For a Quarter of a Century I Traded in Competencies. Only Now Have We Built Them a Proper Market.

Before I became a recruiter, I worked in banking - on the liabilities side. In plainer terms: I looked after the money that clients had entrusted to the bank. To do that well, one had to understand the market - the regulated exchanges and the over-the-counter world alike. And it was there, watching capital move year after year, that I acquired a lasting respect for the power of a well-ordered market.

I came to understand two things that have stayed with me ever since.

The first: money is an easy commodity. Easy to store, easy to move, easy to exchange for almost anything. The second, and the weightier: money has no value in itself. It works only in so far as it serves as a means of valuation and of exchange. And behind every unit of economic value - behind that money, too - there always stands a human being. Someone who actually brought that value into existence.

And here a question presented itself - one that would not leave me for the next two decades.

If money - the easy commodity - enjoys the finest market in the world, why do competencies have none?

Consider it. Capital has its exchanges, its quotations, its liquidity, its transparent parameters. In a fraction of a second one knows what is worth what, and who wishes to trade with whom. Yet competencies - the very thing people actually offer on the market, the thing that stands behind all value - are still traded much as they were in the last century. Send a CV. Wait. Silence. Send another.

Since 2000 I have worked as a recruiter - or rather, I built two recruitment agencies. Over my career as a headhunter I have spoken with some twenty thousand people, about their competencies, their ambitions, their expectations. And the longer I did so, the more plainly one thing stood out: the labour market is structurally unequal.

Save in exceptional circumstances, the employer’s position is almost invariably the stronger. For a single vacancy I could readily find several candidates who met the opening expectations. That is not a market of exchange - it is a market in which one side selects from a queue, while the other stands in that queue, hoping that someone will so much as glance its way.

A worker is not a museum exhibit

For years I tried to regard my work differently from most. I did not ask "how do I sell this person," but "how will they discharge the mission the employer entrusts to them." For the truth we so seldom say aloud is this:

An employer does not need people with handsome CVs. An employer needs people to whom a task may be entrusted, in the confidence that it will be well done.

A CV conveys this only in part. It says something, to be sure, of prior experience and education - it furnishes grounds to suppose that someone will bear the mission. But it is circumstantial evidence, not proof. And we have built an entire labour market upon that circumstantial evidence, as though it were the whole truth about a person.

Drawing on what I had learned in the financial markets, I began to conceive of something else: a market for the exchange of competencies. A genuine market - one in which the individual defines what they can do and puts forward an offer of their own. With concrete parameters: for how much, from when, in which language, in which place. A rational employer then receives the "product" all but on a plate - not a heap of résumés to be excavated, but a definite proposition, to be accepted or declined.

To this I added one further element: anonymity. On the one hand it affords the candidate a measure of security vis-à-vis a current employer. On the other - and this matters more - it obliges both parties to concentrate on what truly counts: on competencies and on the task. Unless, of course, one harbours some hidden agenda. In that case Jobrowse will not work. And rightly so.

Then the idea ceased to be mine alone

For many years all of this existed only in my head. It had not so much as a name. Until there came the people I had been wanting - first-rate engineers and specialists in the workings of markets. (I name no names; the curious are referred to the companies register.) It was they who called it Jobrowse, who designed and built the platform upon the most modern of foundations. They put artificial intelligence to work - not to filter people out and reject them before a human being has so much as looked, but to match them. And they did so before AI became the fashion of the season.

Thus, out of a quarter-century of conversations, two agencies, and one persistent idea borrowed from the financial markets, a simple premise was born: competencies, at last, are getting their market.

This is the first, introductory piece. In the instalments to follow I shall descend from the plane of the idea to that of practice - showing, concretely, what Jobrowse changes for the candidate and what it changes for the employer. These will not be generalities, but rational, calculable reasons to make use of it.

For now I leave you with a single question - the very one I put to myself twenty years ago: if we contrived to build a perfect market for money, why do we resign ourselves to so poor a market for the thing that money creates in the first place - for human competencies?

If you are looking for people, or you sit on the other side of the table yourself, tell me in the comments on our social media how you see it. Follow our blog and our social profiles - in the next instalment I shall show how it works in practice.

- Artur