Quintified

Until now we haven’t ever spent much effort or attention on “the pretty” — the visual aesthetics of our database systems. We’ve intended all along to incorporate a nice design at some point, but until now, ours and our clients’ focus has been on adding great functionality. In the meanwhile, we’ve been told again and again by friends, families, prospects, and ourselves that design is fundamental and “pretty” is going to sell better.

Well, tomorrow we have a big opportunity to demo one of our products to a franchise with many franchisees, and knowing that we have exactly what they need in terms of functionality, we just didn’t want to turn them away from a less-than-positive first visual impression.

So Daniel has been burning the midnight oil and has made some awesome progress on this that we’ll be rolling out into our products soon as well as demoing tomorrow. (Yay Daniel!) I’m quite thrilled at the progress but in some ways it’s like looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself.

We spent the majority of today working on incorporating the new design into our code generator, and it’s going to be a long night. And come morning we probably won’t yet be at the “luscious eye candy” level. But we’re going to be looking much better, perhaps even respectable!

Quintify Database Solutions, a Wilmington-based provider of customized database solutions, is looking for a marketing intern.  This person will be responsible for all aspects of marketing and selling online businesses that sell half-price gift certificates to local communities. 

Port City Deals (www.portcitydeals.com) is the first half-price gift certificate website that Quintify has created.  With the support of Quintify’s team, the marketing intern will be responsible for developing and implementing a marketing plan that results in selling similar websites as business opportunities to budding entrepreneurs in other geographical markets.  We’ll pay a commission on these sales.

This is a great opportunity for an intern with a marketing focus to run with their own project!  Please submit your resume to kelley@quintify.com.

In thinking about what we need in a Customer Education Specialist, and frankly not having time to interview a lot of people one-on-one at the moment, I thought I’d ask candidates to make a phone recording of themselves answering five questions that I’ll be able to easily listen to and share with others on my team for their feedback.

I see this providing me three key benefits in addition to saving me time:

1. Since the position is going to require time on the phone with customers and time making online tutorials with voice recordings and doing webinars, my request to them is not unlike what they’ll be doing with Quintify, and someone who can nail this is (more) likely to be able to nail a screencast or webinar too.
2. The request is complicated enough that it’s going to weed out those who can’t closely follow fairly involved directions.
3. The request is off the wall enough that it’s going to weed out those who really aren’t interested in joining the Quintify team.

Here’s the email I just sent to the candidates. We’ll see how it goes!

—————-

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in our position.

For the next step in our hiring process, we’d like you to answer the following questions by calling (646) 200-0000 and then answer the questions over the phone — your responses will be recorded. (This is a free service called “Cinch” that is provided by BlogTalkRadio.com.)

If you’d like you can answer them all in one phone call or you can answer one question per call, calling back several times. Please take about 1-2 minutes per question answered.

Don’t call from a phone that has caller ID blocked, as your phone number is needed for us to listen to your recordings.

When you do this, please email me the phone number that you called from. We’ll then be able to access your recording by a web address that looks like this:

http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/9105471647

The last part will be your phone number, not mine.

Not to confuse things, but if you’d rather record youself on your computer and then email me the MP3 file, that’s fine too.

——————
The Five Questions
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1. In a minute or so, please describe yourself.

2. What is your favorite computer software, and why?

3. Professionally, what is your single biggest “braggable” in the past five years? That is, what’s the coolest thing you’ve done during that time?

4. What background do you have in helping others learn and/or succeed?

5. Based on the job description found at < http://www.quintify.com/customer-education-specialist.html >, why do you think you would be a good match for this position?

Don’t worry if you have some false starts or you feel you have a “dud” answer. Just call back and answer the question again.

Please complete this by 5 PM on Monday, April 6. We will begin face-to-face interviews on Tuesday, April 7.

Thanks!

Reid

Quintify Database Solutions is looking for a Customer Education Specialist to join our growing team. This person will be able to work at least 50% of the workweek from home.

For now the pay isn’t great, but it is be an awesome opportunity for the right person, with lots of growth potential for the future.

I would love to have this position for myself!