From a Tweet thread.
We’re drowning in information and almost all of it is terrible.
I remember a friend telling me of the coming “infocalypse” more than a decade ago. I didn’t get the problem.
Now I see the pain everywhere.
Part of what we’re doing at Crash is bucking this trend. Information is so cheap, every info problem is being solved with quantity.
We’re juveniles in the info age. We’re excited by this new low cost info so we just pump it out everywhere and apply it to everything.
Need more quality info? No problem, solve it with more quantity! Too much info?
No problem, let’s build some AI or automated data crunching to reduce it down to something manageable!
Some places this works, in others it makes the problem worse. When it’s almost free to make info, lots will get made. When all solutions focus on automatically reducing info overload, the cost goes even lower.
It’s an arms race of every greater pieces of ever weaker info AI sifting for ever rarer good bits. Costly signals are one of the most valuable communication tools known to humans.
All this weak info overload presents an opportunity.
Create something costly, hard to replicate, and you have info 100x better than the crowd. In our space of finding and winning a job, we’re making the end of the funnel (finalist interview and offer) way more efficient
By making the top of the funnel way less efficient!
You heard that right. The hiring arms race is to blast job ops to as many boards as possible for max reach. Make applying as easy as possible – click one button! – for max pool. Slap some keyword scanners or similar on your system and hope it weeds out the worst. You’re left with a (smaller) undifferentiated mass to sort through. Yuck.
Candidated respond by trying to game keyword scanners, etc. so quality of auto filters declines rapidly.
Automation can be gamed.
Costly signals can’t. Our approach at Crash is to make the first part harder.
Only if you really care about the company and role will you take the time to send them a costly signal – info that can’t be re-used or copy-pasted to a dozen other jobs.
Only the most motivated will do it. Seekers go deep (learning and becoming more valuable in the process) creating projects and pitches for a few companies.
Hirers get a handful of finalists instead of masses of noisy chaff. This is just the tip of the “Secret”.
I think raising the cost of creating and exchanging information (not necc money cost, more effort) is a better solution esp. for the most human of exchanges (dating, hiring, etc.) than ramping up quantity and slapping automation on it. To combat the Infocalypse, I don’t think labels and filters and tags generated by bots are the solution. They only escalate the arms race. More cheap info in, struggles to reduce what makes it out.
Costly signals on front end are better.
Less cheap info in = better quality out.