[Troll_Whisperer]

I agree with you that the author had some really crazy preferences in his example. Penalizing a front end webdev who aren't on LinkedIn as harshly as you penalize those who don't know HTML is absolutely bonkers!

In his defense, I think it was just meant to be an arbitrary example. You could avoid this problem by dramatically lowering the point values assigned to college degrees and LinkedIn profiles and upping the credit assigned to having Javascript skills.

The real problem is that there's no distinction made between someone such as myself who knows a bit of Javascript and someone who is an expert in it. Some criteria are binary, others are not.

[seanjohnson]

It is binary, mainly because it has to be. You couldn't reliably job out a screening like this if it required the person to understand the nuances of JS, or any other skill requiring domain expertise.

But as long as you weight it properly, any candidate that makes the short list has javascript as competency. Their level of expertise can be teased out as you go. This is meant to be a first step to go from 300 down to 20, not to take you all the way there.

There are other ways to make it more nuanced - identifying keywords that would make it more likely to identify a JS expert in a resume or cover letter (not a replacement for looking at someone's code, but again something a non programmer could do). Or looking at someone's github account and seeing if they have JS repos (maybe factoring in the # of people following those repos). The formula would need some tweaking, but those are objective measurements that could get you closer.