The culinary tussle over who has the best pie in town is contentious competition. A recently launched Memphis business is taking that theme into the job market, minus the flaky crust.

Hiring a full-time employee is costly. Such an expense makes finding quality employees all the more of a challenge. Sifting through resumes, references and cover letters will only get you so far and a poor choice could cost companies more money than not hiring at all. Hiring a software developer presents its own unique headaches. Employers may not know the difference between the software coding language Python from a display at the herpetarium.

Work for Pie, the brainchild of cofounders Cliff McKinney and Brad Montgomery creates an easy-to-understand grading system for evaluating software developers, thus giving each job seeker a simple visual cue to make hiring intuitive. In their words, it’s “geek cred, realized.”

“Often,” McKinney explains, “a developer’s resume simply goes to a hiring manager who sometimes just can’t definitively evaluate talent.” At Pie, a developer’s tinkering nature is rewarded. They can actually watch their score grow when they participate in open-source software projects, collaborate with other developers and provide rocksolid resumes. Names like Stack Overflow, GetHub and Bitbucket may sound like extras from the last Transformers movie, but in the open-source software developer community, those sites are vital. In them, programmers contribute to collaborative projects, troubleshoot software and open their own projects up for discussion and critique. Where more conventional professions such as medicine or law have their medical journals and law review publications to vet new ideas and innovators, the computer technology community has these types of peer-review periodicals to do much the same thing.

Work for Pie takes the information from those sites, as well as several others, and using a proprietary algorithm, creates a score, or “pie,” for each job seeker. The circular symbol assigned to each user represents the quality of work and participation in the opensource software community.

McKinney and Montgomery have grown their site significantly since they launched the service in May, with its user base swelling to more than a thousand in less than two months. The growth spurt would not have happened so quickly, if at all, if not for the community-focused training and funding initiative that cultivated the business – Seed Hatchery.

Hatchery is a collaborative project between local business booster Eric Mathews of Launch Memphis and Vic Gallo of the Nashville-based seed fund, the Solidus company. Their aim was to bring start-up entrepreneurs together with local business mentors who can take the ideas of the applicants and hone them into workable business plans. Founded in December 2010, the entrepreneurial incubator idea immediately took off. Sixty-five groups applied in just a few weeks. Mathews and his coterie winnowed the group down to six businesses. Those six finalists were then paired to a group of three to five mentors, and put into a rigorous training program hosted at the Emerge Memphis offices downtown.

“It’s all about building community capacity,” Mathews says. “The Hatchery provides rock star mentors, a ninety-day marine-style business boot camp and it provides money.” Mathews is quick to point out though, money is the least important thing the Hatchery provides.

When the Work for Pie duo came to Seed Hatchery, they had a very different idea. With the help of their mentor group, they were able to hammer out the more workable, and hopefully profitable, business plan. “Had we not been a part of Seed Hatchery,” says Montgomery,” I don’t think we’d be involved with a product that’s had this much visibility or has as clear a path to be a thriving business as we do now.”

That enthusiasm runs both ways. One of Work for Pie’s mentors, Brian Swanson, president of Purple Ant Software, found that the entrepreneurial spirit of Seed Hatchery businesses reminds him of his own entrepreneurial excitement. “I’ve always loved the start-up period of a new business,” Swanson said. “As a software developer myself, the idea was close to my heart.”

Seed Hatchery is currently accepting applications for its second round and with such a well-received initial offering, expectations are high. Mathews has set a goal of a hundred applicants and judging by the rapid growth of success stories like Work for Pie, Mathews seems likely to meet his goal.

Related Links:
www.seedhatchery.com
www.workforpie.com

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