Daily Endeavor Blog

Since December you’ve been able to sign up on Daily Endeavor using your Linkedin account, but I’m excited to share a new feature that takes the integration even deeper — Related People I Know.

Now when you connect with Linkedin on Daily Endeavor you can see who in your network is into what you’re into. When you pull up a Daily Endeavor job profile, first and second degree contacts in your network instantly appear.

When would this be useful? To start, it’s a whole new way to browse your professional network. Now you can leaf through jobs you may be interested in, and the related people you know automatically display inside the job guide.

If you’re doing informational interviews, it just got a whole lot easier. Let’s say you have a dream job in mind — or any type of job you happen to want to learn about — but the hard part is compiling the list of who you could meet. All you need to do is lookup a Daily Endeavor job profile, and instantly find contacts, and friends of friends, who can tell you more about the job you’re eyeing.

This is just the first of many applications in pairing up the social graph with the job graph. We’re really excited to be continue creating more. If there’s ones you want to see, let us know!

By the way, to make this mashup goodness happen our team worked closely with the team at Linkedin, using both their Profile Widget and the hot-out-of-the-oven JSAPI. The developer relations and api teams are great. Thank you gals and guys!

We all have a home on the web. Whether it’s a Linkedin profile, Twitter feed or Facebook page, there’s a definitive place people can go to find you. When there’s a definitive profile, it’s easier to learn about and connect with you.

So everyone who wants to be found has a user profile. Similarly, every company has an About Us page. But what about every job? There’s no single place to learn about every type of job.

Wikipedia does a really good job providing an objective description of many of the industries that exist, but not every job in, say, investment banking is the same, and ongoing conversation about how to get or thrive in an investment banking job is not part of its mission.

There are millions of job listings that narrowly describe the needs of a certain company at a certain time, but any given type of job can have 20 or more different titles, so researching or tracking even one job is a huge hassle.

The idea to build a job graph is a simple one: we believe that every job should have a home page on the web — a definitive job profile. Each profile should be a place where you can learn about the job and join the conversation that’s happening around it. It’s a place where you can show what you know, or share what you want to learn.

While the idea was simple to start, building it has been anything but. Our initial research four years ago found that the largest classification system was the US Department of Labor’s. But there was a problem. Their coverage for the entire US economy added up to about 3,500 types of jobs. That’s less than 2% of our estimate of the 250,000 non-hourly jobs. We needed something much more comprehensive. So we decided to build one from scratch.

For three years we’ve been working with niche experts to develop a graph that’s representative of the types of jobs that exist today. While we’ve made a lot progress (15,000 and counting), we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Nevertheless, we’re really excited about how a profile for every job can help job seekers better find personal matches, and hiring managers better find the needles in the haystack. If there’s job profile coverage you’d like to see, please let us know!

I was in a conversation this Fall with a friend who was looking to hire someone to do some hairy statistical analysis. They were in a quandry on where to find them. I suggested Quora. Look up one of the questions you want answered, and in the answers, see who’s good. Quora’s not the only place you can see what people are into today, but it’s one of the good ones. Much like when Doug Crets says the new full-fledged education system is already here, it’s just still operating in the shadows, so it goes for recruiting. The future of recruiting talent is already here, it’s just not yet televised.

We’re in the very early stages of a major upheaval (as major as what Monster did to the newspapers, and what Linkedin did to Monster) in how people find jobs and jobs find people. Most of the companies re-creating this space are still quite young, working their way to the proverbial product-market fit. While the picture of how this new world will work for job seekers is much more clear today, there’s still some more sorting to do for how it will work for recruiters. This will come.

One of the places this conversation will be unfolding is at Unleashed Talent next week in SF, care of Jon Bischke & co. I’m heading to it and very much looking forward. One of the reasons I like Jon, and the main reason I’m going, is that he’s a convener – he seems to be continually bringing people together for interesting conversations. Looking at the attendees, this day looks no different.

My thesis is we’re about to see a step change in how jobs find people. I’m looking forward to hearing what others have on their mind.

What hiring managers use as your “resume” is changing. It’s becoming less backward-looking and more about the present. It’s not just where you’ve worked, it’s a deeper look into you. Very quickly, it’s becoming the conversations you’re in and what you have to say. If they can find you, the person considering you wants to know: what are you really into?

Why the Resume Exists

While most people think of resumes as something indispensable for job seekers, it’s in fact the hiring managers who initiated and have come to depend on them.

As originally conceived, the resume played a critical role for a hiring manager — a sorting mechanism for their time. The resume does not determine whether someone should be hired. The utility of a resume is as a filter. A resume answers whether a person should be considered — Is this person worth spending more time on?

The resume excels at being the quick look in the rear-view mirror. We all know it well — it’s a list of employment, usually full-time. Within that skeleton, there are three types of information that a hiring manager can use to sort people into worth-more-time or not.

• Area of work (subfield experience, functional expertise)
• Reputation of what you worked on (company, project)
• Results (numbers, measures)

In other words, resumes are a short-hand for the arc of a story. They answer in brief: What did you do? With who? How did it work out?

If you’re considering someone for a team, and you know nothing about them yet, it’s easy to see the utility of a resume. It provides an initial reference point for comparison. It can start to give a sense of patterns over time. It can begin to answer the amount of growth required of the person in order for them to thrive in the new role.

What Hiring Managers Really Want to Know

Hiring managers face two hard problems that resumes can’t wholly solve:

1. they need to discover talent, and
2. they need to distinguish between them once they’ve found them.

Since they’ve been around, resumes have always been necessary but not sufficient on both counts.

Besides the most well-known complaints (easy to spoof, keywords are grossly inadequate, they’re free to replicate so thousands can show up for an open job), resumes have always had structural limitations in the questions they can quickly answer. After getting a historical baseline, hiring managers have filled the gaps in other (time-intensive) ways, usually through interviews and references.

So if you were going to make a hiring manager’s job easier for them, let’s figure out: what else do they want to know? (Or better, put yourself in their shoes — what else would you want to know if you’re considering someone to join your team?)

Even more helpful than the potential hire’s full-time role 3 or 10 years ago, when distinguishing candidates TODAY it’s immensely helpful to know what they’re really into right now. Where someone is investing their attention now is the best proxy for what truly motivates them, and as a result, a more distinctive predictor of whether they might thrive in the specific role at hand.

Think: what is this person so into that they’d talk about it even if they weren’t getting paid? What’s something either they’re learning quickly or teach a lot about? Hiring managers are looking for a fast and reliable way to gauge a candidate’s intrinsic motivation.

Current genuine interest is not the only input for a hiring decision, but it’s a huge one. Current genuine interest fuels a person’s willingness to expend the real effort required to grow and get the hard work done. It also helps signal what else — people and insights — they can bring to the table.

Beyond the historical list that a resume provides, hiring managers want to know:

• What are you genuinely interested in?
• What have you learned about it lately?
• Who are you learning from (and who’s learning from you)?
• How fast do you learn? Is it superficial or is there clear-thinking that’s leading to a point of view?

The hiring manager faces the needle in the haystack problem — and if you want to be readily hired, part of your job is to help them solve it. They’re trying to find a very specific person for a very specific role. Put another way, once they find you, the person considering you for a job is trying to discover if what you’re really into is what they really need.

As a job seeker, your job is to help make your answers to these questions as easily discoverable as possible. Your resume, built for a different purpose in a different era, isn’t going to get you there. Here’s what will: showcasing what you know, a few sentences at a time, around a very specific job (i.e. in a way that makes it easy for hiring managers to find you).

Remember, hiring managers are awash in a sea of resumes. They’re trying to separate the wheat from the chaff — they want to discover the few bits you’ve said online that are relevant to their open role without wading through the noise of all the other conversations you’re in. They want to quickly see who’s sharp at being an analyst in management consulting or doing curriculum development for new teacher development.

This is by the way precisely how Daily Endeavor and our partners can help you. At Daily Endeavor you can showcase what you know.

The main question for you: what have you done recently to make your interests and insights discoverable for hiring managers with a very specific job in mind?

If you’re thinking about what to do next, one good rule of thumb is to explore areas where there is tremendous disruption and change ahead, and as a result, a surplus of opportunity.

How education occurs — how it’s designed, how it’s delivered (or isn’t) — is undergoing change on a tectonic scale. If you’re looking for work, it’s understatement to say there is opportunity there for you. **

Sir Ken Robinson speaks a lot on the state of education. I’m glad he does — his big picture thinking simplifies what’s complex, making conversation (and your job search) easier to start. It also happens that this talk in particular is one of the best examples of why I do what I do. It fires me up. Redesigning education at this scale is my life’s work.

RSA, as they always do, does a phenomenal job illustrating the talk.

** Note: At Daily Endeavor there are over 4,000 species of education jobs, and more being invented everyday out there.

• 30 Places We Want to Work by @GOOD — Their criteria alone are worth checking out, if they’re either a strong fit or anti-fit for you, you’re making progress. (GOOD Magazine)

• The Eight-Word Mission Statement by Eric Hellweg — Distilling down to the core helps produce real focus, in this case: “verb, target, outcome.” (Harvard Business Review)

• Serendipity Finds You by Paul Buchheit — Don’t let “other plans” and “ego-fear” blind you to opportunity knocking. (Paul’s blog)

• 10 Types of Crappy Interviewees by Matthew Inman — Common traps to avoid, including not being ready to say what you want to do next. (The Oatmeal)

YCombinator shared a tweet today from the folks at Holstee. They have a manifesto that’s so consistent with our outlook (in fact, with our manifesto), I feel like we were separated at birth.

When we first asked what will you do with your one wild and precious life, this is exactly response we found ourselves answering with

• Start doing the things you love
• No job should be forever
• Life is about the people you meet, and the things you create with them
• Live your dream, and wear your passion

There are hundreds of thousands species of work that you’ve likely never heard of. If the one you’re in isn’t firing you up, don’t settle. Explore your options. Find something that both meets your financial needs and your growth needs. Many people take jobs for money, but almost all leave them when they quit learning. We want to help you seek out a life worth living. And it looks like Holstee does too.

In the fun chat with Lindsey Pollak last week I mentioned the freedom that comes with asking different questions — in particular, making the first step in the job search more manageable by asking two specific, time-bound questions: Over the next two years, what do you want to be better known for? Over the next two years, what do you want to go see for yourself?

If you’re interested in some of the why behind these questions, and why taking a prototyping point of view is helpful, here’s a short talk (13 min) I gave on the topic at AshokaU’s TEDx event at Google DC earlier this year. This talk is a partial introduction to the larger prototyping framework at Endeavor Prep.

If you haven’t met Ashoka yet, founder Bill Drayton gave rise to the term “social entrepreneur” a few decades ago, and since then Ashoka has been at the center of catalyzing change in nearly every corner of the world. AshokaU is their initiative bringing change-making to university campuses.

Video doesn’t always tell the full story of the participants in the room, but as a guest I can tell you they were great. AshokaU and their partners organized a very impressive two-day event. They’re doing some great stuff over there.

I had the real pleasure today of chatting with Lindsey Pollak over on her MyPath BlogTalkRadio Show. Lindsey of course is one of the central (& IMHO one of the best) voices describing career and workplace issues for Gen Y (see e.g. Getting from College to Career). She’s also recently been working with LinkedIn as they start to roll out tools for students.

In the short podcast (10 min) we cover why it’s so hard today to learn about the jobs that are out there and some of the more interesting ones. My favorite question is when she asks “Did you struggle at all?” to which the answer is definitely Yes. Interviews can so often be sterile and she makes it human.

Here’s the clip: