Appear Here's Case Study with Hired

I recently worked with Hired, the marketplace for tech talent, on a case study. I've been using their platform to grow the product engineering team at Appear Here and in the last year have hired numerous engineers through it. Here is the case study as a two page PDF:

Speaking at Facebook's Leadership Summit & Hired's Employer Brand Health Panel

On Wednesday, September 19th I'll be speaking at both of Facebook's Leadership Summit and Hired's Employer Brand Health Panel. 

At Facebook I'll be talking on a panel about "Retaining Culture" along with Gerald Tan (VP Growth & Product at Catapult Sports), Maria Zverina (Engineering Manager at Facebook) and Jessie Link (Senior Director of Engineering at Twitter). This panel will be apart of an all day conference based out of Facebook's 1 Rathbone Square offices in Fitzrovia and will begin at 11am.

At Hired I'll be talking on a panel about "Employer Branding" along with Marta Jasinska (CTO at Moo), Sean Fanning (Talent Manager at Improbable), Maria Campbell (VP People at Snyk) and moderated by Gordon Smith (UK Sales Director at Hired). This panel will be hosted out of Nobu Hotel Shoreditch and will begin at 4:30pm.

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Update

During the Hired panel a videographer was recording a few moments and Hired have compiled this one minute video of the event:

Joining Appear Here as CTO

Brand and Product

Appear Here's very clear and focused mission resonates with me because they want to create a world where anyone with an idea can find space to make it happen. They achieve this by bringing together a community of brands, entrepreneurs and creatives in the world's best cities. They already have 80,000+ global brands and creative entrepreneurs, 10,000,000+ sq ft of spaces and 3 offices globally. Brands and entrepreneurs can use the Appear Here platform to find and book short-term spaces such as high street boutiques, market, shopping centres and shop shares in London, Paris and New York.

Company Culture

From the very first interview to signing my contract and officially joining, the team at Appear Here have built a company that continuously upholds these values:

We're Hiring

We're hiring talented people to help make this ambitious vision a reality. We're currently looking for Software Engineers and we will soon be hiring for other product and engineering roles as we grow.  If you're interested in joining me and the rest of the Appear Here team, feel free to reach out to me directly (via Linkedin or Twitter) and we'll have a coffee to chat through what we're up to.

I'm looking forward to taking on this new responsibility as Appear Here's CTO and working with the team to drive the business forward. 

Recent Press

• Appear Here, a marketplace for short-term retail space, raises £12M Series B
• How an 'Airbnb for retail' is bringing entrepreneurs back to the high-street
• Appear Here - 'the Airbnb for retail' - eyes big brand budgets with launch of Global Projects team

Building a "Job Finder" skill for my Amazon Alexa Device

Growth

According to a recent NPR and Edison Research Smart Audio Report, 5% of the 1,620 surveyed respondents owned an Alexa device (Echo or Echo Dot) and 2% owned a Google Home device. Even more revealing was the fact that 42% of Smart Speaker owners said that "their Smart Speakers are essential to their everyday lives". By any stretch, Smart Speakers have reached a significant level of product/market fit and in a little over 2 years Amazon Alexa devices are leading the pack and growing at a rapid pace:

Business Insider: Amazon Echo sales and stats - Dec 2016

Skill

I decided to build my first Alexa skill to better understand the underlying Alexa Skills Kit that powers all Amazon Echo devices to give users this new intuitive voice interface. I was particularly interested in voice-user interface (VUI) design and how easy it would be to go from idea to building and then deploying a new skill. For the actual implementation, I decided to use the new Flask-Ask framework by John Wheeler to build the skill along with using Zappa to deploy my Python code into AWS Lambda. 

I settled on a simple idea for a "job finder" skill that allows users to answer 2 simple questions that Alexa asks them about which city and job role they were interested in. The skill would then return the most relevant job listings that had been posted in the last 24 hours according to the answers given. I imagined users waking up in the morning with their coffee in hand and asking their Alexa "job finder" skill to get the latest updates for their ongoing job search. If the skill responded with some particularly timely and relevant jobs, the user could then decide to immediately open their laptop and apply for those jobs or, if not, the user could simply continue to enjoy their coffee and resume the job search later on in the day.

Implementation

I spent a few evenings coding up the "job finder" skill's Python backend and configuring the interaction model (the intent schema and sample utterances) to get it working locally. I ended up with a single job_finder.py file for the bulk of my application logic which is only 116 lines of code and a template.yaml file that contains a number of the templated launch, answer and re-prompt responses which are required for the skill. All-in-all the learning curve was reasonable and most of the learning came from understanding the new type of interaction model set out by the Alexa Skills Kit.

Demo

As of writing this post the "job finder" skill is being reviewed by Amazon's Alexa's team and therefore is unavailable at present to enable on your own Amazon Echo device (the skill should be certified in a week or less). In the meantime I've recorded a demo using Amazon Alexa Testing Tool called Echosim.io:

Learnings

• I've capped the number of jobs Alexa responds with to a maximum of 5. I think this is a manageable amount but given that Alexa might misunderstand the job role given by the user, it could be frustrating to have to listen to all 5 jobs if they are based on an incorrect interpretation. Therefore I would potentially improve the skill's VUI to either have Alexa repeat the job role specified by the user before all 5 jobs are listed out OR I would pause Alexa after the first job listed and ask the user a yes/no question on whether Alexa should continue or not.

• I've purposefully kept each job listing very brief so it's easy for users to consume while listening but it might be useful for users to get more detailed information. I could improve the skill's VUI by asking a follow-up question at the end of listing the 5 jobs to know whether or not the user wanted more details about any or all of the jobs listed.

• I'm using the AMAZON.ProfessionalType intent slot and this is currently only supported in the US. Therefore when the skill is certified by the Amazon team it will only be available on US based Alexa devices. I've asked about UK support for the AMAZON.ProfessionalType intent slots but have not yet received information about when UK support for it will be available. 

• Analytics are very important for knowing what is and is not working from a user's perspective. I often use tools like Google Analytics for websites and Mixpanel/Amplitude for mobile apps which have been very insightful to better understand user behaviour. For my Alexa skill, I'd like to add in something like Dashbot analytics to get a window into what users are and are not doing with the skill.

• Most importantly I would like to find ways to improve the VUI for subsequent invocations of the "job finder" skill. If a user has already performed a prior job search then I'd like to be able to have a search saved against their user profile and then have the skill look it up and ask the user whether or not it should be re-used. This will reduce the number of questions Alexa asks the user upon each new "job finder" skill invocation. Such functionality can be accomplished by identifying users by their UserId obtained from the session and then querying a database for prior jobs searches to re-use.

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Update

1. I mentioned implementing analytics within the skill previously. I've since integrated VoiceInsights analytics from VoiceLabs.co to begin receiving data for individual and aggregate user sessions across metrics such as usage, pathing, speech and retention. I'm finding it more valuable compared to Alexa's skill metrics data that are provided by default.
2. My "Job Finder" skill is now live in both the US and UK markets:

My podcast with AWS Startup Stories about hiring for startups

On June 23rd, 2017 AWS released the final podcast in a 6 episode series titled AWS Startup Stories. The series of podcasts cover a range of topics from startup fundraising (Crowdcube, LocalGlobe) to scaling a startup (Monzo, Starling Bank, Once dating app) and growing and retaining a team (Makers Academy, Yoyo Wallet).

In episode 6 Will Bentinck, Head of Careers at Makers Academy and myself, VP Engineering at Yoyo Wallet discuss the ins and outs of hiring for startups and how to retain talent long-term. The 30 minute podcast was hosted by Darren Mowry, Head of Startup Business Development and Venture Capital at AWS EMEA.