We’ve talked a lot about how Verso Jobs is open sourcing nepotism, but never really taken the chance to explain what we mean. This means that when I tell people that we are “open sourcing nepotism,” most people don’t think it’s really cool like we do, and are just confused. So I decided to explain what we mean.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, nepotism is “the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives, friends, or associates, especially by giving them jobs.” In practice this looks like my first job in high school (my dad is friends with the CEO), or the way I found friends to take over my job I left.
Nepotism by itself is actually a pretty good thing - it leads to people working with people they trust more often, and usually with people who care about the same things and have a lot of common interests. It’s not a stretch to say that people are more happy when they work with friends, and nepotism is an easy way of making sure you will have friends at work.
The trust existing when someone refers a friend to a job is great in practice, but as jobs become more and more specialized and innovation continues to accelerate, one’s network begins to not be big enough to fill the roles required. This creates the bottleneck we see in today’s hiring problems.
Open sourcing is a much newer concept than nepotism. The first “free software” was called the GNU Project published by Richard Stallman in 1983, and people started using the term “open source” in 1998. Simply put, open source code is free to anyone to use without payment.
What we dream of building is a world where instead of a select few families getting able to enjoy the benefits of nepotism, anyone who is especially talented in one respect or another can find a job that actually makes them happy, where they are living up to their potential. When nepotism works, it works because it optimizes for trust. Open sourcing nepotism means that we are optimizing for talent, and because of we are able to combine more data (networks) than ever before, we can maintain that trust.
How we open source nepotism is pretty simple: our users join our network and when there is a strong fit for them, we introduce them over text or email. There’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes to find those matches, but that doesn’t matter to our users. This results in the right people getting in the door for interviews because everything is coming from warm introductions. It’s one human introducing another, instead of another resume entering an ATS (aka a black hole).
Open sourcing code allowed innovators to build faster than they had ever been able to build before. Open sourcing access to talent has the potential to do the same thing. We are at a moment in human history where change is happening more rapidly than ever before: let’s build the teams that are going to make that change for the better.
