AD: great article Tom, covers a lot of questions I've had. One I didn't see was in regards to mentors. How important would you say having a mentor was to some of your initial raises? If at all?
> If the latter, employers should be aware they may be biasing hiring in favour rule-breakers.
AD: It doesn't matter if you fund your friends to do it or you do it yourself, someone is taking the risk and so from a signal processing point of view it's a strong signal.
> For most jobs, there are plenty of people who can do it. Of those people, this system advantages those with easier access to some financial capital. Not great for diversity or social mobility.
AD: The stake is commensurate with the salary, and people are likely to be in similar socio-economic bracket with their peers. The rich already have an advantage in life, we can't change that, but we can equal the playing field by adjusting the price per unit of influence to match wealth distribution.
> I would only make the bet if I understood both sides
AD: So this is integral to our system, those who are being asked to endorse candidates won't be doing so if they don't feel they either understand what the company is looking for or how capable their candidate is.
Think of the person you respect and admire the most in the workplace, and they've just asked you to endorse them for a role similar to their current one. The endorsement you give is contingent on them passing the probation only, would you give it?
AD: It wouldn't be a startup without an amount of "look how good we are"!... It absolutely is the endorsement flow. People will only be willing to endorse their candidates if they are confident they can pass the companies probation... They can only really be confident if they have experience of their candidate in the workplace.
AD: Thanks for your comment, if you get into the T&C's we have clauses for when a candidate applies and is let go for reasons outside of being not fit for the role, there are pro-rata returns for the endorsers in those instances.
> What stops Paul paying his friends/acquaintances to endorse him?
AD: The fact that Paul is taking on all the risk, in effect Paul has made a self-endorsement via proxy... Paul can already self-endorse it's a valid signal of confidence that they feel they can do the job.
AD: It's worth pointing out that Harvard Business School just published a report[1] on what they deem as 'Hidden Workers' - one of the major factors in these workers remaining hidden is that their CV or digital profiles can't get past the AI filtering engines almost all ATS system use... We've side stepped AI filtering systems with peer-to-peer collateralised endorsements, humans are doing the match-making and at scale.
AD: I'm very over-due on the second part to this series... On my third re-write. I promise to have it up very soon. It covers why human-centric systems are important particularly in this space.
Hello! Adrian and Paul here, we conceived of Higher almost 2 years ago now, partly inspired by a HN thread! The other part was Paul being asked to endorse a colleague he had worked with before, he did so positively, however the owners asked him if he'd bet anything on it and he retracted his endorsement!
We invented the concept of a confidence curation market as a spin off from content creation markets, the system wide effect is those who rise to the top have the most network confidence in passing probation.
We also wanted to bring the human element back into recruiting, giving control back to the candidates to indicate their keenness and applicability for a role whilst staying informed (it's amazing how many recruiting processes right now DON'T update you), candidates can self-endorse or reach out to their network for endorsements.
It's a big idea with lots of nuances and we've just launched our MVP, we're happy to answer any questions!