In the second year of uni, I started the hand-to-hand combat of finding an internship. I remember my first big moment, inside a Big Four assessment centre. It was kind of like Survivor, but much less romantic and much more sterile.
I had this moment I’ll never forget. I was sitting there in my oversized suit, trying to work out whether to speak up or silently agree to the cacophony of opinions being thrown around the table. Each one of us fighting to be seen, to be heard.
Then I realised. The people with the clipboards weren’t assessing what we said or whether you came up with the best idea, the best answer.
They were assessing how you worked.
Knowing that in real time, I thought: maybe I shouldn’t fight so hard for my idea? Maybe I should show that I can compromise? Maybe I should invite the person who’s quiet to speak up, bring them into the discussion?
That moment stayed with me for the rest of my career. Getting the work done is only half the job. The other half is how people feel about the work.
The White Collar Apprenticeship
with David Yip (Founder & CEO, Alumable)
The full episode is available now on Spotify and Apple
David and I met at the Australasian Consortium for Entrepreneurship Research Excellence (ACERE) - the only two people still needing to earn a crust in a room full of academics. He said a line that stuck with me:
“We need to give kids the chance to earn, while they learn.”
Turns out he didn’t just say it. He built the company.
AIs applying to AIs
Before David built anything, he spent time inside the talent acquisition industry. Recruiters, headhunters. The people that assess people.
He wanted to know what was actually painful for them.
“Before, they used to have maybe two, three, four hundred applications. You could manage it over a week. It’s hard, but you can manage. Now, all of a sudden, four or five thousand.”
A lot of the applications, the recruiters told him, you could pick as AI-generated in the first few seconds.
“It used to be they had all the power. They had these fancy ATS systems, they’ll scan keywords. But now you have AI systems scanning and filtering applications on one side, and AIs on the other side generating the content. So you have AIs applying to AIs.”
Like a perverse ouroboros - a snake that eats its own tail. Two machines swallowing each other whole, optimising around the same average until it becomes impossible to separate the signal from the noise.
“The human part has just become disconnected even more so. And it makes these early entry roles even more difficult to be seen.”
I shuddered as I thought about my 18 year old step-daughter, embarking on her first tentative steps towards the white collar world.
The fix isn’t more technology
The recruiters’ answer to a flood of machine-written applications? A better machine. A sharper filter. A better reader. Detecting the diamond in the rough.
David went the other way.
“The way to fix this technology problem is not to throw more technology at it. Because it’s not a tech problem, it’s a people and process thing. So we go back to basics. Let’s go back to relationships. Who knows who?”
I wasn’t sure if he meant nepotism or good old-fashioned “looking them in the whites of their eyes.” I think he meant a little bit of both, in the best way possible. So I’ve been testing his idea since we met.
Here’s what I’ve learnt - a signal is only real when the person vouching for the work has personally witnessed it and bears the cost of being wrong. It’s true of the work and it’s true of the people you’re willing to vouch for.
Much else drifts to theatre.
The missing co-op
I’ve spent a lot of my career working with and recruiting technical geniuses. Actuaries, investment professionals, the Crème de la crème of numbers work. Many of them do “Co-ops” at university, integrating professional experience and study at the same time. I haven’t come across that in many professions.
David’s point is that most graduates have no version of it. Particularly in business and the world of white collar work:
“If you’re doing a generalist degree - Bachelor of Business or Commerce or Marketing or IT - there are no established pathways. No way for the students to actually earn while they learn.”
The old back door is closing too. In the creative professions, the way kids got on the ladder was the unpaid internship. Rightly or wrongly, that’s been killed off. By Fair Work legislation, cancel culture and plain old ethics. But both sides of the coin have ended up suffering - the employer who loses the talent pipeline and the kid coming through who loses his or her shot.
Why your business isn’t doing it
Universities all want to do this. Employability post graduation is increasingly how they’re ranked. So why aren’t there more work placements?
“They’re only engaging organisations that have an intern program, that have an HR department. There’s a person to talk to. The inbuilt assumption is that it has to be a certain size of organisation.”
Which leaves out most of the economy. Australia is still built on the backs of small business owners.
“If you’re a twenty-person accounting firm, chances are you’re not gonna have an HR person. If you’re a hundred-person firm, you might have one. They don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the twenty different steps to be compliant. Unless you resolve that, you’re always gonna hit that bottleneck.”
Answers are cheap
“These days, answers are cheap. Answers are everywhere. You can ask these AI things a question and it’ll give you an answer. But you don’t really know if the answer is correct. Or if it’s correct in one context but not correct in another.”
Context is now the valuable bit, and almost nobody assesses it (yet).
Lets return to the CV - at it’s essence it’s merely a candidate vouching for themselves. Unverified and sitting in a pile of five thousand others but often its the first and only thing anyone reads. The reference check comes later, if you get that far.
Now, picture a manager who supervised a student through a month of paid work instead. They saw the person and the work, in context. Now their reputation is on the line if they oversell. That’s the signal a paid micro-internship creates.
“Don’t just give them a group assignment. Assess how they engage with each other.”
When we all did dreaded group work at university, our marks were still based on content rather than context. The Big Four assessment centre was the first time anyone had marked me on the thing that actually mattered.
Twenty years of building a career and launching new products taught me the work is both. How humans get stuff done together. Soft and hard. Facts and figures plus warm and fuzzy.
It’s rarely the best idea that wins. It’s the best team.
Relearning work
David’s podcast is called Relearning Work. The next chapter of work is about what’s newly possible and where we find the best people to go after it.
The next graduate application on your desk will probably be written by one machine and read by another. Who in your hiring process has actually seen them work?
AJ
Such a good example that you gave @Ashton, re the big 4 assessment activity that was more about the process vs the task! It’s hard to do, and requires a lot of humans in the loop. Another reason why I’m very optimistic in the medium to long term, and the coming boom in jobs and new career pathways. The challenge is the short term, this current transition is painful and requires a lot of bold, innovative leadership & experimentation at scale!
Interesting article. The future feels equally exciting and scary. I also think we are going to lose a lot of soft skills with the rise of AI & as your article confirms that’s such an important skill to have when trying to create/launch/achieve things together.