The Without Software Blog

Things have been quieter than I’d hoped here on the Without Software blog, but for good reason: we’re prepping our first big update! There are a lot of changes coming, and I thought I’d take a moment and share what’s coming!

• Voting. When someone has applied for a position, you can vote either yes or no. Everyone on your account has a vote, and you can use this to easily determine who you want to hire!
• Comments instead of notes. We’ve changed the notes system to a more collaborative commenting system. You can see what everyone has said about a person’s application.
• Improved notifications. Better message displays for things that happen, like imported resumes, editing, jobs not available on your site, that sort of thing.
• Lots of minor visual improvements. Things that are pretty are nicer to look at when you’re working!

All of this is coming in the Very Near Future. I’ll make an announcement here with some screenshots when we push out the changes!

Bob Walsh of 47 Hats recently posted a short blurb about Spice, describing it as a “killer app for startups and other agile companies who need better hiring results than either conventional recruiting shops or bloated “HR mission critical enterprise” whale apps can deliver.” You can read his entire posting here.

Bob helped us with the general tone and layout of the Spice website, and gave us tons of great advice while we were starting up.

Thanks, Bob!

It was a dreaded time, every time we hired someone. Our Outlook email boxes filled up with resumes of semi-qualified people, and we needed to view the resumes, save the ones we liked, print them up, talk about who we wanted to interview, scrawling notes on the back of the resume… it was a nightmare.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” someone wisely asked, “if we had a way to organize this all online?”

It would be great, as it turns out, and Spice is the result of our attempt to make this easier. Spice does a few things really, really well:

1. It gives you a place to store resumes. Any resumes you get by email can be forwarded to a Spice dropbox account, and the resume is automatically imported into the system. The resume is converted into a web-friendly format so you can view it without downloading it into Word or Acrobat. We call this feature no data entry.
2. It has an online application form, so that people can just apply, rather that sending a resume by email. The application process is ridiculously easy — they just need to upload their resume. Spice automatically pulls out all the relevant information so that they don’t need to type in their name and address and whatnot. We call this feature one-click apply.
3. It lets you track the status of people on positions. Easily see who has applied, who you’re considering, when you’re interviewing people and more. We call this feature awesome. We don’t actually have a name for it, it’s just great.

So, why not check Spice out? It’s free for one position and up to 100 applicants, and it’s pretty inexpensive if you need more.

What a difference a year makes. If someone had told me last summer that I’d be out on my own with a few friends selling a web-based product I’d have said they were crazy.

It all happened over lunch, and then, in a fit of irony, it ate up all our spare time. A fairly innocuous posting by Jeff Atwood titled Does Software Spoil turned into a one-two punch with Are Features the Enemy. As someone who made a living writing Big Software this was a lot to think about. Then I got blindsided by 37signals‘ book Getting Real, which I read over an afternoon, and the next day had lunch with a friend.

An idea we’d had for an Old School program quickly turned into an idea we were having for a website, one that would making hiring easier for small companies, and Without Software was born.

Our philosophy? Keep things simple, focus on what’s really needed, and you don’t need software to make life easier.