Reality is an absurd fiction

What dumb things do we need to cancel or innovate?

Imagine picking up the phone. Cold calling someone. And 20 minutes later they give you the names of all their coworkers.

Sounds like absurd fiction, right?

False. 20 years ago, every agency recruiter (who lasted more than 6 months) mastered that.

Referral gathering. From total strangers. Awkward. Weird. But we did it because we had to.

LinkedIn started in 2002. Trust me: those early years it didn’t help much. No one was on this thing. Not to mention they had this bizarre “someone else had to connect you to someone new” workflow. (Thus the name.)

I bring this up because there’s other things we all do right now that will one day (hopefully soon) seem dated and obsolete.

• Big personalities are still overvalued.
• Ladder climbing is still weighted towards “relationships” over results.
• Cold emails are annoying but it’s still the biggest lever (because it still works.)
• Short stints and contract-heavy backgrounds are still looked down upon for FTE hiring. (Even though exposure to more and different challenges builds experience faster.)

None of us can change the entire system ourselves. But we can look at what dumb sh*t we do on a daily basis and either cancel it or innovate.

10 years from now we’ll tell people we went back to the office just to sit on Zoom calls. The younger crowd will think it’s absurd fiction.

(Inb4 some OG dork claims referral gathering from cold calls is still their primary sourcing method and it’s how they 10x’d their business this year.)

James Hornick

Partner at Hirewell. #3 Ranked Sarcastic Commenter on LinkedIn.