12 ms·

How to Get a Job

135 points by nsedlet 13y ago

hkmurakami 13y ago
>The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then they cull through the results and offer up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them. So hireart is tackling the problem from the demand side for employees by improving the signal to noise ratio of applicants, so to speak. This is only a partial solution, since at least a significant part of the problem is the skill mismatch of the more "ordinary Joes" (for lack of a better word) and the skills that are asked of them by their prospective employers. I don't think there will be a one size fits all solution for the variety of employment related issues we face today. We'll probably see many "winners" in the market that offer very distinct sets of benefits to both job seekers and employers. That makes me think that my friend's startup [1] which does focus on the more basic tier of the supply side of the job market problem, training ordinary people to gain the specific skills that specific employers want. We can't have enough hypotheses tested in this market, so I genuinely wish the best for all the current and future players in this market. [1] http://www.learnup.me/about http://www.learnup.me/about
- esharef 13y ago
  learnup is awesome. we need lots of companies to solve this problem. Elli (co-founder @hireart)
- netcan 13y ago
  To the extent that these are solving the problem, they should work well together. They gave the example of a candidate learning excel. If that person has an effective way of proving that skill to an employer who wants it, they are more likely to acquire it.
cm2012 13y ago
I took a hireart interview recently, really excited for a chance to show off my skills. However, the responses asked for were basic interview questions like, "Describe yourself" and other personality questions. Which is fine, but I thought it had more potential. One caveat is that it was time consuming and cost the company doing it nothing. I really hope such time consuming tasks do not become the first line of defense against job seekers, but are only used on already vetted resumes.
kenster07 13y ago
This is a bandage to the problem, perhaps even a good bandage, but not a cure. The issue is so much deeper than this. On the "physical labor" side of the economy, the college system, in its current form, will not efficiently fill America's production lines with workers. It will not create more craftsmen. It certainly does not cure the average American college graduate of the mentality that they are above being a gardener in their own backyard. On the knowledge side of the economy, MOOC can potentially add enormous value. The distribution of credentials (aka a degree from an elite university) is being decoupled from the educating of the knowledge workforce. Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school.
- karterk 13y ago
  P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school. There are specific verticals, where one can very well be. For e.g. I know people who have been focussing on a vertical since they are 15 years old (e.g. web design, digital art). You can definitely master some verticals after 13-14 years.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  > Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The printing press has been around for hundreds of years. The problem has never been access to knowledge. It has been: 1. Selecting what people need to know (curricula), and 2. Checking that they know it (credentialling). If people want to learn about anything, about any topic, to any depth, public library systems enable that and have done so for a long time. Plus, the reductionist view of Universities as mere generators and disseminators of knowledge is inaccurate. Attendance at universities introduces you to new people, many of whom have similar interests. This leads to friendships, business partnerships and romantic relationships that MOOCs can't replicate (and libraries only poorly).
seferphier 13y ago
This is a very interesting approach to solving an old age problem: how do you match the right people to the right employers? The solution for most people used to be stacking credential and hoping the competition wouldn't have the same level of credentials as you. What type of jobs are available on HireArt? How do you decide on what metrics and skills are useful for that particular post? How many test have you devised?
- esharef 13y ago
  Hey, Elli from HireArt here. We work only with non-technical jobs like marketing, biz dev, sales, etc (we think technical jobs are quite different). And then we have two different types of challenges: 1) Challenges that individual employers create 2) General industry challenges that candidates can use to apply to lots of jobs. In terms of how we come up with the questions, we mostly just ask employers: "What does this employee do at work" and then we ask candidates to do similar tasks.
  - seferphier 13y ago
    Hi Elli, thank you for your response. This is a very interesting startup that I will have to follow. I have a few more questions: 1) How do you price your service? Do you price it by the number of successful hires/ number of job listing / number of questions they ask? How much do you charge? 2) How long does it take to fill up a position after it is posted? 3) As I understand it, you guys are doing most of the heavy lifting by scanning through the questions yourself. How do you plan on scaling the business? 4) How do you judge whether a candidate is suitable for a position? In many instances, tell me about your personality or broad questions are not helpful in pulling top 10 candidates out of 500. I was expecting HireArt to focus on technical jobs since you can give out technical tests - like the excel test cited on NY times.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I'd be interested in hearing how you got such a high-profile writeup. This is not a snark attack. Genuine interest.
lmg643 13y ago
having been on both sides of the hiring equation, my sense is that the current system is broken by design. For myself, I've read positions at a company that are a perfect fit, only to see things like (paraphrasing) "5-10 years of prior experience at a digital media company required". To get that, there are a small handful of companies one could have ever worked for. why wouldn't the hiring manager just call the 5 people you know who are a fit? right - because HR says we have to post the job. From the hiring side - it is important to understanding managerial objectives in hiring, which frequently diverge from company interests beyond a certain size and maturity. Job security and minimizing headaches come to the forefront. The most understandable is training - even a smart pup needs time to learn. the remaining motives are questionable, and hard to surface. No doubt there's room for a company like HireArt, but when i read the description of what the company expects to solve, my first thought is that rather than fix a broken-by-design hiring market, it will mostly relieve the guilt of HR employees who know hiring is intentionally broken.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  I don't know if hiring is "intentionally" broken, so much as it's a casualty of bureaucracy. Very few companies invest strategically in HR, and for the most part, they treat the hiring process on an ad hoc basis. It's a nonissue until it becomes an issue, at which point, it's a fire drill that nobody has really thought through. The hiring manager has other things on her plate, and the HR manager has a few dozen other positions to fill out. And then there are the legal requirements, the risk mitigation, the forms and procedures, the pay bands, and so forth. Nobody's set out to create a broken system; the breakage in the system is the result of a couple dozen microscopic fractures that have built up along the way. What seems intentionally broken is the general approach to human capital. The workforce is massively, ridiculously undervalued. Most companies -- especially the bigger ones -- would rather churn and burn through their employees, replacing them as they leave, than invest seriously in training, retaining, and developing a strong and long-term workforce. The inefficiencies resulting from this attitude are hidden, but massive. But the short-term ROI is, sadly, quite positive. So nobody's got any incentive to change the approach.
  - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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georgeoliver 13y ago
There certainly are multiple ways to attack this problem, but when the vast majority of jobs now are never advertised it makes me wonder how many people will find jobs with this kind of service.
naner 13y ago
What is the HN term for "slashvertisment"?
- jarek 13y ago
  "flag"
- oftenwrong 13y ago
  "submarine"
schrodinger 13y ago
This feels a lot like an advertisement to me
ruswick 13y ago
>The company receives about 500 applicants per job opening. This succinctly demonstrates everything that is wrong with the entry-level labor market, especially in fields dominated by overabundant cohorts like political science and english majors. There are a deluge of incompetent graduates competing for a negligible number of jobs. They are either forced into menial shift jobs for years or, if they're fortunate, will have the privilege working 70 hours per week in an unpaid internship before taking a jobs marginally above the poverty line.
- jseliger 13y ago
  especially in fields dominated by overabundant cohorts like political science and english majors Actually, according to Louis Menand's book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in American Universities, the absolute number of English majors has declined over the last 40 or so years: "Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with PhDs. This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out PhDs. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal arts fields, and, within the decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor's degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business. The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor's degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent. What field has taken its place? Business, which now accounts for about a quarter of all degrees awarded. Moreover, according to the research done by Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift, undergrads in the hard sciences and humanities (including English) tend to show substantial increases in their reading comprehension skills, writing skills, and math skills over their first two years of college and over their college careers.
msellout 13y ago
It seems a bit lazy of Friedman to interview his daughter's roommate. Why not include other sources? At least he mentioned the relationship. I don't begrudge Sharef for using the connection. It's another reminder of how important networking is.
- d0gsbody 13y ago
  Tom Friedman quit writing real articles back in the 90s.
  - caw 13y ago
    This showed up on HN a while back: http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/ http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/
    - d0gsbody 13y ago
      Hah! When i was younger and trying to educate myself into a higher class, I read a couple of his books. The only good one was From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was published in 1989. Everything after that was just crappy analogies. I really don't understand how an "expert" in Middle East affairs could think that the USA going to war in Iraq was a good idea.
jerryhuang100 13y ago
such a shameless advertisement on NYT that you can't even call it a placement marketing
aliston 13y ago
Did anyone else catch the irony in Friedman talking about employers that "increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale," then writing an article entirely about two Yale graduates who went to work at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs post-graduation? Last time I checked, McKinsey isn't recruiting at University of Phoenix. Going to Yale doesn't hurt in getting into YCombinator either. Nowadays, YC's name recongnition functions as a credential as well. Dig a little deeper than the title, and this op-ed only reinforces the reality that credentials and connections matter a lot more than raw skill.
- chatmasta 13y ago
  Have people considered that "credentials and connections" are actually a valuable signaling mechanism? Connections (in the broadest sense of the word) indicate that a candidate is able to form strong personal relationships. People are not robots, and this ability goes a long way in the workforce. If you are hiring someone, you know you're going to spend the majority of your waking time with that person for the foreseeable future. So any kind of signal that this will prove a positive use of your time is a valuable one. This is not to say that other schools don't offer this mechanism. I'm simply observing that the idea of "connections" does not carry nearly as much negative weight as its connotations often imply. Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate. Consider that nobody is born into Yale (contrary to popular belief, and any exceptions to this are in the minority). To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company's point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way -- if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it's a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a "lemon" candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school. You know that at the very least the candidate is capable of learning quickly on the job. In many industries, especially those where most domain knowledge comes from real world experience, like finance and consulting, the ability to learn quickly is a candidates most valuable asset. If every candidate will arrive at the company with a "blank slate"of knowledge and experience, why not recruit the ones who can fill up their slate the best? This is why finance companies recruit history majors, for instance. They know that success in a liberal arts education demonstrates an ability to learn quickly (not to mention strong writing skills). I know many people on here are anti-liberal arts or anti-Ivy favoritism. Those arguments, especially the latter, have obvious validity. But I hope this post will cause you to consider the other side of the argument. Disclaimer: I go to Yale. I realize we are extremely spoiled in the job market, but I also do not necessarily think it's undeserved. It's unfortunate that other people suffer, but I do not feel like we are disproportionately favored. I think a VERY high majority of Yale students are top 1% job candidates. Everybody gets in here for a reason.
lpvn 13y ago
>So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.” I don't know if I'm too cynical but the first thing that came to my mind after reading that was if her pay is gonna be the same of someone who went to Stanford or Harvard.
- supahfly_remix 13y ago
  Isn't excel just a tool? The challenging parts are knowing what numbers to put in and the analysis of the results.
31reasons 13y ago
Personally I think this is not a Friedman level article, more like a HireArt advertisement.
kefka 13y ago
I'm injured. Right arm can lift much more than 5 lbs above horizontal. On Voc rehab, yet disability says it's not one. Been without a job for 2 years. Before that, fired from wal-mart because I got injured (faulty equipment) and had to go to hospital. What the hell do I do? I look and apply for jobs. I'm in school for drafting. Every sign and indication says if you're without a job for 6 months, you're screwed. Do I just start and lie about my credentials? If they catch me, all they can do is just fire me... I'm already up shits creek.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  volunteer? find a project where you can help someone! I've suggested folks with interest and drive find a non-profit they can assist. This is the sort of advice I offer folks who are trying to break into web dev, though it is certainly not an easy road to go down. It can be immensely satisfying though... It's much harder in some ways than it used to be to break into the industry without a degree or formal work experience, but if you work with an organization that has to have "lower" standards due to budget constraints or resources, you can get your foot in the door. I've suggested churches, local social welfare groups, etc. Often times the deadlines aren't as tight or are non-existent and you have a lot of an opportunity to "play" with the technologies and potentially learn from someone there. good luck!
- lambda 13y ago
  No, you're not screwed. Acquire a useful skill that's in demand and which can be done from a desk: drafting, CAD, graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, web design, programming. Do that craft, and develop a portfolio of work. Find a non-profit that you like that needs that work and spend some time donating that work to the non-profit so you can have some real world experience in that field, that demonstrates that you can work with other people. Almost every reasonable hiring manager (which may be a minority of hiring managers, but is still non-zero) will value someone with a good portfolio who's shown that they can get the job done over someone with credentials and years of experience in the industry who doesn't have a good portfolio to show (as someone who's been doing technical hiring recently, I've always wondered about people who apply for a job with 20 years of experience and not a line of code they can show me; I realize that there may be many jobs where you work on proprietary code that you can't show to someone else, but not having a single side project, one-off hack, a few patches to the mailing list of an open source project, or even a former employer you can ask for a code sample to show under NDA in your whole career seems a bit odd).
romeonova 13y ago
After reading the article, I didn't really catch any tips on how to get a job other than use HireArt. I guess that was the message?
lifeguard 13y ago
This read to me like think tank backfill. Friedman has definitely got his own angle on things. I think reading _Linchpin_ would be more useful advice, “The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.” ― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
- b1daly 13y ago
  Does anyone else find Seth Godins advice to be totally devoid of actionable suggestions? It reads to me as "the key to being successful is to be awesome!" It has some hand-wavey concepts, a few cherry picked anecdotes, and a pithy title. I don't get it... The original article had a similar quality when it came to the question of how to actually acquire advanced skills. How many jobs exist in which the main skill is knowing Excel? Maybe there are, but usually if it is listed it's as part of a laundry list of required skills.
  - jarek 13y ago
    > Does anyone else find Seth Godins advice to be totally devoid of actionable suggestions? Same as most motivational and self-help advice, then?
    - b1daly 13y ago
      Point taken!
  - lifeguard 13y ago
    His books are about marketing. This one is about marketing oneself to managers and co-workers. In the beginning of the book he slams public education for preparing people to be good factory workers when there are no factory jobs in the USA. Some thought provoking analysis.
lumens 13y ago
HireArt's approach is an interesting one, but culling through 500 video interviews by hand is time intensive for the reviewer and the 499 candidates who don't get the job. We're working on these problems at Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com), with a focus on talent whose time is more highly in demand. Our approach is to reverse this process: you have an anonymous profile that companies view. If a company sees your profile and they're interested, they can request an interview. You receive these requests via email and can choose to accept or decline. The anonymity means you can both freely decline interviews and use the site while employed with no repercussions. The goal is to provide a similar service to working with a really great recruiter, but without the hassle. As most of the readership here is in our target audience, we'd love any feedback and welcome questions. We'll expedite invites to HN signups - also feel free to email me: lumen@companydomain
orangethirty 13y ago
The correct term is advertorial. It is when the editori staff does an advertisement disguised as an article. It works wonders, more so when it comes from the NYT. This company is now front and center. Well done to your marketers. You will get a lot of flack here, but this is one more way to jump start growth. Good luck.
apagade 13y ago
I agree that if you want a job with good opportunities you definitely need to keep yourself updated. But I think this more looks like idea of being entrepreneur or getting self employed rather than getting a job in some big org.
breakyerself 13y ago
I think a big factor in this discongruety between education and the job market is the fact that students cannot write off student loan debt in a bankruptsy. It alleviates the banks from their due diligence of making sure their loan will create a return on investment. There is virtually no risk on their side. They can be certain. That no matter what you do or where you go you will have to pay them and the longer it takes is just more interest for them to collect. You can be certain that if student loans required the bank to take a risk there would be a lot more engineers coming out of colleges in america and a lot less degrees in ancient Greek philosophy. The banks would require people to choose majors that will pay enough.
- sokoloff 13y ago
  I agree that's a possible outcome, but I think an equally likely outcome is that banks would require parental co-signing of loans, from parents with income and credit ratings sufficient to mitigate the risks. Which overwhelmingly means that the economically disadvantaged (or those estranged from one or both parents) would be shut out, which would make "college degree required" a proxy for "upper middle class or better". I agree that it's a different outcome, but I don't agree that it's a better outcome. There are benefits to easy availability of student loans; with those benefits come some risks. You can't eliminate only the risks and leave all the benefits.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    > Which overwhelmingly means that the economically disadvantaged (or those estranged from one or both parents) would be shut out, which would make "college degree required" a proxy for "upper middle class or better". Considering the overall education picture in the US, this is already true. Students from low income families already have a hard time getting to a point where they can apply and be accepted to a university. See http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/...
ebbv 13y ago
Friedman is such a shameless hack. Using his column as an ad for his daughter's college roommate's business? Honestly? Ugh. Nothing against the HireArt folks who may be great people, and maybe they are offering a useful service. I even understand why they couldn't tell Friedman not to do this for them. I doubt anyone could turn down the free exposure. But it's just tacky, and it doesn't help that Friedman is a hack to begin with.
- robg 13y ago
  It's really sad to me that the top comment on any thread at HN is ad hominem. I'm not around much but this community really has changed. Seriously, ebbv you have nothing to add that is interesting or unique? Calling a columnist at the NY Times a "hack" is hardly original or insightful.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    I pointed out he's shilling for his daughter's friend. That's not enough to support my characterization for you? I think it's plenty. But there's tons of other examples of how terrible Friedman is, and most people don't need me to spell them out because they are very familiar with them already. Do a quick Google search and you'll see what the rest of us already know.
    - robg 13y ago
      There's nothing substantial about that "critique". You only know of the relationship because he disclosed it. And any columnist of the last 50 years at the Times provokes the same exact response from a segment of their audience. In fact, as a columnist, that's the point of his job and so your "test" would fail for every columnist at that paper. My point still stands. Your comment adds no value to this community and itself is a comment on the state of this community. You start with ad hominem then work backwards to the "critique". When pushed, you simply re-state the ad hominem. This community used to be much better than that, esp for a top comment in well-read thread. EDIT: At the very least, I'm glad vapid comments aren't staying at the topmost position. I hope that's a combination of downvotes and the time-gravity function. Too bad ad hominem is so easy to upvote and leads to the herd mentality that begets the trivial.
rollo_tommasi 13y ago
So the Detroit woman who taught herself Excel and outscored Stanford and Harvard grads, and is held out as validation of Friedman's thesis - she's only referred to as a "top applicant". Did she get the job? And if not, what was the background of the person who did? Otherwise, my only take-away from this article is that in a column ostensibly about meritocracy, Tom Friedman managed to turn 3/4 of his column inches into a PR piece for a company run by his daughter's Yale buddies. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality...
- esharef 13y ago
  Hi, Elli from HireArt here. She didnt get the job because she lived in Michigan and couldn't move to SF but she made it as a finalist. I was directly involved and was astonished at how well she did given her lack of "formal" education. I wish more people were like Patti. She really inspired me. The fact that Michigan is struggling economically and that she was unable to leave is a different and very interesting topic.

135 points by nsedlet 13y ago

>The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then they cull through the results and offer up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them. So hireart is tackling the problem from the demand side for employees by improving the signal to noise ratio of applicants, so to speak. This is only a partial solution, since at least a significant part of the problem is the skill mismatch of the more "ordinary Joes" (for lack of a better word) and the skills that are asked of them by their prospective employers. I don't think there will be a one size fits all solution for the variety of employment related issues we face today. We'll probably see many "winners" in the market that offer very distinct sets of benefits to both job seekers and employers. That makes me think that my friend's startup [1] which does focus on the more basic tier of the supply side of the job market problem, training ordinary people to gain the specific skills that specific employers want. We can't have enough hypotheses tested in this market, so I genuinely wish the best for all the current and future players in this market. [1] http://www.learnup.me/about http://www.learnup.me/about

esharef 13y ago
learnup is awesome. we need lots of companies to solve this problem. Elli (co-founder @hireart)
netcan 13y ago
To the extent that these are solving the problem, they should work well together. They gave the example of a candidate learning excel. If that person has an effective way of proving that skill to an employer who wants it, they are more likely to acquire it.

cm2012 13y ago

I took a hireart interview recently, really excited for a chance to show off my skills. However, the responses asked for were basic interview questions like, "Describe yourself" and other personality questions. Which is fine, but I thought it had more potential. One caveat is that it was time consuming and cost the company doing it nothing. I really hope such time consuming tasks do not become the first line of defense against job seekers, but are only used on already vetted resumes.

kenster07 13y ago

This is a bandage to the problem, perhaps even a good bandage, but not a cure. The issue is so much deeper than this. On the "physical labor" side of the economy, the college system, in its current form, will not efficiently fill America's production lines with workers. It will not create more craftsmen. It certainly does not cure the average American college graduate of the mentality that they are above being a gardener in their own backyard. On the knowledge side of the economy, MOOC can potentially add enormous value. The distribution of credentials (aka a degree from an elite university) is being decoupled from the educating of the knowledge workforce. Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school.

karterk 13y ago
P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school. There are specific verticals, where one can very well be. For e.g. I know people who have been focussing on a vertical since they are 15 years old (e.g. web design, digital art). You can definitely master some verticals after 13-14 years.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jacques_chester 13y ago
> Rather than a couple thousand or tens of thousands of people having access to the highest levels of education, it is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The printing press has been around for hundreds of years. The problem has never been access to knowledge. It has been: 1. Selecting what people need to know (curricula), and 2. Checking that they know it (credentialling). If people want to learn about anything, about any topic, to any depth, public library systems enable that and have done so for a long time. Plus, the reductionist view of Universities as mere generators and disseminators of knowledge is inaccurate. Attendance at universities introduces you to new people, many of whom have similar interests. This leads to friendships, business partnerships and romantic relationships that MOOCs can't replicate (and libraries only poorly).

seferphier 13y ago

This is a very interesting approach to solving an old age problem: how do you match the right people to the right employers? The solution for most people used to be stacking credential and hoping the competition wouldn't have the same level of credentials as you. What type of jobs are available on HireArt? How do you decide on what metrics and skills are useful for that particular post? How many test have you devised?

esharef 13y ago
Hey, Elli from HireArt here. We work only with non-technical jobs like marketing, biz dev, sales, etc (we think technical jobs are quite different). And then we have two different types of challenges: 1) Challenges that individual employers create 2) General industry challenges that candidates can use to apply to lots of jobs. In terms of how we come up with the questions, we mostly just ask employers: "What does this employee do at work" and then we ask candidates to do similar tasks.
- seferphier 13y ago
  Hi Elli, thank you for your response. This is a very interesting startup that I will have to follow. I have a few more questions: 1) How do you price your service? Do you price it by the number of successful hires/ number of job listing / number of questions they ask? How much do you charge? 2) How long does it take to fill up a position after it is posted? 3) As I understand it, you guys are doing most of the heavy lifting by scanning through the questions yourself. How do you plan on scaling the business? 4) How do you judge whether a candidate is suitable for a position? In many instances, tell me about your personality or broad questions are not helpful in pulling top 10 candidates out of 500. I was expecting HireArt to focus on technical jobs since you can give out technical tests - like the excel test cited on NY times.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I'd be interested in hearing how you got such a high-profile writeup. This is not a snark attack. Genuine interest.

lmg643 13y ago

having been on both sides of the hiring equation, my sense is that the current system is broken by design. For myself, I've read positions at a company that are a perfect fit, only to see things like (paraphrasing) "5-10 years of prior experience at a digital media company required". To get that, there are a small handful of companies one could have ever worked for. why wouldn't the hiring manager just call the 5 people you know who are a fit? right - because HR says we have to post the job. From the hiring side - it is important to understanding managerial objectives in hiring, which frequently diverge from company interests beyond a certain size and maturity. Job security and minimizing headaches come to the forefront. The most understandable is training - even a smart pup needs time to learn. the remaining motives are questionable, and hard to surface. No doubt there's room for a company like HireArt, but when i read the description of what the company expects to solve, my first thought is that rather than fix a broken-by-design hiring market, it will mostly relieve the guilt of HR employees who know hiring is intentionally broken.

jonnathanson 13y ago
I don't know if hiring is "intentionally" broken, so much as it's a casualty of bureaucracy. Very few companies invest strategically in HR, and for the most part, they treat the hiring process on an ad hoc basis. It's a nonissue until it becomes an issue, at which point, it's a fire drill that nobody has really thought through. The hiring manager has other things on her plate, and the HR manager has a few dozen other positions to fill out. And then there are the legal requirements, the risk mitigation, the forms and procedures, the pay bands, and so forth. Nobody's set out to create a broken system; the breakage in the system is the result of a couple dozen microscopic fractures that have built up along the way. What seems intentionally broken is the general approach to human capital. The workforce is massively, ridiculously undervalued. Most companies -- especially the bigger ones -- would rather churn and burn through their employees, replacing them as they leave, than invest seriously in training, retaining, and developing a strong and long-term workforce. The inefficiencies resulting from this attitude are hidden, but massive. But the short-term ROI is, sadly, quite positive. So nobody's got any incentive to change the approach.
- 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

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georgeoliver 13y ago

There certainly are multiple ways to attack this problem, but when the vast majority of jobs now are never advertised it makes me wonder how many people will find jobs with this kind of service.

naner 13y ago

What is the HN term for "slashvertisment"?

jarek 13y ago
"flag"
oftenwrong 13y ago
"submarine"

schrodinger 13y ago

This feels a lot like an advertisement to me

ruswick 13y ago

>The company receives about 500 applicants per job opening. This succinctly demonstrates everything that is wrong with the entry-level labor market, especially in fields dominated by overabundant cohorts like political science and english majors. There are a deluge of incompetent graduates competing for a negligible number of jobs. They are either forced into menial shift jobs for years or, if they're fortunate, will have the privilege working 70 hours per week in an unpaid internship before taking a jobs marginally above the poverty line.

jseliger 13y ago
especially in fields dominated by overabundant cohorts like political science and english majors Actually, according to Louis Menand's book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in American Universities, the absolute number of English majors has declined over the last 40 or so years: "Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with PhDs. This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out PhDs. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal arts fields, and, within the decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor's degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business. The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor's degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent. What field has taken its place? Business, which now accounts for about a quarter of all degrees awarded. Moreover, according to the research done by Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift, undergrads in the hard sciences and humanities (including English) tend to show substantial increases in their reading comprehension skills, writing skills, and math skills over their first two years of college and over their college careers.

msellout 13y ago

It seems a bit lazy of Friedman to interview his daughter's roommate. Why not include other sources? At least he mentioned the relationship. I don't begrudge Sharef for using the connection. It's another reminder of how important networking is.

d0gsbody 13y ago
Tom Friedman quit writing real articles back in the 90s.
- caw 13y ago
  This showed up on HN a while back: http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/ http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/
  - d0gsbody 13y ago
    Hah! When i was younger and trying to educate myself into a higher class, I read a couple of his books. The only good one was From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was published in 1989. Everything after that was just crappy analogies. I really don't understand how an "expert" in Middle East affairs could think that the USA going to war in Iraq was a good idea.

jerryhuang100 13y ago

such a shameless advertisement on NYT that you can't even call it a placement marketing

aliston 13y ago

Did anyone else catch the irony in Friedman talking about employers that "increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale," then writing an article entirely about two Yale graduates who went to work at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs post-graduation? Last time I checked, McKinsey isn't recruiting at University of Phoenix. Going to Yale doesn't hurt in getting into YCombinator either. Nowadays, YC's name recongnition functions as a credential as well. Dig a little deeper than the title, and this op-ed only reinforces the reality that credentials and connections matter a lot more than raw skill.

chatmasta 13y ago
Have people considered that "credentials and connections" are actually a valuable signaling mechanism? Connections (in the broadest sense of the word) indicate that a candidate is able to form strong personal relationships. People are not robots, and this ability goes a long way in the workforce. If you are hiring someone, you know you're going to spend the majority of your waking time with that person for the foreseeable future. So any kind of signal that this will prove a positive use of your time is a valuable one. This is not to say that other schools don't offer this mechanism. I'm simply observing that the idea of "connections" does not carry nearly as much negative weight as its connotations often imply. Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate. Consider that nobody is born into Yale (contrary to popular belief, and any exceptions to this are in the minority). To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company's point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way -- if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it's a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a "lemon" candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school. You know that at the very least the candidate is capable of learning quickly on the job. In many industries, especially those where most domain knowledge comes from real world experience, like finance and consulting, the ability to learn quickly is a candidates most valuable asset. If every candidate will arrive at the company with a "blank slate"of knowledge and experience, why not recruit the ones who can fill up their slate the best? This is why finance companies recruit history majors, for instance. They know that success in a liberal arts education demonstrates an ability to learn quickly (not to mention strong writing skills). I know many people on here are anti-liberal arts or anti-Ivy favoritism. Those arguments, especially the latter, have obvious validity. But I hope this post will cause you to consider the other side of the argument. Disclaimer: I go to Yale. I realize we are extremely spoiled in the job market, but I also do not necessarily think it's undeserved. It's unfortunate that other people suffer, but I do not feel like we are disproportionately favored. I think a VERY high majority of Yale students are top 1% job candidates. Everybody gets in here for a reason.

lpvn 13y ago

>So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.” I don't know if I'm too cynical but the first thing that came to my mind after reading that was if her pay is gonna be the same of someone who went to Stanford or Harvard.

supahfly_remix 13y ago
Isn't excel just a tool? The challenging parts are knowing what numbers to put in and the analysis of the results.

31reasons 13y ago

Personally I think this is not a Friedman level article, more like a HireArt advertisement.

kefka 13y ago

I'm injured. Right arm can lift much more than 5 lbs above horizontal. On Voc rehab, yet disability says it's not one. Been without a job for 2 years. Before that, fired from wal-mart because I got injured (faulty equipment) and had to go to hospital. What the hell do I do? I look and apply for jobs. I'm in school for drafting. Every sign and indication says if you're without a job for 6 months, you're screwed. Do I just start and lie about my credentials? If they catch me, all they can do is just fire me... I'm already up shits creek.

wavefunction 13y ago
volunteer? find a project where you can help someone! I've suggested folks with interest and drive find a non-profit they can assist. This is the sort of advice I offer folks who are trying to break into web dev, though it is certainly not an easy road to go down. It can be immensely satisfying though... It's much harder in some ways than it used to be to break into the industry without a degree or formal work experience, but if you work with an organization that has to have "lower" standards due to budget constraints or resources, you can get your foot in the door. I've suggested churches, local social welfare groups, etc. Often times the deadlines aren't as tight or are non-existent and you have a lot of an opportunity to "play" with the technologies and potentially learn from someone there. good luck!
lambda 13y ago
No, you're not screwed. Acquire a useful skill that's in demand and which can be done from a desk: drafting, CAD, graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, web design, programming. Do that craft, and develop a portfolio of work. Find a non-profit that you like that needs that work and spend some time donating that work to the non-profit so you can have some real world experience in that field, that demonstrates that you can work with other people. Almost every reasonable hiring manager (which may be a minority of hiring managers, but is still non-zero) will value someone with a good portfolio who's shown that they can get the job done over someone with credentials and years of experience in the industry who doesn't have a good portfolio to show (as someone who's been doing technical hiring recently, I've always wondered about people who apply for a job with 20 years of experience and not a line of code they can show me; I realize that there may be many jobs where you work on proprietary code that you can't show to someone else, but not having a single side project, one-off hack, a few patches to the mailing list of an open source project, or even a former employer you can ask for a code sample to show under NDA in your whole career seems a bit odd).

romeonova 13y ago

After reading the article, I didn't really catch any tips on how to get a job other than use HireArt. I guess that was the message?

lifeguard 13y ago

This read to me like think tank backfill. Friedman has definitely got his own angle on things. I think reading _Linchpin_ would be more useful advice, “The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can. The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job. Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. I call the process of doing your art 'the work.' It's possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that's how you become a linchpin. The job is not the work.” ― Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

b1daly 13y ago
Does anyone else find Seth Godins advice to be totally devoid of actionable suggestions? It reads to me as "the key to being successful is to be awesome!" It has some hand-wavey concepts, a few cherry picked anecdotes, and a pithy title. I don't get it... The original article had a similar quality when it came to the question of how to actually acquire advanced skills. How many jobs exist in which the main skill is knowing Excel? Maybe there are, but usually if it is listed it's as part of a laundry list of required skills.
- jarek 13y ago
  > Does anyone else find Seth Godins advice to be totally devoid of actionable suggestions? Same as most motivational and self-help advice, then?
  - b1daly 13y ago
    Point taken!
- lifeguard 13y ago
  His books are about marketing. This one is about marketing oneself to managers and co-workers. In the beginning of the book he slams public education for preparing people to be good factory workers when there are no factory jobs in the USA. Some thought provoking analysis.

lumens 13y ago

HireArt's approach is an interesting one, but culling through 500 video interviews by hand is time intensive for the reviewer and the 499 candidates who don't get the job. We're working on these problems at Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com https://www.mightyspring.com), with a focus on talent whose time is more highly in demand. Our approach is to reverse this process: you have an anonymous profile that companies view. If a company sees your profile and they're interested, they can request an interview. You receive these requests via email and can choose to accept or decline. The anonymity means you can both freely decline interviews and use the site while employed with no repercussions. The goal is to provide a similar service to working with a really great recruiter, but without the hassle. As most of the readership here is in our target audience, we'd love any feedback and welcome questions. We'll expedite invites to HN signups - also feel free to email me: lumen@companydomain

orangethirty 13y ago

The correct term is advertorial. It is when the editori staff does an advertisement disguised as an article. It works wonders, more so when it comes from the NYT. This company is now front and center. Well done to your marketers. You will get a lot of flack here, but this is one more way to jump start growth. Good luck.

apagade 13y ago

I agree that if you want a job with good opportunities you definitely need to keep yourself updated. But I think this more looks like idea of being entrepreneur or getting self employed rather than getting a job in some big org.

breakyerself 13y ago

I think a big factor in this discongruety between education and the job market is the fact that students cannot write off student loan debt in a bankruptsy. It alleviates the banks from their due diligence of making sure their loan will create a return on investment. There is virtually no risk on their side. They can be certain. That no matter what you do or where you go you will have to pay them and the longer it takes is just more interest for them to collect. You can be certain that if student loans required the bank to take a risk there would be a lot more engineers coming out of colleges in america and a lot less degrees in ancient Greek philosophy. The banks would require people to choose majors that will pay enough.

sokoloff 13y ago
I agree that's a possible outcome, but I think an equally likely outcome is that banks would require parental co-signing of loans, from parents with income and credit ratings sufficient to mitigate the risks. Which overwhelmingly means that the economically disadvantaged (or those estranged from one or both parents) would be shut out, which would make "college degree required" a proxy for "upper middle class or better". I agree that it's a different outcome, but I don't agree that it's a better outcome. There are benefits to easy availability of student loans; with those benefits come some risks. You can't eliminate only the risks and leave all the benefits.
- king_jester 13y ago
  > Which overwhelmingly means that the economically disadvantaged (or those estranged from one or both parents) would be shut out, which would make "college degree required" a proxy for "upper middle class or better". Considering the overall education picture in the US, this is already true. Students from low income families already have a hard time getting to a point where they can apply and be accepted to a university. See http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/...

ebbv 13y ago

Friedman is such a shameless hack. Using his column as an ad for his daughter's college roommate's business? Honestly? Ugh. Nothing against the HireArt folks who may be great people, and maybe they are offering a useful service. I even understand why they couldn't tell Friedman not to do this for them. I doubt anyone could turn down the free exposure. But it's just tacky, and it doesn't help that Friedman is a hack to begin with.

robg 13y ago
It's really sad to me that the top comment on any thread at HN is ad hominem. I'm not around much but this community really has changed. Seriously, ebbv you have nothing to add that is interesting or unique? Calling a columnist at the NY Times a "hack" is hardly original or insightful.
- ebbv 13y ago
  I pointed out he's shilling for his daughter's friend. That's not enough to support my characterization for you? I think it's plenty. But there's tons of other examples of how terrible Friedman is, and most people don't need me to spell them out because they are very familiar with them already. Do a quick Google search and you'll see what the rest of us already know.
  - robg 13y ago
    There's nothing substantial about that "critique". You only know of the relationship because he disclosed it. And any columnist of the last 50 years at the Times provokes the same exact response from a segment of their audience. In fact, as a columnist, that's the point of his job and so your "test" would fail for every columnist at that paper. My point still stands. Your comment adds no value to this community and itself is a comment on the state of this community. You start with ad hominem then work backwards to the "critique". When pushed, you simply re-state the ad hominem. This community used to be much better than that, esp for a top comment in well-read thread. EDIT: At the very least, I'm glad vapid comments aren't staying at the topmost position. I hope that's a combination of downvotes and the time-gravity function. Too bad ad hominem is so easy to upvote and leads to the herd mentality that begets the trivial.

rollo_tommasi 13y ago

So the Detroit woman who taught herself Excel and outscored Stanford and Harvard grads, and is held out as validation of Friedman's thesis - she's only referred to as a "top applicant". Did she get the job? And if not, what was the background of the person who did? Otherwise, my only take-away from this article is that in a column ostensibly about meritocracy, Tom Friedman managed to turn 3/4 of his column inches into a PR piece for a company run by his daughter's Yale buddies. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality...

esharef 13y ago
Hi, Elli from HireArt here. She didnt get the job because she lived in Michigan and couldn't move to SF but she made it as a finalist. I was directly involved and was astonished at how well she did given her lack of "formal" education. I wish more people were like Patti. She really inspired me. The fact that Michigan is struggling economically and that she was unable to leave is a different and very interesting topic.