On block-chained CVs
The CV. What an absolute royal pain-in-the-ass it is. Wouldn’t the world be a better place without it?
Fat chance, eh? Well, it might not be such a crazy idea after all.
But before I get carried away, and as seems to be becoming my style, I’m going to start by taking a step back and understanding the real reason we write CVs; their value to us as individuals, and their application in the recruitment process.
Despite ‘evidence’ pointing to Mr da Vinci writing the first resume some 500 years ago, we only really need to wind our time machine back to the early part of the 20th century to see the birth of the modern resumé.
At some point in the 30’s or 40’s, the CV became an integral part of the recruitment process. Prospective candidates were required to include personal information that we’d recoil at the thought of including now — height, weight, age, even religion.
Here, the true purpose of the CV is revealed. In the years since, despite contorting itself through public opinion and political correctness, we’re still stuck with a piece of paper that exists, fundamentally, to serve the employer.
That is, until we all got smart about it.
Let’s take a look at the job hunting process from our perspective, from the eyes of the man-on-the-ground. Am I going to write my CV with all the information that a prospective employer will want when making a hiring decision — warts and all? Even when considered from a perspective of the greater good, am I going to give this company that might offer to give me a paycheque once a month so that I can pay my mortgage, an excuse to say no — before they’ve even met me?
How else am I going to be smart about my job hunt? Am I going to choose a handful of companies to apply to, or am I going to maximise my chances and apply to as many as possible? Do I care that each company is going to be on the receiving end of this tactic and need to sift through 99 other applications for the same role? Again, am I going to consider the greater good and reduce the number of my applications? After all, if I apply to 10 companies instead of 100, those 90 will only have one fewer application to sort through, but I’ll lose 90% of my applications!
So, what we’ve got is a recruitment system that, going on the above, is a bit of a mess. It’s a system that encourages very selective truth-telling on a CV, long interview processes, and a requirement to process huge amounts of data for both the applicant and the employee. It’s no-one’s fault — we’re all just trying to get the best individual outcome in one of the biggest prisioner’s dilemmas going.
As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them…join them. As far as I’m concerned, the solution to this is twofold:
- Fix the CV
- Embrace, and actively encourage, the volume
Let’s start with point two, and take a bird’s eye view of the whole situation. Let’s forget about current human and technological limitations, and explore what the optimal solution might be in some distant utopia.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if, as an employer, every time you had a role that you needed to fill, every prospective employee applied for the role? Instead of limiting your selection to people that you’ve managed to put your job advert in front of, to people that had the inclination to apply for your role based on the short description you’d given and that were available to apply for it, you instead could pick from the biggest talent pool possible?
What about if as an applicant, you didn’t have to worry about making sure you saw the best roles as soon as they became available? What if you could stop trawling through online job boards, and simply be automatically applied to any role that needed filling, that matched your abilities, experience, and intent?
Pie in the sky thinking. There’s no way that it could work now — just think about the overheads, about the administration requirement to process all the applications, to interview all prospective candidates? That’s not even to say anything of the best applicants — aren’t they going to be called in for hundreds of interviews after being applied to so many employers?
Well, how do we solve those problems? Wouldn’t they all be solved if, somehow, we could do away with the applicant vetting process? Or at least the huge time & cost elements of it.
Back to step 1. Fix the CV.
Enter block-chain.
For the uninitiated, block-chain is the system that the infamous bitcoin operates on. It’s a distributed, secure database that operates as a chain of trust when making a bitcoin transaction. In a world without banks, without a centralised ledger of transactions, there needs to be a way that you can confirm that Joe actually owns the Ƀ10 that he’s about to pay you. The blockchain allows you (or rather the payment processor) to check the chain of transactions that has led to Joe owning the Ƀ10, and then add this transaction to that ledger. This database is encrypted, duplicated, split up, and stored in multiple locations around the world, to make sure that the data it stores is secure.
So let’s take this block-chain, and let’s pour it in a bowl with a CV, with the huge amounts of data that we’re creating, and with the traditional recruitment process, season with machine learning & data-mining, and see what comes out.
Let’s imagine that instead of a regular 2-sidees-of-A4 CV, your CV is a digital record of everything that described your suitability for work. Your hobbies, your exam results, your employment history, or even every single job you’ve completed on Fiverr. They’re all recorded by the organisation that produces them for you, and stored with this block chain technology. Everything that you’ve ever done that makes you more (or less) suitable for a specific role is recorded and stored in a secure, de-centralised, trusted database for anyone that you grant permission to, to view.
Take our machine-learning and data-mining seasonings, and we can take this one step further. This new-world-CV is, to all intents and purposes, no longer human-readable. Let’s let the machines read it then. Why shouldn’t we let them find the patterns, and use it to predict your aptitude for a specific role? Might we find that it will be even able to predict co-workers’ compatibilities?
Suddenly we’ve gone from a massively labour-intensive process, and one that by definition is producing sub-optimal results, and making it seriously clever. Have we turned recruitment from a process that required skilled labour, considerable time and lots of money, to something that could be done in the blink of an eye, for free? What does this really mean for you or me? Might we find that it liberates us from deciding our careers before we really know how the world works? In a world where we’re ‘recruited’ in this way, might we all be free to tread our own paths — do the things that excite us, and then be placed into the perfect role given the sum of our experience when we need to?
What I think is most exciting is that I’m not even talking about the realms of science fiction here. Google have just open sourced their machine-learning library, Amazon and Google all offer public access to their data-mining platforms, and lots of people are already performing digitally recordable tasks on Freelancer, Upwork and Fiverr. Hell, universities are even already confirming degrees via the block-chain.
In a world where recruitment is instant, intelligent and free, what else will change?
