When you are starting a business with very finite cash at hand, you really want to be very careful how you spend every dime. You keep one eye on time and cash while you keep the other on your product and customer. Now, salaries happens to be one of the major drain on any cash you have. You really want to spend the money on things that really add value if not above the monetary value you are partying with at every month’s end, at least proportional to it.
This can be made even more difficult considering the bad practice I have seen among online job portals in Nigeria which is very common; it is terribly damaging and I think we should all discourage it. It is the business model of helping job seekers to re-write their CVs.
Hiring is a big issue in startup; hence the word “hire fast, fire fast”. or “hire slow, fire fast”. Sam Altman of YC spoke at length on this in their How to Start a Startup (Team and Execution). Hiring is a very difficult and time-consuming process. So, you don’t have the luxury of time to go through endless interview process before finally hiring that one person.
Now imagine you place a job ad and over 350 people applied. You painfully sought through the CVs and eventually narrow down to 10 of them. Your judgement so far has been based on the contents of the CVs; the ones you shortlisted were well-written and presented. You interviewed these folks and you end up giving offer letters to two of them. These have the best CVs and experience.
Just a month into the job you begin to see anomalies. The folks you hired and the CVs they presented do not match at all under workplace conditions. They can hardly replicate even their own CVs. You asked them intimately what’s wrong, and they claim this and that. Eventually, after much pleading, they opened up: they had paid some of this job boards to re-write their CVs for them.
Imagine the disappointment. Of course, you could have done your interview job very well before hiring but the point I’m trying to make is that, it is not moral nor ethical for a company to have a business model that, rather than solve a problem, is worsening it, especially when this is deliberate and encouraged. The job boards that re-wrote the CVs that ended up on my desk will enter my black book: I won’t used them again nor encourage others to do the same.
While we pursue aggressive growth and market-share, I think it is equally important that we operate within the ambit of morality and corporate ethics. A good name, the Scripture says, is better than riches. A company with a mindshare will outlast and outshine the ones with mere market share. I believe it is possible to balance both market-share and mind-share.
I appeal to owners of job boards that re-write CVs for money (or even without money) to please re-consider this practice for the good of all. Rather than help them re-write their CVs, it will be better to teach them how to write one that is a true reflection of their skill-set and profile.
After all, our goal is to change the world for better not for worse.