Erdos Had The Number First

Hiring people is difficult. Often times, in the IT world, you’ll just rely on a headhunter and be done with it. But that is problematic and expensive.

I think the world needs a hiring market. Basically how it would work is you the
prospective employee put out a bid, that you will pay some amount of money
to have your resume seen and an offer, that you accept for someone to see your resume. People looking for employees do the same. The market will then the best given price for a job. For example, I want a new job, but not that much, so I put out a Good Till Cancel (GTC) offer of 1000@.03 to view my resume. The book is telling me that my offer is way out of the market right now, which is fine. I’m looking around and I see a job I like, they are 100@10.00 offer, though, which is way to much for me. But, right next to it is a job that is interesting, but they are are 5.00 offer. I pay it, they get my resume. I look at the offer and they’re still holding 20 and the posting’s been up for 7 days. Maybe my investment isn’t so good.

Different order types are available for different things, Good Till Cancel, Fill or Kill, and Day orders are probably the only types this market will need.

Lets say instead of a job seeker, I’m looking to fill a position. The job pays 120,000 a year, plus bonus and has 8 weeks vacation. It’s a high level job, and I don’t want to sift through resumes all day so I put it out for 10@120.
I get one, but the posting languishes there for a while, so I lower my price.
I put out for 10@90 and get filled on 10 almost immediately. OK, I got my resumes, I’m looking through them and I find out I’ve got another job opening for a clerk, I don’t want to spend a lot of time looking at that either, so I just
go through the book and hit all the open bids I find for less than $1.00. I get a hundred resumes, it costs me a grand total of $150 bucks to fill the position (that’s time + cash).

So, why would companies pay for reading resumes? I mean, they would just jack up the prices and the little guy would get screwed. It would be the unemployed guy who needs work that would get hurt by this you skinflint bastard! Not so. Companies already pay to see resumes and this process is often dominated by headhunters. These people fullfill the function that a market should by filtering information and people to companies. Often companies already maintain in-house recruiters as well. The outside headhunters often take a huge percentage in exchange for their services. That percentage is far more than a reasonable and transparent market would bear. Online job sites are very expensive for companies as well, and the best-bid/best-offer system that I’ve proposed would allow them to maximize their value by choosing how much they want to pay to fill a position and letting job seekers choose how much they want to pay to apply. This would have the benefit of eliminating the wide-banding of resumes that causes problems in the first place. But the real reason why companies can’t just jack up the price too much is that no one will pay it if it’s too high. Often companies want to see as many resumes as they can, to insure they find the best candidate. Ability to pay is not a good indicator of candidate quality.