- While the last decade has taken a lot of our workflows remote, we are still working in very local environments – most companies hire national talent, trained in local institutions and with local credentials
- We believe this will be one of the most important changes in the 2020s → a new set of global talent and hiring tools, credentials and training programs that make employment truly global
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Most hiring platforms focus on showcasing skills and experiences that have already been acquired by the candidate
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They end up looking like glorified CVs.
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If the traditionals hiring systems are horses, most new hiring solutions are “faster horses”, not cars.
- Bad hires can cost $240,000 in expenses when you take into account retention, payroll and hiring costs
- Conventional wisdom and old business handbooks say: aptitude tests are the best predictor of success.
- But looking at the actual research, it is clear that:
- Jobs are changing faster than ever, making the effectiveness of these tests shaky.
- The effectiveness of these tests applies mostly to the middle-income jobs in the US more than the economy as a whole, especially high-skill tech jobs.
- Since there's very few ways to quantitatively measure the fit of an employee or their skills, networks and signaling often drive the hire.
- This is terribly advantageous to candidates who come from privileged backgrounds and is absolutely unfair.
- We still haven't found a better way to assess fit than human referrals with enough information on both parties, and we should look for ways to replicate this human process through technology. The issues arise with scale, as no tool has been able to replicate this process successfully.
- We see two approaches to addressing this issue: those who want to augment the power of those human match-makers (e.g. Via by Ondeck, SharpestMinds) and those who want to replicate those actions at scale through technology (Stackraft, Underdog, Skillist). There's probably room for both of them!
- **Sector focus (**own hiring based on sector-specific considerations - niche newsletters and job boards)
- Kill-the-CV approach (skills-based hiring at scale that substitutes the traditional methods - Torre, Tretar, Underdog)
- Market transparency (better connecting the two sides in hiring - LinkedIn Jobs, Handshake, Via, NewCraft)
- **Coaching (**high involvement in the hiring process through coaching and resources, often selective - HireClub)
- Value-Based Hiring (still very early, but focused on identifying what makes a great human fit - KeyValues)