> “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,” Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, tells Fortune.
Man, what a ghoul.
Man, what a ghoul.
Just what happened that caused employers to hold so much power in the employee-employer relationship? The collapse of collective bargaining, sure. But what else…
- Labor protections getting weaker over time, plus courts usually siding with employers. Overtime laws got chipped away, and a lot of folks get called "contractors" when they're basically employees.
- Jobs can move overseas way easier now, so workers don't really have the same leverage they used to.
- Big companies buying everything up, regional monopolies forming, and those non-compete clauses making it harder for people to switch jobs.
- At-will employment, temp work, gig jobs, outsourcing, just makes job security pretty shaky.
- Decades of anti-union talk, pushing this whole "you're on your own" idea, and selling "flexibility" like it's some amazing benefit.
- More workplace surveillance, algorithm-based schedules, and automated tracking, just gives the employer more control.
People quite literally fought tooth and nail with blood sweat and tears to gain their rights over the course of years and years during the 18th and 19th century. Many quite literally died, and a lot more were beaten to pulp by the job owners who hired muscle to do it.
Those gains we made have slowly been eroded.
Busting unions, vilifying poor people, weakening and removing regulations, and (very crucially) changing the basic philosophy behind antitrust.
It's shocking to me people are offended of hearing people tell the truth.
Would you prefer if he lied to you and called you "valuable family members" instead?
Edit to clarify for all those below who misread: I meant "the truth" as in "transparency" from his perspective of how he runs his company and how he views the relationship with employees, not the holy ground truth of how things should ideally work. I imagined that was obvious when I made the statement that he's not sugarcoating it with valuable family member but just speaking his mind as in saying the truth.
In a job seeker applies to 20 jobs, 10 of which have a pleasant interview pipeline that respect the interviewee as a person as well as respecting their time, and 10 which don't (AI interviews, unreasonable at-home tasks, etc), they are more likely to end up in the former group. If you make your interview process worse you either have to make a better offer to entice people to put up with it, or you get worse candidates. No matter what you do there is almost always someone desperate enough to jump through all the hurdles you put up, but desperation is inversely correlated with quality
Firstly, his company, his "cost of friction" to bear. If this cost negatively affects his business then his company will go out of business and the free market will have claimed another victim. Who am I to judge how a man decides to run his own business and interview candidates? I would also like to run my business the way I see fit and not how strangers on the internet want me to.
Secondly, I never said I agree with it, I don't , I just said I appreciate him telling the truth and being transparent about the way he runs his business even though he knew it wouldn't win him any popular votes.
Stop making hoops. Like what part of tech hiring do you really think you’ve innovated on enough to justify making new hoops?
Hell, you’d think with AI and everyone’s digital footprint you’d be able to reduce the number of hoops.
But every company has their own version of hoops that you need to get that job. Nobody is forcing you though. You can just avoid the companies who's hoops you don't like.
What part of that I just said is false?
Yes i'm glad it finally sinks in.
>I’m speaking about how I’d like it to be.
So when are you hiring so we can all enjoy working in a workers' utopia?
I generally never am. I believe strongly in paying a large premium to market for quality and then letting smart people be smart. I’m also perfectly comfortable hiring on gut feeling and references alone without a whole song and dance—I’ve only once had someone ghost their background check once and had to fire someone after a fuckup of a hire once more.
As a result, turnover is low and vacancies short to the point of non existence.
If someone tells you they've commited [insert abhorrent act here], you're not offended by their beliefs, you're abhorred and disgusted by their actions.
Them telling the truth doesn't make it any less abhorrent. Hence "what a ghoul".
Since when is talking to an AI an "abhorrent act"?
Don't you feel you're doing a disservice to victims of actual abhorrent acts?
Btw, you're already talking to an AI when you're applying to jobs online, it's called an ATS.
The original comment to which you replied, called Adam Jackson, CEO and founder of Braintrust, a company that distributes AI interviewers, a ghoul, for saying “The truth is, if you want a job, you’re gonna go through this thing,”. You understood that as them being offended by the truth, implying the relevant truth here was that talking to an AI is an "abhorrent act", and thus being faced by that truth makes them offended.
To which I replied, they're not offended by the implication that people will have to interact with an AI; they're abhorred by the callousness with which a CEO of a company that distributes AI interviews would so cavalierly dismiss any ethical and moral concerns on such a serious topic affecting real humans, and implicitly doing so out of personal gain with no consideration for the humans affected by this tool.
So what makes him a ghoul is that he's willing to peddle an immoral and unethical poor quality solution which causes grief and unemployment and is a faceless system without recourse, while pretending that it is inevitable and thus there's no need for concern or ethical oversight.
As an analogy, if someone sold guns to both factions and when interviewed portrayed themselves as a hero because "war is inevitable", you wouldn't be offended about the truth of war, you'd be abhorred that this guy is facilitating war and death for personal gain.