1 post tagged Job

The job application process for graduating college students is antiquated and inefficient. A majority of interviews and hiring is done through college career services and HR/recruiting departments from various firms.  Students submit a copy of their resume and cover letter through email, or whatever online service their college uses, and the HR people at these respective firms get to work filtering through stacks of resumes, which for the most part, all look the same.

This past weekend I was talking to some friends about the hiring practices at their firms. They’re first year analysts at a top-tier management consultant firm and investment bank, and listening to their stories about college applicants was a little disturbing.  Part of their job is filtering through applications from their alma mater, weeding out the riff raff, conducting interviews, and making hire decisions for summer analysts and incoming first-years.  On paper, a majority of applicants look the same: 3.7+ GPAs, a quantitative or analytical major, a couple extracurriculars, maybe some relevant background experience, and that’s about it.  I asked them how they decide who gets the job and who doesn’t.  Obviously, successful applicants make a good and lasting impression in an interview, but they also have other unique traits like “food adventurer,” or “fluent in German, Japanese, and Tagalog.”  These are the deciding characteristics.  It matters if you have a passion for exotic cuisine or if you’ve helped build houses and plant trees in the middle of Indonesia.  All in all, the whole hiring process is tedious, and it’s inevitable that some of the best applicants are overlooked.  It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re looking at thousands of black and white pieces of paper, all of which look almost exactly alike.  It’s an archaic system.

There has been a growing sentiment in the tech community that if you’re serious about your work, you need to establish an online presence.  Chris Dixon talks about it all the time.  USV hires their analysts by asking for a link to their online hub.  The URL is replacing the standard resume.  It’s a growing practice and it carries significant merit. I’d argue that this approach to hiring and establishing an online persona should be extended to all industries.  If you’re applying for a job, you’re going to be Googled, and when someone Googles you, they should find something you’re proud of.

Everyone should get serious about establishing an online hub you can proudly point to. It can take countless forms: LinkedIn, a blog, Facebook, Twitter, online portfolio, etc. I’ve chosen to make my blog my hub with spokes reaching out to Twitter (where I pass along articles I like) and LinkedIn (somewhat of a formal profile).  I can confidently point to my blog and say that you’ll get a glimpse into what I’m really like as a person. You can see the way I think, the things that interest me, and get a topline idea of what I’ve done throughout the years.

Most hiring practices are impractical.  Some allstars are overlooked, and some undeserving people land gigs.  A step towards rectifying the situation is pointing to an online destination that helps show who you are.  If you’re an exotic food junkie, prove it!  Show me a picture of the seahorse your ate, or the blog entry about the time you cooked rattlesnake.  If you love film, I want to hear about your favorite westerns. Resumes are too easy to bullshit.  (You can argue it’s easy to bullshit an online hub, but if you’re putting information out to the public that isn’t true or doesn’t reflect who you really are, someone is going to inevitably call you out on it and it won’t be pretty.) Creating an online identity that represents who you are as a person is more useful than one page of paper listing your GPA and past internships.  It also provides an opportunity to show, not tell, what really gets you going.  You don’t need to be tech savvy to establish you’re online hub, you don’t need to be a programmer, and you don’t need to have artistic design chops.  The tools are out there and they’re easy to use (Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Twitter are SIMPLE!). I think if more people approached hiring, job searching, and resume creation by establishing an online hub, they’ll be much happier with the end result.