Oops! I only realized in your reply that you’re considering “reliability” the load-bearing element. Yes, the hiring pipeline will look like a background noise of consistent interest from the unqualified, and sporadic hits from excellent candidates. You’re approaching it from the perspective that the background noise of incompetents is the more important part, whereas I think that the availability of an adequate candidate eventually is the important part.
I think this because basically anywhere that hires can reliably find unqualified applicants. For a role where people stay in the job for 6 months, for instance, you only need to find a suitable replacement once every 6 months… so “reliably” being able to find an excellent candidate every day seems simply irrelevant.
I imagined “FocusMate + TaskRabbit” specifically to address this issue.
Three types of workers I’m imagining here:
People who are reasonable skilled types, but who are youngish and haven’t landed a job yet.
People who actively like doing this sort of work and are good at it
People who have trouble getting/keeping a fulltime job for various reasons (which would land them in the “unreliable” sector), but… it’s FocusMate/TaskRabbit, they don’t need to be reliable all the time, there just needs to be one of them online who responds to you within a few hours, who is at least reasonably competent when they’re sitting down and paying attention.
And then there are reviews (which I somehow UI design to elicit honest reactions, rather than just slapping a 0-5 stars rating which everyone feels obligated to rate “5″ all the time unless something was actively wrong”), and they have profiles about what they think they’re good at and what others thought they were good at.
(where an expectation is, if you don’t have active endorsementss, if you haven’t yet been rated you will probably charge a low rate)
Meanwhile if you’re actively good and actively reliable, people can “favorite” you and work out deals where you commit to some schedule.
Depth of specialization to the individual is an interesting question. I suspect that if this was a mature field, we’d have names for distinct subtypes of assistant skillset—like how an android app dev isn’t quite the same as an ios app dev, although often one person can do whichever skillset a situation demands.
I suspect that low-skill candidates would gravitate toward one assistance subtype or another, and lack of skill would show up in their inability to identify which subtype a situation calls for and then adapt to it. But on taskrabbit, we don’t need the same tasker to be good at picking up groceries and also building furniture, as long as we’re clear enough about which task we’re asking for...
It’s true any job can find unqualified applicants. What I’m saying is that this in particular relies on an untenably small niche of feasible candidates that will take an enormous amount of time to find/filter through on average.
Sure, you might get lucky immediately, but without a reliable way to find the “independently wealthy guy who’s an intellectual and is sufficiently curious about you specifically that he wants to sit silently and watch you for 8 hours a day for a nominal fee”, your recruitment time will, on average, be very long, especially in comparison to what would likely be a very short average tenure given the many countervailing opportunities that would be presented to such a candidate.
Yes, it’s possible in principle to articulate the perfect candidate, but my point is more about real-world feasibility.
Oops! I only realized in your reply that you’re considering “reliability” the load-bearing element. Yes, the hiring pipeline will look like a background noise of consistent interest from the unqualified, and sporadic hits from excellent candidates. You’re approaching it from the perspective that the background noise of incompetents is the more important part, whereas I think that the availability of an adequate candidate eventually is the important part.
I think this because basically anywhere that hires can reliably find unqualified applicants. For a role where people stay in the job for 6 months, for instance, you only need to find a suitable replacement once every 6 months… so “reliably” being able to find an excellent candidate every day seems simply irrelevant.
I imagined “FocusMate + TaskRabbit” specifically to address this issue.
Three types of workers I’m imagining here:
People who are reasonable skilled types, but who are youngish and haven’t landed a job yet.
People who actively like doing this sort of work and are good at it
People who have trouble getting/keeping a fulltime job for various reasons (which would land them in the “unreliable” sector), but… it’s FocusMate/TaskRabbit, they don’t need to be reliable all the time, there just needs to be one of them online who responds to you within a few hours, who is at least reasonably competent when they’re sitting down and paying attention.
And then there are reviews (which I somehow UI design to elicit honest reactions, rather than just slapping a 0-5 stars rating which everyone feels obligated to rate “5″ all the time unless something was actively wrong”), and they have profiles about what they think they’re good at and what others thought they were good at.
(where an expectation is, if you don’t have active endorsementss, if you haven’t yet been rated you will probably charge a low rate)
Meanwhile if you’re actively good and actively reliable, people can “favorite” you and work out deals where you commit to some schedule.
Depth of specialization to the individual is an interesting question. I suspect that if this was a mature field, we’d have names for distinct subtypes of assistant skillset—like how an android app dev isn’t quite the same as an ios app dev, although often one person can do whichever skillset a situation demands.
I suspect that low-skill candidates would gravitate toward one assistance subtype or another, and lack of skill would show up in their inability to identify which subtype a situation calls for and then adapt to it. But on taskrabbit, we don’t need the same tasker to be good at picking up groceries and also building furniture, as long as we’re clear enough about which task we’re asking for...
It’s true any job can find unqualified applicants. What I’m saying is that this in particular relies on an untenably small niche of feasible candidates that will take an enormous amount of time to find/filter through on average.
Sure, you might get lucky immediately, but without a reliable way to find the “independently wealthy guy who’s an intellectual and is sufficiently curious about you specifically that he wants to sit silently and watch you for 8 hours a day for a nominal fee”, your recruitment time will, on average, be very long, especially in comparison to what would likely be a very short average tenure given the many countervailing opportunities that would be presented to such a candidate.
Yes, it’s possible in principle to articulate the perfect candidate, but my point is more about real-world feasibility.