Last week, our co-founder Adam Jacobs and lead scientist Prof Sandra Matz answered the question “Why does the future of hiring look a bit like dating apps?” at SXSW Sydney. Read on for some key insights from their keynote.

The bite-sized takeaways:

• Approximately 55% of our lives are spent at work, and we’re constantly looking for work that’s a good fit for us.
• How people look on paper, isn’t usually how they show up in reality. Job searching is currently too one dimensional, focused on resume and job description keywords. We need better tools to represent ourselves and represent jobs.
• Job searching can benefit from a data-driven approach, akin to how dating apps use AI and machine learning to optimise compatibility and match people together.
• We need to focus on building a more complete model for employers and candidates to interact together - centred on what people are good at, how they best work, and why they care.
• We think that the path to get there is: ensuring simple user experience, user agency, and match validity.

Working. Our careers. 55% of our lives.

Based on the average lifespan of an Australian, 83 years, working takes up over half of our lives. Work's not our whole life. We have our family, we travel, we have creative pursuits, we have so many other rich parts of our life. But if we're honest about it, work permeates all of that.  It's the a major foundation stone that delivers stressors, that delivers new connections, that delivers reward, that delivers a safe foundation for growth and development. It’s key that we ask ourselves “How do we find work that’s a good fit for us? And how important is that to us?”

There’s been a really big shift in people making sense of work. If we think back to how work was perceived, it was “having a job” primarily a means of gaining economic security and being able to pay the bills. But if we think about how work is perceived now, we’re on the hunt for so much more, there’s a broader set of criteria that we’re thinking about and we’re willing to sacrifice to get it. 9 out of 10 people say that they’re willing to trade about 25% of their potential earnings in return for having a meaningful job. Never before has it been so important to understand the culture and company you're joining.

The tools people use for hiring need to catch up

How people look on paper, isn’t usually how they show up in reality. Job searching is currently one dimensional, focused on someone’s learned abilities. What’s missing in the hiring space today are the tools to represent ourselves and represent jobs more holistically.

When you look at landing a new role - it’s based on connection, you learn about companies and they learn about you. You’re entering into a long-term relationship with an employer, with very little to go off. You might have a job title, a brief idea of what the job is. But what you really want to know is, what's the relationship that you're getting into?

We need to focus on building a more complete model for employers and candidates to interact together - centred on not only what people are good at, but also how they best work, and why they care.

Job boards today open up a lot of options to people based on the logic of searching, which is an awesome idea, except - it makes it a lot more challenging for candidates and employers. Giving people too many options is what scientists call the paradox of choice. If you have so many options, suddenly choice is no longer liberated, it's actually quite debilitating.

However, there is no world that a company or an app can say to you “this is the absolute best job for you, you don’t have to look at other jobs, just take this one”. User agency is really important when it comes to job searching - we need to make our own decisions when it comes to jobs.

“We have to navigate this fine balance to provide useful matches. We have the ability to show people jobs that match their analytics skills they didn't even know they could do. Here are jobs that are focused on sustainability because we've detected your pretty interested in sustainability without actually telling us.”

What do we need to do to get there?

Job searching needs to be more data driven in its approach, similar to how data apps are increasingly using AI and machine learning to optimise compatibility and match people together.

At Hatch, our marketplace uses organisational psychology and data science to surface jobs that actually mean something to our users, rather than an endless list of roles that are discovered via keywords. It’s no longer enough to use keyword matching as a primary way of helping people discover jobs and being hired. As humans, we’re a lot more than resumes - and jobs are a lot more than a job title and a list of responsibilities.  

We’re building a human-centric, dating-app-inspired experience for job seekers and creating communities for people to connect and work together. If this resonates with you, you can start applying to meaningful roles or post a job on Hatch today.