An interview with a business man who’d hire you without a BA.
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Earlier this summer, I had a frank conversation with a man—he’s in his late 30’s and I’ll call him Bill—whose small business has been growing for the past several years. As a community college instructor, I was interested to learn about his hiring process and how he evaluated applicants.
His business does not require an employee to have a particular skill. By this I mean that he does not need an engineer or nurse. If you’ve got above-average computer skills, can run a word processor and spreadsheet, and if you can keep yourself organized and present the business well to clients or partners, you should be able to work for Bill.
However, when Bill advertised for positions, his minimum educational requirement was a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t find this astounding, but I asked him to explain.
Why do you want BAs?
“I don’t, not really,” he said. “The best person who works for me right now has a GED. I hired him because he did good work for my wife. She’s an artist who outsourced some of her promotional work. I’ve got a BA from a liberal arts college in California, graduated with plenty of brilliant people. But there were also people I’d neither hire nor recommend for work.”
“Starting a cover letter by saying, ‘There is no task I cannot master in seconds,’ is just embarrassing. I’d like to see that person try shaving with a straight razor.”
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So, what gives?
“I’m not proud to say this, but the BA just streamlines the process. Instead of getting 400 applications, 85% of them bad, I’ll get 200, 75% of those bad. When I mean ‘bad’, I mean the first few sentences of a cover letter scream, ‘Don’t hire me!’ Most applications simply aren’t worth reviewing, even when they’re submitted by college graduates. The applicant is either inarticulate, obviously unaware of what kind of business we do, or they’ve got some ridiculous idea about how to represent themselves. Starting a cover letter by saying There is no task I cannot master in seconds is just embarrassing. I’d like to see that person try shaving with a straight razor.
“When it comes to applications worth spending time on, I’d rather have a manageable number to deal with. We’re so small that I’m really involved as a business owner. When we really need to hire someone, I’ll be up until midnight looking over applications and writing responses, and I do most of the interviewing myself.”
Would you hire someone who applied traditionally but did not have a BA?
“Hell yeah. I don’t really care. I want to know you can do the job, that you’re pleasant to work with. I don’t want someone who just avoids being a liability. I look for people I believe can operate and grow on their own without needing someone to follow them around, check up on them every three or five days. College should develop that kind of independence, I suppose. Maybe it just rewards it. I don’t know. But I’ll hire anyone.”
Then why put the educational requirement on there? Isn’t there another way to limit application volume?
“All things being equal, if you’ve got a BA, I can rationally predict or expect some things. It’s not a lot, but it’s something to help an employer. A young person with a BA in History from Madison, Wisconsin might be an idiot. But they should have a certain amount of natural curiosity. Unless they’re masochists, they should like to read and think, and should have an idea of what forces shaped the world we live in, how they’re currently manifesting. That person stands a chance to have a certain kind of openness I really need in an employee. It’s just really important, in my view.
“Right now, things are shifting and changing so often, so dramatically sometimes, and nothing’s certain. What I need is someone who won’t wig out when something completely weird comes along. They need to be articulate and able to work on their own without coming to me or someone else every three hours with a ton of questions.
“We don’t have a traditional office where everybody meets at 9:00 and sticks around until 5:00. But all of us work more than 40 hours. I barely ever see the guys who update our website, for example, but our whole business stops if they stop. You don’t need a BA to run our website. A smart high school kid could do it, quite frankly. What you do need, however, is the energy to own what you’re responsible for supporting.”
How’s our university system doing?
“This is a crass way of saying it, but let’s call a spade a spade: It’s helping us weed people out. I feel it’s keeping certain folks out by design. At the same time, it’s graduating a lot of people who have a less than savvy view of the world. I’m always shocked by people who think their salary is a reward.
“I don’t have money to pay my employees because someone rewarded me for starting a business. We generate revenue because people value our services. So few of the people I interview think of their acquired skill set as a service they can offer someone. So few of them even look at their education as having granted them a set of skills. I don’t care that you have a BA. I want you to tell me that you know what it represents.
“In the end, a BA should mean you’ve got a set of thinking skills and knowledge that can translate into service. Those skills have value, but there’s no magic reward waiting for you when you graduate.”
Photo by photologue
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men