On the one hand I absolutely get wanting to go to where the up and coming talent is. On the other I think a bit more distance between personal and professional platforms is probably in everyone's best interests. I'm curious to see if this gets much traction.
I already see too many people using LinkedIn as a second FaceBook. The few times I look at my feed I see people posting political opinions and other touchy subjects on their "wall" (not sure what the official name is on linked in). I always thought these professional social networks were more for keeping an up to date resume accessible and tweeting or re-tweeeting interesting work topics.
I think there is some percentage of people who actually purposefully would create engagement-worthy postings...just to attract attention, thinking that it will suffice in bringing in eyeballs that they can sift through. (A tweak of the old adage that there's supposedly no such thing as bad publicity.) I'm not a fan of this because it likely would not attract those employers who would be an ideal fit. But i know some folks who likely do that with intent.
> Users can post a TikTok video resume to the site rather than a traditional resume. The idea is for users to give an elevator pitch or work experience summary via the video in a unique way.
Genuine question. Can anyone tell me how recruiters intend to parse through thousands of videos without some level of automation or software-based filtering?
I understand that there are AI systems that can pick up keywords and sentiment, but we all know they are far from perfect. Plus we end up with all sorts of issues where some accents might be under-represented, leading to exclusion etc.
For all the flaws in text resume-based hiring, automated systems can, at least to _some_ extent, help sift through thousands of candidates.
I'm not saying that the present system is perfect, just that the proposed video-based system could be worse in terms of scale.
While sex appeal works, thirst traps have a limited shelf life. Comedy, ingenuity, and creativity go viral.
Also, Remember how the tiktok algorithm supposedly works: if a brand only watches / likes / comments on tiktokers who build things, the "hiring" feed will be full of people building things.
The FYP algorithm is extremely accurate. If that is what you see on TikTok, that’s more reflective of you than anyone else. I don’t think I know a single person with an FYP with that sort of content.
It's actually very easy to go through thousands of TikTok videos. The app is very fluid and as soon as the algorithm begins to get what kind of content you like, the cognitive load of going through videos becomes very low. It's very different from the Spotify algo that assumes you are all into Japanese music just because you liked one song or YouTube that will show you how deep the rabbit hole goes in anything.
I like the idea of elevator pitch style TikToks where you can quickly express yourself and show your creativity. I would imagine the algorithm can start showing the recruiters through the job relevant hashtags and work its magic from there.
The creativity tools of the app can prove very useful, the simplest idea that comes to my mind is a recruiter creating a TikTok video and says something like "Show me something that you learn in your career as X that isn't taught in school" and have the TikToker's quote and reply to the video. The recruiters then can go through the replies and pick candidates for interviewing.
I don't think that anybody will hire through click of a button like shopping for employees, that doesn't happen on LinkedIn, on Indeed, on HN or anywhere. CV or Video, it's just a lead and I bet a few second of a video can tell much more than 2 pages of written CV.
> as soon as the algorithm begins to get what kind of content you like
I have to assume this style of algo-generated feeds wouldn't apply for an actual hiring platform, because otherwise this is ripe for "inadvertent" discrimination.
Seems like the point? Add a bit of bias laund^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmachine learning and you're good to go! It's not your fault if "the algorithm" is doing the discrimination, after all.
I'm not sure how it could fly in the US where putting a picture on your résumé is more or less illegal.
Certainly would help the state plonk you down when your social score gets too low too.
That’s actually a really interesting question. Models and actors usually explicitly include a headshot.
I’ve never heard that putting a picture on a resume was a legal problem for an applicant. Employers have a the burden of running a fair hiring process. Some firms even remove race and gender signifiers from resumes before the initial hiring manager screen.
It was a big deal when they stopped making hotness a requirement for airline stewards, and for most jobs it’s totally illegal to require a particular ethnicity, but for performing arts they explicitly hire people for physical appearance. What’s the difference, legally?
A few possibilities:
- performing arts (film, stage) are artistic expression, and thus protected by the first amendment. (But then why is the physical appearance of an airline steward not free speech of a brand’s image?)
- appearance is “inherent” to acting (but I’m sure people have argued that whiteness is inherent to staffing all kinds of things, and that’s not tolerated)
- actors are rarely employees, but instead sign independent contracts with short lived, project specific LLCs. Thus “casting” is not “recruiting” and actors don’t have traditional employment protections. (Most film jobs work this way though - is it permissible to apply appearance standards to the Key Grip?)
Even if we had a demographically ‘fair’ recommender, a normal recommender is super top heavy. Telling 1000 companies person x is great is not very useful to them or the rest of candidates. I would expect this system to need some heavy limiting of amount of companies a candidate sees for it to be useful. Very different than typical recommendation where a great video can be thousands or millions of views.
Ya, a perfect recommender for the "best" candidate on some qualitative set of metrics would not be discriminatory (unless the underlying metrics were).
It definitely wouldn't be useful. Hiring isn't a popularity problem as much as a matching problem.
That’s the beauty of TikTok. the rich don’t necessarily get richer. You will often be presented with fresh people, AFAIK they spread out new content to measure response.
It’s not really the type of platform that everyone watches the same most popular people.
It’s refreshing that doesn’t push for “more from the same” .
I used to work at tiktok on recommendation. While we definitely do better exploration than some places there’s still a very clear top heavy bias. Part of that is just content quality. A lot of content is worse than others for any form of media. But while we are better at showing small things than say youtube, there remain very clear tiktok stars. Even for smaller areas you will still have some creators lead in that area.
I get quite a bit fresh content in the sense that it’s fresh for me(but popular otherwise) or fresh content that has a very few views and likes.
In contrast, twitter is horrible because I’m in a bubble and everyone I’m exposed to is there to push their agenda.
Instagram is fine but it’s essentially place where people I know and I don’t know pretend to be living the good life. It’s boring. The content discovery never worked for me.
Youtube is actually great in terms of content but the discovery revolves around the “more from the same” which makes discovery of something fresh pretty hard.
TikTok is not perfect but it’s the only platform that actually seems to create a stream of stuff that I like and are not the same.
"The creativity tools of the app can prove very useful, the simplest idea that comes to my mind is a recruiter creating a TikTok video and says something like "Show me something that you learn in your career as X that isn't taught in school" and have the TikToker's quote and reply to the video. The recruiters then can go through the replies and pick candidates for interviewing"
This sounds like the very worst parts of LinkedIn, but with more video and far more social pressure.
I agree with you. When I'm reading resumes, I might give each one five seconds before moving on. I'd probably do the same with Tiktok applications and I'd probably have an order of magnitude fewer applications to go through in the first place.
I also see it as a huge vehicle for hiring discrimination.
Introverted? Neurodiverse? Ugly? Differently abled? Have a regional accent? Too bad, your video resume is disqualified for not being as “good” as the charismatic member of the cultural/ethnic majority.
I think it’s especially important for employers to make their evaluations as blind as they can be for as long as possible, including things like removing names from resumes before presenting them to hiring managers.
In my view this is an incredibly lazy way for TikTok to launch a new revenue stream while engaging in a bare minimum amount of product development. They see how LinkedIn can charge a hundred bucks a month to recruiters and they want in.
You're not entirely wrong, but why make it even more obnoxious and entrenched?
I can see this kind of stuff useful for applying for jobs in the (traditionally) "creative" fields; a well crafted TikTok can show the recruiter a sense of the applicant's editing skills, taste in art/music, and general presentation skills, after all. For a cookie-cutter desk job? Not sure what gap this fills that isn't already occupied by the venerable Curriculum "Resume" Vitae.
Its not that discrimination doesnt exist, but it isnt TikToks job to solve it. If the amount of discrimination remains the same between traditional job seeking and Tiktok, then i dont see an issue.
It is our jobs to call out the discrimination this creates for minorities. Tiktok isn't being asked to end discrimination. Selling a product who's main feature is discrimination is unacceptable.
A normal jobs finds keywords on resumes, filters by experiece and education. Tiktok filters by looks and race and then calls people in for an interview.
My argument is that TikTok is making it worse, not better, not the same.
The status quo is that a paper/PDF resume is the initial screening method. An employer committed to removing hiring bias could have the recruitment department strip personal identifiers like the name before handing the resume to the hiring manager.
Now, instead of that, you have a video of the person. Now you’re subconsciously judging everything: how the person looks, speaks, dresses, and even the decorations in their house.
Obviously, there’s potential for bias as soon as you see a person in real life or hear them speak. That’s going to happen at most jobs at some point.
However, this TikTok service introduces new methods of bias to the initial screening process that didn’t exist previously.
I'm sure we have that, but it's the second filter, after the resumes have provided the first filter. Moving it to step one seems like it would exacerbate the problem.
That is, you'll get better results (in terms of hiring competent employees) if you find out whether the person is physically attractive after you've already anchored on whether they're qualified in a more objective manner. Resumes aren't great at giving you an accurate anchor, but better than nothing, imo.
I'm reminded of a recent study on speed dating that found that higher physical attractiveness increased people's perception of ones intelligence: https://psyarxiv.com/ewvny/
(Just to note, I'm not particularly opposed to TikTok's service as a new avenue to try, but I do agree with the OP that it could make various discriminatory biases worse, and we should be aware of that risk.)
> Introverted? Neurodiverse? Ugly? Differently abled? Have a regional accent? Too bad, your video resume is disqualified for not being as “good” as the charismatic member of the cultural/ethnic majority.
This already happens, in interviews. There are vanishingly few jobs that will hire you without meeting you, because there are some basic things that are difficult or impossible to convey without meeting. Most white-collar jobs don't have to spend much thought assessing whether a candidate is likely to show up to work everyday", or whether thy can handle workplace conflicts without screaming or violence, but this is unfortunately a legitimate concern that eg hiring for some McDonald's locations must consider. L
I don't think this will be the primary way most companies take applications. I think it may be a short-term, alternative method of applying to a job where the less volume is more likely to get you noticed.
However, I'd bet companies will be more averse to this due to the fact you get a video of someone initially, rather than their resume, so it may make it easier to employers to quietly discriminate or unconsciously discriminate.
Assuming a TikTok-typical video length of one minute, you can watch 1000 videos in about 16 hours, or two work days.
Of course that's a rough first estimation. Most videos wouldn't be watched to the end, but on the other hand additional time is needed for reflection on noteworthy candidates, and for reaching out. But overall I don't see the need for automation here.
Seems like someone watching a thousand videos in 16 hours would burn out pretty quickly. I imagine after the first hundred or so all the videos would start to look the same.
If I was hiring I would prioritize someone who took the time out of their day to have a 60 second pitch than someone who just has a resume. There is no automated way to have someone parse through the videos because the point is to get a sense of who they are through the video which might be hard to get a face to face interview. Reading the article the jobs board would have the ability to add a TikTok video to your submission (although I guess you could this already through an unlisted YouTube video but then the selling point for this would be to make that process easier).
I could picture a scenario where both video and written approaches co-exist and support one another. There's been a number of times where I'm left wanting to see more of a person's voice in a hyper-templated piece of paper.
Ugh, the notion of gamifying my resume on social media sounds like a nightmare. Especially because I want to keep my professional and my personal life separate.
Not that I support tiktok, but I feel the opposite. Resumes aren't really that useful for determining whether or not you'd want to work with that person. A short video is a lot better at that, before moving to something more detailed like a resume. How we handle resumes in general is just very outdated and archaic.
Videos introduce bias towards young, attractive candidates and bias away from shy people or those without a lot of confidence or experience talking at a camera. Which makes peoples' objections understandable.
However, there are a lot of jobs for which being young, confident, and attractive are pretty valuable skills. So I'm sure that it will enjoy fairly wide adoption.
> Most people have an online profile, so what's preventing the interviewer/hiring personnel from just looking them up online?
Citations needed. What % of currently alive humans have an 'online' profile, how are you measuring that statistic? Are they engaging actively? How many have never had a smartphone, how many do not use social media at all?
Without sources and actual numbers it's hard to take your point seriously. MOST people do this on Hackernews, claiming "most" or "everyone" or "the majority of..." without actual data to back that up.
I've never bothered to look up pictures of candidates online. I read through the resumes on greenhouse can click proceed or reject. Eventually I see them, but not until the actual interview.
But you were probably not hiring for roles were being attractive, friendly, used to being in front of a camera and (possibly) extroverted were important, right?
> Videos introduce bias towards young, attractive candidates and bias away from shy people or those without a lot of confidence or experience talking at a camera.
Regarding young candidates: it's specifically targeted at Gen-Z.
Regarding attractiveness, confidence and experience talking/acting in front of a camera: there are a lot of jobs where that's important.
I doubt the intention is to hire senior engineers via tiktok.
Yea, I think a lot of the criticism being posted here on HN is because this would be, at best useless, at worst counter-productive, for hiring software engineers in particular. But there may be other careers where a short video would be helpful. So I'd be willing to give the idea the benefit of the doubt.
Just please don't use it to try to hire me in tech! I have enough disadvantages, I don't need my monstrous looks and obvious signs of old age to put me at a greater disadvantage. Written resume for me, thankyouverymuch. At least a written resume helps you get your foot into the door before the onsite interview happens and looks-based biases start making their way in.
I fully agree with you, but I think a missing piece is that the resumé-oriented system has biases as well. Writing resumés and cover letters is a skill that many people don't have. There are mountains of jobs for which resumé-writing ability is a needless barrier that's not very useful (or common), and a video app is likely a _less_ biased filter.
I used to work at a co building a chatbot to filter candidates for low-skill hiring (restuarant, retail, etc). These hiring processes are sometimes little more than 1) do you meet a basic list of requirements and 2) are you "okay" -- ie not going to be slovenly, violent, rude to customers, dumb, etc. Step 1 is trivial enough that we automated it away, and step 2 is crucial enough that we _always_ scheduled an interview once a candidate was qualified. The same bias exists towards young, energetic, and socially-savvy people, but 1) it seems unavoidable, given how expansive and inaeticulable the goals of the interview are and 2) it's fairly relevant to many of the jobs, particularly customer-facing ones.
Funnily enough, we actually had a feature requested by a couple of companies to make candidates upload videos, for exactly the reasons I described above. This is the niche that Tiktok is trying to operationalize. While going through videos is slow and expensive, going through interviews is much more so.
If it were a “down to earth” video that’s fine but TikTok culture encourages polished, professionally-lit quirky and provocative performances while being sexy and dressed like a LA yoga hipster. I assume that will carry over to this video resume culture which IMO will be kind of a disaster. I want to hire capable people not quirky sexy hipsters with on-camera TikTok skills.
What makes you think hiring managers will suddenly prioritize "quirky sexy hipsters" if those traits aren't desirable for the role? You seem to be assuming users on the hiring side will use it the same way the average TikTok user browses through average TikTok content
Until AGI recruiters simply will be limited in number of seconds they can spend on each video. And applicants will be taught to optimize for "first N frames" impression.
/s
i can see this being genuinely useful for CX type roles, where voice and sentiment are important.
Its a quick way to list a database of effective 1st round (call) interviews. Then you can let software take over doing analysis of the network effect (who knows you and can voice for you) do the rest of the work.
I have done recruiting for CX roles in the past, and it has frustrated me to no end that I'm unable to easily parse thru a list of effective phone interviews. Most recruitment sites dont even consider it (probably because CX is low in the totem pole, unlike ENG)
That being said, not sure how it would work outside of CX
It will fail because people don't want to work for the prices being offered.
At $15 or $20 an hour, companies will either be fully automating or mostly automating their business processes. They don't have time to deal with yearly strikes and walkouts over wages.
Hiring people based on charisma and ability to charm within short video clips might make sense if the position involves performing, recording videos, or pitching to people.
However, this seems like a step backwards in an era where savvy companies are going out of their way to avoid any appearance of hiring bias. When companies are going so far as to strip names from resumes, asking candidates to perform on video doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Or, they are just looking for people who are comfortable in front of a camera, have some editing skills, and know how to make an interesting <1 minute video - which is a pretty desirable skill depending on who you ask.
Right yes, but there are many jobs that fall under the "not engineer" umbrella. This might actually be perfect for people going for marketing roles, though.
> if the position involves performing, recording videos, or pitching to people
I don't know about everyone else, but the last year working from home my life has been an avalanche of video calls. Not infrequently, there's a 60 second pitch that is the most important part of the call.
I think this could actually work. For a generation that has grown up with visual-first mediums, it makes sense that they would be able to express who they are better in video form than on a piece of paper.
I could totally see recruiters swiping through videos to find candidates. The only potential downside I could see is obviously racial/gender bias being exacerbated or attractiveness on camera entering the sourcing equation for candidates.
That said, those issues exist even today with traditional resumes, so one could argue it's not really making the problem worse and we're going to have to solve that either way.
Pretty clever. It not only allows you to make a first cut of candidates without dragging them out for an interview, it also allows you to easily filter by gender, race, age without saying so. No more obfuscations in a resume for those items.
You don't have to include a profile picture in LinkedIn. That protects race and age. I suppose you could also replace your given name with an initial, protecting gender.
You just know that some-smart-guy(tm) has written software to predict age/race/gender etc. from LinkedIn accounts. Step 2 is to write a tool that filters for that.
True, but there is significant pressure to have a LinkedIn profile and fill it out completely. Employers and recruiters might prefer prospects that have a profile picture.
The last time I brought this up there was a surprising amount of people trying to defend this behavior from TikTok. Glad to see you bring this up—awful company.
Compared to traditional mass market media is it that different? Actors and actresses on prime time TV are beautiful by western standards, thin and with perfect teeth. Living in beautiful, spacious houses that most people can't afford.
edit: Not that I'm defending Tiktok, just saying that the way it distorts and portrays the world is a continuation of what media companies were already doing. I was going to make a point about how it is a lot like the Society of the Spectacle, but it looks like others have already made the connection:
I suppose the argument would be that there's no illusion that media hiring is intended to serve actors' desires as opposed to building the image that studios want for their product. If tiktok had marketed themselves as a unique kind of curated content company instead of a social media service with democratically-determined exposure, I think the studio comparison would be apt.
You're probably downvoted because of how you articulated your message, but the initial idea is correct. We're biologically programmed to like beautiful things, people, whatever.
That's brilliant. It's unfortunate you're being downvoted for the sharpest comment in this thread.
Trying to find cultural fit (exactly as in product market fit) for max attention (clicks, likes, ads) is exactly what social media pandering is all about, both by the companies and the "influencers." With each post they're experimenting to reach that end goal.
The algorithm simply accurately reflects what people like. It turns out most people, perhaps subconsciously, actually kind of hate poor and ugly people.
I have some friends that went from overweight/obese to looking fit. Their very first reactions were “wow, I cannot believe how differently I am being treated.” Seeing the pettiness of human society, as expressed by the massive difference in how they were being treated, turned many of them into misanthropes. It is a completely different world for good-looking people.
However, solving this problem isn’t really TikTok’s job. Whether a video interview or a physical one, if you’re pretty and rich, you’ll have massive advantage regardless.
As a formerly obese person, I can absolutely confirm this. Respect is a big issue for me, because for the first ~25 years of my life, disrespect and even disgust were the default with every new person I interacted with.
Still, I mostly like videos posted by attractive people on TikTok, because I’m not about lying to myself to pretend to be woke. It’s a visual medium. Just like you don’t hire stupid engineers, it doesn’t make sense to watch ugly people. It’s about knowing your strengths, if you’re not going to maintain your appearance, maybe do podcasts instead. Or one of the millions of TikTok videos that don’t show your appearance, because that is 100% optional.
Colour me skeptical. Things like that are organisational culture, deeply embedded in "the way we do things". I'd be very surprised if they had an actual change of heart.
In this thread - people who have never used tiktok talk shit about tiktok. Some of my favorite tiktokers are severely disabled, grotesquely disfigured, and wildly popular, and making a living telling stories that they would otherwise not be doing
People don’t like watching ugly and poor people, that’s just how the life is. I don’t see how turning TikTok into Harrison Bergeron will make the situation any better.
Interesting, I wonder if this tool could serve as a way to formalize the work relationship between brands and influencers - it seems to me that social media native resume is perfect for this type of work. What could follow next is even more brands using TikTok and its job service, and hopefully a more diverse work environment for Gen Z.
Really hope this doesn’t get traction. I’m imagining yet another hoop to jump through in the hiring process where recruiters and hiring managers require your Tiktok (and a dance video interview particular to their company). Seems very dystopian.
The replies to this are emblematic of HN culture -- a whole lot of quick dismissals without engaging with why this might exist, who it might benefit, and who it might turn away.
A decade ago everyone was telling me how millennials were lazy or disconnected or didn't understand the real world. And it felt pretty bad. I'm seeing all the same commentary shifted down a generation to GenZ without any introspection.
Yes, you might find this silly, and yes, you might not want to get hired this way. But also consider that for some companies, for some roles, or even for some pipelines there could be benefits to broadening the applicant pool.
Some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via resume, some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via tiktok. Why wouldn't we want to consider folks from both input sources and let folks present themselves using the form they feel best conveys their strengths?
You should realize that HN audience is old and graying, I was really looking forward to new tech forums populated by younger people, but havent seen any popular ones.
I'm sure the HN audience is a diverse set of folks across age ranges, there's just a culture of punching down at things they don't understand that's permitted here.
The history of what works vs what flops for similar products is always fascinating. The iPod is basically no more, but it sure did better than I ever thought it would.
I think it would be uncontroversial to say that HackerNews would have had the exact same take if it existed.
And I, at the time, had the exact same take.
Despite being full of entrepreneurs and hackers, folks here are remarkably out of touch with the average consumer.
It's not a damning criticism. Like I said, I include myself in this group that reacted with a resounding "What? WHY?" to almost every single Apple product launched under Steve Jobs's tenure, and was wrong every time.
But it's a blindspot we should be cognizant of. And anything related with TikTok is the perfect confluence to lead to the most stale takes.
Having said that, there is always a bit of a survivorship bias with these trends.
I also was completely negative and dubious on Snapchat and turned out to have been vindicated.
I do think TikTok is something different. It captures my imagination and attention better than any platform EVER, and I include YouTube and Instagram in this. Their recommendation algorithm is truly wonderous.
Imgur is in the same boat. It was a younger, energetic social network and the comments were mostly whimsical. I used to enjoy perusing its frontpage. Now it's heavy on political spam, talking points and general political propaganda, more or less cloning the descent you see on mainstream Reddit (plenty of niche subs are still great and mostly free of politics). I think it largely mirrors the manic obsession you see in certain parts of the US culture to hyper focus on politics 24/7.
Not in my experience. You just have to subscribe to subreddits that don't have a political tilt. On rare occasions some subreddits go dark or sticky something political, but I'd hardly call that a take over.
The defaults (Or what used to be defaults), are all generally garbage and filled with political spam. Finding more niche and specific subreddits yields better results.
You will note that /r/science is a mainstream sub. You've got to subscribe to niche subreddits only and build up your experience from there to avoid politics. Most of my small hobby subs are politics-free.
Reddit’s audience is old; it’s a bunch of millennials and older gen Z. And the kids don’t really use the comments on Reddit, they just yoink memes and throw them on whatever social media platform their friends use. The gen z’s I know through the LGBT community couldn’t give a shit less about politics.
Text as a medium is rapidly falling out of favor unless it’s for purely informational purposes. I read an article this morning about how the book publishing industry is all but dead because nobody is buying books anymore. Newspapers are largely dead, and the ones that still exist have pivoted hard to video or metatextual content.
Text doesn’t sell valuable ads and reading requires your full attention, and that is in direct competition with social media. It’s why banner ads were never really effective and the big ad revenue shift only happened after video ads became viable (and made YouTube unwatchable).
There is literally one or two comments if any on most articles. Some articles "Trump blog not lighting it up" and "Elon Musk is not your friends" are worse than anything that even appears on slashdot.
Did you spend some time reading these posts? I actually did and found them both interesting.
The first confirms that once DJT was removed off of large platforms like Twitter, he lost a lot of followers and digital support, proof that large scale networks have a strong positive feedback loop.
The second provides 2 videos that go into excruciating detail on why Elon Musk is a fake futurist, ruthless capitalist and overall a terrible person (Including working his factory workers at the TSLA factory through COVID forcefully, threatening their jobs and saying we will be at 0 cases by the end of April 2020). At the very least, you should dislike Elon for his anti-union, ruthlessly capitalistic approach to human labor and selfishness.
Looks interesting, but I don't understand how it's supposed to grow with limited access. Imo, it's better to have free for all registration (maybe until it hits a certain number) and just block the unwanted users later.
This invite only approach doesn't seem to be working all that well, I've been following Lobste.rs, from what I can tell it's got the same problems as HN with poor comments.
I think there's quite a few young people here. Like you say, there's no many other tech forums. That's why this one is popular and why people come here.
Actually, I think HN skews younger. The previous polls demonstrated this [1], this is an old link but I think it holds up.
Also 'young people new to the job market' will probably always have a major mismatch with respect to expectations and values, it's probably been that way since the dawn of time.
It took me 2 years just to get my head straight in a 'basic way' to even start to understand the professional world.
Though I don't think it's fair to characterize any generation as 'lazy' though, that's not the right word - although Millenials are the first generation to not consider 'hard work' as a characteristic of their generation - this is an old data point (10 years old) which could either indicate a generational value shift - or - simply the fact that people of a certain age don't have that virtue (or don't think of themselves as that) but by the time they are 30 then their views and values shift etc..
TikTok surely can reach young people for certain kinds of jobs, not doubt. But it's also just a way to try to make money in any way they can.
There's a weird gap between Gen Z and Millenials in how each of our generations experienced what "tech" is, and I do wonder how it affects the Gen Z tech world in particular. My generation, Millenials largely learned technology at a time when unpolished, non-standardized platforms were still the norm. We got comfortable with installing and rolling back drivers, setting up routers and printers, and navigating text-dominated forums and mailing-list email chains to troubleshoot issues. Lots of us were into PC gaming, and that kind of stuff was just expected if you wanted to play. When we went into technical fields later on, those skills were still really applicable.
Meanwhile, my early-teen step-siblings have very similar interests to what I had back in the day (they enjoy playing games like roblox/minecraft on the computer, and FPS on consoles) - but are way less comfortable messing with the OS to troubleshoot vs what I was doing at their age. They were raised with tablets, where things just kind of work. When they do want to learn something, they pretty much always go to youtube first - and I'm not really sure if that's more effective or less effective than what we used to do, or if means they will have a harder time parsing technical docs later on in life.
They've expressed interested in computer science fields, and I do think they'll be able to learn it just fine. In some ways, maybe the exposure to more polished UX will make their bar for those experiences higher than what my generation would accept.
I get the feeling you are right. I remember when I was kid during the late 90s and early 2000s, when these "unpolished" systems were the norm.
A lot of my peers were starting to use them, but just like kids today, they didn't really look into how things worked, they weren't really curious about them, they didn't really tinker with them.
They wouldn't go and update / rollback a driver. They would just complain if things didn't work, and maybe asked a "geek" friend for help.
Today, if a random game doesn't work, people will just try the next one.
yes, not too many people tinkered with their computers then. But the real question is: how many of those who tinkered then, would tinker now if they were born in the 00s? Probably less then if they were born in the 80s, just because e.g. ipads or smartphones are not to be tinkered with. I mean many pupils have problems just working at a laptop (e.g. understanding the file system) because they never did it at home where all they might know are smartphones. So there definitely is a very different technological structure today than back then.
That's true, the way "technology" is set up now, with locked-down tablets and phones may be less conducive to tinkering. But then again, computers, in general, are much more affordable.
So if people are curious, it's much easier to get their hands on a computer, and there's less risk.
When I was growing up, a PC was a fairly consequential purchase for my family, and they couldn't afford to buy a new one very often. There was a lot of pressure to "not break it". Of course, looking things up a bit and getting help from my father and friends, I was able to figure out that "messing with drivers" would likely not break it physically. But I understand this could have been limiting for people not having someone to guide them.
There's also the fact that today much more people have access to "computing", so if the part of the population interested in tinkering is roughly the same in absolute terms, the ratio between those who tinker and those who don't is skewed in favor of those who don't.
These people might not be tinkering with iPads or iPhone, but web development has infinite possibilities and a very low barrier to entry (you only need a computer with a web browser). Anyone interested in code will find a way to scratch that itch.
i m sure ease of tech has to do with it. In the 80s, lawyers would use SQL -- because that was the state of tech at the time. Problems that are out of sight are out of mind.
btw there is no such thing as techie anymore - everyone is into tech, there are very very few luddites left. There's a tendency of UI designers to infantilize their designs , but i m not sure that's based on actual measurable improvement or a certain "contempt" for the end user.
In this case, I really don't think they're very different. I ended up in tech, but I didn't consider myself a techie at their age. I could do the stuff I mentioned, but pretty much everyone in my peer group could - and most of us did not end up going into tech. In some ways, they're more advanced (one of them used to play some tablet game that basically used programming concepts - though he's never touched real code or applied anything outside of roblox to my knowledge).
I'm a Gen Z and I've noticed the same thing. I think the ease of use for a lot of these technologies is to blame. A lot of people I know are into the Gaming PC subculture, but couldn't do much on the software side to fix a PC. The main reason why I tend to be good with low-level stuff on the computer is because I had a computer which constantly broke, and I had to optimize.
I think for anyone who has a kid, the best way to get them interested in this stuff is to have a bad computer, or at least one that primarily uses the shell (not that those computers are bad, I use one myself).
Also a zoomer...I don't know if I agree with the sentiment but my experience was similar. Made my first computer in 6th grade, evidently I did something wrong because I was debugging crashes on that machine for 6 years. Also significant time spent min-maxing our internet for League of Legends around that time.
>I think for anyone who has a kid, the best way to get them interested in this stuff is to have a bad computer, or at least one that primarily uses the shell (not that those computers are bad, I use one myself).
I got deeply interested in technology the opposite way. I got an iPod touch as a kid, and I was amazed by how well designed it was. The thing felt completely delightful to use compared to the Windows XP/Vista systems that were around in the day. I immediately had dreams of writing apps for the iPod that were every bit as amazing as the rest of the system. It didn't take me long after unboxing that iPod touch for me to boot up an old Mac to start on my programming journey.
And to this day, creating great user experiences is what drives my interest in software above all else.
and macbooks. Totally opaque systems that you d rather replace than upgrade. That's OK -- it would happen inevitably, as it did with cars. The problem is that this culture has extended to software, where it is normalized that any technology must be offered through frameworks, APIs and prepackaged cloud solutions
Same generation as you, and same experience. It's just that creativity went elsewhere now.
Because there's three trillion ways you can write a program and all of them seem to come with dozens of READMEs and what-to-do and what-not-to-do and very opinionated maintainers, the creative minds of today might just create their games within Roblox or get to know Javascript by making mods for a browser game, or learn to use DAWs to make cool-sounding EDM, etc. This was already a thing in "our" time with Flash and Adobe's software, but now that's the norm.
Effectively those minds have migrated over generations from the pure hardware to progressively thicker layers of software, which makes sense to me since that's how all human progress basically does with any other field too.
I believe it! My mom would always tell me about how she would do the same, as a teenager learning to program on her Commodore 64.
Funnily enough though, memory constraints were still relevant for me and some of my friends - since Ti-83 calculators were the first exposure to programming for many of us. It helped that we were all required to buy them, so we could collaborate and copy over programs to each other. I would write programs so I wouldn't have to memorize chemistry stuff in HS. The teachers back then never checked, and they expected us to use calculators for normal calculations anyhow.
By the time I was using real code in college though - I agree. Performance optimization like that was taught as more of a "nice to have", and the only classes where it really mattered were assembly, and one elective I took on game engine development.
I think most kids back then, just like most kids today, weren't/aren't super into computers or hacking. But the young teens I've met who do enjoy this stuff are seriously impressive -- some know rust, or machine learning, or build websites or reverse engineer apps. During the pandemic, high schoolers are figuring out ways to bypass their schools' surveillance software. That is to say, the kids are alright.
Modern docs, youtube tutorials, and high quality free courses are much more conducive to learning than the forums, mailing lists, and library books of yore.
HN has decided it hates TikTok, and so it is. No one here will care to read deeper. Despite the (for whatever reason) superior/smug attitude of the readers on here, they’re still party to extreme groupthink.
The thing is, you can have negative feelings about tiktok (I am) without thinking that their jobs service is useless or doomed to failure.
I'm not much of a social media user, despite being of an age full of extremely active users. I find Tiktok in particular annoying, like someone took the inauthenticity of mediocre YouTube creators and decided that every user in the network should ape it.
But that has nothing to do with the jobs service, the fact that it may expand a company's recruiting reach or provide opportunity to those who don't fit well into the stodgy workflow of traditional job apps. Just because the tiktok application format wouldn't fit my co's hiring doesn't mean that there aren't tons of jobs for whom a short demonstration of personality and creativity is signal as useful as a resumé.
The difference is that most people on here have used Facebook (wrote and read something) while I'm pretty certain most people here have not created a video on Tiktok.
I'd wager that's mostly because Facebook already had a decade before Tiktok to work its network effect magic, and nobody wants to subscribe to yet another social network that is Tiktok.
I was pretty sad when they banned it here in India. TikTok had become really popular among poorer people somehow. The income and class gaps in India mean that you don’t often get to know how the rural poor really live - TikTok was rare a window into that life. Helped me understand and empathize deeply.
The new replacements for it just don’t have the same vibe.
I dunno. This strikes me as the digital version of driving over to The Home Despot and looking for some day hands to help you out with the yard or something like that —except it’s for service jobs rather than manual labor.
I really loathe the “sell yourself via video snippet” aspect. It’s inhumanely degrading.
Hyperbole much? There are a lot of inhumane, degrading things in this world. TikTok videos are not one of them.
Anyways, clearly some people thought it would be cool and interesting. I think this will be an interesting alternative for those that don’t do well with resumes.
Fortunately, no one is going to make you use this, so I don’t know why everyone here is acting like it will be forced on them. This is obviously a secondary application method, one that will work particularly well for creative or extroverted types.
Short-video clips are a few steps removed from a tryout at a strip club? Can’t tell if sarcasm - surely you realize how absurd this sounds? It is simply a different way for candidates to express themselves.
When you’re initiating an interview process and it begins with a video snippet where the candidates “sell themselves”, it necessarily highlights photogenic candidates as well as exposes their ticks. This may well skew hirings toward the younger demographic.
When you put it like that...I still think the strip club comparison was weird because I can think of at least one other other common and far less contentious career-path with an interview/try-out process similar to this:
Acting.
Is there perhaps something deeper you want to say about sex workers that’s going unsaid right now?
Acting is apt; however, at least in principle you’re doing a screen test given you want to ensure acting ability as well as photogeneity. But we also know the colloquial acting couch.
Strip clubs don’t care what your skills are, they mostly look for the eye candy their clientele seeks. Video is similar in that it doesn’t care about skills other than maybe being able to present yourself at the cost of all other attributes.
Well, we’ll have to wait and see how it gets used but I see potential for this being abused.
It’s not different from TV news vs Daily newspaper. One is more fluff than the other. When was the last time you saw an “ugly” news anchor. In the papers you don’t care what the reporter looks like.
During a sit down interview you at least have a chance to make your argument if the interviewer has misconceived something or it needs elaboration.
>When was the last time you saw an “ugly” news anchor. In the papers you don’t care what the reporter looks like.
To be completely honest, I don't care what the reporter looks like in either case. But I'm going to presume this was a rhetorical question and not meant as a reply or question to my specific manner of news consumption?
You'll have to forgive me (or, well you don't have to, that's up to you) but this still feels like putting the career carriage in front of the job prospect horse to me-for some reason. Perhaps said another way: none of what you said speaks to me to be a problem with the medium of interviewing (in this case video, ostensibly via tiktok), but instead rather the individuals participating in the process.
I can't quite pin down why, but it's a very strong sensation. I'll take this elsewhere and find a way to reconcile it without going turtles all the way down here in the thread.
Tryout is at the extreme side of being intimate and without any due distance at all. CV is is impersonal and as much distance as you can get. Videos are in between. Is it still absurd?
> Hyperbole much? There are a lot of inhumane, degrading things in this world.
There are degrees of inhumane and degrading. Sure, there are plenty of worse things than having to apply via a video CV on Tiktok, but that's a difference in magnitude and not a difference in kind.
Of course. Text doesn’t care about looks, presentation, voice, speaking skills, etc. It does require forethought, ability to organize things logically, and present the best aspect of your work history, accomplishments and future potential with much less ability to judge and dismiss within mere seconds.
> Text doesn’t care about looks, presentation, voice, speaking skills, etc.
Lots of jobs care precisely about those. Most notably sales, but also most other customer-facing jobs. Even for jobs where these aren’t the primary skills, they contribute to overall success. People who are good at these can equally complain that text doesn’t do them justice. In any case, calling these inhumanely degrading is just a subtle way to be inhumanely degrading to people who possess these qualities. It tells us more about you than the process honestly.
I don’t dispute that. However, a video snippet has the potential of disqualifying many prospects before they’ve interacted with a hiring manager because of their short video —which I hold gives them the short shrift.
Great. So now the job market is rigged even more against:
- introverts
- people without well-developed social skills
- people who do OK with smaller, familiar audiences (think an office with 40 co-workers) but not OK with larger, unfamiliar audiences (public speaking and presentation)
- non-neurotypicals
than it already was in the text CV era. How is that an improvement?
Extroverts and people who know how to operate in the society already have an unfair advantage, we don't need to give them yet more of it.
Imagine if games were made of discussions on how the game should be.
it’s important stuff but should not be replacing the stuff that it’s supposed to regulate.
Intense rule making periods are tragedies. Everything of substance is easily lost on the promise that we will have more of it in the future.
At the end, often the rules remain about the same but the rulers change. Politics is not about philosophical argument but power distribution. It's not the case that the more you argue the better rules you produce. In the Middle East the everyday life is deep into politics and they failed to produce the outstanding rules.
There’s always politics but politics is overhead. It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.
You can’t do if all you do is arguing over what to do and how to do it.
> It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.
This has always been the case - some sub-groups of the population didn't notice it because it wasn't their/our bandwidth being consumed. Pick any past century or decade, and I will name a group whose world was consumed by politics then.
Yes, there were always some rules for some subgroup that caused political discussions and that's fine.
The problem starts when the bandwidth gets saturated. I don't say that people just should shut the f up and follow the rules, I'm simply saying that this saturated state is very bad.
>you just didn't realize when it was your little group getting the free pass.
As a lifelong minority with periods of being undocumented or illegal if you wish, I rarely got a free pass. I'm very familiar of the concept of being not allowed to do things o be denied stuff due to status I have no power change.
There was a time I had to beg bank employees to open me an account because I was working for months now and I need to get paid, and not because the law forbid me from having an account. There was a time when I was on a fishing boat crossing borders illegally and it was not because I was too lazy to get a proper visa.
Can you please inform me about the freebies I got? Why don't you tell me about the wonders of having your family being threatened to be send to the place where people often get lost without a trace? Tell me about the privilege of having your father feeding you by working for less than the minimum wage despite being an Electrical Engineer with Masters degree?
If anything, part of the big political events of the last few year revolves around me getting similar rights to those who are not happy with the new situation. I guess they want their underpaid Engineers back.
Would you consider your past as a time when politics "wasn't eating the world" then? Did you not look at things "through the eyes of clans and governance"?
It was “eating the word” when things were happening. Think the collapse of the SSSR, the transition period was politically intense waste of time. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t for the better, eventually.
You must be thinking that inheritance taxes discussion or carbon emission limits are intense but no I’m not talking about that. I'm talking about situations where you decide if you like something or not depending to the political affiliation of its makers. Like the idea of a CV in a special format that comes from a Chinese company being instantly dismissed is an example of unnecessary politics.
Gradual changed are necessary, maybe full throttle are necessary too however the periods of “everything is about our battle in the politics” are huge waste of life’s.
To be fair, the Internet was much more of a niche back then. Internet and technology have since become the nervous system of every economy and society in the developed world, so it's no wonder that they now reflects the predominant concerns (such as politics and governance) of the people it's connecting.
10 years ago the following issues were topical: the Tea Party wave had just crested, Obamacare, rabid birtherism and Obama's "Terrorist fist jab". It was the same polarization we're seeing today, only less intense as social media hadn't quite amassed the critical mass it has today.
edit - I looked it up and the "Terrorist fist jab" comment was made in 2008 - so 13 years ago
Its amusing that less than 24 hours ago on the 'how to write a resume that converts' thread many people commented that "Resumes are completely outdated", and now here we are with more negativity on this modern approach.
For entry level jobs requiring young people that are customer facing, a video application makes a lot of sense to me.
It also removes a lot of the awkwardness Gen Z's might feel going down to their local retailer and asking if they are hiring.
My instinct says props to TikTok for at least trying something that's different and thinking a bit outside of the box
Everyone’s a critic. It’s always easier to dismiss and be pessimistic than embrace and be constructive. In fact this very comment I write is dismissive itself.
> Its amusing that less than 24 hours ago on the 'how to write a resume that converts' thread many people commented that "Resumes are completely outdated", and now here we are with more negativity on this modern approach.
I find myself in state regularly. At least I know now how to recognize the paralizing absurdity. Still very often a new solution is best when it massages an old one to fix problems but the world seems to operate by big deviations that shock the status quo and then new and old blend again.
It isn't that amusing. It just shows that HN isn't a monoculture.
This is why comments complaining about HN monoculture get upvoted. Because a large enough piece of the userbase agrees with both sides. If they didn't, those comments would just get downvoted and you would never see them.
Kinda funny how that works. "See, lots of people agree that HN is a hivemind!" Proving it's not a hivemind.
> Its amusing that less than 24 hours ago on the 'how to write a resume that converts' thread many people commented that "Resumes are completely outdated", and now here we are with more negativity on this modern approach.
Don't you know? Recruiter supposed to hire you by using their mind tricks, duh.
Ignoring the fact that in the many countries HR would quite rightly avoid asking for a picture in an aplication (apart from modeling / acting gigs oh and SC/DV jobs) to avoid potential legal blowback.
I have observed young people today, on tiktok, wallstreetbets, and other communities, to generally be very savvy and cognizant of trends and good investments more so than older people, who get stuck in ruts, such as subscribing to hype/fud of zerohedge or peterschiff. TikTOk and Reddit investors are good at filtering out this bad advice and alarmism.
Is this satire? TikTok, IG, and WSB are comically bad and dangerous investment advice. Sure there are a few DD's on WSB that get upvoted to the top, but most are just jumping on a few tickers because someone said it's the next hot thing. Even worse on TikTok and IG, it's 99%:
"look at BTC went 500% last year, buy the dip for another 5x"
"these stocks are the future $RANDOM_SOLAR_PANEL_CO, $TSLA, $WEED_CO"
The most generally knowledgeable sizeable investment advice community is on bogleheads.org and users are usually like age 35+. They're generally well informed on tax implications, century old historical performance, different asset classes, factor analysis, ETF securities lending, etc.
Meme-driven investing is riding on a short-term wave now, but soon everyone who didn't get off the bandwagon in time to save their gains will go home crying.
The fact is that short-term (<10 years) investing is indistinguishable from gambling, unless you're Warren Buffett. Investment should be done accordingly, with the plan to get rich slowly if you want to be certain of the outcome.
If we're going to go out of our way to acknowledge this new service could be a civic good we should also acknowledge that it could be immensely destructive. If you get to have optimism for a brand new corporate product launch from TikTok I get to have cynicism.
Social media, particularly to Gen Z, and particulary TikTok, has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity - often in unhealthy ways. Rich people tend to have more followers, white people tends to have more followers, blondes tends to have more followers, sexually provocative content tends to have more followers.
I do not see TikTok shedding its whole zeitgeist to forward a a jobs product that helps the world.
I must be seeing a different sides of Tiktok than you. The Tiktok I see has plenty of vanity (though nothing compared to Instagram), but also an immense amount honestness/earnestness/openness where Gen-Z shares its mistakes/embarrassments/awkwardness.
You have just described literally every generation of humans that ever existed. The ancient Romans complained about their lazy, disconnected successor generations.
> The replies to this are emblematic of HN culture -- a whole lot of quick dismissals without engaging with why this might exist, who it might benefit, and who it might turn away.
Curiosity comes from exploring both positive and negative consequences. You now have the top comment, so how emblematic of HN's culture is that?
This is the third time today I've read this sentiment and it's always someone frustrated that their view isn't as widely supported as they've hoped it would be. It's a big crowd here, from all across the world and the US. Trying to box HN much less HN users up is fruitless. Feel free to look at some of my post-history where I assumed I knew things about a user or their intent.
>everyone was telling me how millennials were lazy or disconnected or didn't understand the real world.
a decade ago was the single largest financial collapse in american history since the depression. millennials were told they would all get office jobs and a lexus. they all largely got working-poor fast food jobs and endless student debt.
now GenZ is looking at the same prospect. Covid and stagnant wages, and unapproachable college debt.
whatever Tiktok hopes to do, it needs to pivot from this malarkey where everyone needs to be a programmer and start offering trade jobs, which have been starving for new hires for 40 years. plumbing, HVAC, electrical, mechanical maintenance, and engine techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.
You are being sarcastic, but that is literally the fix. If you offer backbreaking work without matching compensation, it's clear that you won't get any applicants.
> start offering trade jobs, which have been starving for new hires for 40 years. plumbing, HVAC, electrical, mechanical maintenance, and engine techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.
Salaries in those fields have been flat. That shows that there is NOT some magic pent-up demand in the trades.
Yes, a lot of people would like a flood of tradespeople to drive those flat salaries down but that does not mean that there is a shortage.
This is what happens when technology outpaces laws and laws are reactive rather than preventitive.
We seriously need to rethink some of the most fundamental layers of society - built and designed for an era where information travels at the speed of light and PB's of information is moved around the globe each day. Our current laws are obsolete, outdated and outpaced and should be updated every 1-2 years in lockstep with new apps/services/platforms. We're only now beginning to see legislation against online platforms, decades later after they first appeared...Why?
I understand the need and desire for innovation, and sure, it's a 'free market', but certain 'apps' can have far reaching social consequences; now you need to be comfortable having your likeness exposed to multiple platforms, and of course, you'll need the capability to make a video in the first place (phone, internet service, account on platforms...).
What's the use of 'laws' when they are bypassed this easily? How is this not going to be discriminatory/racist the second it's launched? It's ripe for a budding lawyer to build a case and sue someone.
Why are there no laws preventing/outlawing video based resume's until we have decided whether they are okay and in what capability they are allowed.
Why are we even allowing the concept of an "AI" to exist before it's legislated against? Have we learnt nothing that we should probably make laws first, otherwise it's essentially a free-for-all situation which is not good for society.
Usually the first filtering step is done without much PII - if it's a paper/word document then you can decide what information to include and it's filtered based on that before interviews (which is how it's always worked for me, my employer knew nothing about my background, history, ethnic group, race/religion and it was the same for each candidate who applied for the position).
IMO it should be a requirement that at least 1 filtering step in a hiring process is done without the employer knowing certain pieces of information (and it would be down to them to ensure they have a process that avoids collecting this information before step 2 which you can then hold interviews/video calls etc.)
> Why are we even allowing the concept of [] to exist before it's legislated against? Have we learnt nothing that we should probably make laws first, otherwise it's essentially a free-for-all situation which is not good for society.
"Free-for-all" is actually one of the founding objectives of the USA.
Laws are not written overnight. I am not really sure what kind of `SLA` you have in mind for drafting and passing legislating for new fields (especially massive paradigm shifts with countless unknown-unknowns), but history would suggest that it takes...a lot longer than you expect.
It's a cool idea, and I support it, but it will apply to a fairly narrow demographic. I also think it will have a very difficult time passing legal challenges. Caveat emptor...
Either way it is irrelevant. People put on TikTok what they want the world to see. The importance of the app for any sort of intelligence is vastly overrated - Facebook would be far more useful as people expect relative privacy amongst their friend group.
What difference does it make as to which country has a quirky public dance video of mine? Again, the potential benefit of TikTok as an intelligence platform is overrated. Bypass cert pinning and inspect the packets sent by the application if you’re so paranoid - most reversing and packet capture efforts haven’t found anything of note.
286 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] thread> As the quality of a social network deteriorates, it becomes indistinguishable from Facebook.
or
> All social networks converge to Facebook over time.
Something like that. It needs some work but you get the idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I'm always blown away by how unnecessarily cruel people are on that site.
Genuine question. Can anyone tell me how recruiters intend to parse through thousands of videos without some level of automation or software-based filtering?
I understand that there are AI systems that can pick up keywords and sentiment, but we all know they are far from perfect. Plus we end up with all sorts of issues where some accents might be under-represented, leading to exclusion etc.
For all the flaws in text resume-based hiring, automated systems can, at least to _some_ extent, help sift through thousands of candidates.
I'm not saying that the present system is perfect, just that the proposed video-based system could be worse in terms of scale.
Sort by likes?
Also, Remember how the tiktok algorithm supposedly works: if a brand only watches / likes / comments on tiktokers who build things, the "hiring" feed will be full of people building things.
I couldn’t help but laugh a little.
I like the idea of elevator pitch style TikToks where you can quickly express yourself and show your creativity. I would imagine the algorithm can start showing the recruiters through the job relevant hashtags and work its magic from there.
The creativity tools of the app can prove very useful, the simplest idea that comes to my mind is a recruiter creating a TikTok video and says something like "Show me something that you learn in your career as X that isn't taught in school" and have the TikToker's quote and reply to the video. The recruiters then can go through the replies and pick candidates for interviewing.
I don't think that anybody will hire through click of a button like shopping for employees, that doesn't happen on LinkedIn, on Indeed, on HN or anywhere. CV or Video, it's just a lead and I bet a few second of a video can tell much more than 2 pages of written CV.
I have to assume this style of algo-generated feeds wouldn't apply for an actual hiring platform, because otherwise this is ripe for "inadvertent" discrimination.
I'm not sure how it could fly in the US where putting a picture on your résumé is more or less illegal.
Certainly would help the state plonk you down when your social score gets too low too.
How does it work for models and actors?
I’ve never heard that putting a picture on a resume was a legal problem for an applicant. Employers have a the burden of running a fair hiring process. Some firms even remove race and gender signifiers from resumes before the initial hiring manager screen.
It was a big deal when they stopped making hotness a requirement for airline stewards, and for most jobs it’s totally illegal to require a particular ethnicity, but for performing arts they explicitly hire people for physical appearance. What’s the difference, legally?
A few possibilities:
- performing arts (film, stage) are artistic expression, and thus protected by the first amendment. (But then why is the physical appearance of an airline steward not free speech of a brand’s image?)
- appearance is “inherent” to acting (but I’m sure people have argued that whiteness is inherent to staffing all kinds of things, and that’s not tolerated)
- actors are rarely employees, but instead sign independent contracts with short lived, project specific LLCs. Thus “casting” is not “recruiting” and actors don’t have traditional employment protections. (Most film jobs work this way though - is it permissible to apply appearance standards to the Key Grip?)
It definitely wouldn't be useful. Hiring isn't a popularity problem as much as a matching problem.
That’s the beauty of TikTok. the rich don’t necessarily get richer. You will often be presented with fresh people, AFAIK they spread out new content to measure response.
It’s not really the type of platform that everyone watches the same most popular people.
It’s refreshing that doesn’t push for “more from the same” .
In contrast, twitter is horrible because I’m in a bubble and everyone I’m exposed to is there to push their agenda.
Instagram is fine but it’s essentially place where people I know and I don’t know pretend to be living the good life. It’s boring. The content discovery never worked for me.
Youtube is actually great in terms of content but the discovery revolves around the “more from the same” which makes discovery of something fresh pretty hard.
TikTok is not perfect but it’s the only platform that actually seems to create a stream of stuff that I like and are not the same.
So , congrats.
This sounds like the very worst parts of LinkedIn, but with more video and far more social pressure.
> a few second of a video can tell much more than 2 pages of written CV.
These are -different- things though, one is an interview the other is a CV.
Introverted? Neurodiverse? Ugly? Differently abled? Have a regional accent? Too bad, your video resume is disqualified for not being as “good” as the charismatic member of the cultural/ethnic majority.
I think it’s especially important for employers to make their evaluations as blind as they can be for as long as possible, including things like removing names from resumes before presenting them to hiring managers.
In my view this is an incredibly lazy way for TikTok to launch a new revenue stream while engaging in a bare minimum amount of product development. They see how LinkedIn can charge a hundred bucks a month to recruiters and they want in.
I can see this kind of stuff useful for applying for jobs in the (traditionally) "creative" fields; a well crafted TikTok can show the recruiter a sense of the applicant's editing skills, taste in art/music, and general presentation skills, after all. For a cookie-cutter desk job? Not sure what gap this fills that isn't already occupied by the venerable Curriculum "Resume" Vitae.
A normal jobs finds keywords on resumes, filters by experiece and education. Tiktok filters by looks and race and then calls people in for an interview.
The status quo is that a paper/PDF resume is the initial screening method. An employer committed to removing hiring bias could have the recruitment department strip personal identifiers like the name before handing the resume to the hiring manager.
Now, instead of that, you have a video of the person. Now you’re subconsciously judging everything: how the person looks, speaks, dresses, and even the decorations in their house.
Obviously, there’s potential for bias as soon as you see a person in real life or hear them speak. That’s going to happen at most jobs at some point.
However, this TikTok service introduces new methods of bias to the initial screening process that didn’t exist previously.
That is, you'll get better results (in terms of hiring competent employees) if you find out whether the person is physically attractive after you've already anchored on whether they're qualified in a more objective manner. Resumes aren't great at giving you an accurate anchor, but better than nothing, imo.
I'm reminded of a recent study on speed dating that found that higher physical attractiveness increased people's perception of ones intelligence: https://psyarxiv.com/ewvny/
(Just to note, I'm not particularly opposed to TikTok's service as a new avenue to try, but I do agree with the OP that it could make various discriminatory biases worse, and we should be aware of that risk.)
This already happens, in interviews. There are vanishingly few jobs that will hire you without meeting you, because there are some basic things that are difficult or impossible to convey without meeting. Most white-collar jobs don't have to spend much thought assessing whether a candidate is likely to show up to work everyday", or whether thy can handle workplace conflicts without screaming or violence, but this is unfortunately a legitimate concern that eg hiring for some McDonald's locations must consider. L
However, I'd bet companies will be more averse to this due to the fact you get a video of someone initially, rather than their resume, so it may make it easier to employers to quietly discriminate or unconsciously discriminate.
Of course that's a rough first estimation. Most videos wouldn't be watched to the end, but on the other hand additional time is needed for reflection on noteworthy candidates, and for reaching out. But overall I don't see the need for automation here.
However, there are a lot of jobs for which being young, confident, and attractive are pretty valuable skills. So I'm sure that it will enjoy fairly wide adoption.
Is this not exactly the same for regular interviews today? Ageism is a huge problem. People who lack confidence won't do as well, etc.
Most people have an online profile, so what's preventing the interviewer/hiring personnel from just looking them up online?
Citations needed. What % of currently alive humans have an 'online' profile, how are you measuring that statistic? Are they engaging actively? How many have never had a smartphone, how many do not use social media at all?
Without sources and actual numbers it's hard to take your point seriously. MOST people do this on Hackernews, claiming "most" or "everyone" or "the majority of..." without actual data to back that up.
Regarding young candidates: it's specifically targeted at Gen-Z.
Regarding attractiveness, confidence and experience talking/acting in front of a camera: there are a lot of jobs where that's important.
I doubt the intention is to hire senior engineers via tiktok.
Just please don't use it to try to hire me in tech! I have enough disadvantages, I don't need my monstrous looks and obvious signs of old age to put me at a greater disadvantage. Written resume for me, thankyouverymuch. At least a written resume helps you get your foot into the door before the onsite interview happens and looks-based biases start making their way in.
I used to work at a co building a chatbot to filter candidates for low-skill hiring (restuarant, retail, etc). These hiring processes are sometimes little more than 1) do you meet a basic list of requirements and 2) are you "okay" -- ie not going to be slovenly, violent, rude to customers, dumb, etc. Step 1 is trivial enough that we automated it away, and step 2 is crucial enough that we _always_ scheduled an interview once a candidate was qualified. The same bias exists towards young, energetic, and socially-savvy people, but 1) it seems unavoidable, given how expansive and inaeticulable the goals of the interview are and 2) it's fairly relevant to many of the jobs, particularly customer-facing ones.
Funnily enough, we actually had a feature requested by a couple of companies to make candidates upload videos, for exactly the reasons I described above. This is the niche that Tiktok is trying to operationalize. While going through videos is slow and expensive, going through interviews is much more so.
It sounds like a bad idea.
Its a quick way to list a database of effective 1st round (call) interviews. Then you can let software take over doing analysis of the network effect (who knows you and can voice for you) do the rest of the work.
I have done recruiting for CX roles in the past, and it has frustrated me to no end that I'm unable to easily parse thru a list of effective phone interviews. Most recruitment sites dont even consider it (probably because CX is low in the totem pole, unlike ENG)
That being said, not sure how it would work outside of CX
At $15 or $20 an hour, companies will either be fully automating or mostly automating their business processes. They don't have time to deal with yearly strikes and walkouts over wages.
"Please implement a shortest path algorithm using dance, in O(n^2) time"
However, this seems like a step backwards in an era where savvy companies are going out of their way to avoid any appearance of hiring bias. When companies are going so far as to strip names from resumes, asking candidates to perform on video doesn’t sound like a good idea.
I don't know about everyone else, but the last year working from home my life has been an avalanche of video calls. Not infrequently, there's a 60 second pitch that is the most important part of the call.
I could totally see recruiters swiping through videos to find candidates. The only potential downside I could see is obviously racial/gender bias being exacerbated or attractiveness on camera entering the sourcing equation for candidates.
That said, those issues exist even today with traditional resumes, so one could argue it's not really making the problem worse and we're going to have to solve that either way.
At least it's not Tinder for jobs, that would be even worse.
I’m pretty sure I’ve lost a lot of jobs for being fat, and I know from experience the hiring bar is much lower for unusually pretty people.
Win win.
After all who doesn't love the smell of circumventing anti-discrimination laws in the morning.
Reminder: "TikTok Told Moderators: Suppress Posts by the “Ugly” and Poor"
[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
edit: Not that I'm defending Tiktok, just saying that the way it distorts and portrays the world is a continuation of what media companies were already doing. I was going to make a point about how it is a lot like the Society of the Spectacle, but it looks like others have already made the connection:
https://blendertrouble.substack.com/p/now-i-know-whats-real-...
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
Trying to find cultural fit (exactly as in product market fit) for max attention (clicks, likes, ads) is exactly what social media pandering is all about, both by the companies and the "influencers." With each post they're experimenting to reach that end goal.
It’s not like it matters, anyways - your users will suppress posts like these for you regardless.
I have some friends that went from overweight/obese to looking fit. Their very first reactions were “wow, I cannot believe how differently I am being treated.” Seeing the pettiness of human society, as expressed by the massive difference in how they were being treated, turned many of them into misanthropes. It is a completely different world for good-looking people.
However, solving this problem isn’t really TikTok’s job. Whether a video interview or a physical one, if you’re pretty and rich, you’ll have massive advantage regardless.
Still, I mostly like videos posted by attractive people on TikTok, because I’m not about lying to myself to pretend to be woke. It’s a visual medium. Just like you don’t hire stupid engineers, it doesn’t make sense to watch ugly people. It’s about knowing your strengths, if you’re not going to maintain your appearance, maybe do podcasts instead. Or one of the millions of TikTok videos that don’t show your appearance, because that is 100% optional.
You understand China culled the herd and killed millions and disenfranchised any who disagreed with their revolution?
disgusting.
A decade ago everyone was telling me how millennials were lazy or disconnected or didn't understand the real world. And it felt pretty bad. I'm seeing all the same commentary shifted down a generation to GenZ without any introspection.
Yes, you might find this silly, and yes, you might not want to get hired this way. But also consider that for some companies, for some roles, or even for some pipelines there could be benefits to broadening the applicant pool.
Some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via resume, some folks are going to have a hard time articulating their experience via tiktok. Why wouldn't we want to consider folks from both input sources and let folks present themselves using the form they feel best conveys their strengths?
[1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
And I, at the time, had the exact same take.
Despite being full of entrepreneurs and hackers, folks here are remarkably out of touch with the average consumer.
It's not a damning criticism. Like I said, I include myself in this group that reacted with a resounding "What? WHY?" to almost every single Apple product launched under Steve Jobs's tenure, and was wrong every time.
But it's a blindspot we should be cognizant of. And anything related with TikTok is the perfect confluence to lead to the most stale takes.
Having said that, there is always a bit of a survivorship bias with these trends.
I also was completely negative and dubious on Snapchat and turned out to have been vindicated.
I do think TikTok is something different. It captures my imagination and attention better than any platform EVER, and I include YouTube and Instagram in this. Their recommendation algorithm is truly wonderous.
Not in my experience. You just have to subscribe to subreddits that don't have a political tilt. On rare occasions some subreddits go dark or sticky something political, but I'd hardly call that a take over.
Text as a medium is rapidly falling out of favor unless it’s for purely informational purposes. I read an article this morning about how the book publishing industry is all but dead because nobody is buying books anymore. Newspapers are largely dead, and the ones that still exist have pivoted hard to video or metatextual content.
Text doesn’t sell valuable ads and reading requires your full attention, and that is in direct competition with social media. It’s why banner ads were never really effective and the big ad revenue shift only happened after video ads became viable (and made YouTube unwatchable).
https://tildes.net/
I'll drop a few invite codes below for anyone interested (if they are all used, let me know)
https://tildes.net/register?code=I448A-IEYUI-UDNWH https://tildes.net/register?code=VDTMC-SBJTQ-PTW9X https://tildes.net/register?code=HEX3N-VA48Z-AIJIT https://tildes.net/register?code=7L0GO-L4BZ0-962ZN
Note: I am not affiliated with Tildes, just an active member who wants the community to grow.
The first confirms that once DJT was removed off of large platforms like Twitter, he lost a lot of followers and digital support, proof that large scale networks have a strong positive feedback loop.
The second provides 2 videos that go into excruciating detail on why Elon Musk is a fake futurist, ruthless capitalist and overall a terrible person (Including working his factory workers at the TSLA factory through COVID forcefully, threatening their jobs and saying we will be at 0 cases by the end of April 2020). At the very least, you should dislike Elon for his anti-union, ruthlessly capitalistic approach to human labor and selfishness.
This invite only approach doesn't seem to be working all that well, I've been following Lobste.rs, from what I can tell it's got the same problems as HN with poor comments.
Also 'young people new to the job market' will probably always have a major mismatch with respect to expectations and values, it's probably been that way since the dawn of time.
It took me 2 years just to get my head straight in a 'basic way' to even start to understand the professional world.
Though I don't think it's fair to characterize any generation as 'lazy' though, that's not the right word - although Millenials are the first generation to not consider 'hard work' as a characteristic of their generation - this is an old data point (10 years old) which could either indicate a generational value shift - or - simply the fact that people of a certain age don't have that virtue (or don't think of themselves as that) but by the time they are 30 then their views and values shift etc..
TikTok surely can reach young people for certain kinds of jobs, not doubt. But it's also just a way to try to make money in any way they can.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2175588
Meanwhile, my early-teen step-siblings have very similar interests to what I had back in the day (they enjoy playing games like roblox/minecraft on the computer, and FPS on consoles) - but are way less comfortable messing with the OS to troubleshoot vs what I was doing at their age. They were raised with tablets, where things just kind of work. When they do want to learn something, they pretty much always go to youtube first - and I'm not really sure if that's more effective or less effective than what we used to do, or if means they will have a harder time parsing technical docs later on in life.
They've expressed interested in computer science fields, and I do think they'll be able to learn it just fine. In some ways, maybe the exposure to more polished UX will make their bar for those experiences higher than what my generation would accept.
Because this a really broad extrapolation.
A lot of my peers were starting to use them, but just like kids today, they didn't really look into how things worked, they weren't really curious about them, they didn't really tinker with them.
They wouldn't go and update / rollback a driver. They would just complain if things didn't work, and maybe asked a "geek" friend for help.
Today, if a random game doesn't work, people will just try the next one.
So if people are curious, it's much easier to get their hands on a computer, and there's less risk.
When I was growing up, a PC was a fairly consequential purchase for my family, and they couldn't afford to buy a new one very often. There was a lot of pressure to "not break it". Of course, looking things up a bit and getting help from my father and friends, I was able to figure out that "messing with drivers" would likely not break it physically. But I understand this could have been limiting for people not having someone to guide them.
There's also the fact that today much more people have access to "computing", so if the part of the population interested in tinkering is roughly the same in absolute terms, the ratio between those who tinker and those who don't is skewed in favor of those who don't.
btw there is no such thing as techie anymore - everyone is into tech, there are very very few luddites left. There's a tendency of UI designers to infantilize their designs , but i m not sure that's based on actual measurable improvement or a certain "contempt" for the end user.
I think for anyone who has a kid, the best way to get them interested in this stuff is to have a bad computer, or at least one that primarily uses the shell (not that those computers are bad, I use one myself).
I got deeply interested in technology the opposite way. I got an iPod touch as a kid, and I was amazed by how well designed it was. The thing felt completely delightful to use compared to the Windows XP/Vista systems that were around in the day. I immediately had dreams of writing apps for the iPod that were every bit as amazing as the rest of the system. It didn't take me long after unboxing that iPod touch for me to boot up an old Mac to start on my programming journey.
And to this day, creating great user experiences is what drives my interest in software above all else.
and macbooks. Totally opaque systems that you d rather replace than upgrade. That's OK -- it would happen inevitably, as it did with cars. The problem is that this culture has extended to software, where it is normalized that any technology must be offered through frameworks, APIs and prepackaged cloud solutions
Because there's three trillion ways you can write a program and all of them seem to come with dozens of READMEs and what-to-do and what-not-to-do and very opinionated maintainers, the creative minds of today might just create their games within Roblox or get to know Javascript by making mods for a browser game, or learn to use DAWs to make cool-sounding EDM, etc. This was already a thing in "our" time with Flash and Adobe's software, but now that's the norm.
Effectively those minds have migrated over generations from the pure hardware to progressively thicker layers of software, which makes sense to me since that's how all human progress basically does with any other field too.
My dad would tell me stories of copying code from magazines by hand and how little memory they had.
Today, memory and CPU speed is basically a non-factor; it's assumed to be infinite or at least extremely high for many applications.
Funnily enough though, memory constraints were still relevant for me and some of my friends - since Ti-83 calculators were the first exposure to programming for many of us. It helped that we were all required to buy them, so we could collaborate and copy over programs to each other. I would write programs so I wouldn't have to memorize chemistry stuff in HS. The teachers back then never checked, and they expected us to use calculators for normal calculations anyhow.
By the time I was using real code in college though - I agree. Performance optimization like that was taught as more of a "nice to have", and the only classes where it really mattered were assembly, and one elective I took on game engine development.
Modern docs, youtube tutorials, and high quality free courses are much more conducive to learning than the forums, mailing lists, and library books of yore.
All younger folks I see use TikTok and Snap to communicate, interact and get their data feed.
I'm not much of a social media user, despite being of an age full of extremely active users. I find Tiktok in particular annoying, like someone took the inauthenticity of mediocre YouTube creators and decided that every user in the network should ape it.
But that has nothing to do with the jobs service, the fact that it may expand a company's recruiting reach or provide opportunity to those who don't fit well into the stodgy workflow of traditional job apps. Just because the tiktok application format wouldn't fit my co's hiring doesn't mean that there aren't tons of jobs for whom a short demonstration of personality and creativity is signal as useful as a resumé.
The new replacements for it just don’t have the same vibe.
I really loathe the “sell yourself via video snippet” aspect. It’s inhumanely degrading.
Hyperbole much? There are a lot of inhumane, degrading things in this world. TikTok videos are not one of them.
Anyways, clearly some people thought it would be cool and interesting. I think this will be an interesting alternative for those that don’t do well with resumes.
Fortunately, no one is going to make you use this, so I don’t know why everyone here is acting like it will be forced on them. This is obviously a secondary application method, one that will work particularly well for creative or extroverted types.
Acting.
Is there perhaps something deeper you want to say about sex workers that’s going unsaid right now?
Strip clubs don’t care what your skills are, they mostly look for the eye candy their clientele seeks. Video is similar in that it doesn’t care about skills other than maybe being able to present yourself at the cost of all other attributes.
But okay.
Thanks for clarifying and sharing your perspective.
It’s not different from TV news vs Daily newspaper. One is more fluff than the other. When was the last time you saw an “ugly” news anchor. In the papers you don’t care what the reporter looks like.
During a sit down interview you at least have a chance to make your argument if the interviewer has misconceived something or it needs elaboration.
To be completely honest, I don't care what the reporter looks like in either case. But I'm going to presume this was a rhetorical question and not meant as a reply or question to my specific manner of news consumption?
You'll have to forgive me (or, well you don't have to, that's up to you) but this still feels like putting the career carriage in front of the job prospect horse to me-for some reason. Perhaps said another way: none of what you said speaks to me to be a problem with the medium of interviewing (in this case video, ostensibly via tiktok), but instead rather the individuals participating in the process.
I can't quite pin down why, but it's a very strong sensation. I'll take this elsewhere and find a way to reconcile it without going turtles all the way down here in the thread.
Also photogenic characters are at an extreme disadvantage with people like you, who have prejudice against them. So everything evens out in the end.
There are degrees of inhumane and degrading. Sure, there are plenty of worse things than having to apply via a video CV on Tiktok, but that's a difference in magnitude and not a difference in kind.
Interesting, why do you find it more degrading than selling yourself via text snippet (your CV)?
Lots of jobs care precisely about those. Most notably sales, but also most other customer-facing jobs. Even for jobs where these aren’t the primary skills, they contribute to overall success. People who are good at these can equally complain that text doesn’t do them justice. In any case, calling these inhumanely degrading is just a subtle way to be inhumanely degrading to people who possess these qualities. It tells us more about you than the process honestly.
- introverts
- people without well-developed social skills
- people who do OK with smaller, familiar audiences (think an office with 40 co-workers) but not OK with larger, unfamiliar audiences (public speaking and presentation)
- non-neurotypicals
than it already was in the text CV era. How is that an improvement?
Extroverts and people who know how to operate in the society already have an unfair advantage, we don't need to give them yet more of it.
It’s upsetting, uncreative and harmful.
it’s important stuff but should not be replacing the stuff that it’s supposed to regulate.
Intense rule making periods are tragedies. Everything of substance is easily lost on the promise that we will have more of it in the future.
At the end, often the rules remain about the same but the rulers change. Politics is not about philosophical argument but power distribution. It's not the case that the more you argue the better rules you produce. In the Middle East the everyday life is deep into politics and they failed to produce the outstanding rules.
When was this not the case - ever? Perhaps it didn't seem like "politics" for you in the past.
You can’t do if all you do is arguing over what to do and how to do it.
People have limited time and cognitive capacity.
This has always been the case - some sub-groups of the population didn't notice it because it wasn't their/our bandwidth being consumed. Pick any past century or decade, and I will name a group whose world was consumed by politics then.
The problem starts when the bandwidth gets saturated. I don't say that people just should shut the f up and follow the rules, I'm simply saying that this saturated state is very bad.
As a lifelong minority with periods of being undocumented or illegal if you wish, I rarely got a free pass. I'm very familiar of the concept of being not allowed to do things o be denied stuff due to status I have no power change.
There was a time I had to beg bank employees to open me an account because I was working for months now and I need to get paid, and not because the law forbid me from having an account. There was a time when I was on a fishing boat crossing borders illegally and it was not because I was too lazy to get a proper visa.
Can you please inform me about the freebies I got? Why don't you tell me about the wonders of having your family being threatened to be send to the place where people often get lost without a trace? Tell me about the privilege of having your father feeding you by working for less than the minimum wage despite being an Electrical Engineer with Masters degree?
If anything, part of the big political events of the last few year revolves around me getting similar rights to those who are not happy with the new situation. I guess they want their underpaid Engineers back.
DB.
You must be thinking that inheritance taxes discussion or carbon emission limits are intense but no I’m not talking about that. I'm talking about situations where you decide if you like something or not depending to the political affiliation of its makers. Like the idea of a CV in a special format that comes from a Chinese company being instantly dismissed is an example of unnecessary politics.
Gradual changed are necessary, maybe full throttle are necessary too however the periods of “everything is about our battle in the politics” are huge waste of life’s.
edit - I looked it up and the "Terrorist fist jab" comment was made in 2008 - so 13 years ago
For entry level jobs requiring young people that are customer facing, a video application makes a lot of sense to me.
It also removes a lot of the awkwardness Gen Z's might feel going down to their local retailer and asking if they are hiring.
My instinct says props to TikTok for at least trying something that's different and thinking a bit outside of the box
I find myself in state regularly. At least I know now how to recognize the paralizing absurdity. Still very often a new solution is best when it massages an old one to fix problems but the world seems to operate by big deviations that shock the status quo and then new and old blend again.
This is why comments complaining about HN monoculture get upvoted. Because a large enough piece of the userbase agrees with both sides. If they didn't, those comments would just get downvoted and you would never see them.
Kinda funny how that works. "See, lots of people agree that HN is a hivemind!" Proving it's not a hivemind.
Don't you know? Recruiter supposed to hire you by using their mind tricks, duh.
"look at BTC went 500% last year, buy the dip for another 5x"
"these stocks are the future $RANDOM_SOLAR_PANEL_CO, $TSLA, $WEED_CO"
The most generally knowledgeable sizeable investment advice community is on bogleheads.org and users are usually like age 35+. They're generally well informed on tax implications, century old historical performance, different asset classes, factor analysis, ETF securities lending, etc.
The fact is that short-term (<10 years) investing is indistinguishable from gambling, unless you're Warren Buffett. Investment should be done accordingly, with the plan to get rich slowly if you want to be certain of the outcome.
Social media, particularly to Gen Z, and particulary TikTok, has a major focus on projecting success, wealth, beauty, and other aspects of vanity - often in unhealthy ways. Rich people tend to have more followers, white people tends to have more followers, blondes tends to have more followers, sexually provocative content tends to have more followers.
I do not see TikTok shedding its whole zeitgeist to forward a a jobs product that helps the world.
Focus on projecting success, wealth, and beauty is a tale as old as time. It is not unique to Gen Z, nor is it heightened in Gen Z.
Funnily enough, those claims are also as old as time.
This statement can apply to LinkedIn as well.
Citation needed.
Curiosity comes from exploring both positive and negative consequences. You now have the top comment, so how emblematic of HN's culture is that?
This is the third time today I've read this sentiment and it's always someone frustrated that their view isn't as widely supported as they've hoped it would be. It's a big crowd here, from all across the world and the US. Trying to box HN much less HN users up is fruitless. Feel free to look at some of my post-history where I assumed I knew things about a user or their intent.
a decade ago was the single largest financial collapse in american history since the depression. millennials were told they would all get office jobs and a lexus. they all largely got working-poor fast food jobs and endless student debt.
now GenZ is looking at the same prospect. Covid and stagnant wages, and unapproachable college debt.
whatever Tiktok hopes to do, it needs to pivot from this malarkey where everyone needs to be a programmer and start offering trade jobs, which have been starving for new hires for 40 years. plumbing, HVAC, electrical, mechanical maintenance, and engine techs would stop traffic for a chance to so much as talk to someone from GenZ about the trade.
Pay more. Stop asking people to give up their physical health to compete on the job. Give them a career.
Construction wages have decreased, adjusted for inflation, so it's not a surprise there's no interest in taking those jobs.
Wow! What an insightful suggestion! If you aren't paying enough, just pay enough, duh.
Salaries in those fields have been flat. That shows that there is NOT some magic pent-up demand in the trades.
Yes, a lot of people would like a flood of tradespeople to drive those flat salaries down but that does not mean that there is a shortage.
We seriously need to rethink some of the most fundamental layers of society - built and designed for an era where information travels at the speed of light and PB's of information is moved around the globe each day. Our current laws are obsolete, outdated and outpaced and should be updated every 1-2 years in lockstep with new apps/services/platforms. We're only now beginning to see legislation against online platforms, decades later after they first appeared...Why?
I understand the need and desire for innovation, and sure, it's a 'free market', but certain 'apps' can have far reaching social consequences; now you need to be comfortable having your likeness exposed to multiple platforms, and of course, you'll need the capability to make a video in the first place (phone, internet service, account on platforms...).
What's the use of 'laws' when they are bypassed this easily? How is this not going to be discriminatory/racist the second it's launched? It's ripe for a budding lawyer to build a case and sue someone.
Why are there no laws preventing/outlawing video based resume's until we have decided whether they are okay and in what capability they are allowed.
Why are we even allowing the concept of an "AI" to exist before it's legislated against? Have we learnt nothing that we should probably make laws first, otherwise it's essentially a free-for-all situation which is not good for society.
IMO it should be a requirement that at least 1 filtering step in a hiring process is done without the employer knowing certain pieces of information (and it would be down to them to ensure they have a process that avoids collecting this information before step 2 which you can then hold interviews/video calls etc.)
"Free-for-all" is actually one of the founding objectives of the USA.
Oh wow. I cannot believe you seriously said that.
Either way it is irrelevant. People put on TikTok what they want the world to see. The importance of the app for any sort of intelligence is vastly overrated - Facebook would be far more useful as people expect relative privacy amongst their friend group.