2: Your Day

The centerpiece of HQ is the Day. The goal here is to build a page that a user could use just like a daily journal, but in a digital form.

Sort of like this, but digital.

From Best Self Co

Physical journals are great, and many people use them (including me) for a variety of purposes. Some are like the above and have sections with prompts to guide the user and provide structure, while others are free form with either dots (my preference) or lines or even blank paper.

A typical dot grid journal

The Day Page

The goal with the Day page in HQ is to recreate the best parts of the physical journal, but in a digital form. It looks like this (below). The center column has prompts for what should go in your journal today, while the left sidebar has tabs to quickly jump around to other days. We'll cover the right column in a minute.

Day Page Sections

Each day has various sections that allow for text input or that connect to other activities done throughout HQ. By default (and for privacy and ease of viewing), each section is closed when you first load the page.

Free Form Text

Clicking on any one section will reveal its contents. In some cases, there is a space to write something, just like you would in a physical journal.

Linked Records

In other cases, the section links to records from other places in HQ. This is particularly useful if some of the things you would keep track of in a journal are calls you want to make or other outreach to people in your life. While you could just write down "- Call Dad" in your journal, doing it this way lacks useful context. When was the last time you talked to this person? What did you talk about? Has this task been completed yet, or not? etc.

A better design would be if your journal was 1) digital and 2) smart enough to reference your contact and pull in necessary information right where you need it.

Right Sidebar

For these linked records, clicking on them will pull up more details related to that record in the right sidebar, providing additional context.

This works for records of all types of data that HQ stores, including contacts, habits, meals, workouts, and more...

a really healthy snack there huh? :/

It even works for papers!

And, you can make them bigger too so it's almost like holding them in your hand.

The capability of scanning papers (taking a picture) is especially great because it allows you to get the best of all worlds. Use your physical journal for things where writing is preferred (there are many), and use a digital journal for things where referencing of data and the other benefits of digital is required (there are a lot of these too).

I personally draw a bunch of diagrams and wireframes of product and business ideas using my trusty dot grid journal. I've tried many digital products for this purpose over the years—mostly on the iPad—and none work nearly as well for me as old fashioned pen and paper. For these sorts of purposes, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

But for other purposes like editing text you've written, a digital form factor is superior and certainly avoids the numerous scratch outs that I have with pen & paper.

Metrics

Lastly, as a person goes about their day, they're doing numerous things. Many self-help and personal development books such as Atomic Habits and others stress the importance of tracking the things you do. This is great for accountability and just for keeping track of what's been done and what hasn't. HQ tracks these activities automatically as you interact with it.

Currently, it tracks:

• Communications

• Contacts

• Papers

• Jobs

• Workouts

• Meals

This list is growing, as is the depth of tracking that each thing can perform.

Mobile

Most of this is available on mobile as well. Soon all of it will be.

Summary

The design objective the Day page is to have a single representation of all of a person's daily activities:

• It needs to be powerful, but not visually overwhelming

• It needs to be scannable so a person can use it to quickly find what they're looking for

• It needs to provide more info about a thing when the user wants to drill down further

• It needs to combine the best elements of a physical journal and digital one all into one

Hopefully, HQ is off to a good start hitting those objectives.

Why build HQ?

You’re reading about an early prototype of HQ — the operating system for your daily life. HQ is being built in public and various aspects of the application and/or this blog post could change. This article originally appeared on Medium.

For more information, visit twitter.com/gotomyhq

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We all aspire to greatness. HQ helps you achieve it.

If you study the habits of peak performers — the people we look up to and marvel at how much they achieve — one common theme emerges: they all keep track of what they do.

Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

Why? …so they can do it better the next time!

Here’s the problem

Keeping track of what you do is all well and great, but for many years I asked myself the question: how exactly do I keep track of all this information, and where do I store it?

For a long time, the answer to that question involved suggestions like keeping a journal or building a spreadsheet to log various activities, or various manifestations of these ideas. But with the complexity and connectedness of our 21st century world, neither of these approaches really work — I’ve tried both and a number of others too.

Today, a good portion of our lives take place online, so while a physical journal may be good for writing, it can’t capture pictures, video and other media, nor can we use it to do any data analysis, nor does it have any automation, or search capability, etc. It’s just writing.

As a digital tool, Excel (and Airtable, Notion, et al) has some of the right features, but it’s just a shell. We as the user are charged with building a model to house the data we want to track. Assuming we know how to do this at all, doing it is both time-consuming and unlikely to yield a system we can really use in the long run. And again, WE have to build it.

Here’s the vision

What if there was a system that was already set up for all of us to keep track of our lives just like the people we aspire to be? What if this system didn’t require that we have won super bowls or be a billionaire or be a celebrity or have a “person for that?” What if there was an app that let us manage our daily lives with precision, and keep track of every activity and detail we care about, from what food we eat, to the workouts we do, to the people we communicate with, and the stuff we have to do, to the things we own, even down to the papers on our desk?

Better still, what if we could get all these capabilities without having to use a multitude of apps and having our data spread out all over the place? Apple may have told us “there’s an app for that” but what we didn’t quite understand is they meant “there’s a separate app for that.”

What if there was just one?

Introducing HQ

HQ is the world’s first Smart Journal. It functions as the operating system for your daily life.

Every aspect of your day, organized and accessible

A list of your contacts and the communications you’ve had with them

A place to log all of your workouts

Using HQ, consumers can record and manage all the important aspects of their lives from within a single space, all with the aim of helping them get better at whichever parts of life are important to them.

- Manage your contacts and the communications you’ve had with them.. even where you met them
- Log your workouts, down to the last rep
- Plan your meals and maintain a food journal, even including meals from restaurants
- Put together habit lists and track your daily performance as you complete them
- Check off tasks and get projects to the finish line

And a lot more … see more about how HQ Works.

One App. All of you.

We all have dreams. We all have a vision of a person we want to be. The people we admire for all that they accomplish have spent years building systems that help them execute at a high level.

Now you have one too.

Moovin FTW

This article was written about Moovin 1.0 to provide more of a narrative explanation of how Moovin could become a unicorn company. While the focus has changed in 2.0 to being purely software based, some of this background is still valuable, and other aspects such as focusing on high-density cities will have changed entirely in a post COVID-19 world.

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You’re reading the TOP SECRET plans for how Moovin is going to become a multi-billion dollar company. If you don’t want to think big, stop reading.

Moovin is a home furnishings service for today’s upwardly mobile society. We create magazine-worthy interior designs, available on an affordable rental basis.

“I’d love to live in a place that looks average”
-No one, ever

Why build this company?

If you asked most people to describe the lifestyle of their dreams, 100% of them would explain something about the place they see themselves living, and 100% of the time those dreams would include well-designed and great looking places. Never will you hear someone say, “I’d love to live in a place that looks average.”

But most of us DO live in a place that looks average. Why is that?

First of all, the places with magazine worthy interior design are expensive and generally require a professional designer’s talents to create. Then we have to pay for all the stuff the designer selects. Then we have to pay the designer.

Assuming we can afford all that expense (and want to), there’s another problem: what happens to all that stuff when we inevitably need to move to the next place? Do we have to go through this whole exercise again? What if the stuff we bought for place A doesn’t work in Place B? What if our needs change? what if… what if…

TAKEAWAY: the expense and lack of flexibility keeps most of us from having great interior design. Instead we settle for average. Instead of living the lifestyle we want, we settle for this dream of hopefully having it eventually.

But eventually rarely comes…

Our vision

Instead of settling for average and eventually, what if there was a service that transformed your home into a magazine worthy space with just a few clicks?

…and, you didn’t have to become an expert in interior design?

…and, you didn’t have to visit endless websites or furniture stores?

…and, you didn’t have to buy any of the furnishings?

Enter Moovin.

TAKEAWAY: Moovin makes getting great interior design easy, flexible, and less expensive.

Show me the Money $$$

Ok, you get the idea.. Moovin can make your place look magazine worthy, and we rent you a complete interior design instead of you having to buy furniture piecemeal. So who cares? Well, if you’re an investor you will. Here’s why:

Big Market

Home Furnishings is a $120B market in the US. Moving & Storage is another $73B. Let’s call it $200B all in.

People spend a LOT of money each and every year on buying home furnishings, moving them from one place to the next, and storing the stuff they don’t want or won’t work in their place now.

So this is a BIG market.

And…

1. It’s a market that’s changing because people are becoming more and more mobile (Mobile Society).

2. There is growing societal value placed on interior design (Design Importance)

3. The population growth is happening in cities, where space constraints and urban lifestyles place more emphasis on design (Growth of Cities).

So not only is this already a big market, but it’s growing big market.

Interior Design Services

Moovin has two interior design services: Staged Design and Custom Design. They’re essentially the same service, but with different rental durations to appeal to different customer segments and use cases. Think Uber Black vs UberX. Staged Design has better economics, but Custom Design has FAR more potential customers.

Staged Design is for staging a house so that it looks desirable to potential buyers. Contracts range from 2 weeks to 3 months, and in our first 12 months, Moovin’s average Staged Design in San Francisco was $5k+ and lasted 54 days. Some examples from projects we’ve done are below.

Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4

Custom Design is just like Staged Design except that it’s for a consumer to actually use, and the contract is for 12 months. We estimate that Custom Designs will average $250/month across all markets once we implement them, and a higher number in major markets like San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, etc. That number is informed by our team’s combined 30 years of experience in the furniture rental industry with Aaron’s (NYSE: AAN) across 60+ locations.

Ok, so now to the money

With these 2 services (and again, they’re really just the same service with a different name and different duration), we believe each market can support, on average, 10 Staged Design projects per month and 2,000 Custom Design Customers, and generate over $6M in revenue annually.

We have identified the first 29 markets we plan to grow into, but there are likely 100+ markets in the US that have the right characteristics to support Moovin.

Here’s the rationale:

Staged Design: We have already had months where we’ve done 7 Staged Designs with ZERO marketing or sales budget, so it’s very believable that we would average 10 per month or even more once we are able to focus on it. Our current average revenue per job is $5k, so even if we cut that by 50% to account for non-SF real estate markets, that’s still $2,500 per job on average. 10 jobs per month @ $2,500 per job equals $300K per year in Staged Design Revenue, per market. Interesting you say, but not venture scale… well, now let’s talk about Custom Design.

Custom Design: Our team has previously achieved 500 customers per market with their Aaron’s franchises in small town markets (<20,000 people) in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas et al, so averaging at least 2k customers in larger markets seems very doable. We already have a deal in place with the 11th largest property manager in the Bay Area that has 3k units, and we’ve only just started the sales/marketing process to bring in other opportunities. And, the SF Bay Area has 2M households and ~7M residents. So again, getting to 2k customers on average seems doable. At an average of $250 per customer per month, that’s $6M per year in revenue, per market.

TAKEAWAY: Those 29 markets are worth roughly $180M per year or more in potential revenue to Moovin, and if we can expand to the full 100+ markets, we’re talking $600M per year.

What about Unit Economics?

Ok, so I have your attention on revenue… now let’s look at unit economics. As we’ve said already, Staged Design has the better economics, but Custom Design has more customers. It’s not an either/or, it’s a both.

**Staged Design:**Breakeven period is about 3 months.Useful life is 60–120 months.600%+ levered IRR.No wear & tear.

**Custom Design:**Breakeven is 12 months.Useful life is 60–120 months.150% levered IRR.Average wear & tear.

Per Project Financial Performance

Moovin DB (our backend tech) calculates financial performance on a project by project basis, bringing in the inventory used in each project, the logistics costs, payments made, etc. This helps us analyze which customers perform best, where we can improve, etc. In a sports analogy, reviewing this data is the equivalent of watching game films.

The below example from 42 Sumner Street was our best project from an ROI standpoint. In the upper right corner you’ll see we returned 10x+ on this project overall. Returns are a combo of cash returned from the customer and the value of the inventory returned following project completion, less the cost of logistics to accomplish the project. Moovin DB calculates budgeted amounts for these costs depending on the rental duration, property type, etc.

Wear & Tear

The best part about Staged Design is the furniture doesn’t get used. It just has to look good for photos to be taken.

Custom Design items get more wear and tear because they get used, but this isn’t nearly as big of an issue as you might think.

First, when you buy great items to start with they have more durability anyhow. In the furniture world, this more durable furniture is called contract grade or hospitality grade, and that is more the direction we will be going from an inventory standpoint. It’s what hotels use.

Second, as items get wear, we will simply discount the rental price for the next customer a little bit if needed (the 10yr financials above build this idea in). With a great overall design, even slightly worn furniture can still look great. The best example you’re already familiar with is called a hotel, particularly the hip/cool boutique hotel variety. A hotel room is simply rental furniture with a room wrapped around it. No one walks into such a place and says “wow, this furniture has some wear and tear.” Instead, they’re simply impressed by the overall design aesthetics, and wondering why their own home doesn’t look as cool.

TAKEAWAY: Moovin has great unit economics, giving it flexibility to drop prices to gain market share OR reinvest more profits to grow more efficiently. What’s more, the ability to fund inventory purchases with debt financing allows for more efficient use of equity capital and less overall dilution, benefitting early shareholders.

Ok, so how does Moovin actually work?

Ok, let’s talk about how Moovin works, and what makes it defensible.

Here’s the high level customer journey:

(1/4) Technology

Moovin’s competitive advantage is its backend technology (Moovin DB), which brings together and automates numerous operations that formerly were done manually. This capability is expanding and getting more powerful all the time, but already it handles numerous functions that competing companies would solve through headcount, yielding a 50% reduction in scaling costs.

This article has a deeper dive on Moovin’s tech layer.

(2/4) User Experience

On the front end, consumers and service providers can instantly get price quotes for complex interior design projects. Moovin’s algorithms calculate the property type and what should go in it, as well as all logistical considerations to return a quote instantly. For Custom Design, consumers can even specify that they prefer to use certain furniture they already own and the algorithm will give them credit and recompute a new quote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbyPHuvzyyY

(3/4) Design

Once a customer agrees to a quote, In-house designers use Moovin’s software to assemble an interior design for each customer, including not only furniture but also artwork, rugs, linens, etc. We call this a “Design Brief” and seeing it all laid out carries a high prestige value and gives customers a sense of the possible.

(4/4) Logistics

Once a customer signs off on the Design brief, the necessary items are retrieved from our warehouse (or ordered), delivered, and setup for the customer. Moovin’s software handles all logistics and scheduling for deliveries, pickups, and move jobs, and was built to incorporate future services as well (more on that later). It also provides work time estimates, and can track estimated time vs actual for future planning accuracy.

3rd Party Logistics

The way Moovin actually handles logistics is by partnering with 3rd party moving companies. This is a smart growth strategy because it scales up more efficiently and leverages existing capacity in a market. Each market has existing moving companies that we can work with, and Moovin’s software was built in a way so they could easily be added as needed.

TAKEAWAYS:

• Moovin’s technology automates numerous functions that interior designers previously did manually.

• Rather than taking days to schedule a property tour and get a quote, a Realtor can get an instant quote from Moovin in seconds.

• Rather than a consumer having to master interior design and spend weeks scouring the internet for the right home furnishings, Moovin DB helps our in house design team put together a design in 30–60 minutes.

• Rather than a legacy company getting bogged down by complex logistics and having to add headcount to address the problem, Moovin DB allows Moovin to operate lean and easily manage numerous overlapping jobs. Our outsource relationship with 3rd party logistics carriers makes it faster and cheaper to enter a new market.

How does Moovin get customers?

In other words, what’s our gotomarket strategy?

Real Estate Agents:

Realtors aren’t the buyer for home staging, but they do influence 99% of the decision to use a given vendor. They also have the trust of sellers and buyers (and even some rental tenants) and can make referrals and influence thinking around interior design. Here’s what we’re doing to target Realtors:

• Assemble list of Realtors in San Francisco Bay Area: Currently, our list has 3,200 people and growing. We have already done several jobs with Compass, the largest firm in San Francisco with almost 1k Realtors.

• Present to Realtors through speaking opportunities for Vendors. Each real estate firm has a flavor of this, and we’ve already made 6 presentations to offices of Coldwell Banker, Intero, Sotheby’s and Vanguard. We will continue doing this to build relationships and expose more Realtors to how Moovin can help them and their clients. As you can see from the presentation below, the reception is pretty strong from Realtors, and it’s a great means of continued customer development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etC6Umk3Vos

• Engage Realtors through customer development conversations; provide them blog posts and case studies that detail Moovin’s unique value propositions vs traditional stagers; ask them for targeted referrals to other Realtors (in VC speak, an intro :). Realtors are in a relationship driven business and playing off this personal element has been our best way to generate new opportunities to date, far more than email marketing or cold calling.

• Offer Discounts to Realtors who make referrals that lead to new sales. We have a program called Moovin Credit that allows Realtors to get credit for 10% of the value they refer. For example, if a Realtor refers another to Moovin for a Staged project that yields, $5k in revenue, the referring Realtor would get $500 in Moovin Credit that they can use on anything Moovin does.

• Meet the Realtor is a marketing campaign we haven’t started yet to offer Realtors the opportunity to introduce themselves to Moovin’s audience and explain why they’re different from every other Realtor. The campaign would center around a video that Moovin would produce and would include branding for Moovin surrounding the Realtor’s content. An example is below. The purpose of a Realtor doing this is that they get an opportunity to tell their story on video and describe what makes them unique. This is crucial when competing with 3k other people in the Bay Area who have the same title and capabilities. For Moovin, for the simple effort of producing a short video we get to build a relationship with a new person, tell our story, etc. If we did this with 50 Realtors and created 50 superfans, and 1/5 had a project for us at any one time, that’s 10 projects per month, at $5k per, that’s $50k per month in revenue.

Consumers:

Consumers are Moovin’s target market for Custom Design. Most consumers are also going to be apartment renters, though some will also be home owners.

Moovin’s target market is:

• Millenial/Gen-X, age 25–45

• Values experiences over possessions

• Values great design and a story behind a product/service

• Digital native; heavy internet, app and smartphone user

• Expects nearly everything to be available online, as-a-service

But there is a much wider market of potential users beyond this target:

• Homeowners: We typically associate rental furniture with renting an apartment but as length of home ownership decreases, more and more Moovin customers will be homeowners as well. Homes appreciate (usually), furnishings do not.

• Roommates

• Divorce/Breakups

• Temporary workers e.g. consultants

• Airbnb owners who want their place designed well so they can get higher average daily rates and occupancy %

• Professional Athletes: this isn’t a huge market, but we’ve already had one as a customer (Kevin Durant) and it’s an important category for generating buzz and cool factor.

• Baby Boom generation moving back to cities (empty nesters)

Property Managers

Property managers want the ability to market their properties as furnished rental optional. This gives them a way to get tenants in the door who don’t have furnishings, as well as appeal to others that do. But, few property managers want the gargantuan project of doing all the design themselves or trying to figure out how to build a similar flex furnishings company such as Moovin.

We already have a deal in place with Structure Properties, a great customer of ours, that has 3k units in the San Francisco Bay Area. We will be compensating Structure’s leasing agents with a commission equal to 2 months of rental payments for each new tenant they sign up for us. It gives their agents a reason to push Moovin to exactly the people we want to appeal to, and is the cheapest sales force around in that we only pay for successful referrals.

Structure has 3k units in the Bay Area, and is turning over 40–50 units per month. Once we start marketing and pushing this program, we estimate a 20% conversion on new tenants, so 8–10 per month, and an unknown conversion on existing tenants. Given Structure’s apartment prices and feedback from them, we estimate a customer pays Moovin $300–400 per month. With just this partnership, we estimate ramping to $50k MRR within 12 months, possibly even more.

We plan on using this first deal as the archetype for other partnerships with property management companies.

Moovin Pro

What is Moovin’s fundraising Strategy?

Similar to the effort to land man on the Moon, we’ve broken Moovin’s growth into phases. We’ve completed phase 1 “Angus” already and are raising money to fund phase 2 “Longhorn.”

After Phase 3, we plan to raise another round and more aggressively begin entering markets, perhaps 1–2 new markets per month. Inside of 5 years, the plan is to have operations in 30–40 markets.

The Future in 5–10 years

Here’s where all this is building up to… the future of our “stuff.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZZqQZp1CJs

“All this is aspirational… as I change, as my needs change, my ‘place’ should be able to change too, and up until now that hasn’t been possible... THAT’S the service we’re building.”

-Trevor Goss

The Easiest Relocation Ever

Fast forward 5–10 years and imagine that Moovin exists in every city (We’re in it to win it, afterall).

How much easier would it be to relocate from one city to the next if all you had to do was make a few clicks and then…

1. A truck showed up to pick up the furnishings you have now and packed up your personal stuff to send to the next city

2. A relocation expert helped you find your new place in your next city

3. A designer put together an interior design for that new place that you loved or you could select an existing package

4. Another truck showed up to your new place with all your new stuff as well as your personal effects

5. You only dealt with one company for all of it, and entered your credit card one time

6. You could manage everything online, or from your phone

That reality doesn’t exist yet, but that’s our North Star.

A place online for your place in the world

Everyone has a place in the world, and that place is important. In fact the place that you call home is, if you think about it, the place you spend the most time in your lifetime. We believe making it great should be easy. We’re building Moovin so that it can be.

You’re going places. We make places great.

I thought I was building a startup to make hiring better. Now I’m building an agency to make hiring obsolete.

In 2014, I started working on a product that represented a novel approach to solving one of the most challenging problems I’d encountered in life: hiring and getting hired. I had had several subpar experiences on both sides of this equation, both as someone doing the hiring, and as someone looking for a job.

Now, 2 years later, the product I built has been relegated to the dust bin, and I may have stumbled upon the future of building a startup.

How I got to here

My solution was simple: instead of having employers spend untold hours pouring over resumes, sorting them into the “no” pile and the “interview” pile, what if they could simply create a project for a prospective employee to complete? Then, they could use the person’s performance on that project as the first step in considering them for the job.

• The employer would get an honest look at the candidate’s true capabilities and suitability for the job

• The candidate, regardless of credentials or background, would get an equal opportunity to compete for the job

• It would get done quickly

I detailed the wisdom behind this approach in an article titled We keep talking about diversity. We should be talking about bias. It got a fair bit of attention, not least of which because it offered a real solution to the lack of diversity in hiring in the tech industry. While it wasn’t my original intent to solve that problem, it turns out to be a natural byproduct of the approach I advocate because it rids the hiring process of ALL forms of bias. Instead, it focuses a hiring manager’s attention exactly where it should be: on evaluating if the person applying for a job has the capabilities to do it well. Period.

This isn’t a new idea, or even a novel one. Nearly all forms of athletic competition use the exact same methodology to evaluate talent and have done so for a long time. In sports, they call it a tryout (and so did we). Our innovation was simply to build software around the tryout methodology and offer it to employers as a better way to evaluate talent. Game on!

Go to http://old.varsidee.com for more info

Things were going well… until they weren’t

While the idea was interesting and people were enthusiastic about it, ourexecution of that idea didn’t measure up. I poured my heart and soul into building this concept into a great product, but it turned out that product wasn’t able to generate the necessary traction with users.

Heartbreaking as this was, I’m far from the first entrepreneur to experience this sort of letdown. In fact, this scenario is the rule not the exception. As Steve Blank described in his seminal work The Four Steps to the Epiphany

“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.”

That lack of customers, otherwise known as “traction”, is what derailed my efforts, and the sad truth is that the vast majority of entrepreneurs have experienced this same outcome. I’d been following, participating in, and building startups for years, and yet, despite knowing about customer development, an MVP, traction, short sprints, SCRUM, and the like, I still wasn’t able to achieve enough traction in a short enough time frame to advance the company.

The team is everything…

Every successful entrepreneur and investor will tell you that the team building a startup is the single most important element of it. This has been true for a long time, and it’s the basis for the oft-heard anecdote “investors bet on the jockey, not the horse.” In startup-speak, this is a reference to the importance of the team, not so much the product that team is building. A talented team, so goes the thinking, can iterate their way to a successful product, whereas a good product — without a talented team behind it — won’t be able to keep pace and will eventually lose. Yup :(

…but how do you actually build one?

Intellectually, everyone gets the concept of building a great team. I mean, it’s sort of obvious, right? But actually doing it is the hard part. What does a great team look like? Who should be a part of it, and who shouldn’t? What is the criteria for “great?” These are questions without easy or consistent answers. Furthermore, the types of people and skill-sets a startup needs often change over time.

Even Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the challenge of building a great team, commenting that he spends 50% of his time on recruiting. That’s nice for Zuck, but he has more than 10k employees working at Facebook, meaning there is a lot of headcount to help him get stuff done. But what about when you’re the CEO of a 10 person startup? How can you allocate such a huge block of your time to finding new people, at the expense doing of all the other stuff you have to get done? You know building a great team will benefit you for the future, but there may not be a future if you can’t make it to your next fundraise or start generating some revenue.

The problem isn’t lack of time, it’s lack of urgency

When we were building the first version of Varsidee, the value proposition of “time-effectiveness” was something we talked about often with every prospective customer. They all loved it. It turns out when you ask a candidate to complete a project (again, we called it a Tryout) as the first step in the hiring process, not that many actually will. And, because a huge proportion of possible candidates opt not to complete the Tryout, the hiring team saves a ton of time that otherwise would’ve been spent screening and interviewing all those people. Said differently, it’s much faster to find the needles in a haystack if you start by removing the hay.

While our early customer development efforts produced amazing levels of enthusiasm and interest in this concept for this reason, when we delivered the product for our first customers a funny (sad) thing happened: they didn’t use it. Pressed for reasons why they weren’t using the product, the nearly uniform answer was:

“We TOTALLY get it, and we’re gonna do it, but we haven’t gotten to it just yet”

This went on for days, and then weeks. We were perplexed. These same customers had sent us numerous emails asking when they could use the product. They clearly had the very pain point our product solved, and had told us repeatedly that “yes, this product would indeed solve our pain point.” And then… nothing.

I’ll spare you the intermediate steps and cut to the chase. What we eventually learned was that while nearly all of our customers loved the concept in theory, they didn’t want to do the work that went into putting that theory into practice. I eventually took to calling this the “Gym Membership Problem.” Our customers said they wanted to get ripped, but they didn’t want to lift the weights.

My takeaway from this experience is that people often want the outcome of something, but aren’t interested in the input that produces that outcome.

This only makes sense. We live in a world of instant gratification. If I need a ride, I tap a button on Uber. If I want to meet someone new, I swipe right on Tinder. If I need any product ever, I can have it delivered to my door the following day by Amazon.

What my team and I got wrong with our “solution” is that even though the Tryout method saves time in the long run, it costs time in the short run because a hiring manager has to create the project she wants candidates to complete before they can, well, complete it. Here I thought we were selling “aspirin” to kill pain, but the market thought of it as “vitamins” where we were preventing pain from happening. To a customer not in pain, buying vitamins is interesting. To a customer in pain, buying aspirin is essential!

The Varsidee Workflow

Why do companies hire?

These learnings have prompted a fundamental reconsideration of my founding premise. I started my company trying to build a better, faster, cheaper way for companies to hire. Now I’m wondering if hiring is even the right outcome? Maybe I was providing the right answer to the wrong question. Perhaps the better question is “why do companies hire in the first place?”

The most immediate answer is that companies add headcount so that new employees can help the company accomplish the projects and tasks that, taken together, move the company forward. Seems simple enough.

Now I’m wondering, is hiring the best way for a startup to get all that stuff done? Maybe there’s a better way to move a company forward without having to hire anyone. Interesting…

Hiring will be disrupted by Agencies & Operators

If we’re all seeking instant gratification, hiring isn’t the right solution to getting work done. As we know, it takes time to define what kind of person you’d like to hire, then you have to market the opportunity, recruit candidates, interview them, make an offer, onboard them, and then get them up to speed on their new job. Best case scenario, this activity takes several weeks. More commonly, it takes several months. All the while, the work you’re hoping this new hire will do isn’t getting done.

Did I mention hiring is extremely expensive? In SF, the average tech worker makes $176k/yr, and often arrives with transaction costs of 20% of first year salary (recruiters). Ouch…

So if we acknowledge that hiring’s purpose is for the person hired to complete various projects and tasks that move the company forward, and if we observe that hiring is both extremely time-consuming and costly, might there be an alternative way to get those projects and tasks done?

There is, sort of… we call them contractors. But the problem with contractors is that a company still has to go through most of the same steps to find and identify them as with prospective employees.

What we need instead is a new form of contractor. Right now, we think of a contractor as a person. But what if a contractor was an Agency, and that agency sub-contracted a multitude of subject matter experts who could form ad hoc teams to work on a project for a client? I’ll call these people “Operators.”

What is an Operator?

Think of an Operator (capital “O”) as a person similar to a freelancer, but whereas the freelancer works on her own both finding clients and doing the work for those clients, an Operator is only responsible for the “doing” part. The Agency is responsible for getting the contracts and managing clients.

This isn’t a new concept. In fact, it’s a long established model. The purest example is the construction industry, where a “general contractor” deals with clients on the one side and “sub-contractors” on the other. General contractors are responsible for getting the deal and managing a project to completion, while sub-contractors are only responsible for completing their specific work within their unique trade (plumbing, electrical, carpentry, et al.).

If it’s a good way to build office buildings, maybe it’s good way to build the startups that sit in those office buildings

What I’m wondering is why we can’t apply the Agency-Operator model to startups in a more meaningful way?

We know that startups need to get lots of things done to keep moving the company forward, and we know that hiring is time-consuming and expensive. Wouldn’t it make more sense for startups to partner with an Agency that could complete a lot of the same work, instead of trying to recruit, interview, hire and onboard an employee to do it?

I think it makes all the sense in the world, and that’s the new focus of Varsidee: to build such an Agency.

And, it turns out we already had the perfect name. The varsity team in any sport is a group of the best and most talented athletes. That’s exactly what we’re building: a team of “the best” that are available to jump in on a client’s project whenever they are needed.

Bringing it full circle

In 2014, I started working on a product that represented a novel approach to solving one of the most challenging problems I’d encountered in life: hiring and getting hired.

In 2016, I’m beginning work on a service that presents a better approach to solving one of the most challenging problems I’ve encountered in trying to build a startup: We used to think that hiring was the best way to get projects and tasks done. But maybe there’s a better, faster, cheaper way that leverages the subject matter expertise of Operators. Maybe we need to evolve our definition of how to build and grow a startup. Maybe…

Varsidee, and our growing cadre of Operators, is not in the advice business, we’re in the “get stuff done” business, and our BIG IDEA is to help you buildyours.

We’re open for business.

Trevor Goss is an Operator at Varsidee. This post originally appeared on Medium.

Part 6: We can fix this if we decide to care

By now, hopefully you agree that, “Yes, the candidate experience sucks.” And, as you can very clearly see, “No, I will not shut up about it.” If you made it through Parts 1–5, bravo! (and thank you). But I didn’t write all this just to word-vomit all over Medium. I wrote it because we need change, and we’re not going to get it by sitting around reading essays like this one. Here’s what we should do:

Someone needs to “own” the candidate experience

Just as there is a person at many tech companies who cares a lot about “user” experience, there should be someone who cares about candidate experience. Right now, there isn’t such a person, but if we’re serious about creating a better hiring process, there needs to be.

Job descriptions should actually describe the job

Job descriptions should be written with more detail about exactly what a person might be doing if they are hired, and what’s in it for them. And everyone would really benefit from omitting terms like “dynamic” and “multi-tasking” and similar jargon-riddled BS. Just explain the job as you would to a person if you were speaking directly to them. Really, it’s as simple as that. 

One item that’s often left out is how much the company is willing to pay in salary and other benefits. Does anyone really believe that the company hasn’t approved a budget for making this hire in advance of posting the job? Of course they have. A person accepting a job at your company is trading their time/effort/ability/etc for the compensation you give them. But it’s pretty hard to judge the attractiveness of your job without knowing important details like how much you might get paid to do it. 

Ditch the requirements

The requirements for the job should be obvious: that you can do the job! So rather than spending a bunch of time on “must have 5 years of experience in X and a degree in Y”, just tell someone what the job entails and give them a way to show you if they can do it or not. If they can prove to you that they can do the job, but they don’t meet the requirements you came up with, maybe that’s a good indicator to YOU that your so-called “requirements” weren’t nearly as essential as you thought they were.

Give candidates an assignment to demonstrate their talents as the first step in the hiring process… and make it anonymous

As I just mentioned, it’s important to give candidates a way to show you if they can do the job or not. And not just some candidates. It’s important to give all candidates an equal opportunity to demonstrate their skills.

Don’t screen people out. Let them screen themselves out by whether or not they do the assignment for the job. This concept is utterly simple, yet amazingly profound. Right now, most employers seem to believe that they can accurately judge a candidate by spending 6 seconds reviewing a resume or LinkedIn profile. Therein lies the problem: As employers, we’re casting judgement and making assumptions about what someone can do, instead of letting that person show us what they can do.

If you’ve read all this, I hope I’ve impressed upon you why the candidate experience sucks, and why the fact that is sucks matters so much. If you found yourself scoffing at times or wondering why I’m making such a fuss, consider this: besides the person(s) we choose to spend our life with, the work we choose to spend our life on is one of the most important decisions a human being makes. 

Besides the person(s) we choose to spend our life with, the work we choose to spend our life on is one of the most important decisions a human being makes.

For better or worse, what we do defines who we are. The tragedy playing out every day across America (and across the world really) is that what we’d like to do is being partially dictated to us by what other people deem us capable of doing. They get to screen us in or out. They get to tell us we don’t have enough experience and reject us for it. They get to decide our fate without so much as giving us a chance to prove them wrong.

And I for one have had enough of it!

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re at an inflection point. We can either rise to the occasion and fix this problem, or shrink from the challenge and fail to. I get it, change is hard. Doing something new implies risk and risk invites failure. It’s much safer to default to what we’ve always done. 

But if we just have the courage to try we really can make this a lot better. We just need to start.

This article (and my efforts to build Varsidee) is my way of starting. I really believe in this, but I wrote this article not as a call to attention but as a call to action.

No amount of writing will solve this problem. Change comes from doing. It comes from adding up 1,000’s of tiny efforts. The first of those tiny efforts you can make right now is to share this article. The second one you can make is to commit to making your company’s hiring process better for candidates along the lines I’ve outlined above.

Part 5: Failure to communicate

One of my favorite terms to use when describing the candidate experience is the resume black hole. Whoever thought of it, A+ on that one. In three short words, it conveys so much that a candidate feels.

But why do we have that term in the first place? That’s an easy one. It’s because employers as a group have a lousy track record of getting back to and keeping up with a candidate who has applied. Sure, the candidate might get one of those lovely auto-responses that tell them their resume has been received. Ok, great, now what? They wait. And wait. With little or no ability to get in touch with anyone at the company.

This is no accident. Most hiring software attempts to insulate talent managers and hiring managers from the multitude of candidates who send in a resume because the makers of said software know that these people (their customers) don’t want to be bombarded with over-communication from applicants (we’re back to our “defense” metaphor from Part 4).

Even when communication does happen, it’s often sporadic with lengthy gaps between messages. Meanwhile candidates are in the dark (hence the black hole metaphor) about what’s going on internally. And if you’ve ever been a candidate in this situation (and I have) you know how utterly frustrating this is.

Transparency? What Transparency?

Let’s think about it from a candidate’s view for a moment. First, you see a job posted and decide you’re interested in the opportunity. Awesome! Now you think about applying or trying to connect with someone about the opportunity. But before you do so, a thought enters your head: how many other people have applied? That’s kind of an important data point, right? It influences the likelihood of getting the job, or even just getting to the next step in the process. On that note, where is the company in the process? Have several people been interviewed? Has someone gotten an offer? Or is the process just getting started? Looking at the job description, you have absolutely no idea about any of this! These would be quick questions to ask. But who do you ask? And where do you go to ask them?

Do we really believe that’s effective communication? Really?!? Even people buying lottery tickets are told what the odds of winning are. People applying to colleges can get a rough idea of the odds of being accepted from the school’s published acceptance metrics. Yet, for this process called “job search” candidates are kept completely in the dark, and given few if any means of asking questions until after they’ve been able to connect with someone directly, which may or may not happen at all. #WTF

It’s 2016. We live in a hyper-connected world of near ubiquitous communication. Look at your smartphone. I’ll bet if you counted them up, you’d have a dozen or more separate apps that allow communication. Yet, for this one area of human activity, it’s like we’ve forgotten everything we know. We’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to do simple things like ask questions, get answers and have a real dialogue between two human beings. Is this really the best we’re capable of? Is it really?!?

I think we can do a lot better

Part 4: Bouncer syndrome

Think of the last time you went to a crowded bar or club. If it was crowded, in all likelihood, you waited in line to get in. When you got up to the front of the line, you dutifully handed over your ID and stood there quietly awaiting confirmation from the bouncer that you could proceed. In that moment, the bouncer was the gatekeeper. He had the power to allow you to enter and have a great night inside said bar/club, or to deny your entry for any reason he wanted — legitimate or not.

In our current hiring model, talent managers or screeners or whomever is serving as the entry point for an applicant has a similar power, and low and behold they’re demonstrating all the same characteristics as bouncers.

Can you spell POWER TRIP?

The person that receives inbound resumes or connects with candidates online is often the first line of defense for a given job. Notice what I just said there, “the first line of defense!” This is how employers casually refer to the screening function: In terms of “defense!” It’s as if they have an existential fear of some horde of barbarians/candidates massing at the gate, poised to breach the walls. To the rescue comes the resume screener who will beat back this horde by only letting certain candidates proceed and rejecting the others. Heroic, isn’t she?

I’m overdoing it on this metaphor, but the idea behind it is true enough: a person, generally called a screener or a recruiter or a talent manager, has the power of the gatekeeper just like a bouncer does. And just like a bouncer can choose to deny you entry for wearing shorts or a hat, the screener can deny your resume for similarly arbitrary reasons. Whether they do so because you don’t appear to have enough experience, didn’t go to the right college, or haven’t worked at a well-known employer, all of the screener’s decisions to accept/reject your resume are made based on a litany of personal biases and preferences.

These biases, which we should be talking more about, are unconscious and part of human nature, so no amount of screeners saying “I would never do that” matters. They are doing it. They just don’t realize it. And these biases are harmful because they rarely have anything to do with someone’s ability to do the job.

With such power to screen people out, we shouldn’t be surprised that screeners, recruiters and talent managers demonstrate some of the worst elements of bouncer syndrome. It’s not the power that’s the problem. It’s them knowing they have it. When people know they have such a large amount of power, they often choose to wield it in harmful ways simply because they can.

So if the problem is too much power, is the solution to have less? Yes and no. I submit that the best solution would be for screeners, recruiters and talent managers to focus on attracting candidates, not screening them. As we’ve said previously, a complaint of talent managers at some companies is not having enough candidates or there being too many “passive” candidates. So why not focus more effort on attracting candidates instead of dissuading them? Those who they attract should be directed to an assignment for that job and asked to complete it. This assignment is what should be the screening mechanism, not a human reviewing a resume and acting like a bouncer. Let me repeat that because it’s a key point:

This assignment is what should be the screening mechanism, not a human reviewing a resume and acting like a bouncer.

By asking EVERY candidate to do this assignment, an employer is giving EVERYONE an equal opportunity to prove themselves. (more on this in Part 6)

Part 3: Those who can, network. Those who can’t, apply.

One of the first use cases of the early internet was to move classified listings for employment online. Think Craigslist, early job boards, the careers section of corporate web sites, etc. 

We thought we’d be entering a golden age where everyone was able to find job opportunities online, and easily apply, all without leaving their desk or pickup the phone. However, an unintended consequence of this online growth was more applications. Lot’s more. It turns out when you let everyone easily apply, everyone does. This paradox was best exemplified by a clever ad from The Ladders.

When you let everyone in, the best people can’t stand out.

-The Ladders

Now, let me say this before anything else: I don’t agree with a LOT of the message of this ad. It’s elitist and even mean-spirited in some ways. In my opinion, ANYONE should be able to apply for ANY position they want and have an equal opportunity to get the job. Period. (more on this in Part 6)

That said, I’ll bet there were a lot of talent managers, hiring managers, resume screeners, and recruiters who just watched this ad and said to themselves, “yep, I deal with this EVERY day.”

And the unfortunate truth is this ad is right in an important way: when you let everyone apply, the best people can’t stand out. So what are we to do?

I submit that we need to change our definition for what it means to “apply.” Right now, apply equals sending in a resume, or the equivalent thereof. And that’s too easy to do. And that’s why everyone does it. Instead, if apply meant “complete an assignment to demonstrate your capabilities”, an immediate consequence would be fewer people would apply for each job because they wouldn’t be willing to do the assignment required to apply. But the ones who do complete the assignment would likely be the most interested and capable candidates, and thus best suited for the job. So we’d end up with a system where anyone could apply, but the reality would be most people wouldn’t apply. Equal opportunity? Check. Let the best people stand out? Check.

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know

Since it’s so easy to apply for a job using online job boards, SO many people do. You’ll hear people say, “in order to get 1 job, your need to apply to 100” or “it’s a numbers game” or similar kinds of things. So what happens? A company posts a job, and they get lots of applicants. Now what? How does a talent manager or hiring manager even begin to respond to this flood of people? ANSWER? In most cases, they don’t.

For competitive jobs with lots of applicants, many companies pay little if any attention to candidates that apply online, instead focusing on 1) people they’ve sourced themselves 2) people who they know or are connected to on LinkedIn/Facebook or 3) people that were referred either via another employee or via an outside recruiter.

Translation: If you want to get noticed, you gotta know somebody.

Think on that for a minute… Do we really believe that your personal connection(s) at a company should be more important than how talented or capable or passionate you are? Do we really?!?

That idea sounds a lot like the 1950s to me (heck, maybe even the 1750s), and I for one could not more vehemently disagree with it. TALENT and ABILITY and SKILLS and PASSION FOR THE JOB should always be more important than who you know.

TALENT and ABILITY and SKILLS and PASSION FOR THE JOB should always be more important than who you know.

But right now, they aren’t. For a lot of companies, no matter how talented you might be, if you don’t know the right people or can’t get to know them, you are completely invisible, and never even considered even if you apply.

Do you have an “in?”

But wait, there’s more. Because candidates have begun to get wise to the situation I just described, some are going to great lengths to “network” their way to someone at a company in the hopes of getting some “inside track” on the job. They know that NOT knowing someone at the company will likely prevent them from being considered at all, so they take steps to get to know someone.

Ok, fine. Here’s the problem with that: it results in a system that optimizes for one’s ability to network, not their ability to do the job. And, it perpetuates the ‘unfair playing field’ sentiment that many job seekers who didn’t do that end up feeling. Lastly, it puts company employees in an awkward position of having to connect (or not) with so many potential candidates that have done nothing more to demonstrate their interest in the job or capability to do it than click the “connect” button. #FAIL

Now, if ability to network is the key skillset for the job, like in a sales position for example, there’s some legitimate justification for this approach as the activity is a good proxy for the actual work the person would be doing if hired. But those roles are the exception, not the rule. Currently, we’re treating them as the rule, not the exception.

The network > talent reality is troubling in other ways too. By optimizing for ability to network over ability to do the job, many highly talented people are getting missed, many less talented people (who are superior networkers) are getting hired, and many hiring processes are horribly biased, as I’ve written about in the past. These biases perpetuate the sentiment of exclusion that many feel. While this chorus of exclusion is being sung the loudest by women and minorities, I’d argue that the problem is far deeper than race or gender discrimination alone. Whether intentionally or not, what employers are doing is creating a “clubby” type of environment where personal connections and friend status have become more important than talent, ability and passion for the job. 

In perverse ways, this structure is even celebrated in Silicon Valley. People are often described as “ex-Google” or part of the “PayPal Mafia” or some similar company affiliation. People from those groups are seen to be more talented, more capable, and more employable than others irrespective of their actual contributions at their affiliated companies, simply due to the name recognition. On the other hand, non-mafia members — irrespective of actual talent and abilities — are viewed with skepticism or not considered at all. 

If we play all this out, what we’re doing is creating a 2-class system: the connected and the not connected. The not-connected people follow the rules and apply for jobs via online job boards believing that they will be reviewed fairly and equitably. Meanwhile, the connected people know that rules don’t really matter. Rather than “apply” for the job, they “connect” with someone at the company in an effort to network their way to the hiring manager or talent manager. The intention of this activity is to get some sort of preferential insider status and outmaneuver the people who went to the trouble of applying.

I don’t blame the candidates who do this. They’re only acting in their own self interest, and I would do the same thing if I were them because it’s more effective. But as employers, we need to realize a few things. First, by allowing this sort of thing, we’re perpetuating the clubby, exclusive, insiders system of hiring that results in an unequal playing field. Second, candidates are trying to “hack” the hiring process in the first place because the user experience of the current system is so bad. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this approach does NOT produce the best candidates. It merely produces those candidates that are well-connected.

Part 2: Job descriptions are non-descript

When we started Varsidee, we did a lot of customer development with professionals in an effort to understand the degree of interest a typical job description generated about a company and the opportunity to work there. We asked people, “on a scale of 1–10, how well does the average job description motivate you to want to apply for the position?”

The highest number ANY respondent gave us was 3! 

Note: Several people lobbied for answering with a negative number

When you look at the typical job description, most don’t describe the job at all. They also don’t sufficiently motivate a candidate to want the opportunity. Instead, they’re littered with “requirements” that a talent manager or hiring manager has arbitrarily inserted.

• Must have 5 years of experience building and optimizing marketing campaigns

Does this mean that if I have 4.5 years of experience that I’m incapable of doing the job and shouldn’t apply? What about 4? What about 3.5? If you asked most talent managers that question, you’d often get a “oh, just go ahead and apply anyway” response. If that’s what they’ll tell you, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of listing it as a requirement then?

The reality is most so-called “requirements” are irrelevant to someone’s ability to perform the tasks, duties and responsibilities of the job anyway. They appear on job descriptions for no better reason than because someone decided to put them there.

Why would I want to work at your company when I don’t even know what I’ll be doing there if hired?

Put yourself in the role of the professional: via some means they have arrived at your job description and are now reviewing it. The first thing they are thinking is “If I were to make this change in my life, and go work for this company, what would it be like? What would I do during an average day? During an average week? What would you offer to pay me in exchange for me doing these things?” 

The person is trying to visualize themselves in this new job (yours), but they can’t because your job description is pretty non-descript when it comes to explaining such details. “What will my workspace look like? Will I have a Mac or PC? Does this company use Slack, Asana, Jira or something else? Will I build marketing landing pages myself, or does this company have a designer that does that whom I’ll collaborate with? How will my performance be evaluated? What options will there be for getting promoted, and when?”

This list of questions and curiosities could be endless, but the point isn’t to answer ALL of them. It’s to answer MORE of them. Right now, job descriptions answer NONE of them, and as a result, candidates can’t visualize themselves in the job. If a candidate can’t visualize themselves doing your job, should you be surprised that they’re not taking steps to apply for it? I’m certainly not

Part 1: It’s not my job. In fact, it’s no one’s job.

When you think Nordstrom, you think customer service. When you think Zappos, you think customer service. When you think Apple Store, you think customer service. These companies — each in their own way — pride themselves on delivering customer service that is markedly better than their competitors. In fact, I’d go so far to say (and so would they) that customer service is a competitive advantage that each posseses.

Now here’s a thought exercise: Who’s the Nordstrom, Zappos or Apple of candidate experience?

Exactly! You don’t know and neither do I. And the reason neither of us knows is that very, very few companies even think of hiring as an experience at all.

Employers care deeply about user experience, but they don’t give a hoot about candidate experience

Let’s stick with tech companies since that’s what I know best. As product managers & designers, we go to INSANE lengths to rethink a workflow so we can save a single click! We know that each of those clicks we can eliminate, each of those page reloads we can avoid, each of those process steps we can remove, all of that effort makes the difference between a great product and one that’s, well, “meh” or even worse, one that causes user frustration. It may sound trivial to you, but to a product manager or designer, this stuff is religion.

But the candidate experience has no such preacher. No one cares. And the reason no one cares is no has to care. Just as “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”, no one ever got fired for allowing a bad candidate experience to exist. There is no champion focusing her time on making the hiring process better, and if we’re serious about improving the candidate experience, there needs to be.

If all else fails, blame the candidates

If a company designs a product that users find frustrating and choose not to use, the first person who has to answer for the product’s failings is the product manager (yes I’m simplifying this a bit, but stay with me). Applying that logic to hiring, we would assume that the Talent Manager would have to answer for a hiring experience that caused similar frustration and a lack of candidates, right?

Nope! 

Talent managers have managed to convince us that it’s the candidate’s fault that their hiring process produced poor results, referring to these candidates as “passive” candidates. It’s pretty remarkable “spin” when you think about it: rather than accepting blame for a process that isn’t sufficiently engaging potential employees and getting them to apply, find a way to shift the blame to those people by implying that the problems stem from their passivity rather than your system’s lack of appeal.

I wonder what would happen if a sales manager said to the CEO, “gee, it’s not my fault sales are down, there are a lot of “passive customers.”

In fairness to talent managers who are reading this right now and cursing me, the problem isn’t entirely your fault. Many of you have tried to implement change, but haven’t gotten authority to do so from company leadership, or have in other ways been stymied internally. Furthermore, many of you would define passive candidates differently than I just did. You’d say that these people are happily employed at their current companies, and not “actively” looking for something new. Fair enough, but that only accounts for some of them. The research shows that many people are casually looking around to see what else is out there, but choosing not to go to the trouble of applying. It’s these people that I’m referring to, and the reality is that if the experience of applying were better designed, these people would apply. They’re not because it’s not.

We keep talking about diversity. We should be talking about bias.

This article originally appeared on medium.com on October 29, 2015

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There has been a LOT of talk about diversity within the workforces of technology companies as of late. Tim Cook has spoken out on this issue. Google, Slack and others have released diversity reports detailing the gender ratios and ethnicities of their employees. Article after article after article has come out talking about diversity.

But they’re all missing the point. And we’re worse off for it.

Diversity shouldn’t be our goal. Equal opportunity should be.

Let me explain. Most of the articles I’ve read on the subject of diversity continue to emphasize diversity for diversity’s sake. They discuss what’s being done to get more women into tech, or attract more minorities, or close the age gap. The proponents of these objectives certainly mean well, and believe that continued advocacy for disaffected people and protected classes will make the situation better. However they are missing a key point:emphasizing that employers try harder to hire people in disaffected groups because they are in a disaffected group degrades the actual talents and skills those people have.

It’s like saying to some female applicant “oh, you may be a great programmer, but the reason we really want to hire you for this job is because you’re a woman and you check a box on some diversity report that we’ll put out.”

Do we really believe that there are so few talented female programmers that could get the job on their own merits and talents if given the chance that we need to provide some artificial incentive?

I’m not buying that for a minute. There are talented people everywhere. Butmost employers aren’t seeing people’s talents because they aren’t even looking for them. Instead they’re looking for “credentials” (more on that in a minute) and those credentials are what trigger biases.

If we’re serious about creating diverse workforces — and we should be — this has to change. And it has to change for everyone, not just women or minorities or people over 40. The reason companies lack diversity has nothing to do with the absence of talent. It has everything to do with the presence of bias.

This isn’t a talent problem, it’s a bias problem.

The moment a company accepts a resume as the first step in their hiring process, they have already FAILED because the resume contains bias triggering information. If we want to get rid of bias, we have to start with the resume.

Names, Names, Names

If I told you there were four applicants for a job named Alison, Chamiqua, Venkat and Anatoly, I’ll bet the instant you just read those names an image of who each person was formed in your mind. I’ll bet you saw Alison as a Caucasian woman, Chamiqua as a Black woman, Venkat as an Indian man, and Anatoly as a Russian man. Your mental picture formed because of “unconscious bias” and every single one of us does it, without even realizing that we do. That’s why it’s called unconscious bias and there’s no avoiding it. It’s human nature.

Where’d you go to college?

We do the exact same thing with college names. If I told you one candidate went to Community College, one went to Stanford, one dropped out of college and another went to Florida State, I’ll bet you immediately honed in on the Stanford grad as the most impressive. Name recognition triggers association and association triggers preference and bias. This isn’t groundbreaking stuff; the entire advertising industry is built on the idea of name recognition and association of a need to a name. These biases areunconscious so no amount of saying “I don’t do that” gets around the problem. You are doing it, you just don’t realize it.

You worked where?

As should be obvious by now, names trigger biases, and the names of former employers are no exception. In fact, they might be the most biasing of all. If one candidate worked at Google, another at Acme, Inc, another is unemployed and the last works at Safeway, I’ll bet you were impressed with the Google employee, scared off by the unemployed person, unsure about the person from Acme, Inc, and bewildered by the person from Safeway (what do groceries have to do with tech?). The name of a former employer has absolutely nothing to do with the talent of the candidate, yet we assume it does because of name recognition. We assume that people who worked at iconic employers whose names we recognize must be more talented than people who worked at companies we haven’t heard of, or worse, companies unrelated to ours, or worse still, people who aren’t working at all.

The resume and bias are forever joined at the hip

The primary objective of a resume is to list these names, and each of them triggers a bias. Whether we realize it or not, as employers we’re aggregating those biases to form an opinion about a candidate before we’ve done a single thing to evaluate how talented or capable they might be or how well they might “fit” on our team. So if our hiring process starts with a resume, we might as well put up a sign that says “Apply here, we’re really biased.” You simply cannot have one without the other.

We think we’re looking for talent. What we’re actually doing is looking for credentials.

Besides a person’s name, each and every thing they write on a resume is a credential. Employers. Titles. Degrees. Skillsets. Everything. And it’s no accident. The entire purpose of a resume is to list all these credentials, and candidates go to great pains to do so in the hopes that we as employers will review them favorably.

Here’s the reality: when a human screens a resume, research has shown they spend a grand total of six seconds looking at it, on average. Yes, six.

What do you think they’re spending those 6 seconds looking for?

If you said “talent” you haven’t been paying attention. No, screeners are only interested in credentials (i.e. names), because that’s what the candidate has provided in the form of a resume, and frankly that’s about all anyone couldreasonably absorb about a candidate in only six seconds. As we’ve seen, every credential listed, as well as the name of the person and their gender triggers a bias.

What if we could design a hiring method that was free of bias, and was completely equal opportunity? What would that look like?

I’ll give you my answer to this below, but admittedly I’m biased. (Get it, play on words? Yeah, hopefully you got it and smiled a bit).

Here are 3 things we could do right now to get rid of bias in hiring, and make things truly equal opportunity:

- Evaluate talent as the first step: Rather than asking candidates to send in their resume, we’d ask them to do something to demonstrate their talents, skills and abilities. We’d give them an assignment (or even several assignments) related to the job, and assess their performance on that assignment. Simple.
- Open to everyone: We’d make the assignment open to anyone who wanted to apply, irrespective of degree status or years of experience. We can do this by leaving the “requirements” off of a job description. The requirements for the job should be obvious: that you can DO it!
- Apply anonymously: When a candidate applied, we’d remove their name so the only thing an employer would get to see would be the work product on the assignments. Names trigger biases, and those biases are human nature. We can’t remove human nature, but we can remove the names. No names = no biases.

If we did just these three things, a lot of bias would go away and I am 100% convinced we would see a lot more diversity as a result. But it wouldn’t be diversity for diversity’s sake. It would be diversity for talent’s sake.

We don’t need to (and should not) artificially engineer diversity into our workforce. Diversity should be a consequence of a truly equal opportunity hiring system. Let me repeat that because it’s a key point:

Diversity should be a consequence of a truly equal opportunity hiring system.

And experience shows it can be. Auditions for symphony orchestra membersused to be done in full view of the judges, and mostly men were selected. But when the auditions introduced a screen that prevented judges seeingwho was playing, an immediate result was a huge increase in the percentage of women that were selected. This really works.

We’ve spent long enough talking about diversity. We should be talking about bias. If we want to actually do something about diversity, we can start by getting rid of bias, and we can only do that by getting rid of the resume.

Trevor Goss is Cofounder & CEO of Varsidee, software that lets employers assess talented professionals by creating work sample projects called Tryouts. He is leading a movement to change the way companies identify and assess talent, so they can build more effective teams.