TikTok launching jobs service for Gen Z
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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.
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.
> 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.
I'm always blown away by how unnecessarily cruel people are on that site.
Win win.
After all who doesn't love the smell of circumventing anti-discrimination laws in the morning.
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.
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.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme7d5/once-upon-a-time-this...
"Please implement a shortest path algorithm using dance, in O(n^2) time"
It won't mean the death of TT in general. This service will likely be wildly successful and prompt TT to build more platform features like it to appeal to businesses willing to pay for the attention they've managed to garner.
The story has played out the same, and I don't expect this to be much different. The corporatization of social media is a foregone conclusion at this point.
It's almost fascinating to view the changes as a kind of biological succession. It won't take long before the younger generation sees TikTok as a place invaded by the very people they were using it to escape from. And the next Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc will rise to take its place as the new cool place all the kids are hanging out.
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.
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
Whether we like it or not, if I were trying to prove my chops in a particular space, I'd be creating content and building a following on TikTok, and sharing it with prospective employers.
I accidentally look at people like they’ve grown two heads when they ask to find me on facebook, in person. Some communities rely on Facebook for coordination and so periodically I might actually have a Facebook account, but still. Yuck!
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...
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
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).
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.
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.
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.
As if it wasn't true for basically entire human history.
It is just the way in which the success or image of it is being projected that is changing.
You, Mister, need to study history a little bit before you start to compare generations. Also get a little bit of distance and learn about your biases.
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.
They have a staggering amount of behavioral data that any headhunter worth their salt will be drooling over and can charge outrageous premiums for ad space. Can still be screwed up of course, but they hold some pretty big aces in that space.
Plus, maybe the idea that someone needs to present themselves a certain way to the public to be hirable is a millennial thing. This could be a glimpse into the future of a world filled with Gen Z adults, who have internet culture and mannerisms in their DNA.
I use it sometimes and most of my feed is just funny commentary by people in similar life situations or who have similar viewpoints. I'm sure there are people doing irresponsible things, but I just wanted to chime in and say that it's not strictly for hooligans.
TikTok isn't all that different from YouTube. Like YouTube, you can find a lot of stupid or outright irresponsible content. But also like YouTube, there is a ton of amazing, informative or outright entertaining content on the platform.
In short, TikTok is whatever you want it to be. Just like YouTube.
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.
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.
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.