Recruiting

I used to head up recruiting and PR for FutureAdvisor, a fast-growing investment advisor managing hundreds of millions in investments from our offices in San Francisco. Their revenue and assets under management have both grown by 18 times in the last year, which isn’t bad even by Silicon Valley standards, and their staff has more than doubled. In my time there, I saw thousands of job applications, and threw thousands away.

Last year, I sponsored an event called Staffup Weekend, brought an insightful man named Brooke Allen to San Francisco to run it, and supported Deborah Branscum as she wrote a story about the event for Medium. I’m not going to retell that story, but I would like to dig a little deeper into precisely what’s broken about the job market, and how it might be fixed.

Dakota Younger, founder and CEO of Boon, explains the psychological barriers to building an effective referral program and how to overcome them.

Anyone involved in hiring knows that at its heart there is a painful process, repeated over and over. Rejection hurts on the receiving end, and it’s not all that fun to dish out every day, believe me. To reject someone is to disappoint them, which is not something we’re brought up to enjoy.

It has become abundantly clear that higher education is not effectively creating employees who are job-ready, according to business leaders anyway. Are we at a pivotal moment where the education model needs to fundamentally adjust to an ever-changing job market that requires new and different skills at a scary fast pace? How can big data help us create better job training models? How will new education solutions like Coursera, Udacity, and Codefights play out in the future? These questions are more on this episode of the Boon podcast.