSeatGeek.com. Before describing what that is, here’s a description of the role. Our PR strategy uses the mountain of ticketing data we’ve collected over the past few years. Whenever a big story in sports or music breaks, we try to quantify fan sentiment through ticket prices. Reporters love this data; we get 3-4 press mentions per week. Examples of how we utilize our data are available on our blog and press page.

If this is a role that interests you, here’s how to apply using WorkAtSeatGeek.com:

• Email write@seatgeek.com with your resume attached
• The email address will auto-respond with instructions on how to access a ticketing dataset
• One you receive the data, use it to write a blog post of up to 300 words with a graph or chart. It’s unlikely that all the data-points in the dataset will be relevant the story you choose.
• Post your article on workatseatgeek.com. You can easily create an account by going to http://workatseatgeek.com/wp-login.php?action=register For obvious reasons, we will only display the handle you choose and never your full name or email address

Readers will vote on the most compelling posts by sharing them on Google Plus, Twitter, and Facebook. We encourage applicants to accumulate these social shares by actively promoting their pieces. In fact, the strongest applicants will probably be able to get legitimate press coverage. Just as we focus on engineers that solve our developer challenge, we’ll focus our interviews on the handful of writers with the best-written and most-shared articles. Best of luck!

We’re looking for someone to help with SeatGeek’s website copy and content, including descriptions of teams, artists, venues, broadway plays and sports matchups.

Freelance Writing Job Responsibilities

• Write about sports team matchups and trends for NHL, NBA, MLB, and/or NFL teams
• Produce short profiles for pop stars, indy bands, rappers and other artists across all key genres
• Profile both new and historic venues across several event types: sports, concerts, theater & more
• Note that assignments are divided up as much as possible by interest (i.e. if you know nothing about sports, but everything about music/concert venues, then you would not have to write about sports)

(prior web writing experience a plus, but not required)

Send your resume and a writing sample to chad@seatgeek.com or check out more SeatGeek job opportunities.

The early stage of the hiring process has a huge signal-to-noise problem.  A job posting on one of the standard career sites garners hundreds of resumes, but most are poor, and sorting cruft takes countless hours.  Outstanding web developers don’t generally spend their time trolling the job listings on Craigslist.  They do, however, enjoy puzzles.

Therefore, we’re changing the application process for our web developer position.  All applicants must now submit their resume by solving a puzzle: they must hack into our backend jobs admin panel.

Admittedly, this is contrived.  We didn’t have a backend jobs admin till last week, when Eric and Mike made it for the purpose of this challenge. But it should be a fun challenge for any dev up to the task.  Anyone who successfully submits their resume will be carefully considered.  Even if you aren’t looking for a job, feel free to give it a spin and drop us a line at hi@seatgeek.com to let us know what you think.

Note: All errors you run into are intentional.  A blank page should be considered an error.  If you see a blank page, your resume has not been submitted.

Here’s a link to the puzzle: http://apply.seatgeek.com/
Here’s the job description: http://seatgeek.com/jobs/lamp_developer/

We’re expanding our team. Check out our jobs page for a list of open positions.

We’re listing seven jobs there, under the philosophy that startups should always be hiring. Jason Cohen has a great post that explains the rationale.

With that said, there are two positions we’re focused on filling within the next week or two: (1) Lead Backed Web Developer (listed as LAMP Web Developer on the jobs page) and (2) Social Media Intern. If you or anyone you know might be interested in either of those, drop us a line at jobs@seatgeek.com. We’d also love to hear from people interested in the other jobs listed.

As an aside, as we’ve gone through the hiring process I’ve scoured the web for blog posts on startup hiring. Here are a few of the posts I found most useful:

• Jason Cohen’s article on hiring employee #1 (mentioned above)
• Mark Suster’s advice on hiring people who “punch above their weight class”–this has been a focus for us at SeatGeek
• Dharmesh Shah’s post on trying before you buy–we’re doing this too
• Venture Hack’s post on option pools, which provides some handy equity ranges for different types of hires