I’m not sure if TechCrunch jumped the gun, but boy is TalentSpring awful. I noticed that TalentSpring is a northwest company (Seattle), which made me want to check it out, as I don’t bother with most of the stuff that comes through TechCrunch these days. Though I can’t speak much for the business and/or idea itself, as I’m not totally sure what the point of it all is yet. It seems slightly interesting, but the TalentSpring site itself is so unusable right now, I have no motivation to explore.

talentspring-candidates.png

First off are the 500(!) requests to urchin.js, locking up my browser. Once that is fully swallowed, you are presented with a half-empty UI. I guess there are no “Amateur Programmers” in the system? I play with the job category thingamabob and still can’t get any results. Next I try these filter widgets, and boy are they slow (this is client-side slowness, having nothing to do with the load on the site). Oh, I see that I’m “Already Logged in,” well no actually I haven’t logged in. Finally I entered some stuff to the “Get Ranked” form (I put some skills, not sure exactly what they mean by accomplishments, seems kind of vague) and hit go, and after about 30 seconds my browser finally came back to life with absolutely nothing changed on the screen. After that, I’m outta here. I can’t wait until uncov gets on this one.

User Experience is hard, I can relate with my own struggle to to create positive experiences that really get the message I’m trying to spread, across. But, simplicity can go a long way to helping that, and I would give that advice to the TalentSpring team. I think the problem is that the home page is trying to do too much with multiple kinds of filters in the browse area, the results area itself, and the “get ranked” form. But, while trying to do too much, nothing gets accomplished here, I never saw any results. Perhaps getting rid of the “Get Ranked” form and prefilling the latest resumes into the results (then the filters can be used) would be a good start. Just some thoughts.