Tech CEOs: What If Workers Had a Permanent, Public Performance Report Anyone Could See?

Auren Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph, hosts a podcast called World of DaaS (Data as a Service). His May 3rd episode invited Charlie Youakim, CEO of Sezzle (a buy-now-pay-later firm), to discuss a number of various entrepreneurial touchpoints. During a part of their conversation focused on hiring and “team-building” techniques, the pair came up with a dicey idea: to record workers’ test scores, performance reviews, employment history, and more on a privately-owned (yet publicly viewable) website. The goal? To give employers a central report card on which they could base future hiring decisions.

“If you’re a younger potential employee, we want to see a transcript. Like how did you do in school? What was your GPA?” Youakim began after Hoffman prodded him about hiring practices. He went on to clarify that not only does he already require transcripts from candidates at Sezzle, but that even candidates five years out of school must provide proof of their GPAs.

Many high schoolers and college students graduate with the expectation that future employers will want to know their GPAs. This makes Youakim’s anecdote feel innocuous enough—until the pair elaborated on the concept and encouraged listeners to run with their idea.

“Now if there is, like, a World of DaaS listener out there and they started a co-op to gather all the data of, like, inputs of what people look like and then how good they did in your company and you could see this across thousands of companies—”

“That’d be awesome,” Youakim said, cutting Hoffman off. Youakim then confirmed he would subscribe to such a site on behalf of Sezzle.

I know I’m not the first to make this comparison, but their idea sounds eerily like the episode of Black Mirror called “Nosedive,” in which everyone regularly receives peer-issued ratings that impact their socioeconomic statuses. Both are highly subjective; a positive performance report from one employer or colleague might be a negative to the next, and vice versa. Just because a person struggled at one company, for instance, doesn’t mean they’ll have such a hard time at the next.

They’re also both prime breeding grounds for subtle demographic-based inclinations and outright bigotry. During the interview, Youakim mentioned that Sezzle’s end goal was to look at the attributes of those who were already successful at the company, then seek out candidates with those same attributes. But if Sezzle is anything like most tech companies (where fewer women are hired than men, and even fewer women receive promotions), Youakim is simply reinforcing a culture that helps men grow their careers while causing women’s careers to plateau. This also does nothing to promote racial equity—something the tech industry has long lacked. (Not to mention Hoffman’s definitively worrisome comment about his ideal report showing “what people look like”—a so-called data point that should have zero impact on most employment opportunities.)

In a way, one shouldn’t be too surprised that Hoffman and Youakim floated such an idea. During the episode, Youakim bragged that one of his “tests” for candidates was asking them to meet him for coffee at 7 AM on a Saturday; if the candidate said no, they were disqualified. Youakim seems to have no regard for how any candidate who isn’t childless or able-bodied (or completely lacking a personal life) is supposed to make that time, especially on relatively short notice. If that doesn’t provide some insight into how Sezzle and many other tech companies make economically impactful decisions, I’m not sure what does.

Still, tech loves to run with novel ideas, no matter how controversial or unsound. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, speaking about a public employment record on a podcast practically constitutes speaking it into existence. (Hopefully I’m wrong, but I’ll believe it when I don’t see it.) Pre-employment quantifiers are often found to be inaccurate or discriminatory, particularly those most often used by recruiters. Making those scores permanently and publicly available instead of on a one-time basis therefore increases that risk significantly.

Unexplored biases and poorly-designed applicant tracking systems already complicate job acquisition—one of capitalism’s most basic necessities—enough. Will an employment report card really solve that problem?

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