This is the third blog post (read the first "You Are More than Your Resume" here and the second "We Want to Help Other Companies Grow here) in a series where I'll be sharing why we're building Entelo. We'll be launching soon and we thought it was time to share a little bit more about our motivations. We feel that the world of employment and hiring is changing and many tools of the past are not adequate for the future.
In this third post, I'll cover something that's bit theoretical but no less important in explaining why we're building Entelo. An interesting shift is taking place in how great companies are being built: opportunity is being routed to the right talent rather than the other way around.
Let's think about that for a second. Historically, the impetus has been on employees to find the right job. People would look at the classified ads section of their local newspaper or, with the advent of the Internet, at job boards or corporate websites searching for the right position. While some opportunities were routed to talent (often through personal and professional networks), employees were largely responsible for finding new opportunities.
But something started to shift with the advent of the Net. Millions of resumes floated around the web through sites like Monster, Dice, CareerBuilder and others. Resumes became searchable by recruiters looking for top talent. Then came LinkedIn and all of a sudden, it seemed like everyone in the world had a resume of sorts that was online and (mostly...) freely accessible. But of course that was only the start as the rise of Facebook and Twitter and professional communities like Github, Stack Overflow, Dribbble, Quora and others have made talent more visible than ever before. Within the last five years, literally billions of social profiles have been created that contain information related to a person's professional life and interests.
With the explosion of data, we're beginning to step into a new era. It's an era in which talent is more visible than it has ever been. Looking for engineers? Github has million of profiles. Designers? Dribbble, Behance, Forrst, deviantART, Carbonmade have you covered. Accountants? Apparently you can now do that on Proformative. Biologists? Maybe Benchling? Academics? Try Academia.edu or ResearchGate. Do you see where we're going with this?
What does this trend indicate? That it's only a matter of time before routing opportunity to talent becomes easier than it's ever been. Tools to search this data will become more powerful and it's our goal to build the most powerful one (try us out and let us know how you think we're doing!). We think that this is incredibly important for several reasons.
First, opportunity being routed to talent makes for a more effective labor market. Right now, the labor market is characterized by a tremendous amount of inefficiency. As systems for routing the right jobs to the right talent improve, this friction is reduced. Will this help the economy? We think that it will in the same way that increased visibility and transparency generally help markets function better.
Second, talented individuals everywhere can get discovered, thereby making the labor market more meritocratic. This is the American Idol-ization of the employment market. Today, platforms like American Idol and YouTube enable talented singers to be discovered based on their talent. A generation ago, this was far less possible. Sites like Github and Dribbble present the same opportunity. You no longer need to go to Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT or Carnegie Mellon or have tons of social capital to get on the radar of some of the world's leading technology companies. Do excellent work and the right people and opportunities will find you.
Third, if done properly, it's actually an enjoyable experience for those being recruited. The "if done properly" part is key here. Because, in large part, it's not being done properly today. Recruiters are armed with too little info and tools that aren't powerful enough and therefore the recruiting "spray and pray" mentality (where recruiters send hundreds of messages to people simply because they match a keyword in their open job req) rules the day. But as recruiters get better tools, they'll have an opportunity to send better-matched opportunities to interested candidates. That's our hope at least, and we spend the better part of our days working on it.
We're still early in the game and there's still much work to be done of course. But we're excited by the wave of new companies that are tackling this challenge. We envision a world in which talent can be found in more and more innovative ways. We're happy to spend our days working on this challenge and while there's a long way to go before this trend will play out fully, it will be fun to look back one day and say "Remember when..."