Ten years ago, DARPA issued a challenge to hide 10 large balloons across the country and reward $40,000 to the team who could find the most within a week. They made plans to take down the balloons at night and redeploy them in the morning. This proved unnecessary, however, because the MIT team found all ten in under 9 hours.
They used a variant of the “Query Incentive Network” to find the balloons, which they aptly explained:
We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all — we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we’re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on … (see how it works).
In some practical cases, electronic computers are less efficient than biological computers. For instance, the Traveling Salesman Problem is computationally difficult, but can actually be solved quickly by ant colonies, giving rise to the term “ant-ernet.” In the case of the red balloon challenge, it only required a network of 5000 people.
Finding Great Employees
If the idea of issuing recursive prizes is so efficient, could it be used to fix our broken hiring system? We propose adapting the Red Balloon method to allow companies to find a better hire in a shorter amount of time.
For every company that places a job posting, there is a “right person” for the job who is tough to find through all the noise. Offering a bounty to the full chain of people leading up to the ultimate hire improves efficiency all around. In a sense, you are creating a decentralized recruitment network.
Of course, many times the challenge is not getting a lot of applicants, it is in sorting among them to find the best applicant. Fortunately, the Red Balloon method also solves for this. Much of the work in the original DARPA experiment was in verifying the information, as competing groups cleverly threw out some false reports to throw them off the trail. The full theory of Query Incentive Networks is a bit more complicated than described prior, allowing for more complex incentive structures useful and verifying information.
Advantages of Red Balloon
For our early test we were able to help a small telecommunications company who needed a candidate with a rare blend of a passion for progressive politics and tough-to-find expertise in the Asterisk open-source platform. Great candidates appeared quickly, for a fraction of the cost of a traditional recruiter. Given the truly superior results, can be sure that within a decade all hiring will be done this way.
The Red Balloon approach has been so successful we are rolling it out to a wider community. The benefit for hirers is obvious, as it delivers better candidates quicker and cheaper. Best of all, if you don’t find a candidate, you don’t need to pay a bounty. Try it now and avoid the hiring headache.
If you are a job seeker, this also bears fruit. There are many job boards, but RezScore Jobs is the only job board that will pay you just for using it! All successful bounties, subject to the discretion of RezScore and the hirer, is to pay the entire chain at a 50% reduction for each link in the chain.
