Byron Auguste: recommendation

Transcript context

…We have such a diversified economy, so many millions of employers. They’re willing to do a lot of weird things. You see that in the tech sector. And to think this problem, they can’t overcome because they’re just massively failing at the level of millions of individual decisions — Well, just to be clear, I think it can be overcome. I’m working full time to overcome it. To your point, I’m very optimistic about solving the problem for three main reasons. The biggest reason isn’t even one you’re talking about. The biggest reason I’m optimistic about solving it is that you’ve got 70 million STARs — half the workforce — who are busting their tails to learn new things, to actually figure out what it would take to have the skills for the job. I don’t know if you saw this. There was a Harvard Business Review, the big survey, Harvard Business School survey and Accenture, I think, that actually looked at attitudes about digital transformation. And senior executives said that one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation is that their frontline workers did not want to learn new skills. But they also surveyed frontline workers who, off the charts, wanted to learn new skills for digital transformation and saw as the problem that they weren’t being given any guidance on what skills to learn. I think you see that that’s absolutely true of college. Think about the information problem facing someone working in a frontline job, say, making $15 an hour, who wants to do better, wants to earn more, wants to be able to support their family more. Half the people will say, “Oh, you need to go to school. You need to go four years, five years, six years, and then see what happens.” The other half of the people are like, “Oh, you should apply for a job.” If you say, “Go to school,” where do I get the money? By the way, even if I can get scholarships or student loans or whatever, who supports my kids? Who pays the rent? That’s one problem. Then it’ll be years before you know. But then, if you apply for a job, you’re not going to know that much more either. You might not get the job, but then the question is, why didn’t you get the job? You don’t get feedback from the interview. You don’t know if you’ve been screened out. We’ve worked with people who said, “You can’t get me a job at this company. I’ve applied four times. They rejected me.” But guess what? They hadn’t rejected them. They had screened them out. They had not evaluated their skills and found them wanting. They had screened them out without considering them. Since we partner with this company, say, “Hey, in our system, you just do it based on skills and attributes. You don’t screen people out.” They actually got the job. There is a market failure in the actual workflow of hiring that is massive, and I agree with you. We should be very optimistic about being able to overcome that. I can tell you, lots of employers have been moving in that direction for the last 5, 10 years because they see the old direction’s not working for them. If it’s privately profitable to deviate from this practice, why not run a for-profit rather than a nonprofit?…

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