A Well-Funded Startup Emerges From the Unemployment Lines | Hacker News Reader

A Well-Funded Startup Emerges From the Unemployment Lines

wired.com

30 pointsjyu11 comments

This is one of those "wow, so perfectly obvious no one has never done it." This could (and probably should) the hiring process at many retail and service jobs. In my teens I would have been all about proving myself by taking whatever quiz or prescreening training available to get the job. This could have micro impacts on allowing the most tenacious to get the job rather than the most experience, which for the level of jobs they're focusing on initially could be a positive force. Just imagine if Wal-Mart was filled with the most proactive, not just the one with 6 months more of register experience. Certainly many caveats to these statements, but with some evolution and execution this could have really important impacts on the way low-level wage employment is conducted. The interesting aspects would be to see it move up the org chart. Also love the customer development of them walking the unemployment lines to understand the market.

This sounds like a great way for big employers to require what would otherwise have been on-the-job training be completed in advance of even applying. Which is undoubtedly fantastic for employers, but probably less so for the unemployed.

On-the-job training is already dead.

LearnUp, by recognizing it first, will profit as the middle class further disintegrates into various strata of indentured servitude.

Corporations hold all the chips and so the labour force is obligated to take a paycut--but since there is a minimum wage the paycut has to come somewhere else. The market treats regulations as damage and routes around them.

Instead of the paycut coming in dollars, it comes in the form of pre-application training requirements, internships, strange work hour arrangements, complicated contracting situations, etc.

On-the-job training emerged because there was no way for workers to gain certain skills they needed without working under a corporation.

Sometimes the limiter was capital expenses....You couldn't go to your toolshed and train on how to work in a steel mill, so instead you got trained on the job.

Sometimes the limiter was social.... such as with lawyers---they receive on the job training because you can't just graduate and start taking cases for "practice".

On-the-job training will remain alive and well for people who are hiring into specialized positions (e.g. database scaling specialists, engineers for financial firms, anything to do with hardware, etc.).

Why do you think it's dead?

It's very easy to train for eg steel mill work in eg community colleges. Specialized jobs can easily have their training outsourced. When a job pays >minimum wage OTJ training can be paid fr by an apprentice paycut. When a job pays close to minimum wage, this is impossible, so the OTJ training is outsourced and the employee must pay out of pocket. This amounts to a paycut--an innovation of the market in response to the artificial market distorting minimum wage.

Because highly specialized jobs are a vast minority. OP was talking about retail jobs, not "database scaling specialists".

I believe this creates a centralized venue for prospective employees to show their motivation and fit for the job. That sounds like a great benefit to me!

This is a great idea!! Also there is a lot of useful content already on the site, even on topics like programming/startups. This was the missing link in the hiring chain.

Am I crazy or does Wired have the best tech startup journalism? These are the kind of startups that should be covered by TechCrunch and funded by YC.

More evidence that public education is completely broken in terms of job training.

Public education is about citizen training not job training.

Once upon a time, employers would actually train their new employees. These days they have managed to push those training costs onto publicly supported community colleges and the unemployed.

privatize profits and socialize losses. :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com