How to Get a Job
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Underneath the huge drop in demand that drove unemployment up to 9 percent during the recession, there’s been an important shift in the education-to-work model in America. Anyone who’s been looking for a job knows what I mean. It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.” And since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?

One of the best ways to understand the changing labor market is to talk to the co-founders of HireArt (www.hireart.com): Eleonora Sharef, 27, a veteran of McKinsey; and Nick Sedlet, 28, a math whiz who left Goldman Sachs. Their start-up was designed to bridge the divide between job-seekers and job-creators.

“The market is broken on both sides,” explained Sharef. “Many applicants don’t have the skills that employers are seeking, and don’t know how to get them. But employers also ... have unrealistic expectations.” They’re all “looking for purple unicorns: the perfect match. They don’t want to train you, and they expect you to be overqualified.” In the new economy, “you have to prove yourself, and we’re an avenue for candidates to do that,” said Sharef. “A degree document is no longer a proxy for the competency employers need.” Too many of the “skills you need in the workplace today are not being taught by colleges.”

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.

With 50,000 registered job-seekers on HireArt’s platform, the company receives about 500 applicants per job opening, said Sharef, adding: “While it’s great that the Internet allows people to apply to lots of jobs, it has led to some very unhealthy behavior. Job-seekers tell me that they apply to as many as 500 jobs in four to five months without doing almost any research. One candidate told me he had written a computer program that allowed him to auto-apply to every single job on Craigslist in a certain city. Given that candidates don’t self-select, recruiters think of résumés as ‘mostly spam,’ and their approach is to ‘wade through the mess’ to find the treasures. Of these, only one person gets hired — one out of 500 — so the ‘success rate’ is very low for us and for our candidates.”

How are people tested? HireArt asks candidates to do tasks that mimic the work they would do on the job. If it is for a Web analytics job, HireArt might ask: “You are hired as the marketing manager at an e-commerce company and asked to set up a Web site analytics system. What are the key performance indicators you would measure? How would you measure them?”

Or, if you want to be a social media manager, said Sharef, “you will have to demonstrate familiarity with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, HTML, On-Page SEO and Key Word Analysis.” Sample question: “Kanye West just released a new fashion collection. You can see it here. Imagine you had to write a tweet promoting this collection. What would your tweet be?” Someone applying for a sales job would have to record a sales pitch over video.

Added Sharef: “What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates. If we can’t get the basics right, there is a real problem.” Still, she adds, HireArt sees many talented people who are just “confused about what jobs they are qualified for, what jobs are out there and where they fit in.”

So what does she advise? Sharef pointed to one applicant, a Detroit woman who had worked as a cashier at Borders. She realized that that had no future, so she taught herself Excel. “We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.”

People get rejected for jobs for two main reasons, said Sharef. One, “you’re not showing the employer how you will help them add value,” and, two, “you don’t know what you want, and it comes through because you have not learned the skills that are needed.” The most successful job candidates, she added, are “inventors and solution-finders,” who are relentlessly “entrepreneurial” because they understand that many employers today don’t care about your résumé, degree or how you got your knowledge, but only what you can do and what you can continuously reinvent yourself to do.

找工作 先搞懂自己要什麼

當前波經濟大衰退發生時，由於需求急速下降，失業率被拉高到9%，導致美國的「教育─工作」模式出現重大轉變。哈佛大學教育專家瓦格勒總結出兩句真言：世界不在乎你懂什麼，所關心的是「你如何學以致用」。

光憑著學士學位，雇主已不再認為你的能力能夠勝任某項特定的工作，也不會因此就僱用你。於是更多雇主自行設計一些測驗，來評量應徵者所擁有的技能。他們也愈來愈不在意你如何獲得這些技能；他們只要知道一件事：你能否創造附加價值？

要了解勞動市場變動的最佳方法之一，就是去跟「僱用網站」的共同創辦人、27歲的麥肯錫公司離職人員夏瑞芙，以及離開高盛公司的28歲數學奇才塞雷特聊聊。他們新創的網站，就是要為求職者及工作創造者牽線搭橋。

夏瑞芙表示，「市場的供需兩端已斷裂。許多求職者根本未擁有雇主所尋求的技能，也不知道自己如何獲得這些技能。但雇主本身也有不切實際的期望。」她指出，雇主們都在「尋找人中龍鳳：能與工作完美配合的人。他們根本不想訓練你，他們期望你能一切超標。你必須證明自己。文憑已不再是雇主要求的核心。你今天在工作場所所需要的太多工作技能，大學裡根就本沒教。」

夏瑞芙解釋道，「僱用藝術」網站的運作方式如下：由企業界的客戶，包括思科、喜互惠超市與Airbnb等大公司，以及小型的家庭企業等，向網站提出工作內容說明，由網站來設計與該項工作有關的線上筆試及視訊測驗；之後由網站依據測驗的結果，向企業推薦最適合的求職者，再由企業從其中挑選及僱用。

夏瑞芙表示，網站平台上有5萬名求職者登錄，而每個職缺約有500名求職者應徵；她並指出：「有些求職者告訴我，他們在四、五個月內共應徵了500個工作，但幾乎沒有做過任何研究。」

夏瑞芙說，「應徵者令我最吃驚的，是他們的文字及文法非常之糟，連大學畢業生亦然」。該網站也遇到不少天才，但他們「搞不清楚自己具備那些工作的條件？這裡有哪些職缺？及他們適合應徵什麼工作。」

夏瑞芙表示，人們求職被拒的主要原因有二，「第一，你未能向雇主證明自己能夠協助他們創造加值；第二，你不清楚自己要什麼，也因此你沒有學會自己所需要的技能。最成功的求職者是發明者及解決問題者；他們是冷靜的創業家，因為他們了解今天許多雇主根本不在意你的履歷、學歷，或你從哪裡學來的知識，而只在意你現在能做什麼，以及你在不斷自我充實之後還有什麼本事」。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/opinion/friedman-how-to-get-a-job.html

2013-06-28．經濟日報．A5．國際焦點．編譯任中原