Ask HN: Are Value Qualifiers useful to get jobs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Value Qualifiers useful to get jobs?

1 pointReDeiPirati6 comments

I was thinking that doing Value Qualifier[s] might be a good strategy to play to stand up from the crowd to land a job in this market, but I’m afraid that it would hardly pay off given the amount it takes to create a good one and the chances to get the work noticed. Had any of you succeeded in using value qualifiers for landing an interview? Put simply, do they work?

What is a Value Qualifier? A Value Qualifier is a proposed solution for a key problem that the company is facing delivered to the hiring managers to showcase applicants’ skills to qualify for the role regardless of background and seniority. Aka your ticket to skip the line. Usually particularly adopted by people who are trying a career switch or have just started their first job search. I learned the term on LinkedIn from Andrew Bowker, despite the brand new terminology the concept isn’t new.

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> A Value Qualifier is a proposed solution for a key problem that the company is facing delivered to the hiring managers to showcase applicants’ skills to qualify for the role regardless of background and seniority. Aka your ticket to skip the line. Usually particularly adopted by people who are trying a career switch or have just started their first job search.

Sounds like a bunch of LinkedIn bs. It seems quite arrogant and out of touch to claim that you have solutions to problems you know nothing about, especially if you have limited experience.

> out of touch to claim that you have solutions to problems you know nothing about

That's the hardest part of coming up with a good one. In some case, expecially when applying to early stage startups, a quick research could definitively help you to identify their biggest source of pains. However for people early in their career is far from be something easy.

A search for "value qualifier" turns up a lot to do with data ontologies, nothing to do with sales which is what I assume you are talking about. What exactly is a "value qualifier?"

A Value Qualifier is a proposed solution for a key problem that the company is facing delivered to the hiring managers to showcase applicants’ skills to qualify for the role regardless of background and seniority. Aka your ticket to skip the line. Usually particularly adopted by people who are trying a career switch or have just started their first job search. I learned the term on LinkedIn from Andrew Bowker, despite the brand new terminology the concept isn’t new. (updating the description now with the terminology)

The "standard model" for hiring is an elimination process, which is not in the best interest of the qualified job seeker, or frequently the employer which is struggling to find talent.

There are numerous ways to bypass this.

I've frequently been hired on the strength of a demo, sometimes a demo that got the attention of recruiters, other times a demo I could talk about in applications and interviews. There was that time I built an AI-powered "application tracking system" to manage my job search and the first employer I interviewed with (an AI startup) thought it was so great that I got the job.

Another approach to interviewing is to approach it like you were selling consulting work. You might try, for instance, pretending you already have the job, ask probing questions about the problems facing the company that they want you to help with and try to help them with their problems right in the interview.

There is the issue of timing. I've had job searches that lasted three days. I've had others that took nine months. There was one case where I had won people inside an academic organization to my side but it took them about six months to get the funding for me.

If other approaches to getting job are working for you then you might not want to do the ones that take more time, but I think everybody should have a good demo.

I'll say this person's course changed the way I think about getting a job:

https://job-interview-answers.com/job-interview-tips/about-b...

> There are numerous ways to bypass this.

I found your comment really insightful, so I created this other Ask HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912522) to discover what other ways could be.

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