Cur Non

I have a friend who’s a mechanical engineer. He used to build airplane engines for General Electric, and now he’s trying to develop a smarter pill bottle to improve compliance for AIDS and cancer patients. He works out of a start-up ‘incubator’, in an office space shared with dozens of web companies. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. ‘I’m fucking sick of it,’ he told me, ‘all they talk about is colours.’

Web start-up companies are like play-companies. They stand in relation to real companies the way those cute little make-believe baking stations stand in relation to kitchens.

Take Doormates, a failed start-up founded in 2011 by two recent graduates from Columbia University whose mission was to allow users ‘to join or create private networks for buildings with access restricted to only building residents’. For that they, too, raised $350,000. You wonder whether anyone asked: ‘Do strangers living in the same building actually want to commune? Might this problem not be better solved by a plate of sandwiches?’ (The founders have since moved on to ‘Mommy Nearest’, an iPhone app that points out mom-friendly locations around New York.)

A lot of the stuff going on just isn’t very ambitious. ‘The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean,’ wrote Alexis Madrigal in an essay about start-ups in The Atlantic last year. ‘Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like what you’d get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavour: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.’

CROOKS & LIARS—

From the Economic Populist, this piece explains how automated software is screening qualified people out of the job application process. While Mr. Cappelli is saying that companies are short-staffed and using software because of the overwhelming volume of applications, the real problem is that employers are demanding unrealistic qualifications and then blaming the applicant pool and the schools for the fact that they’re not offering enough of a salary to attract the high skill level they want.

This isn’t specific to this recession. When I was a recruiter, I saw employers turn into petty tyrants after 9/11, demanding absurd combinations of skill sets at lower wages because they were convinced they had the upper hand. Now, large corporations are using the inability to get qualified workers at slave wages as an excuse to bring in lower-paid workers from other countries. Progress!

Finally someone speaks the truth about U.S. employers claiming they just can’t find people for job openings. Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli has analyzed why employers dare to claim they cannot find people to hire when the United States has over 27 million people needing a job.

There is no skills shortage, none. In fact employers are being absolutely ridiculous in their hiring practices. It’s so bad, employers use software and third party rejection job application websites, which pretty much guarantee a candidate will be rejected. These websites and software are like virtual wastebaskets for your resume. No human involved, it’s automatic, guaranteed rejection. It’s so bad, an HR executive applied for his own job and was rejected.