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Comment by ipsin | Hacker News Reader

"Job seekers, who must have a college degree in any discipline..."

I think it's a mistake to ignore candidates with a proven track record but no college degree.

To bump my response to this (it's at risk of being lost in the chain below): To clarify, I'm suggesting that we need to walk before we can run. I absolutely agree that many individuals without a degree far surpass companies' hiring needs, but our initial focus is entirely on providing a diverse pipeline of talented candidates who fit the criteria our partners are currently seeking. As we continue to demonstrate this value, I HOPE we find ourselves in a position to influence the traditional pipelines that companies turn to for talent.

I'm Ryan, co-founder of Jopwell. There are many different points along the spectrum where problems relating to diversity can be tackled; we're specifically focused on the collegiate and post-collegiate employment puzzle. This is simply a reflection of our initial target market and the immediate hiring interests/needs of our partner companies.

>This is simply a reflection of our initial target market and the immediate hiring interests/needs of our partner companies.

I think Ipsin was saying that some people without a college degree do meet the interests and needs of many companies. I'm not sure who your partner companies are or what your target market is though.

To clarify, I'm suggesting that we need to walk before we can run. I absolutely agree that many individuals without a degree far surpass companies' hiring needs, but our initial focus is entirely on providing a diverse pipeline of talented candidates who fit the criteria our partners are seeking. As we continue to demonstrate this value, it would be exciting to find ourselves in a position to influence the traditional pipelines that companies turn to for talent.

I would love to hear what company you think someone would want to work for that absolutely excludes anyone without a college degree?

> we're specifically focused on the collegiate and post-collegiate employment puzzle. This is simply a reflection of our initial target market and the immediate hiring interests/needs of our partner companies.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you're excluding candidates without a degree, your solution isn't a solution at all.

Stripping candidates names from resumes would accomplish the goal you're attempting to solve without creating the massive blindspot of candidates without a degree.

It's hard to boil the ocean.

I think this makes sense for the first release (they're fresh out of YC after all).

Kind of like how TripleByte are focusing on those who can work in SF and recruiting specifically for YC companies.

Let's set aside the college degree requirement then. Can they succeed if their entire business is based on the idea of actively discriminating against a certain race of people (despite the arguments that its reverse discrimination)? That question isn't rhetorical; I'm not an employment/labor attorney, so I don't know.

Their business is not in hiring, they are a talent agent. Candidates can choose to list themselves with Jopwell or not, and there is no exclusivity so they can list themselves multiple places. It is just an additional source of people for the customer, which is the companies themselves that make hiring decisions.

> This is simply a reflection of our initial target market and the immediate hiring interests/needs of our partner companies.

Hiya Ryan!

I applaud what you're doing, but I join others in my concern that you are narrowing focus.

I don't want to work in an office surrounded by only other straight white males, but as a person not fortunate enough to have a college degree, I really don't enjoy working in an environment where _everyone_ is a college graduate, feel it can be toxic, creates institutional bias against unconventional thinking, and is overall IMNSHO boring.

That said, you have to pick what problem to tackle, and if workplaces become more diverse overall, esp in leadership positions, I think that's a great move in the right direction. There may be a bias in favor of people that demographically resemble me and haven't gone to college, because we had access to family members and other people with engineering backgrounds, even if that leg-up doesn't guarantee a slam-dunk.

Hey there - we appreciate you expressing your concern. This is absolutely something we're keenly aware of. By restricting our initial target user base, we're putting ourselves in a position to do this one thing REALLY well. We want to one day do much more than that (i.e. we believe as strongly as you do that a college education, or lack thereof, is NOT a signal of one's professional value or ability to contribute). We're humbled by the possibility that we can influence the funnels that companies turn to to hire; this is step one.

I hear that, and I heard it from your first post as well - just wanted to share my perspective.

There are invisible diversity challenges, and economics is one. Yes, if I don't stutter, and I clean up, and pretend not to be a loudmouth political radical, I can waltz into the Ol' boys club, but my welcome wears out real damn fast. ;)

I think what I was really getting at was that, as in _all_ hiring and recruiting situations, and basically even all consulting situations, you have to keep "what your client wants" and "what your client needs" separate, because you're not selling the first one unless it matches the second, if you're doing well. ;)

I also have a concern about people creating companies that have good ethnic and gender diversity numbers, but which are even _more_ against hiring people without college degrees. I'm not sure this is well founded, because people who are first or second generation college grads are likely to have some of the perspective I have, and understand that their piece of paper is a piece of paper, etc..

Sometimes, when I'm talking about this, it boils down to a chat I had with a manager at Rackspace, years ago. Everyone else on the team wanted to throw away all the resumes without college degrees, and I wanted to throw away all the resumes WITH college degrees. I was like, "We need more of me!". And my boss, a really nice guy I still respect today even though we mounted a horrible coup against him, basically said to me:

  "Justin, they're not all you."

There's some truth to that, but I wonder if people tugging at racial and gender diversity get that as well. "You're one of us, you're not like the ones you think you're like. Be happy you're here, kid."

Anyway, I'm excited at what you guys are doing and hope it has an influence! If you succeed at this, you could actually position yourself to be a strong player for recruiting folks from economically diverse backgrounds as well, because our resumes just don't make sense to people, and someone sometimes needs to snap their fingers in front of a manager's face and be like: "HEY! You can't fill this position. This person has already done this work. What are you hung up on?"

A rich kid can get away with spending a year backpacking in Europe at 20, but a poor kid who takes a couple years off from 24-26 because they've been working since 14, well, obviously a bum.

Anyway, I appreciate you all engaging here on HN and I'm looking forward to seeing you succeed. Maybe I'll reach out when we have hiring needs. :)

Do college educated people of color with tech skills currently have trouble finding work in the industry, or is the problem that there simply aren't enough people like that?

You may be addressing the wrong problem.

> Do college educated people of color with tech skills currently have trouble finding work in the industry,

Compared to similarly-educated, similary-skilled white people, my impression is, on average, yes. (Where "people of color" is taken to mean "from groups underrepresented in technology"; there are certain non-white groups for which I don't get the impression that this is the case.) Largely because of network factors.

> or is the problem that there simply aren't enough people like that?

That's also a problem. The two are not mutually exclusive.

> Compared to similarly-educated, similary-skilled white people, my impression is, on average, yes.

Is that based on personal experience, data, or ?

Its an impression based on personal experience, immediate-circle anecdotes, and other non-structured, potentially non-representative data, as well as various bits of more structured research I've seen that is not directly on point (e.g., not tech-specific, but general to hiring, such as on responses to ethnic names in hiring processes) but seems to suggestive in the absence of more specific, field-specific research.

This is absolutely right. While there are unquestionably fewer black, hispanic / latino, and native american individuals with STEM backgrounds (another problem that needs to be solved at an educational level) there is still an uphill battle to be climbed even for individuals who DO possess the necessary skills and experience.

Hiring systems, especially in tech, are largely based on referral models and the "who do you know who can do X?" approach. Despite the many benefits of this approach, one danger is that it often inadvertently leaves underrepresented ethnic groups on the sidelines.

Having the skill set is not always enough.

I'm Randy, CTO of Jopwell. Thanks for the question! The problem is that companies are having trouble finding minorities with technical backgrounds. But they are there. We're trying to solve this by building a place where companies can find diverse individuals, and in turn, be able to consider a diverse pool of candidates when looking to hire.

how much of this is companies companies think "we want X" when really, they don't need X?

i ask because for a long time google said "we only hire from top schools" and then they looked at the data and found the school they hired from didn't really matter.

What are minorities with technical backgrounds doing now?

I'm just wondering if they're already working in technical jobs, and you're only moving them around.

There are many talented individuals working across a range of industries, but the reality is that in industries where hiring is very referral-based, such as tech, these talented individuals would not know where to reach out in their networks to have access to the many promising tech opportunities. Our value add is to give these talented individuals access and exposure to opportunities that they did not have before.

Have you considered that excluding non-graduates is inherently non-diverse from a racial perspective [0], much less an egalitarian one?

[0] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/race-gap-narrows-in-coll...

Agreed. This feels like adding an additional hurdle that non-minority hires would not face (most generic recruiting sites I've seen don't require degrees).

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