While India adds a million people to its job market every month and Africa is set to add more people to its workforce by 2020 than the rest of the world combined, over half of emerging market companies still can’t fill the roles they have open. Startups consistently rank talent acquisition as a top barrier to growth. What gives?
I saw this dilemma firsthand while investing in financial technology startups around the world for the last five years, as the founder of seed venture fund Accion Venture Lab. Once an investment was closed and cash was in the bank, the company’s problem shifted from not having financial capital to not having the human capital they needed to be successful.
The picture is even bleaker on the jobseeker’s side. Even skilled professionals often can’t get hired because they didn’t go to the “right” school, didn’t work at the “right” company, don’t know the “right” people, or fall victim to unfair biases during the application process. They are left lobbing their CV into job board black holes, never able to show potential employers what they can do.
This needs to change. We believe that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. What often appears to be a lack of talent supply in markets is more often a failure of not knowing where to look or what to look for. At Shortlist, we want to level the job search playing field, shifting the recruiting paradigm from one based on pedigree and prejudice to a new version grounded in competency and potential.
How are we doing it?
1. Bringing intelligence to technology
Technology has burst on the scene to flatten access to job opportunities and broaden candidate pools (thank you LinkedIn and Monster). But without intelligent intermediation, more tech creates more noise, more decision fatigue, more work, and more despair for companies and jobseekers — not better outcomes. Just ask any of our employers who have received 2,000+ applications to a single job posting.
We combine a chatbot questionnaire with online assessments and phone screens to help us decide who is most likely to be great in a job. This filtering layer combines technology, data, and a human touch to ensure that talented candidates don’t slip through the cracks, particularly those who risk being overlooked based on CV alone.
2. Creating signals beyond the CV
Most companies have been hiring the same way for centuries (seriously): source and skim a lot of CVs, speak with some of the candidates, then make a decision — and regret those decisions more often than they would like. Not only is it hard to discern genuine ability and fit through a CV and unstructured interview alone, but this mode of decision-making is also often riddled with bias and prejudice.
Companies often do this not because they think it’s best, but because, frankly, there’s nothing else to go on. It’s like the joke about the economist looking for his keys under a streetlamp, not because that’s where he lost his keys, but because that’s where the light is better. At Shortlist, we engage candidates digitally to user-generate more accurate signals. We screen not only for basic experience fit but layer on additional data points for cognitive ability, competencies, and motivation. To be Shortlisted for a job, it’s more important to show us what you can do, not just tell us what you’ve done.
3. Refocusing on what matters
Let’s be clear: many people who went to great schools and worked at impressive companies are great and impressive. But for the vast majority of job-seekers, particularly in emerging markets like India and Kenya (where we work), prior experience paints an incomplete and often misleading picture of a candidate’s capabilities.
Schooling and subsequent corporate experience is — in all countries — more often determined by “birth lottery” than by merit. And we all hold biases, positive or negative, about certain schools or corporate brands. Looking past pedigree and refocusing on potential is the first step towards a world where everyone gets a shot at fulfilling professional experiences. Further, reconceiving the nature and focus of talent screening matters not only for hiring fairness, but also for hiring effectiveness. Building a team based on merit and performance instead of connections and pedigree is not only the right thing to do — it’s good for the bottom line.
The Shortlist mission
At Shortlist, we are on a mission to unlock professional potential and help great companies succeed in building great teams. We’re starting with a new way to match talent with opportunity, but we’re just getting started.
We want to level the talent playing field, but we can’t do it alone! We want to learn from each of you about what you think works to find and understand great talent, and what makes a great team. Visit our website, email us, or tweet at us — we’d love to talk with you about how we can help you hire. We’ll be using this blog as one of the ways we share the ideas behind what we do and how we do it, so stay tuned…
