I had an IM conversation with a friend where he made it clear that not only did we not make it clear what was going on with resume versions on the site (I knew that), but that lack of clarity was causing more frustration and angst than I had expected.
We need to both make it more clear in our UI as well as having some Help that explains it as well. This post is not instead of those changes, but rather a chance for me to do a braindump on how things work so that those who make the UI changes and write the help can use it as a reference, plus a reference for those of you who are more technically minded and are curious.
So, why do we need versions? The biggest reason is that when you get ranked on http://www.talentspring.com/, if we allowed people to make changes afterwards they could easily game the system. A simple version would be to get ranked with incredible (and wrong) accomplishments or work history, then once you get a wonderful score you change the contents of the resume to be correct and never ask for a re-ranking.
More importantly, when people are voting they're voting one set of contents against another. If the contents have changed that decision is no longer valid, which makes the rest of our calculations bad at best.
When you request ranking at TalentSpring, we freeze the contents of your resume and save it as a version, creating a new version that you can then edit. People will vote on your resume versus others, but you cannot change the contents, all edits are to the new version.
You can only be ranked in a job category with one version of your resume, and you can only be in the process of being ranked in a job category with one version. Once the new version is ranked, the old ones are removed. The data remains, however, because the decisions people have made about whether the contents are better or worse than other contents are necessary to make correct calculations of the overall rankings in the job category. However, votes on previous versions do not affect rankings for new versions, so you aren't at a disadvantage if you get ranked with less than ideal resume contents at some point.
We need to tell the power user for each job category:
- Are they ranked, and if so what is their score?
- Which version of their resume is the one that is ranked (and a way to view it).
- Is that version now out of date, that is has the user updated their resume since that version?
- Are they in mini-resume (the three accomplishments version) or full resume mode for that job category?
For the normal user, we want to tell them that they're out of date in a job category and that they should get re-ranked for it. The same basic decisions but in a simpler and more action-oriented format to help those who don't necessarily know or care to know what is going on under the hood.
If you have any other questions about this topic let me know, I want to make it clear to our users what is going on and why.
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