Rumble: Recruiting in the 21st century

Many bloggers like myself use Feedjit widgets to monitor and track traffic on their blog.

This morning, I was reading the Feedjit blog and found this recruitment ad:

Feedjit is Hiring -- February 27th, 2008

We’re hiring!! Feedjit is based in Seattle in Pioneer Square - home of the worlds best coffee shops. We’re interested in chatting to Rock-Star ModPerl (2.0) developers and Ubuntu/Debian ops folks with cluster management experience.The encrypted string below is derived from an email address. If you can crack it, send an email to the address with your resume and we’d love to chat over coffee!

aa5jCQfLReMvQ

Clue: The salt is ‘aa’ and the username matches ^[a-z0-9]{4}$

Reminds me of 2003, when we recruited out of our old Al Quoz office in Dubai, "where the streets have no name"... We would explain interviewees only once how to get to our office. If they don't find it, or did not make it on time, they could not work for us...
Actually it was an effective method to make the first selection. Candidates who really wanted to find us, could... as long as they were a bit creative and had a good brain (first selection). Those who really cared to work with us, would ensure they arrived half an hour in advance, and would not underestimate the challenge of finding our office (second selection).

That probably contributed why we had such a great team in Dubai: