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.