By: Brian Egge

In the mid 1990′s the advent of the Internet promised to make our lives easier and markets more efficient. The availability of information and low transaction costs made sites like eBay and Amazon possible, and in turn changed many primary and secondary markets. The Internet has also had a large effect on labor markets; it has allowed people to work from home, and also allowed work to be performed where and when it’s most economical. Some of the most interesting changes have occurred only in the last few years.

When Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com, he decided to start by selling books because there were so many existing databases of book information. Taking the existing databases of standardized products, and offering a more efficient market for them, allowed Amazon to make an economic profit. The revenue for a website which improves the efficiency of labor markets stands to be larger than any of the existing marketplaces on the Internet.

In a perfectly competitive market, each participant is a price taker and has no influence over the price of the product it buys or sells. One of the requirements for a competitive market is homogeneous products. A product, like a new book or a bond, is homogeneous because every unit is alike. As no two people are alike, it makes it difficult for buyers and sellers or employers and employees to agree on a rate and transact business. The easier the output is measured, or the more quantifiable the skill, the easier it is for markets to become competitive. Some jobs, such as sales, have quantifiable outputs, and pay is often tied directly to the revenue produced. While the output of many knowledge based jobs is difficult to quantify, the knowledge and skills required can often be quantified and measured. Various industry certifications exist to help validate a candidate’s skill, though it varies to the extent in which employers rely on these measures.

For a while now, sites like eLance.com have attempted to connect buyers and providers, or employers and employees.  The majority of the projects on these sites ask for bids for a specific project. One of the difficulties with the project based approach is again the homogeneity.  Each project is unique as is each provider (or worker). This results in an increase in higher transaction costs and requires parties to bid on less than perfect information. Each bidder has to attempt to estimate the time the project will take and convert that into their rate. If bidders were to spend 25% of their time bidding on projects, that time would be added to the cost of the average project. Additionally, one often has the problem of the winner’s paradox. That is, the bidder who submits the lowest bid and ‘wins’ the project is also probably the same bidder who either underestimated the project time or has the least skill to complete the project. The buyer doesn’t have to accept the lowest bid, but instead evaluates each bid and may look at the provider’s history and background will contribute to their choice. While this can help prevent ‘a race to the bottom,’ it increases the transaction cost even further. The time the buyer spends evaluating each bid adds to the transaction cost as well.

One way of reducing the transaction cost is to agree on a time based rate. Traditionally, most employers pay either an hourly wage or an annual salary. If each time a boss wanted to worker to do something they had to negotiate a fixed price, huge amounts of time would be wasted estimating and negotiating. This model is very easy to implement in a brick and mortar setting, where employees may time in using a time card, or for call centers where when you’re on the phone, you considered to be working. The site oDesk.com is working on changing this, and allowing people to work remotely and charge an hourly rate. The solution oDesk has come up with is for workers to run a program on their computer which takes a screenshot about every 10 minutes, while the worker is signed in to a project. At the end of the day, the worker can remove screenshots during periods that they weren’t working, and their employer doesn’t get billed for them. On oDesk, a provider can offer their service, say Ruby on Rails programming, at a fixed hourly rate. Buyers can then post projects and accept bids, or directly contact a worker at their posted rate. This creates a double sided auction, a more homogeneous offering, and results in lower transaction costs.

In a market, if one party has more information than the other this can create an advantage to the person with more information. If the information asymmetry is too large, it will discourage trading. Jewelers allow customers to get an independent appraisal of a potential purchase, not because they want to be nice, but they want to reduce the information asymmetry just enough to encourage trading to occur. Consumers in this situation recognize they have virtually no ability to price a product, and the dealer has near perfect information. Allowing for a third party appraisal gives the consumer enough information so they will trade, but still gives the dealer plenty of room to make a profit. Outside of government jobs, salary information is usually kept fairly secret, and generally the employer has more information than the employee. Many websites and salary surveys have attempted to gather this information, but the results they gather are incomplete at best. The website oDesk.com makes all transaction information publicly available. A provider can see what a buyer has paid other people for similar work, and has visibility into the market as a whole. This also benefits the buyers, by seeing their earnings history. While, it can be a bit uncomfortable at times, the market as a whole becomes more efficient. Not only can skills and projects be priced better, but it allows the market to adapt to changes in supply and demand. When the iPhone SDK was first released, there was a shortage of workers with the skill to create apps. As the information became known – through higher wages paid to those with the skill – many people around the world taught themselves the required skill.

The Internet has greatly reduced many of the barriers to entry/exit the labor market. Generally, it’s easier for the suppliers (employers) to enter and exit the market. An employer simply needs a credit card and some work to be done to enter the market. For most firms, labor is a variable cost, but property and equipment are fixed. When sourcing work online, generally the provider has their own office space and equipment. This allows firms to rapidly enter and exit the market, and means they can shutdown quickly in the event their average total cost exceeds the price of their product. At the same time, it allows employees to rapidly enter and exit the market. While there is some barrier, as buyers prefer providers with longer histories, it generally takes only a short while to setup an employee profile. Unemployment figures might make people assume that the supply of workers fixed, but it reality it is quite elastic. Consider a stay at home mom who as a four year degree. Her indifference curve might make her willing to work part time if she can do so at home and earn more than $30 an hour. If the demand of a skill like medical insurance processing causes wages to move into this range, then she will enter the market. If, absent any regulation or unions, there are 10 workers for nine jobs, the wage for the workers will drop to the point in which one of them decides they would rather not work than accept the offered wage. The more elastic the supply of workers, the better off those who are working will be.

The same low barriers to entry/exit in the online labor market also discourage larger employers and higher paying jobs. First, it is not easy to filter the supply of workers and determine who is serious and capable about working, and who is not. Despite the large number of online job sites, recruiters or head-hunters are still used by employers, and provide an important benefit. Qualifying and filtering applicants is time consuming and certainly a skill. Finding someone who can commit to working for 2000+ hours in a year can be difficult to do, and is even more difficult online. This causes employers who want long term work to avoid looking at sites like oDesk and eLance, and also means it’s difficult to find workers there. The company which runs oDesk.com hires most of its employees as full time non-telecommute positions.

In an efficient market transactions are costless. Even if costs related to non-homogeneity are minimized, there are many other exogenous costs. These costs create a gap between the supply and demand curve, and causes less trading or employment to occur than would otherwise. Both employers and employees pay taxes, and the amount of taxes largely depends on where there are physically located. This gives an advantage to firms who choose to locate themselves in a lower tax area, and also to employees whose location offers lower taxes. For example, News Corp relocated itself from Australia to the USA largely due to the lower corporate taxes. In general, this is good, as it can encourage governments to find other methods of raising revenue other than income and corporate taxes. oDesk charges a 10% transaction fee on all payments going through the site. Other sites charge listing fees and one may be exposed to exchange rate fees or other costs. When transaction costs are low, it makes it possible to profit from arbitrage opportunities. Subcontracting work out is an arbitrage. One can simultaneously change a higher rate for the services for which one pays for at a lower rate. The less friction involved in the transaction, the easier this is to do. The existence of these parties who are neither have work nor have employees, but rather make money by either connecting buyer and sellers as recruiters do, or by being an intermediary as consultancies and agencies do, can have the positive effect of increasing liquidity.

I’ve used the site oDesk.com to find workers to help me with design and programming projects. The hourly model, salary transparency, low barrier to entry, and low transaction costs make it one of the better online marketplaces for employers and employees to meet. The site is most suited for employers with small projects and defined work, and for employees who value working where and when they want. The efficiency gains being made by sites like oDesk and it’s competitors will benefit employers and employees alike and both traditional jobs as well as jobs performed online.

David said, “Every day, I want working here to be your best option.” David is the founder of the company I work for, and we were discussing what would go into my employment contract. It is standard, in this industry, for people in my position to have two year non-compete clauses, which mean that if I quit the job, I could not work at what I do for two years.

I did not want to have such a clause, but the amazing thing was that David did not want me to either. He and I both knew how important it is to know that you choose to do what you do, not that you are doing it because you have no choice. That conversation took place 15 years ago. I’m still here, and happy, even though I have never worked at a place where it is easier to go somewhere else.

Most people aren’t bound by a clause in a contract. Their constraints come from an inability to create choices for themselves. Or, they can’t see the options staring them in the face. During hard times, they will take the first job that comes along because they feel they have no choice. When times get better, they will jump at the first opportunity to jump ship, without doing the due diligence it takes to determine if they will be better off. Finally, they have a choice, so they feel compelled to move, discounting the value of the choice to stay put, or mustering the courage to ask for something better of from the boss.

The ironic thing is that almost all employers require that you be good at finding a job before they will hire you.

The difference is that, I don’t require you to be good at it before we first meet.

I went to a jobs fair, not to find work, but to interview HR people and recruiters to learn how to better help NSoW readers.

I asked the head of HR for a large firm, “What do you look for in a job candidate?”

“I want a well formatted resume, and their cover letter must be well written. They must be good at presenting themselves in a positive light. They must know all about our business and our needs. They need to look sharp; dress for the part. They need to be personable; at ease in the interview.”

“They need to be good at finding a job.”

“Correct.”

“And they have to know how to sell themselves?”

“That’s right.”

“Is it a sales job?”

“No. We’re hiring engineers.”

“But I don’t get it.” I was astonished. “Most good engineers I know are nothing like that; they are introverts, they don’t look you in the eye, they don’t have a business sense, they can’t sell for beans, and they dress like slobs. They have spent their time honing their engineering skills, not their people skills. And the last thing I think you’d need your engineers to be good at is finding someone else to work for.”

Suddenly he remembered he had to do something else, and the conversation came to a screeching halt.

I bet if I hired engineers the way he does, I wouldn’t get the best engineers, I’d get the best people at convincing me they are. And, they will leave because it is easier for them to convince someone else somewhere else, than to actually be a good engineer for me.

So, before I hire you, I want you to be good at most of what I need you to do. And be a good enough student to learn the rest. If you are good at finding a job, I won’t hold it against you, but if you aren’t, let’s work on that.

First you need to be good at creating choices before you and I can determine if working for me is your best choice.

But there is another reason to be good at it.

The skills you need to be good at finding a job are skills you need to be maximally effective at doing the work I want you to do.

Let’s take networking, for example. Most “networkers” give networking a bad name. When they lose their jobs, your acquaintenances suddenly want to become your best friends. They will have discovered a fascination with how well your children are doing. Yet, if they land a job by December, they won’t return your Christmas card.

That’s not what networking is all about. It is about making deposits in the Karma Bank. It’s about being useful to others, and not keeping score. And, it’s about asking for help, but only from people who can give it, in a way that doesn’t piss them off, and that allows them to bow out gracefully. It’s about being someone people want to spend time with, not about spending people’s time.

Almost all the people I know are interesting, and charming , and will help you if they can. But when they become unemployed, they withdraw and become depressed and are of little use to anyone. Or they become self-centered, shallow, and pushy – in short, they become their own worst image of a bad salesman. Both these reactions are natural, common, and forgivable. But would you want to hire someone like that? I don’t.

Most employers want to hire you only if you are currently working somewhere else and already doing what they want done. They do this because they they think that if your boss wants you, they probably do too. They also do it because the employed come with less expressed baggage than the unemployed.

But there are downsides for me in hiring someone currently doing what I want.

I like to feel that working for me will be a step up for you. If you are coming from the unemployment line, that’s easy. And if you don’t work out, I want to be able to send you back, without you being worse off. Few employers will t take you back, but the unemployment line will.

Also, if you want to work for me doing the same thing you are unhappy doing for someone else, perhaps the problem is that the work and you aren’t a good fit. Or it once was, but now it is time to move on to something new.

In conclusion, you don’t need to be good at creating choices for yourself right now, but I would like you to be by the time we both have to make a decision. You don’t need to be already doing what I need you to do, but if you learn much of what the job entails between now and when I make a decision, I won’t hold that against you. In fact, if you can learn things quickly, it is evidence you’ll easily learn the rest after I hire you. If you learn things with a spirit of adventure, and because you have a love of learning, and not just because I said so, then you are much more likely to be the kind of person I, and others, want to hire.

My approach might seem upside down and backwards, but there is a certain logic to it, and it works for me. It might work for you too, and reap benefits even if I don’t hire you. If I don’t choose you, you will still have given me something very valuable; a choice. I hope I can show you how to create choices too.

- Brooke Allen

PS: Someone just wrote to ask if this some kind of come-on, and if I’m going to try to sell training to you. The answer is: absolutely not. I do not charge the people who work for me to learn things – I pay for their education. And if someone wants to learn something from me before I hire them, I do not charge for that either. I always wanted to be a teacher, but it doesn’t pay nearly as well as running the business I run with the well-educated people I’ve hired.

I don’t have much turnover in my group. Everyone has been with me for between 5 and 10 years. Sadly, Darla, who I only hired last year, has had to leave. She did wonderful work and we all loved her. And she liked it here too, but something unfortunate came up.

So, I’m hiring again.

We placed an ad in Craigslist.

Within three days, hundreds of people replied. If they were interesting, or they asked good questions, I responded, by sending them everyone’s questions and answers.

If a candidate was still interested, I then invited them to attend one of a few open houses.

We had our first yesterday where I met nine interesting and wonderful people.

I introduced myself, the team, and described the work. Because there are so many of them, and only one job, I suggested that, rather than having them all try to compete to impress me, we all work together to help everyone get a job. That way, I can differentiate the people who are only good at selling from the ones who like to help others.

If you are one of my applicants, please feel free to post a comment about your experience of this way of hiring.

Thanks,

Brooke

(Or anywhere else, for that matter.)

NSoW recently caught up with Ken Caldeira at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a climate scientist working at Carnegie Institution’s Dept. of Global Ecology on the Stanford University campus. He is also a Professor (by courtesy) at Stanford University’s Dept. of Environmental Earth System Science.”

We asked him: What is the best way to get a job in a lab? This is what he wrote:

My experience is that people come in and want to start at the top. They typically come and say “I have these great skills that I want to apply to your research.” Then they get offended when you say that you don’t think you can maximize your marginal return on investment by paying them to do the thing that they were trained to do.

Instead people should come in and listen to what we do and try to figure out what we need that would make our work become more efficient and productive and then offer to do that thing (or those things).

If people are local, they should ask if they can join us for lunch on “nothing special, just ordinary lunch” days. They should come to seminars, ask if they can sit in on group meetings. If you hear some little thing that you would be able to help on, say “Oh, I can do that.” At first, make it something small. Do it fast and well.

Start out by being helpful. Let people discover your skills and abilities. Look for chances to demonstrate your skills and abilities. If you sit in a bunch of meetings and never see an opportunity to make use of your skills, that might be a message.

So, rather than presenting your wonderful skills, show that you can fill a need and improve group productivity. Rather than asking to work, entrain yourself into the life of the lab.

If people really do not like you, they will eventually tell you to go away.

===

I just offered a part-time job to one of my former students who asked to have a social lunch with me and my group. The issue of work never came up at lunch, but when I needed something done I thought, ‘oh, if this student is asking to have lunch with us, she probably is interested and wants to be entrained in our activities, so I will ask her first to she if she wants the part time job.’ Even though there were better students, I didn’t offer the job to them because they did not demonstrate to me the same level of interest or motivation. When I asked her if she wanted part time work, she was very happy.

===

People over-interpret the lack of response to an email as a negative reply. I would recommend interpreting no answer to an email message to mean “I am busy and do not have time to read every incoming email from people I have never heard of.”  Be persistent and keep emailing until you get a response. After the third time, you can start putting in your emails “Please let me know if you want me to stop emailing you.”

===

I hired a post-doc who I never would have hired except that she was so persistent. First she kept on emailing me saying she wanted to work with me. I said that it did not really look like a fit and that I would not pay for her to fly overseas to interview her. She offered to pay her own way to come out for an interview (we usually pay travel for prospective employees). I thought “If she is that motivated, let her come out to visit us.” She was familiar with my work and enthusiastic about how much she wanted to work with me. I thought, if she is so highly motivated to work with me, I should give her a chance. So, I offered her a post-doc position.

===

Most scientists are egomaniacs. Before you interview with a group, read their papers. When you visit, ask the scientists and post-docs about their work. Show that you are familiar with their work and the questions they are addressing. Mostly, you should be asking questions about their work, not telling them about your own.

===

Start the job in the interview. Pretend it is your first day on the job and you are figuring out what you are going to do. Ask the questions you would need to ask in order to start working.

====

When you read a scientific paper and you have a question or comment, email the lead author (or authors) with your comment or question. Be complimentary if you can. Most scientists love it when people are interested in their work and saying nice things.

Chances are, if you are interested in their work, you will bump into them in the course of your career. Having that email contact gives you a connection that could lead to a job, a positive review, etc.

I made an offer of a post-doc position to a graduate student who I never would have offered a job to except that he had emailed me several times over the prior year asking intelligent questions about my papers.

===

Best,

Ken

PS, After this is published, I will probably be saturated with people attempting these strategies on me. Your best bet may be to try these strategies on someone else.

(not just in a science lab)

After reading Ken’s excellent post on how to get a job in a science lab, I just had to ask a few more questions. His answers are applicable to GETTING ANY JOB.

Brooke: Ken, I’ve known you for years – we met in the early 1980′s when we were both working as computer programmers. I went to Wall Street and you went to Graduate School. Did you find that the kind of advice you are giving others worked well for you, when you were starting at the bottom?

Ken: I have developed collaborations with people by following my advice, for example asking to do a small definable piece of a project before I understood the big picture view of what we were doing.

So, maybe I should add one more thing that touches on what I said earlier:  It is good to know people.

Except for my first job on Wall Street and my first post-doc position at Penn State, I have never gotten a job where there was not some sort of personal connection involved. Most people will hear this and say, “Oh, that is unfair. It is all an insider’s club and I am only going to get a job by having personal connections.”

Brooke: How did you make these personal connections?

Ken: Before I answer that, let me say that I got my post-doc position at Penn State by funding myself through a grant from the NSF post-doctoral program. I then contacted somebody I wanted to work with and said, more-or-less, I have my own money, let me come and work for you for free. So, in this sense the only academic job I did not get through personal connections I got for offering to work for free.

I got the interview for my second post-doc position, at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, because a professor in my department who was not my PhD academic adviser had a friend working at Lawrence LIvermore in management position. I sought and got help from people I had met during graduate school. I got my current job because I engaged in various academic service committees (review panels, and so on). My current boss was chair of one of the panels I served on. At the time, I looked at serving on these panels as a community service function with no benefit to myself, but it turns out that the network built up through these service activities helped me to get a job.

And how did I look good to my now-boss working on these panels:  Probably by volunteering to do small tasks and then doing them well. I probably avoided being disruptive and managed to say more thoughtful things than stupid things.

By the way, I don’t think that connections help you get a job so much as help you get an interview.

When I worked in the finance industry (before going back to graduate school) I thought business was all about product and marketing and that science would be all about product and nothing about marketing.

I was wrong.  Whether it is yourself or your science that you are trying make successful, you need two things:

(1) the product needs to be good, and

(2) people need to know about the product.

So, whether it is a scientific career or a specific scientific study, you need to make sure that what you do or produce is worthy of interest and of high quality, and then you have to work to make sure that people know that you and your work exist. Marketing of your career means building up a web of contacts who think highly of you.

Doing things of service to others is one of the ways that people will get to know you and come to think highly of you.

Brooke: Amen.

Interview by Nick Cordodilos of Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work.

Nick Corcodilos, host of AskTheHeadhunter.com and author of How Can I Change Careers? and How to Work with Headhunters. Nick also publishes the free weekly Ask The Headhunter Newsletter.

Brooke Allen is the founder of No Shortage of Work. He recently hired an assistant. This is the story of how he went about it.

Brooke: Yes.

Nick: Does anyone become annoyed?

Brooke: Seldom. I have over 3,000 contacts and there was only one complaint. A guy said he was a senior executive who had been out of work for over a year, and this position was beneath him.

Nick: But, your email asked if I knew of anyone who might be interested; it didn’t presume I should be interested.

Brooke: That’s right. This fellow was only thinking of himself. The second response was from the wealthiest person I know… he’s worth billions… and he said, “I’ll see who I can find.” Later, when I thanked him for his time, he said, “No problem. Everyone has to start somewhere.”

Nick: I bet I can guess why the first guy is unemployed, and the second is wealthy.

Brooke: My words exactly.

Nick: How many responses did you get?

Brooke: Perhaps 20 from the mailing. We also ran an ad on Craigslist, and some people reposted it elsewhere, so within two weeks we had about 200 applicants.

Nick: How did you read all those resumes?

Brooke: I didn’t. For a position like this, I hire for attitude and aptitude, not for resume writing skills.

Nick: What do you care about?

Brooke: Two things – Integrity, people who lack integrity are really bad news.

Nick: And the second thing?

Brooke: The ability to do the work. You taught me that years ago. It’s all about the work.

Nick: Thank you. How do you find out if they can do the work?

Brooke: For every position, you must not be lazy and be able to read and write English. If you sent a resume, I sent you a four page email describing the work, our group, the company, and our industry. I tried to answer the questions I could anticipate, even ones that might put us in a negative light, and I closed by asking you to send me your unanswered questions; if you were interested in the position, you should tell me why. If you didn’t respond, either you were not interested, which is fine, or you are lazy, can’t read, or can’t write, which means you don’t meet the minimum qualifications for the job.

Nick: How many responded?

Brooke: About 40. It always seems to be about 20% no matter what job I’m advertising.

Nick: So, did you read those resumes?

Brooke: I did not. I asked them to give themselves a grade on various skills such as: Spreadsheets, HTML, writing and editing, accounting, programming. Grades were:

E – Expert (could teach others)

G – Good (but could get better with further self-study and practice)

P – Poor (but willing to learn more)

N – No experience at all (but willing to learn)

U – Uninterested in this skill – don’t care to learn, or work in this area

Nick: How did know if they were being honest?

Brooke: I explained that if they told me now they weren’t good at something, we would send them to training after we hired them. But, if they told us they were good, and they weren’t, we wouldn’t hire them no matter what, of if we didn’t figure it out until after we hired them, we’d fire them. I also set a tone of honesty in how I described ourselves – both the good and the bad. Our mantra, “no nasty surprises later” and people like that. Few people want to be dishonest, even to land a job.

Nick: How many people were you down to now?

Brooke: Twenty-seven. I invited them all in for one of three open houses.

Nick: How did people feel about a mass interview like that?

Brooke: I made it clear that we were not going to interview them; they were coming to interview us. When they arrived, I gave them $20 for their time, a book about Wall Street, and we had pizza.

Nick: That must have cost at least $1,000. Where did the money come from?

Brooke: The money came from not paying an H. R. person six figures to tell me how to hire someone. It came from not paying $10,000 to a headhunter to send me resumes that I might have then had to read. It came from not running ads in Monster and CareerBuilder. It came from profits made by the great people I’ve already hired this way. $1,000 is a pittance compared to the cost of hiring the way most people usually do.

Nick: But in this market, people are so desperate for an interview, you don’t need to give them anything.

Brooke: Perhaps, but I wanted to thank them for giving me one of the most important things anyone can ever give.

Nick: What’s that?

Brooke: A choice. Unfortunately, in this market, most people don’t think they have many choices. They have plenty – they just don’t think they do, but that’s another conversation.

Nick: What did you talk about when they came?

Brooke: The work, our company, our mission, and so on. Then they discussed ways they could help each other find work.

Nick: Why do you care if they find work elsewhere?

Brooke: Because I want people to work for me because they choose to, not because they think they have no choice. Besides, if I were them, that is how I would like to be treated.

Nick: Many employers claim to be good to their employees, but why be good to people you haven’t even hired yet?

Brooke: I believe we’re all in this together. For me, hiring someone is getting a bunch of people to help me solve my problem. But, having them work on my problem without caring about theirs seems selfish. I know how I’ll help the person I hire, the trick is to find time-efficient ways to help the people I can’t hire. This approach seems to pay dividends, but I can’t tell you why.

Nick: Does your approach take a lot of time?

Brooke: Not really. Remember, I’m sending out mass mailings and  holding group meetings, so I’m not repeating the same thing with individuals. In essence, I’m having my candidates do the work of determining if we are right for them before they bother me with an application.

Nick: After the open house, how many were still interested?

Brooke: About a dozen. So, now we began reading resumes and their skills inventories. We called in six people to spend half a day learning the job. No interviews in the traditional sense – just work and rubbing elbows.

Nick: Did people prove to be honest about their skill levels?

Brooke: Yes. The important thing we got to see was how well they learned. Some people might be superb at something, but learning the next marginal thing proves difficult. Others didn’t know what we were talking about at first but caught on immediately. I prefer the second type because we’re always operating right on the cusp of not knowing how to do the next thing that needs to be done.

Nick: Then what?

Brooke: We ranked our candidates. Our first choice was a woman I will call Alice – it was almost embarrassing how easy everything was for her. I called her up and said I’d like to make an offer. The salary was $35,000 and was non-negotiable, but I was willing to pay for graduate school. I told her I wanted her to think about whether it was in our best interest to hire her, and I would think if it was in her best interest to accept an offer.

Nick: That is what you talked about, “If the shoe were on the other foot, would you hire me?”

Brooke: Yes, except that we did it by email. I wrote an essay, and so did she. When we were both ready, we swapped.

Nick: And…

Brooke: I had written about three pages. For this to be her best choice, I would have to offer her much more of a career path than I had planned on, so I discussed how that might progress.

Nick: What did she write?

Brooke: She said that she realized that she wasn’t sure what she wanted, and this period of unemployment was a good time to explore. She also said she had developed a moral dilemma in that she saw that taking this job would deprive someone else – and this wasn’t just abstract, she had met those other people. She wanted to withdraw.

So, we decided to work together on some side projects that interest me and that might help her figure out what she wants to do.

We moved to our second choice.

Nick: Who was?

Brooke: I’ll call her Betty. She had created an on-line group so our various job candidates could interact and help each-other find work. Not only did she have the technical skills, she had a good heart.

Nick: A good heart? Is that important to you?

Brooke: Yup, we even put that in a job ad once. People laugh, but I suggest if you are at a big firm, you should try the experiment; populate one department with good-hearted people, and hire only nasty people into another one. Wait a year and see how things go. I can’t afford to do that experiment.

Anyway, Betty called back the next day to say she wanted to withdraw. She wanted to see if she can make her business work. I had my own business like hers once, and I know you can sometimes get in a rut, and it is good to talk to someone. To give up on something she’d worked so hard on might not be her best decision.

Nick: So, in this market, you’ve had your top candidates turn you down!

Brooke: That’s right, I prefer it that way. I hate telling people “no.” Next, I called Darla. Previously, she had told me she was interested in going to grad school for marketing, but now she confessed there was nothing in business school that interested her.

Nick: So, it was on to number four?

Brooke: Not at all. Darla was honest, which is refreshing. Besides, I have an MBA and it was an almost complete waste of time. I asked her, “Is there nothing you want to learn?” and she said, “Lots of things… just not in business school.” So, I asked her to make a list of all the things she wanted to learn, and whether, if she were me, I should pay for her to learn them.

Nick: And she said?

Brooke: Excel-yes, Powerpoint-yes, AutoCAD-Maybe, Watercolor Painting-No, Statistics-maybe, Cooking-no, Creative writing-maybe. The list went on. She was clearly an interesting person.

Then I asked her for what she thought I would want her to learn that she would agree to learn. She listed: Accounting principles, Project management, Adobe Illustrator, Logic, etc.

Nick: So, did you hire her?

Brooke: We went back and forth – I brought up reasons working here wouldn’t be in her best interest and she brought up reasons she might not be our best candidate. We couldn’t find any insurmountable problems, so I made an offer and she accepted. She’s great, there have been surprises, but they have all been positive, at least for me.

Nick: Are you sending her to school?

Brooke: Nope, better than that. She is studying on her own and teaching what she has learned to the rest of us. I buy each of us a copy of the same book, and she presents it. Last month she did writing and next month she does accounting. The fact is we’re all doing this now; someone presents a book each week. If we keep this up for a year, all six of us will have a library of about 50 books and it will cost me less than had I sent Darla to two college courses!

Nick: Why didn’t you think of that earlier?

Brooke: Because I hadn’t met a candidate who didn’t want to go to college. I’ve probably spent $100,000 sending my employees to grad school and I personally have gotten less out of it than six weeks of Darla not going to school.

Nick: Did you ever read Darla’s resume?

Brooke: Near the end. It wasn’t that impressive, a degree in Geography from Thomas Edison State University, which I had never heard of… some experience doing historic preservation. I might have tossed her resume. It wasn’t until after getting to know her that I discovered she’d gone for the first three years at the University of Chicago. There were some other things that might have eliminated her.

Nick: Like what?

Brooke: The attachments to her first email didn’t open, so I asked her to resend them as pdfs. She got lost coming to an open house and so I told her to come to the next one. I think that HR people who play the elimination game might have rejected her for any of those reasons, which aren’t good enough in my opinion.

Nick: Did she write a cover letter?

Brooke: Funny you should ask. A few weeks after I hired her I went back and looked. She was the first person to send a real cover letter, sixteen minutes after my ad ran on Craigslist, and it was perfect. Because my ad said she needed to know how to write, she attached an essay she’d written in college. Then she asked two questions, and I quote:

1. Do you like going to the office every day? I want a job I like going to, so it’s pretty important that current employees are generally happy where they are at your company.

2. What growth is involved in this position? I don’t usually define my life by my current job, but it’s also nice to know I can move up within a company after putting my best efforts forth and being rewarded for such.

How cool is that?

Nick: But you did not read the cover letter when Darla originally sent it?

Brooke: I did read it when it came in, and I added her questions to the list I was accumulating. However, I did not use cover letters as part of my decision making process. If someone was too busy to write a good cover letter, it did not mean they were not a good candidate for me. However, it is such a great pleasure to discover that her cover letter is consistent with the forthright, responsive, and talented person I hired.

Nick: You would recommend people ask their hiring manager if they like going to work every day?

Brooke: Absolutely, although people do lie. I asked that question on an interview at Merrill Lynch once, and the guy told me how great the place was. The following week, I interviewed with the same person, but now he was at the New York Stock Exchange. I asked him why he had changed jobs over the weekend. He said, “Merrill sucked… I hated working there. I couldn’t tell you that last week because I worked for them” That tells you something about a place if part of your job description includes lying.

Nick: You enjoy hiring people, don’t you?

Brooke: Absolutely, it is the best part of my job.

Some people like shopping for a car. I don’t. I like shopping for talent – and people are so much more interesting than cars. Besides, the people I hire this way don’t seem to need much management, so I’ve got to find something to do with my time.

I learn so much, I meet so many wonderful people, and I can usually help some of the people I can’t hire.

Speaking of which, what advice would you have for good people in this awful market?

Nick: Let’s meet soon and discuss this.

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Note: This approach is one that Brooke Allen has used on occassion with his current ventures, and former employers. It does not represent policy or standard practice of any particular organization, and it is not even the only way he has gone about hiring all his employees.