We’ve added a new feature to the site today..

PIN access!

Adding a 5 digit PIN to your account means you would have to enter a PIN to view areas you’ve specified.

Examples of this, are viewing completed transcriptions, making changes to your account in the settings area, or a few other areas we’ll be adding shortly.

Reasons for this?

Some users share their accounts with other people for handling interviews, so adding a PIN helps make this easier by adding more security to your account.

Until recently, we’ve been using PayPal.com for handling payments.

As of today, we are now using Stripe.com for all payments.

Anybody currently with a PayPal subscription will stay the same, but all new subscriptions and purchases will be handled via Stripe.

Reasons for this move?

Stripe.com provides more security, and we’ve been eyeing it for a while. Recently, it launched in Canada, so that seemed the perfect time to make the switch.

We’ve made a little addition to our Contact Management section so that it now includes a FullContact.com look up on your contacts, so you can get even more information.

This is a feature available to subscribers only, and will appear underneath the Social Network section of your contacts.

You can enable FullContact in your settings page, by selecting “Social Interactions”, and enabling the checkbox, this will turn on FullContact if you wish to use it.

This partnership will help grow keeping in touch with your contacts, and is one we’re excited to add.

Link: The science behind why better energy management is the key to peak productivity

We live in a culture that seems obsessed with being productive.

While increasing our output and doing more with our time is certainly an admirable goal, according to Tony Schwartz, author of Be Excellent at Anything, that misguided approach is actually liable to hurt your productivity.

How so?

Without real restoration and rejuvenation throughout the day, people (knowingly) hold themselves back because they are worried about “pacing” their energy to make it through the day.

Useful post on enhancing your productivity. Handy advice for anyone involved in a start up of any sort.

You may notice a small difference when you logged in today, the site is now protected under SSL.

This helps protect your privacy even more, which is important to us here at The Interviewr.

Link: The business intelligence scorecard

One way I like to think about the different aspects of “business intelligence” is as an organizational scorecard. It helps to maintain a mental model of what you’re doing and why when prioritizing investments of time or money.

On this scorecard, the rows represent analytical competencies of growing sophistication from top to bottom. I classify these competencies as:

• Instrumentation / Warehousing – can you measure things, and can you store that data in a clean, retrievable format?
• Reporting – can you get the data out of your warehouse and into the hands of people who can use it?
• Analytics – can you add value to raw data with analytics, benchmarks, etc.?
• Strategic Impact – do the results of your data and analysis impact the direction of the organization in a meaningful, accretive way?

The columns represent different functional areas of relevance to your organization. For our purposes, I use ‘Application Health/Ops’, ‘Support’, ‘Financial’, ‘Marketing’, ‘Retention’, and ‘Product Usage’. This taxonomy isn’t completely clean, and there’s some overlap, but they’re roughly distinct areas.

When you draw this grid out, you end up with something that looks like the below.

We’ve used this approach several times with this site, as we’ve built it up, we’ve stopped and looked at the various factors too see where everything scores..

It’s something everyone should look at if they’re involved in some kind of startup..

Link: 5 Ways to Avoid Natural Reactions that Prevent You from Making Good Decisions

Most of us like to think that we are in-control of our actions.

Turns out, your brain can be a big jerk, and you are susceptible to a large list of cognitive biases and natural reactions that tend to hold you back from acting objectively. Luckily, some good social psychology books (spurred on by well-research papers & experiments!) have revealed a large amount of these biases to the common reader.

Today, we’re going to take a look at 5 notorious social biases and discuss ways that you can recognize and react when your brain is trying to pull a fast one on you.

I thought I’d share this post I came across since it was something that I thought about when I first began building The Interviewr..

Interesting reading.

You may have noticed we’ve made some changes to our home page..

This new design is one we’ve had in the works for a little while now and decided that with all the other work we’re doing was the perfect time to roll it out.

There’ll be some more changes coming as we launch new features so keep an eye out here.

We’ve been busy making changes to the look of the front end of this site to get ready for all the cool things coming over the next month or two.

New mobile apps, new interviewing features and a few new services such as our transcription service…

It’s going to be a busy season

One frequently requested service here at TheInterviewr is Interview Transcriptions..

Well, I’m happy to announce that we have partnered with a local company and will shortly be launching a transcription service with competitive pricing so that you can get your interviews transcribed quickly, efficiently, and affordably.

Stay tuned for more!