Who Hires Whom? Moving from Resume Dispatches to Intern Syncing with Companies

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeAny job searcher knows, you can be really passionate about your career, your past experiences and your expertise, but getting a job is a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded in a taxi headed uptown during a tropical storm.

Nobody who wants to hire you is really going to tell you the real reasons they want to hire you, because revealing too much about the inner workings of the company is a risk. You have to be good at guessing, and you have to be very good at packaging a story that makes you seem enticing enough to be hired.

Many people dno't realize that it's yo uthat hires the company, not the company that hires you. That's why a resume doesn't make sense.

HR is tasked with screening. They have a position to fill and that person they fill it with needs to look exactly like the position. But often that is not what happens in a job. A job is about unexplored possibilities. It's about being put in the driver seat and taking the turns that make sense, taking risks, and making something new.

They look at a resume and see past performance. To me this past performance doesn't always suggest the truth. It suggests that within the box of a company job, you were able to do the things that are set up to be done.

A portfolio approach makes more sense. But even better is a move towards cultivating an intern culture, as InternMatch is doing with a recent $US500,000 funding round.  there is a hugely opportunistic gap in the way interns, colleges and corporations function together in the hiring space.

Any company that can jump into that space and provide a strong offering of linking up exactly what corporations need with exactly what colleges can afford to provide is going to be a winner. You can think of intern match-ups as a dating service for companies. What needs to be packaged into that is real information about what training an intern or a prospective employee needs to be an effective worker.

Often students are ushered from college campus to work campus with only the skills that make sense to the college.  There is room for HR to team up with startups in this space to be less of a screening agency for teh company and more of a curator, or a filter, for the "information" flow between consumer, real world and company. Instead of using colleges as just a seed pool for potential employees, colleges could be hired as a kind of creative assembly line of real employees who have the necessary skills to help the company and integrate the company with real world problems.