If you’re having goosebumps listening to the word plagiarism, I can relate! Let’s explore this a little further.
A Brief Historical Overview: Plagiarism as a phenomenon is not new but it got the official name back in 1601 referring to literary theft aka copy/pasting, paraphrasing, accidental/image/data stealing.
It can be a social media post or an academic work, a Pinterest image, or a Youtube video: if you’re copying, then you are plagiarising.
Why Do People Plagiarise: It’s similar to asking why people steal. The short answer: They lack their own ideas.
The longer answer includes reasons like:
Using others’ thoughts seems easier.
People can be lazy by nature.
Time constraints.
Lack of self-confidence/knowledge.
Not realizing they’re plagiarising.
Fear of failing with their own ideas.
Disregarding ethical honesty.
Believing they won’t get caught.
How to Overcome Plagiarism and Stay Real: If you can relate yourself to any of the above points, that’s great. Why? Since you’re one step behind from making another plagiarism. We could go point by point, but at the same time we can just state- Stop it!
Anyway, if you’re still struggling with this:
Develop research skills to form your own conclusions.
Prioritise tasks to have time for original thinking.
Work on your writing skills. Even if you are expressing your thoughts but doing it with someone else’s style of writing doesn’t keep you away from plagiarism
Starting with citations could be a thing for the first steps. So be aware of how to use them (see at the end of the article).
Ethical honesty/awareness, anything that starts with the word ethical is already a matter of subjective perception, still, there are non-written rules we should follow.
Impact of Plagiarism on Business:
Reputation Damage: Copying damages a company’s reputation, leading to lost trust and customers.
Legal Consequences
Financial loss to the other company which can later also result in legal issues
Missed Partnership Opportunities.
What to Do If You Are Plagiarised: Well, you can write such an article as I did 🙂 Or if that doesn’t work you can take action by gathering evidence and contacting the plagiarizer. For academic or professional work, involve authorities if you’ve copyrighted your content.
Final Notes: In today’s AI-dominated world, where the temptation to use tools like ChatGPT/Bard at every opportunity is increasing rapidly, keep your genuineness, since at the end of the day that’s one of the core things that makes us differ and stand out.
References:
Fixgerald, Fixgerald website, August 17, 2023. https://fixgerald.com/blog/plagiarism-in-business
ChatGPT, ChatGPT website, August 17, 2023. Chat.openai.com, proofreading
Pattern-based sourcing (PBS): How to Use Retrospective Information for the Company’s Best
Hire like-minded people
We often use the hyped expression “cultural fit”. In the same breath, do we understand our own company’s lifestyle, and can we determine if a person suits us or not?
Pattern-Based Sourcing (PBS) or sourcing based on the retrospective information of the company is the way to decrease the number of rejections based on culture fit. PBS is a framework to put into use the information about the current employees and lessen the number of rejections on the last stages of the employment process. Dean Da Costa is a prominent supporter of that method, I will try to elaborate on the topic and give practical use to the theory.
Referrals
When thinking about PBS, the first hiring tool that comes to mind is the referral program. If you want to find candidates similar to your team, it makes sense to ask your existing employees to be your recruiter. Make it clear for the team, explain why you approached them, point out what you like about them and what kind of people you are looking for. If you skip that part and let people decide on their own you will end up with recklessly chosen candidates – your employees may enjoy their company, but they are not necessarily suitable for the position.
Active PBS
Before jumping to an active phase of PBS you need to put together as much information about your team as possible. Here is what exactly you need:
Current role in the company
Current responsibilities, stack, the grade
Ex-employers
Previous positions
Education (grade)
University
Local / Relocation
Source of hiring: how did we find that exact candidate?
Social media profiles and accounts on the professional networks
The exact date he/she joined the company
We will use this data to level up the sourcing game.
Step 1: Find people inside the company
Consider team members who are engaged in the most similar activities. If it’s a new position or if you, for example, have never recruited people working on that stack look for people working on the same grade but in other departments. It’s important to find 3-5 people so that the sample is representative. Choose the best performers if the number of staff allows you.
Step 2: Accumulate information about those employees
Collect the information on the points listed above and look for patterns. Maybe, all of them are alumni of the same University. That’s rare, that is why look at their major. Maybe all of them studied Computer Science or Physics and decided to go with programming only after. Or all your best employees used to work at the financial companies at some point. Or maybe your best data scientists were analytics who later on found their interest in data science.
Step 3: Analyse the results
Not to spread the efforts in all directions possible, you can ask your target group about their social footprint. Make a detailed table and ask them to fill in all the info:
The channels are different for every position. If you are looking for a designer, don’t forget to mention Behance and Dribbble. Looking for a JS developer, include NPM.JS, while for data scientists the source is Kaggle.
Step 4. Start sourcing candidates at the chosen channels
The information we’ve collected will help with the first iteration – to identify the most suitable candidates. And only after screening those profiles there is a point to move forward. It’s good to source from 25 up to 250 candidates for the first iteration. The number depends on the position and the location. In case you have sourced 500 and more candidates in the first iteration, that means you can narrow your search by finding more patterns.
Let’s go through the cases and see how we can come up with the searching query for different positions:
Special Notes are the data we’ve retrieved from our employees, and are ready to use in sourcing new candidates.
Pattern-based sourcing and D&I
At first sight, PBS contradicts the principles of diversity and inclusion, as looking for like-minded people we can end up hiring look-alike people. All the developers will come from Cambridge, Oxford, and ETH Zurich. All of them we enjoy skiing in the winter with, watch TEDx and celebrate Christmas in the countryside.
PBS can be used for both look alike AND look un-alike demographics. As a theory, it is neutral in its core and the approach to use is to exclude several patterns so that different demographics can be targeted. Even if you see that the whole development team consists of guys aged 25-28, it doesn’t mean you can use that as guidance for future sourcing.
Kind of patterns you need to ignore:
Gender
Age
Origin
Physical features
Sexual orientation
If you explain to the sourcing team why you decided to use PBS and make clear instructions on how to prevent discrimination of the candidates, you will stay away from the problems.
Let’s sum up the keypoints:
– Search people inside the company
– Use referrals
– Don’t overvalue the company culture
– Diversity is cool
– Analysing your results can be helpful in future hiring process
Meettal is a team of topnotch recruiters with a brand new approach for building tech teams. Along with recruiting, we create long-term relationships with candidates based on trust, fun and tech-love.
For those of you who don’t know who the f*ck is Edgar Degas, WELCOME. For those of you who know about Edgar Degas, but don’t understand how he can be connected to startups, MORE THAN WELCOME.
Abstract Something OR Something Abstract
The story begins like this. Fresh morning air of Lori region, some unknown “Art Collection” book and my 2.7 years of experience reading Startup related books make me to come up with this Mixture and Intersection of Startups and Art. Sounds fancy, right? I also believe so 🙂 Anyway the first touch will be one of my Com Si Com Sa favorite painter, Edgar Degas.
So Called Bio: To be concrete as possible, Edgar Degas is one of the eminent French painters. He is considered as one of the founders of Impressionism, or as he liked to call himself a “Realist” artist. He is most famous for hisBallet Dancers drawings. For more Google…
It’s time to start my research and “curious” observations. (Right now I feel like a Soviet Union spy from the “Bridge of Spies” movie. BTW worth watching if you have a free time and focused mood.)
10* Ideas “proving” Edgar Degas’s Startup Mindset
*Could be more, but I am lazy…
# Target Niche Market: He selected the dance field as the industry where he wants to operate and, particularly, ballet dance as the niche market.
# Conduct your Market Research: Before starting each of his masterpiece, he was doing a thorough research on the color palette, which shop to choose for the drawing equipment, and the drawing personas.
# Talk to your customers: He was personally going and seeing the ballet dancers in order to understand their feelings, emotions, and movements. He was trying to see from their perspective.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas
# Do experiments; Do A/B testing: He was constantly doing experiments with chosen materials, colors, and ideas. He was trying to paint the same picture with different color styles to see which one works and sales better.
# Pivot considering the market need: He shifted from painting history paintings to contemporary paintings. He was primarily painting in the beginning of his journey, such as Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.
# Don’t follow the crowd & Market Differentiation: In technical terms, Degas differed from the Impressionists in that he continually shifted from their practice of painting en plein air (meaning open air paintings).
# Do First Sales as a Founder: He was selling his own picture by his own, and his financial situation improved through sales of his own work. Just for the information, gained money he used to pay off his brother’s debts.
# Bringing Innovation through identifying problem: The lack of color in the 1874 Ballet Rehearsal on Stage and the 1876 The Ballet Instructor arose his interest to explore the new technique of photography.
# Have advisers, mentors, and huge network: Throughout his career, he was surrounded with a lot of advisers and mentors, like Édouard Manet, Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier. Moreover, he has a huge network of painters and press media representative, because of visiting art exhibitions quit often.
# Influence Marketing: He photographed many of his friends, such as double portrait of Renoir and Mallarmé. This made his reputation to increase even more through times of his friends’ audience.
Bonus point for compensating my laziness 🙂 # Learn, Grow, Change: His whole working mindset was dependent on these three notions: Learn New things, Grow his personality and professionalism, and Change himself overall.
This story ends with the continuation. I have decided to jump from Degas to the topic “Selecting a painting for the exhibition collection, like choosing a team member for your team.” What do you think?
“Make Art, Create Startup OR Create Startup, Make Art.”
When reading this title any developer is going to ask “why the hell?”, and the question is going to be the same for a tech recruiter. Well if you are really interested, here is a short story that hopefully, in the end, will satisfy your curiosity.
Two years ago, I was a student at the American University of Armenia studying computer science, and as every junior programmer, I was searching for that perfect start of my career as a web developer. After a very very long time of searching, finally, I found an internship at one of the outsourcing companies. The main languages that I was using were jQuery, PHP, also worked with WordPress and Joomla.
In the beginning, it was so much fun. I enjoyed every single code line that I wrote; there was so much learning, coding was all I did. I enjoyed working with DB and even started working on my own little project with Vue.js and MongoDB.
But the issue with outsourcing companies is that if the client wants you to write your code with PHP, you simply have to write it with PHP. There is no time for you to experiment and play around, say with Node.js. There is a deadline and you have to finish it on time.
As time passed and I was still doing the same thing going through the same routine, I couldn’t stop thinking “Is programming, that I was dreaming so long about, this boring?”. And the thing is when you get bored at work, your productivity will never be the same. I somehow started missing deadlines and lost the spark and the enthusiasm that I had before.
At the time, I had already developed a rule for myself — if you are not fully enjoying what you do in life, you must change stuff.
That was it for me — time for changes! But as a typical Gen z and a university student, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.
It’s funny, we always need to learn new things, its like hunger of knowledge that always needs to be fulfilled. This should be considered by the employers, otherwise, you will lose your employees.
I truly believe that companies always need to be ready for experiments, give their employees space to learn new things. The employees will still be doing the job, but feeling much more provided with fun space to play around and learn new things.
Going back to my story, I came to the decision to try a completely new thing and I came across this very funny job announcement — “if you like communication and tech, and have քթի ծակ” and more of this kind of phrases. The position was called “tech recruiter”.
Honestly, I had no idea what it was but decided to give it a shot. It turned out that there were people who work with different IT companies and developers and try to match them by various factors such as company culture, specific job requirements, salary, and more.
This was a new world for me. It’s like looking from the other side of developers. It was very funny too when you get to look at yourself from recruiters’ eyes.
Let me describe a very typical process of tech recruiting. Say X company is looking for Y developer, they send you the JD (job description) and the first thing you do is go over it and take out keywords such as Python developer who worked with Django and REST APIs with two years of experience. Easy right?
Then you start doing what we call “sourcing” in recruitment or research, call it as you want. It’s when you combine those keywords in google in a way it helps you get maybe 30–50 LinkedIn profiles of developers. Imagine when you have a DB and you are writing a query to find a specific set of data.
A side note: if you are a developer keep your LinkedIn updated.
The next step is to start communication. Here is the thing about developer/recruiter relationship, some developers don’t like recruiters because they think they just randomly write developers and suggest a job that is not relevant to them, or recruiters only care about the company and how fast they can sell it to developers. Well, guess what — not true.
Before writing a message to the developer, we look through all possible profiles that we can find on them and, trust me, we can even find out what your cat’s name was when you were three years old. Just kidding or am I 😉 ?
After making sure that the developer is really the person to work at X company, we message or have a call with him/her.
This is where my technical background helped me a lot. I was able to talk with developers in their language and understand their technical background.
The funny and probably the most shocking thing that I ever learned was that a recruiter, who doesn’t have a technical background, knows a loooot about the tech industry. So the stereotypes, that I had, just faded away. Maybe they can’t write code as well as developers, but they know how things work. Sure as hell!
And still, during the whole process you are going to read a lot of messages like “not interested,” “no,” “*blank” aka ignore, and some other harsh answers. On the other hand, there is the one awesome emotion when your candidate gets hired.
At that time, the recruiter is the happiest person on Earth. Imagine you are working on a product and finally, the day comes for release, and everything works perfectly and people love your product. Or you just built a model with 0.9 accuracy.
You might ask, do you miss coding? Yes, I do sometimes. Do you think you will do recruiting for a long period? Who knows. Do you regret leaving programming? Nope. Will you ever get back to it? Maybe, why not.
I hope this will help in taking a look at both sides and building a better developer/recruiter relationships.
Recruitment is all about the RIGHT relationship creation.
Let’s do a simple google search about the tagline “Recruiter is…”!
If you change the word Recruiter in the search results with words like Salesperson, Spy, Murderer, or Girlfriend, the meaning of search suggestions will still be relevant. Sounds funny, right? In reality, people still have wrong dogmas and associations with the recruiters. For sure, it is gonna continue for a while, until the recruitment industry is fully automated, recruiters are replaced with bots, and thus new dogmas arise. Just #PredictingTheFuture don’t judge 🙂
The work in this kind of environment teaches you a lot of things, and it is time to share some of the valuable lessons I have learnt as a technical recruiter or, more fancy said, as a tech recruiter.
P.S. For you to know, the role of technical recruiter is to find the brightest tech talent for technical jobs. OR as JobHero says “Technical Recruiters are a unique breed of recruiter” (Advice: never say this to technical recruiters ever again) XD
Lesson 1: Sorry, I am not interested… No worries
If you have been rejected today from a college application, job interview, or life changing academic program and you think it is the end of the world, please think twice. You will hear a LOT OF rejections in your life, believe me.
Los Angeles Times: The average job seeker is rejected by 24 decision-makers before they get the “yes,” according to research from career coach and author Orville Pierson.
Daily, as a recruiter, I was getting on average 80 rejections out of 142 people contacted candidates. Attention, this is without follow ups XD
I am not interested in changing my job I am not interested in the relocation I am not interested to live in Berlin I am not interested in your salary range I am not interested in your industry I just had a baby, sorry, not interested I am not interested and period
Hence, the only choice is to get used to hearing a substantial amount of rejections. It is just a rejection, come on 🙂
Lesson 2: Not feeling valued ??? You should
Candidates will ignore you. Candidates will not value your job. Candidates will think you are just a random recruiter.
But there will always be a candidate who says “Thanks dear for your support and for the suggestion”, “Thanks for changing my life”, “Thanks for helping me on weekends as well”, OR “Thanks also for helping me after working hours” (Recruiter:Although it is 3 AM in your local time and you are already in the bed).
Don’t worry about not being valued by a lot of people. There are still people who will Really Really value your efforts. Besides that, there is You who should value your work.
Lesson 3: Patience you must have, My Young Padawan
This point is the hardest one, at least for me. Being a recruiter requires to have a strong patience, which I am still lacking with 80% 🙂
You need to have a patience of hearing “I am interested” after thousand of rejections, communicating with the semi-interested candidates, and, eventually, waiting for a candidate’s decision about the offer acceptance.
Believe me, patience will result on more productive results and outcomes in your life. Comment: Still in the process of learning how to be more patient!
Lesson 4: Being a Change not only in somebody’s life
The candidate’s decision to change her/his job will not only result on a single individual, but also on family members, relatives, colleagues, current projects, and many other factors. Therefore, as a recruiter you also have an influence on other factors’ integration process.
You may help her spouse or his wife to find a new job as well You may help children with finding a new school You may help with finding a new apartment You may help with finding local community groups of interest You may help with finding tutors for learning local language
Indeed, we, tech recruiters, can help with all of these life decisions, through our great sourcing skills. Magic!
Lesson 5: What is the difference between Chef and Ansible?
The main difference between Chef and Ansible is…, ok let’s stop here, cause this is not the point 🙂 The point is that as a tech recruiter, you actually learn in a detailed way the stack information of the position and all the required tech skills needed in the requirements.
So, yes the main difference between Chef and Ansible is that Ansible is easier to manage because it uses YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) to manage configurations, and plus there is python in use. While for Chef there is still ssh at your service and you can leverage the whole brilliance of client/service architecture for your benefit. It is always matter of choice and engineering problem at hand – credits to my team lead.
Please don’t take it serious, I am still not an engineer 🙂
Being a recruiter, and, especially, a tech recruiter is a hard job. But, honestly, every recruiter, or at least me, can say that the warm relationship with candidates is one of the most pleasant and spectacular things. The End.
P.S. Ending is not as good as it was in the “Parasite” movie, but still I tried 🙂
Where do you picture yourself when you think of a perfect job — is it a modern open space office with the best view over the city or your couch with your lovely pets around? Well, maybe you own an art gallery, but that would be another article. Meanwhile… it’s a growing trend that many people choose freelancing over the office job, moreover, see it as a long term solution.
According to the first-ever European freelance EFIP survey, the main reasons for choosing an independent working style are the flex working hours, freedom in choosing the project, the location, going “own boss” and having a better work-life balance. The survey says that freelancers count for 7% of the total workforce, while in the US, 35% of the workforce work independently. As per the FIA report, younger generations are more likely to freelance, where the percentage of Gen Z freelancers outruns Millennials by 13%.
No doubt freelancing seems to be a burning topic. We hear millions of stories about digital nomads, tips on finding your first freelance job, and yet, nothing about people switching to the opposite. It may sound like the scariest transition ever, right? While for many, it turns into a success story.
With the highest curiosity of mine, I decided to interview those heroes and find out how they marched over a dark and unknown bridge. I was lucky enough to talk to Software Engineers, a Content writer, and a DevOps engineer. We talked about the challenges they have faced and what they found beneficial in this transition, Pros and Cons didn’t go unseen. Let’s dive in:
Challenges
A tiny change without a challenge? Never heard!
#1. Finding your dream company
Finding the right company where you can apply all of your skills and be happy with the pay can be the first struggle you face.
#2. Public transport & traffic
To the office and back home. If this goes by default for many of you working in an office, it can be annoying for a freelancer, hmm, to most of the freelancers I interviewed, well at least in the beginning.
#3. Even if you dreamed of becoming an astronaut, open space might be scary
Whether it’s a content or a code you’re writing, it can be scary as hell to be seated in an open space of about 100 people, who would pass around throughout the day. Goes without saying that you need to improve your concentration skills since it’s also very distracting. Who relates?
#4. Fixed schedule
Being a freelancer means you might choose to work at night times, while getting back to the office routine, you have to revisit your alarm settings. You’ll probably guess that spontaneous coffee breaks with a friend will stop being a daily thing.
#5. Coffee distractions or keeping the balance between work and socializing
For the one and only DevOps engineer I interviewed, it was quite a challenge to be able to concentrate on the task with an already dying deadline and still dedicate time to socialize with coworkers during office hours. Guys, coffee or tea?
#6. Mastering negotiations
Whether you are a content writer, like one of my interviewees or your tasks are strongly dependent on your co-workers, you will need to level up your negotiation skills. Still being a very talkative person, it was not easy for her to “make” others speak when working on her article content. Eventually, she found out the way to everyone’s heart. You’ll need a little bit of effort here, maybe treating with pizza will help?
Yet, you may benefit from:
#1. Stability in terms of projects and finances
When taking on an office job you will skip the process of searching for a new client every once in a while and feel more stable with your monthly payments.
#2. Being right there
When working in a company you have the chance of getting a clearer picture of Company status, where it goes and what problems it may face.
#3. More interaction more fun
Well, it’s not only about making friends with bright people and being in the center of professional events but also about improving your social and technical skills, which might be a bit less common when working with remote teams.
#4. Fixed working hours can be beneficial
Usually, the remote working time might be widely distributed throughout a day, meaning you will not have a continuous free time. As one of the interviewed developers mentioned, you’re in “always-on” mode when freelancing. While at an office job, it becomes easier to manage the time since there is a bold line between the work and the resting time.
#5. Better in person
Some situations get solved much easier when there is real communication, be it a career promotion topic or another burning issue which needs a “human touch”. As another developer pointed out, the feedback loop is shorter than in remote companies.
#6. Perks and benefits
Paid vacation, days-off, remote working days and sick days, insurance, stock options, team-buildings, membership cards, free lunch, and snacks. Nice to have, isn’t it?
Without a doubt, some of the listed advantages might appear to be a disadvantage to you or another person, or maybe you didn’t even notice a single shade of a challenge among the listed ones. Quite predictable, we are all individuals with our own perceptions and experiences. Some say freelancing is a lonely business or being alone is a common occurrence for freelancers. Same, as it’s a debatable question, whether the office badge makes you more engaged and boosts your social interaction or it brings no changes. Like if we talk about your time management, this way or another, you have to manage your time. Regardless of the working style, you should think well about what to invest your time into and how to benefit from it.
Be it a promotion, an office job or a remote one, a relocation or a fundamental career change you will step into another reality and embrace yourself in a storm of Pros and Cons. Let’s see what we recap on this:
PROs
Stability in terms of projects and finances
Job perks and benefits
Amazing people to work with
A lot of networking and fun
Communication
Engagement and involvement
Solving problems in person
Having a better picture of the company
No time trackers
No day&night missing meetings
Self-growth opportunities
CONs
Finding a fit company is hard
Traffic and public transportation
Low income
Less authority in choosing your boss
Less learning in tech
Fewer chances to improve your second language
Too much coffee destructions
Less time spent with family
Less freedom and flexibility
More negotiation needed
Noise, noise, noise
It doesn’t really matter whether you’re in Thailand grabbing your suncream or sitting by your office desk enjoying the last sip of your 2nd cup of coffee, you still have to do your job. A great motivation, right?
Want to share your own experience? Find me on LinkedIn to discuss 🙂
Meettal helps tech companies hire senior tech talent across Armenia, the UAE, the US, Europe, Singapore, Australia and Taiwan. Twenty minutes with our team – we tell you honestly whether we can help.
