5 ms·

I like the idea of starting a conversation instead of the usual resume and interview approach, but the example job listing (here: http://brookeallen.com/pages/a

I like the idea of starting a conversation instead of the usual resume and interview approach, but the example job listing (here: http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/982 http://brookeallen.com/pages/archives/982) came off as creepy to me, somehow. Maybe it was the overly familiar tone from a stranger, or the slightly self-centered focus on the prospective employer's own personality, or the paternalistic tone of the listing, down to the closing line: "deal?" I would personally not be comfortable answering an ad like that. I prefer my professional relationships to at least begin with a more professional tone. Phrases like "I will not hire anyone until we both understand and care about each other" remind me of bosses I've had when I was younger that seemed to want to treat me more like a son or nephew than an employee, and it always made me kind of uncomfortable. I can imagine for a woman, this might set off even more alarm bells than it does for me as a man. Hire skilled, talented people. Looking for "good-hearted" people with "giving personalities" sounds to me like I'm going to have to hug you at the end of the day or something.

jckt 13y ago
I don't blame you. I thought the picture just sealed the creepy touch. But then again, one can argue that creepiness is a social construct, and that it itself is a barrier against making the conversation approach of interviewing for jobs seem unnatural, when really they shouldn't be. If more of us decided to be more "professionally personable" in the way that Brooke is, then perhaps this social construct of creepiness would change.
- reaclmbs 13y ago
  you guys are rationalizing. brook's way ahead of ya
  - hype7 13y ago
    If he is, it's only because he's managed to take that load of crap job posting and somehow turn it into an article advertising the fact on Quartz. A bigger false dichotomy I have never seen in my life. Good vs nice, with some kind of implication that nice people cannot have integrity? It's the worst kind of these posts — just enough truth sprinkled in with the bullshit to make you think he's onto something.
    - jckt 13y ago
      I think you are making a superficial analysis. He didn't really create a false dichotomy. Of course there's a big overlap between nice people (without quotation marks) and "good" people (his take). In the OP he created two models of people, which he labelled "good" and "nice". The characteristics of "nice" are, to the outside observer, socially apt and likeable. "Good" people fall into this category too, and so do people that lack the "good" qualities. To simplify things he simply talked about a "nice" person that was nice in your sense but lacked the qualities of being "good". Obviously they share characteristics, but the point was that he has developed a way of hiring, which I personally thought quite interesting (that it worked/works), of figuring out whether a nice person was also "good" or was he/she just "nice". Admittedly it's a weird, awkward, maybe even creepy job posting, but that doesn't mean it's just bullshit. His methods will probably fail in a larger workplace context but he never claimed that they would the contrary anyway.
    - krichman 13y ago
      You are just arguing against the typical meaning of those words and not how he used them. The usage was more like Good vs. Yes-man.
      - hype7 13y ago
        When you say "typical", you mean their actual english definitions? If he "meant" something else, he should have said something else!
        krichman 13y ago
        Probably. But we could also say you should have read the article before having a knee-jerk reaction to the title.
        hype7 13y ago
        I did rtfa!
  - calinet6 13y ago
    No, he's got some decent concepts, but the way he uses them comes off as inauthentic. He really doesn't have the full picture of human relationships here. Though it may very well work for him—and more power to him if it does—what these kind persons have pointed out is that it is not generalizable advice, since it alienates a good portion of people from making contact in the first place. I tend to agree. However, he makes some excellent points about keeping the hiring process honest and genuine, and I think you could use that advice generally and apply it to your own personality with ease.
enraged_camel 13y ago
I didn't find it creepy. I found it refreshingly genuine. To each his own I suppose.
Centigonal 13y ago
Do keep in mind the job listing is for a personal assistant. I'd assume the author would be working with whomever he'd hire on a more intimate level relative to most other professional relationships. That said, I do agree that his attitude toward employment certainly isn't for everyone. Luckily, though, it seems to self-select the people who are comfortable with it.
nnq 13y ago
well, he's hiring a PA not a "rockstar programmer" or a startup manager, so it's good that he is filtering out the types of people with "bold personalities, disdain for authority and desire to revolutionize everything" - if you find it creepy (and I do too, btw!), it only means that he did his job of filtering out some of the worst people for the job! ...overall, great HR tips, even the indirect ones :)
mc-lovin 13y ago
You will have to hug him. But he's alpha, so it won't be creepy. Learn the difference.
jt2190 13y ago
> I prefer my professional relationships to at least > begin with a more professional tone. Interestingly, if you dig into what he means by "good" I think that he's also looking for more professionalism. His point: > "Nice people care if you like them; good people care > about you." Reminds me of this saying: "I'm not your friend, I'm your doctor." For example, if I were overweight, I would expect my doctor to tell me to loose weight, every time I went for a visit. I would not expect him to stop raising the issue because I was sensitive about my weight, and it upset me to talk about it. My doctor must advocate for my own best interests, even if it makes him uncomfortable to do so.
- peterbessman 13y ago
  I think anything too different from the standard manner of hiring is going to come off creepy to some extent. Much of the way we hire people is probably a deeply ingrained cultural ritual, and large deviations from that script would be disorienting. Not to say that cultural rituals are a bad thing. Manners and etiquette keep the machinery of society well lubricated and running smoothly, so I'm not a fan of tossing them out and starting anew, tabula rasa. At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if the way America does hiring could be improved. In particular, my experience of hiring in tech has been that it's pretty tough to do much better than having 60%-70% of your hires work out. But not only do companies have a tough time with hiring, there's this weird phenomenon where large swathes of seemingly qualified people also have a hard time getting hired. So I'm all for innovation in hiring to the extent that it can fix these problems. But are these problems really addressable by changes in hiring? It seems like that would be pretty low hanging fruit, so I would expect businesses to have figured this out already. The fact that they haven't makes me wonder if there are other systemic explanations for the problems we're seeing. For instance, in tech, relatively little filtering is done up front by education and credentialing institutions. Sure, it helps to have a degree from MIT, but there are substantial numbers of successful high-performers in this field without a college education. By contrast, only around 40% of the people who apply to medical school get in, but my understanding is that >99% of all physician and surgeon hires work out. So perhaps tech businesses would experience a similar rate of successful hires if there was something like the medical school filter in the tech world. As for the tech workers who have trouble getting hired, there are numerous possible explanations. One could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, where low-competence workers are unable to recognize their own skills gaps. Vivek Wadhwa has previously argued that ageism is to blame here, and that tech is really an up-or-out industry. Norm Matloff makes the case -- and granted it's quite controversial and potentially inflammatory -- that abuses of the H1B visa system are too blame. Clear as mud. Still, although I don't think the solution lies in this particular hiring innovation -- which wasn't for tech, I'll grant, but the spirit of the preceeding applies to the larger US economy, struggling as it is -- the solution can only emerge from many different actors trying many different things. In that regard, the guy gets my respect. I'm reminded of something Linus Torvalds once said: "I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style."
3minus1 13y ago
An environment where everyone has to care about each other sounds cultish to me. I prefer to be hired on the basis of my ability to make a company money, not my ability to open myself up and gush about how much I care about strangers.
BrookeAllen 13y ago
Hey, This is Brooke. I understand your points. I thought about whether I should include a picture or not because I'm not that photogenic. I'll often advertise the same position under multiple job titles. In this case, for example, I did a straight-up ad for position under Administrative Assistants and I got dull candidates. The best candidates came from this ad placed under Writers and Editors. Anything I do that is unusual gets its share of skeptics, which is fine. I am more interested in the people who wonder if I am a fraud or not, but are not afraid to find out. One of my best hires for a position of Compliance Officer Trainee also came from an ad in Writers and Editors. She had an undergrad in Psych and a Masters in Tibetan Buddhism. It had never occurred to her that there would be a Wall Street job that cared about her ethics training. She answered because she didn't think I was legit, but was curious to find out. I also hate the hugs - it is creepy, and I also don't like the cheek kissing, etc. But that's just me.

jckt 13y ago

I don't blame you. I thought the picture just sealed the creepy touch. But then again, one can argue that creepiness is a social construct, and that it itself is a barrier against making the conversation approach of interviewing for jobs seem unnatural, when really they shouldn't be. If more of us decided to be more "professionally personable" in the way that Brooke is, then perhaps this social construct of creepiness would change.

reaclmbs 13y ago
you guys are rationalizing. brook's way ahead of ya
- hype7 13y ago
  If he is, it's only because he's managed to take that load of crap job posting and somehow turn it into an article advertising the fact on Quartz. A bigger false dichotomy I have never seen in my life. Good vs nice, with some kind of implication that nice people cannot have integrity? It's the worst kind of these posts — just enough truth sprinkled in with the bullshit to make you think he's onto something.
  - jckt 13y ago
    I think you are making a superficial analysis. He didn't really create a false dichotomy. Of course there's a big overlap between nice people (without quotation marks) and "good" people (his take). In the OP he created two models of people, which he labelled "good" and "nice". The characteristics of "nice" are, to the outside observer, socially apt and likeable. "Good" people fall into this category too, and so do people that lack the "good" qualities. To simplify things he simply talked about a "nice" person that was nice in your sense but lacked the qualities of being "good". Obviously they share characteristics, but the point was that he has developed a way of hiring, which I personally thought quite interesting (that it worked/works), of figuring out whether a nice person was also "good" or was he/she just "nice". Admittedly it's a weird, awkward, maybe even creepy job posting, but that doesn't mean it's just bullshit. His methods will probably fail in a larger workplace context but he never claimed that they would the contrary anyway.
  - krichman 13y ago
    You are just arguing against the typical meaning of those words and not how he used them. The usage was more like Good vs. Yes-man.
    - hype7 13y ago
      When you say "typical", you mean their actual english definitions? If he "meant" something else, he should have said something else!
      - krichman 13y ago
        Probably. But we could also say you should have read the article before having a knee-jerk reaction to the title.
        hype7 13y ago
        I did rtfa!
- calinet6 13y ago
  No, he's got some decent concepts, but the way he uses them comes off as inauthentic. He really doesn't have the full picture of human relationships here. Though it may very well work for him—and more power to him if it does—what these kind persons have pointed out is that it is not generalizable advice, since it alienates a good portion of people from making contact in the first place. I tend to agree. However, he makes some excellent points about keeping the hiring process honest and genuine, and I think you could use that advice generally and apply it to your own personality with ease.

enraged_camel 13y ago

I didn't find it creepy. I found it refreshingly genuine. To each his own I suppose.

Centigonal 13y ago

Do keep in mind the job listing is for a personal assistant. I'd assume the author would be working with whomever he'd hire on a more intimate level relative to most other professional relationships. That said, I do agree that his attitude toward employment certainly isn't for everyone. Luckily, though, it seems to self-select the people who are comfortable with it.

nnq 13y ago

well, he's hiring a PA not a "rockstar programmer" or a startup manager, so it's good that he is filtering out the types of people with "bold personalities, disdain for authority and desire to revolutionize everything" - if you find it creepy (and I do too, btw!), it only means that he did his job of filtering out some of the worst people for the job! ...overall, great HR tips, even the indirect ones :)

mc-lovin 13y ago

You will have to hug him. But he's alpha, so it won't be creepy. Learn the difference.

jt2190 13y ago

> I prefer my professional relationships to at least > begin with a more professional tone. Interestingly, if you dig into what he means by "good" I think that he's also looking for more professionalism. His point: > "Nice people care if you like them; good people care > about you." Reminds me of this saying: "I'm not your friend, I'm your doctor." For example, if I were overweight, I would expect my doctor to tell me to loose weight, every time I went for a visit. I would not expect him to stop raising the issue because I was sensitive about my weight, and it upset me to talk about it. My doctor must advocate for my own best interests, even if it makes him uncomfortable to do so.

peterbessman 13y ago
I think anything too different from the standard manner of hiring is going to come off creepy to some extent. Much of the way we hire people is probably a deeply ingrained cultural ritual, and large deviations from that script would be disorienting. Not to say that cultural rituals are a bad thing. Manners and etiquette keep the machinery of society well lubricated and running smoothly, so I'm not a fan of tossing them out and starting anew, tabula rasa. At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if the way America does hiring could be improved. In particular, my experience of hiring in tech has been that it's pretty tough to do much better than having 60%-70% of your hires work out. But not only do companies have a tough time with hiring, there's this weird phenomenon where large swathes of seemingly qualified people also have a hard time getting hired. So I'm all for innovation in hiring to the extent that it can fix these problems. But are these problems really addressable by changes in hiring? It seems like that would be pretty low hanging fruit, so I would expect businesses to have figured this out already. The fact that they haven't makes me wonder if there are other systemic explanations for the problems we're seeing. For instance, in tech, relatively little filtering is done up front by education and credentialing institutions. Sure, it helps to have a degree from MIT, but there are substantial numbers of successful high-performers in this field without a college education. By contrast, only around 40% of the people who apply to medical school get in, but my understanding is that >99% of all physician and surgeon hires work out. So perhaps tech businesses would experience a similar rate of successful hires if there was something like the medical school filter in the tech world. As for the tech workers who have trouble getting hired, there are numerous possible explanations. One could be the Dunning-Kruger effect, where low-competence workers are unable to recognize their own skills gaps. Vivek Wadhwa has previously argued that ageism is to blame here, and that tech is really an up-or-out industry. Norm Matloff makes the case -- and granted it's quite controversial and potentially inflammatory -- that abuses of the H1B visa system are too blame. Clear as mud. Still, although I don't think the solution lies in this particular hiring innovation -- which wasn't for tech, I'll grant, but the spirit of the preceeding applies to the larger US economy, struggling as it is -- the solution can only emerge from many different actors trying many different things. In that regard, the guy gets my respect. I'm reminded of something Linus Torvalds once said: "I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style."

3minus1 13y ago

An environment where everyone has to care about each other sounds cultish to me. I prefer to be hired on the basis of my ability to make a company money, not my ability to open myself up and gush about how much I care about strangers.

BrookeAllen 13y ago

Hey, This is Brooke. I understand your points. I thought about whether I should include a picture or not because I'm not that photogenic. I'll often advertise the same position under multiple job titles. In this case, for example, I did a straight-up ad for position under Administrative Assistants and I got dull candidates. The best candidates came from this ad placed under Writers and Editors. Anything I do that is unusual gets its share of skeptics, which is fine. I am more interested in the people who wonder if I am a fraud or not, but are not afraid to find out. One of my best hires for a position of Compliance Officer Trainee also came from an ad in Writers and Editors. She had an undergrad in Psych and a Masters in Tibetan Buddhism. It had never occurred to her that there would be a Wall Street job that cared about her ethics training. She answered because she didn't think I was legit, but was curious to find out. I also hate the hugs - it is creepy, and I also don't like the cheek kissing, etc. But that's just me.