This would work if the employers were also mandated to follow certain rules like no leaving people hanging, hard deadlines, no more than 3 rounds of interviews etc. They should also be required to provide a reason for rejection if the candidate clears the first two rounds.
This would make the job application process unique enough to actually be worth paying 1 $.
This is an interesting addition! Part of the idea behind this is rebuilding a social contract through incentives. The hope is that with fewer applicants, companies would treat them better - but maybe we need to formalize that social contract, especially at first.
I wonder if you could do this indirectly though. Maybe build a Glassdoor competitor for the companies that participate in this? Or have some transparency built in, and share what % of applicants got an interview and average time to hire?
Yes. Exactly. One of the reasons in the current job market that everyone just applies to every job possible is because it is a coin toss. If employers acted like they were equal to their employees by doing even a fraction of what is mentioned above, people would sign up.
I remember applying for a job and being told by the HR why they were rejecting me. That was wayy better than being ghosted. People want to be treated as people not resources.
If it’s a platform, I’d sign up as an employer. If it’s an plugin to the jobs portal on our website, I’d add it.
The number of completely irrelevant applications with cover letters written by AI is mind-numbing. Some of the absolute best looking applications and cover letters were written by people with zero experience working at target, while some of the best employees had the boilerplate resume format you see everywhere else.
Who we hired literally depends on completely random factors like whose resume I read first today, and how many hundreds I just never read because it’s a pain. I wouldn’t trust some HR rep to handle it any more than I’d trust an AI to usefully sort through those resumes.
Sounds like we have our first customer! Glad to get this validated from an employer's perspective - mass applications are not just harmful to applicants, making it hard to find good employees hurts both sides of the matchmaking process.
Reading your comment, I wonder if reduced volume might make it feasible to do more direct hiring - e.g. have the actual person hiring review every resume. For even 50 applications it'd be burdensome, but maybe there's a breakeven point where HR goes from a gatekeeper to a validator that "this person sent a real resume."
I'm really interested in the point you made about application polish not correlating with quality. I think historically you had a mix of good and bad resume advice, with well-connected candidates getting better guidance. Today that signal is probably scrambled; there's lots of influencers advising people on how to format their applications. Maybe a whole different problem to solve: what's the right way to structure applications that doesn't just filter for "good at applying to jobs"?
The trick that worked for me was in the middle of the job description, I wrote the instruction:
- Send an email to (email) with the subject “I actually read the job description” with your resume and a 4 sentence cover letter.
Literally less than 5% of people compared to the number applications on LinkedIn followed through, which tells you a lot about who’s actually applying for this job, and what percentage are just applying for any job without actually reading the description.
It’s not so much about polish as it is about people using AI + our website to generate a cover letter that relates their experience to our company and the role we are hiring for in a cover letter. AI is really great at writing 3-4 sentences that are really well targeted and hard to recognize as AI, since it’s not long enough to be recognized, so from my perspective I see an applicant who understands our company, has experience that relates to our company, and is uniquely interested in working here.
When interviewing you can very quickly tell who is just not min-maxing their application game but are great options independent of their resume, which people used AI and actually have no idea what your company even does, and who lied on their resume. Interviews take a lot of time, and get really boring really fast, so it’s very easy to get frustrated/lazy as an employer, and rely even more heavily on (in my opinion) useless signals like internships and university. Every time I do an interview, ask about some specific experience, and it turns out their resume was grossly exaggerated in terms of responsibilities, it kills a few hundred brain cells.
As someone who worked at Upwork on the freelancer experience, the connects approach really works! It was an incredibly powerful approach to drive a healthy marketplace for both the demand and supply side.
It allowed the business to get high intent freelancers and it allowed the freelancer to also sus out the business (i.e. they weren’t willing to waste their connects on a job that wasn’t worth it).
I wonder if there’s a way for the employer to have a higher stake in their job postings in this $1 per application idea? So many open jobs today are high demand and low/lower pay but aren’t incentivized to create quality roles/postings. They’re relying on a tougher job market. Maybe something like if you don’t meet x threshold of submissions in a given timeframe, the business either pays or is forced to update the role, pay, description etc in order for the posting to stay open.
Such a great point about it being a signal of intent both ways! The quality of the post is a really interesting problem in itself - like you said, a crappy job post isn't really a deterrent in a tough job market. But it does probably impact applications at the margins, especially among high quality candidates.
I know Upwork has been pushing AI job descriptions to improve baseline quality, but I think that actually creates some of the same issues that occur with AI job applications. There's sort of an AI style of writing that becomes ubiquitous, and at least to me starts to be a negative signal (they can't even bother to write a job description, have they thought through what they want?)
I wonder how much of it is lack of a feedback mechanism vs a choice they make. On Upwork there's a review system, so candidates have some transparency into the job poster (and may choose to save their connects because of it). But the review system is only there for people they actually hired! So if a poor quality job description or low pay leads to not getting the applicants they want, it's not totally clear which part of the process is breaking down.
Maybe you could add a "cancel" button in the application flow that leads to a quick "why are you not applying"? Low pay/unclear duties/want you to be in person? The big issue I see is that it's not clear whether the people complaining are the same as the ones you want to apply - by definition that'd only gets people who don't finish!
I like the idea of adding friction, I do wonder whether it would be more effective if the currency was time rather than $...
I've heard from several hiring managers how much difference it makes when applicants submit a Loom video or a voice note. I do wonder what would happen if you made that mandatory.
I reckon a tonne of people would not apply, and you'd get some of the very real benefits you mention in this post.
It’s a great callout! I agree that money isnt the only option - it just has to be something that’s not easily scalable. I think the three options are money, time/attention, or networks/connections.
The interesting part is that the Loom/voice note example works whether or not it’s actually part of the hiring process! If you require applicants make a recording and nobody ever watches it, it serves the exact same purpose of culling low intent candidates. The question is, how many people would rather pay the $1 than have to watch a video recording of themself 😅
Although thinking about it - a Loom requires effort, but you could even imagine just requiring them to just spend some time - sitting in a corner for 5 minutes and staring at the wall may be just as effective. Although maybe it’s not healthy for the job market if we start hazing candidates to prove interest?
Great idea, especially because you didn't dismiss it right away and gave it a complete gameplan. Love what you're doing with this newsletter, I've recommended it to my readers in my post today.
This would work if the employers were also mandated to follow certain rules like no leaving people hanging, hard deadlines, no more than 3 rounds of interviews etc. They should also be required to provide a reason for rejection if the candidate clears the first two rounds.
This would make the job application process unique enough to actually be worth paying 1 $.
This is an interesting addition! Part of the idea behind this is rebuilding a social contract through incentives. The hope is that with fewer applicants, companies would treat them better - but maybe we need to formalize that social contract, especially at first.
I wonder if you could do this indirectly though. Maybe build a Glassdoor competitor for the companies that participate in this? Or have some transparency built in, and share what % of applicants got an interview and average time to hire?
Yes. Exactly. One of the reasons in the current job market that everyone just applies to every job possible is because it is a coin toss. If employers acted like they were equal to their employees by doing even a fraction of what is mentioned above, people would sign up.
I remember applying for a job and being told by the HR why they were rejecting me. That was wayy better than being ghosted. People want to be treated as people not resources.
I fully endorse this idea and will happily promote it. For the small cost of $1.
You can have $1 for every person who misunderstands and yells at you as the face of the concept - best compensation package in the industry
If it’s a platform, I’d sign up as an employer. If it’s an plugin to the jobs portal on our website, I’d add it.
The number of completely irrelevant applications with cover letters written by AI is mind-numbing. Some of the absolute best looking applications and cover letters were written by people with zero experience working at target, while some of the best employees had the boilerplate resume format you see everywhere else.
Who we hired literally depends on completely random factors like whose resume I read first today, and how many hundreds I just never read because it’s a pain. I wouldn’t trust some HR rep to handle it any more than I’d trust an AI to usefully sort through those resumes.
Sounds like we have our first customer! Glad to get this validated from an employer's perspective - mass applications are not just harmful to applicants, making it hard to find good employees hurts both sides of the matchmaking process.
Reading your comment, I wonder if reduced volume might make it feasible to do more direct hiring - e.g. have the actual person hiring review every resume. For even 50 applications it'd be burdensome, but maybe there's a breakeven point where HR goes from a gatekeeper to a validator that "this person sent a real resume."
I'm really interested in the point you made about application polish not correlating with quality. I think historically you had a mix of good and bad resume advice, with well-connected candidates getting better guidance. Today that signal is probably scrambled; there's lots of influencers advising people on how to format their applications. Maybe a whole different problem to solve: what's the right way to structure applications that doesn't just filter for "good at applying to jobs"?
The trick that worked for me was in the middle of the job description, I wrote the instruction:
- Send an email to (email) with the subject “I actually read the job description” with your resume and a 4 sentence cover letter.
Literally less than 5% of people compared to the number applications on LinkedIn followed through, which tells you a lot about who’s actually applying for this job, and what percentage are just applying for any job without actually reading the description.
It’s not so much about polish as it is about people using AI + our website to generate a cover letter that relates their experience to our company and the role we are hiring for in a cover letter. AI is really great at writing 3-4 sentences that are really well targeted and hard to recognize as AI, since it’s not long enough to be recognized, so from my perspective I see an applicant who understands our company, has experience that relates to our company, and is uniquely interested in working here.
When interviewing you can very quickly tell who is just not min-maxing their application game but are great options independent of their resume, which people used AI and actually have no idea what your company even does, and who lied on their resume. Interviews take a lot of time, and get really boring really fast, so it’s very easy to get frustrated/lazy as an employer, and rely even more heavily on (in my opinion) useless signals like internships and university. Every time I do an interview, ask about some specific experience, and it turns out their resume was grossly exaggerated in terms of responsibilities, it kills a few hundred brain cells.
As someone who worked at Upwork on the freelancer experience, the connects approach really works! It was an incredibly powerful approach to drive a healthy marketplace for both the demand and supply side.
It allowed the business to get high intent freelancers and it allowed the freelancer to also sus out the business (i.e. they weren’t willing to waste their connects on a job that wasn’t worth it).
I wonder if there’s a way for the employer to have a higher stake in their job postings in this $1 per application idea? So many open jobs today are high demand and low/lower pay but aren’t incentivized to create quality roles/postings. They’re relying on a tougher job market. Maybe something like if you don’t meet x threshold of submissions in a given timeframe, the business either pays or is forced to update the role, pay, description etc in order for the posting to stay open.
Such a great point about it being a signal of intent both ways! The quality of the post is a really interesting problem in itself - like you said, a crappy job post isn't really a deterrent in a tough job market. But it does probably impact applications at the margins, especially among high quality candidates.
I know Upwork has been pushing AI job descriptions to improve baseline quality, but I think that actually creates some of the same issues that occur with AI job applications. There's sort of an AI style of writing that becomes ubiquitous, and at least to me starts to be a negative signal (they can't even bother to write a job description, have they thought through what they want?)
I wonder how much of it is lack of a feedback mechanism vs a choice they make. On Upwork there's a review system, so candidates have some transparency into the job poster (and may choose to save their connects because of it). But the review system is only there for people they actually hired! So if a poor quality job description or low pay leads to not getting the applicants they want, it's not totally clear which part of the process is breaking down.
Maybe you could add a "cancel" button in the application flow that leads to a quick "why are you not applying"? Low pay/unclear duties/want you to be in person? The big issue I see is that it's not clear whether the people complaining are the same as the ones you want to apply - by definition that'd only gets people who don't finish!
I like the idea of adding friction, I do wonder whether it would be more effective if the currency was time rather than $...
I've heard from several hiring managers how much difference it makes when applicants submit a Loom video or a voice note. I do wonder what would happen if you made that mandatory.
I reckon a tonne of people would not apply, and you'd get some of the very real benefits you mention in this post.
I enjoyed reading this, thanks :)
It’s a great callout! I agree that money isnt the only option - it just has to be something that’s not easily scalable. I think the three options are money, time/attention, or networks/connections.
The interesting part is that the Loom/voice note example works whether or not it’s actually part of the hiring process! If you require applicants make a recording and nobody ever watches it, it serves the exact same purpose of culling low intent candidates. The question is, how many people would rather pay the $1 than have to watch a video recording of themself 😅
Although thinking about it - a Loom requires effort, but you could even imagine just requiring them to just spend some time - sitting in a corner for 5 minutes and staring at the wall may be just as effective. Although maybe it’s not healthy for the job market if we start hazing candidates to prove interest?
Great idea, especially because you didn't dismiss it right away and gave it a complete gameplan. Love what you're doing with this newsletter, I've recommended it to my readers in my post today.
5/5 for me - a wonderful way to trim the fat in the early stages of job application!
Btw, just discovered this newsletter and it's awesome. No dumb ideas!!
There are none!!
plenty of businesses make money as platforms for donations, look to classy for a business model... https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/13/gofundme-acquires-classy/
I'll only pay $1 if they pay $1000+ to be able to list it.
Great idea, you are really thinking out of the box. Bravo