Try Before You Buy: How a Craft Demo Can Take Hiring A Quick Base Problem-Solver to the Next Level
With the launch of our new community platform this past week there is a bevy of new features and functionality for you to sink your teeth into. One of the more interesting additions is the new Job Postings page. The Job Posting page can be a powerful tool for anyone looking to hire someone to work on or create Quick Base applications. Finding the right fit when hiring someone is a hard task in general but when you add in the potential complexity of Quick Base app-building it makes it significantly more difficult. As the Leader of the Quick Base Care Organization, it is a difficulty that I know all too well. How do you find the best candidates? In addition to relying on your crack interviewing skills, you can utilize a tool that the Care Organization wields like Thor’s Hammer: the craft demo.
Now you are probably wondering “what is a craft demo?” A craft demo is an assignment to build an app based on a provided scenario to specific specifications. In practice, this is a great way to measure an applicant’s technical ability and their ability to follow directions. When assigning a craft demo, it’s a great idea to give the applicant a relatable scenario. For example, ask them to build an app to track their book or DVD collection. Maybe even their favorite sports teams, or movies. The key is to try to make the topic as engaging as possible to help the applicant stay focused on the task at hand. You can give them a demo topic that is more closely related to your business but doing so may prove difficult since the applicant presumably doesn’t know enough about your business to speak about it intelligently.
You can give your demo any backstory you like, but the meat of the craft demo is the specifications you give the applicant as guidelines for the build. You want your applicant to have to dive into the platform headfirst and get their hands dirty as well as be able to discuss what they did to complete your requirements. Here is a list of few basic things you can have them do that if they complete properly will give you an idea of how they handle basic Quick Base:
- A list of tables that need to be created
- A breakdown of each field that will be needed for each table
- Create multiple relationships
- Build reports w/filters
- Create different types of Notifications/Subscriptions/Reminders
- Add Summary fields
- Create dashboards
The list of potential specifications is only limited to your imagination for the more advanced builders you can through in tasks such as:
- Create automations/webhooks
- Table-to-table imports
- Create a Sync table
- Creating code pages
You are probably thinking that with enough time anyone can build a Quick Base app. That is true, but the craft demo isn’t just designed to see who can build an app. The demo provides insight into things that you can’t generally get out of your normal hour-long person-to-person interview. Putting your applicants through the paces of building a craft demo app will help you measure their inherent technical ability as well as give you insight into the few harder to chart traits:
Are they afraid to ask questions?
- Coming into Quick Base cold and being expected to build an app is a daunting task. It’s almost impossible to do without asking questions. If the app they present is a dud and they didn’t reach out with questions, it is easy to know why. An applicant that can’t identify when they need help isn’t ideal.
- If they are completely new to Quick Base there is no way they can complete the task you give to them without doing some research on the platform. Specifically, ask what resources they used to see how far they went to complete the task.
Are they upfront about their failings?
- When it comes to the craft demo mistakes will be obvious but what matters is how the applicant handles them. Do they mention the issues they had during the process? Were they not able to figure something out but able to create a workaround of some sort?
The benefits of utilizing a craft demo are endless. It is an effective way to measure someone with minimal Quick Base knowledge to someone with advanced Quick Base knowledge. It forces your applicants to discuss what they did, how they did it, and why they did it. In the end, the craft demo gives you the ability to do something hiring managers usually don’t: you get to try before you buy.
