A Mentat is a fictional type of human, presented in Frank Herbert's science fiction Dune universe. In an interstellar society that fears a resurgence of artificial intelligence and thus prohibits computers, Mentats are specially trained to mimic the cognitive and analytical ability of electronic computers.
founder chiming in: company name is a reference to Herbert's Dune. Been a huge fan forever and think the concept of flipping artificial intelligence towards giving humans computing power is super cool.
I've been unemployed for just about 16 months now, due to a serious family tragedy that required me to not only leave a past job, but also relocate from the east coast to a rural part of the midwest with no nearby tech job centers. The rural area also makes it borderline impossible to conduct Skype calls, because the tower-based internet service this far out is spotty and unable to handle video streaming.
I'm back on the job market and able to consider relocating, and I would be very interested in considering their services as a job seeker, but I can't tell anything from their website to suggest any way they might actually help me. Plus, I'm pretty idealistic in terms of my expectations for my next employer, and seriously won't compromise about some of the stuff.
It's a shame. This is nearly the sort of thing that would be worthwhile, but I don't know if I can justify almost $300 without more up-front information about whether they will be compatible with my search standards and exactly what effort they will put in.
If they just offer a resume make-over and then they troll Indeed and LinkedIn so you don't have to, that hardly seems worth it. The importance of resume formatting is extremely overstated (I know from being part of tech hiring teams within several past jobs).
I'm in the recruiting space. An enormous part of the disparity in applicant success comes down to "job-hunting skills". Will their resume, as presented & formatted, speak to the employers they're after? Are they applying to enough jobs? Do they tell the story of their career trajectory in a compelling way? It's very exciting to see a company trying to level the playing field the way Mentat seems to be.
There's a limit to what recruiters can do. In general, good recruiters have been incredibly helpful to me in understanding exactly what opportunity they are looking to fill, to match expectations etc. But after a certain point, its gotta be a conversation between the applicant and the company and that is something that recruiters can't affect much.
I agree - it's about focus and time. Recruiting is already a very manual process, and it's hard enough for most recruiters to identify candidates and get them interested in the role. The conversion rate from initial outreach to interested candidate is abysmal. Adding a layer of advising / resume help just doesn't fit with their model and would make them uncompetitive with other recruiters.
At HireArt we certainly do try to do this, but we're still a small part of the recruiting market.
All of these things seem like services provided by a Recruiter/Headhunter. I guess Recruiters only start providing these services once you reach a certain payband. External Recruiters are sales people for HR, and the higher the sale (% of your salary), the more services they are likely to add. Mentat looks like they will be targeting young professionals that haven't made it to that level yet.
That being said, people are woefully uninformed about the hiring process. Your resume is not a life story, its a flyer with keywords that convinces the Recruiter to pass your name to the Hiring Manager. Also networking is way more effective than any tool/trick/strategy when getting a new job.
Wow, I had this very same idea (get applied to jobs on one's behalf) like one week ago. Not from a startup point of view, but as job hunter. Actually I went as far as writing up my requirements and searching for some freelance recruiters near me.
(I already work for an awesome client, btw. Just wanted to experiment)
I had planned to keep my operation secret because if the employer discovered that I didn't personally apply, that could be an immediate discard reason.
Also, if you're already a good professional / job hunter, making sure the agent is equally good/consistent can be as demanding as doing the thing yourself in the first place.
Probably Mentat should keep those in mind - applying-on-behalf is a double-edged sword.
Hiring is broken. It's just broken into many pieces, especially as you get to larger organizations.
The first disconnect occurs when management wants something, but HR loses it in translation, and that job description is classified and immutable for the next decade. So it gets posted, and everyone complains that the "right candidates" aren't applying. Well, that's because we can't actually write job descriptions to tell candidates what we're actually trying to do.
If by some miracle I get to post a job the way I want to describe it, I have the option of receiving every resume that comes in or letting HR screen, whereby they interpret what I want and probably trash a lot of quality candidates. Because they were doing Java instead of Python or didn't include SQL or something like that. So I tend to do my own screening, looking for evidence of critical thinking, curiosity and potential, which takes some time.
Maybe I found my candidate and I've hired them. I mentioned I'm big on potential, critical thinking and curiosity. I think I'm a pretty good manager and people developer, and I'd even like to think that those who have passed through my team have learned a lot. Naturally I don't have the sort of pay scale or rapid advancement culture to work with, so I eventually lose them to someone who does. (As an aside, I used to work with a great HR recruiter, who could really deliver the right candidates - naturally she went somewhere else to get paid more!)
And then we start over. So I like the idea of startups like Triplebyte and such, who I can maybe trust to think like me and get me a few candidates for a last round interview and a hire. Naturally, my large, old school company will have none of that :)
From the candidate perspective, these same issues manifest differently, but share the same root causes. I can see why startups who understand the process on the inside are starting to try and monetize their knowledge of the game. Personally, I'm a pretty big fan of Jobscan - it's a really helpful tool to help you adjust the language in your resume to match the keywords from the job posting, which is useful in getting your resume into the hands of an actual human to read. From there, you may still run into the above issues, but the first hurdle has been cleared.
That would be less disheartening if any of the "hiring is broken, let's fix it" companies actually tried to fix it instead of just streamlining and/or automating the existing, broken systems
It really depends on which end of the transaction you are talking about. If you are willing to insulate the job seeker from the broken stuff then you've 'fixed' that half of the problem from their perspective. In a perfect world, a total rethinking of the whole process would be much better but unless you can get N number of companies to buy in to that, then solving the problem through an abstraction layer might be the best bet.
The abstraction layer requires the company to buy in (politically, not just monetarily). If you've been around the Fortune 500 at all, it's very common to have large-ish, very powerful HR organizations. Taking something very fundamental away from them - the candidate pipeline - would be really unpalatable and controversial because it takes away about half the organization and a good chunk of the supply side.
You aren't wrong, I'm just stating why it's not happening.
No, and I'm not criticizing you or anything. I'm just saying it isn't the least bit easy in the sense that a lot of these startups have chosen to go after the parts of the process where they can get some kind of foothold and make money.
Even if you can get the company to buy into the broken nature of its talent pipeline, there's a lot of human capital consulting out there and the top tier firms haven't quite bought in to the talent pipeline as a(n external) service concept yet. While the natural idea might be to get into the human capital consulting game to fix this, it's really hard for little firms to get into large companies, because as they say, nobody ever got fired for bringing in Mercer, Aon Hewitt, Towers Watson, Deloitte, etc (the "top" HC consulting firms).
If you can't tell, I care about this quite a bit. It impacts my long term effectiveness as a manager.
I feel like one of the things that a recruiter (or really, any separate person, like a good/pro-active reference) can do is actually tout your abilities. When we tout our own abilities, it often sounds way too self-serving or obnoxious.
Heh. I wonder just what the guarantee is in "Mentat guarantees job interviews, with a 99% success rate on more than 1,000 job applications." Would I get my $249 back when they can't get me a job.
Getting to the interview has always been the hard part for me. I'm curious about this - I'd imagine you can really up your interview rate if you fit the resume to the job posting, including all of the things you've never actually done that are in the description. If there's a more honest way, I'd be open to it.
I'm only now getting to the point where interview = offer is no longer true, but it's been for executive level positions where I don't know that they realize I'm on the early end of 30 until they see me. Still, if I could get that interview percentage up, that'd help my odds.
Cultural fit is very important. A lot of my hiring often comes down to it - I won't bring someone in who's a bad cultural fit even if they're brilliant because odds are they're going to be unhappy and leave, even if they're not the type of poor cultural fit that would negatively impact the rest of the team. I'm a sample of one here, but I have to hire good cultural fits because I have to try and retain in the long term, if not on my team, in the organization, because we're not in a top tier market for technical talent and it's hard enough getting good people over.
Anyhow, I'm telling you that to lead into this question - do you know what about the cultural fit isn't going well? All of us are bad cultural fits for some organization or another, but if you're getting that consistently, start looking bigger picture about yourself, and also the types of organizations you're looking to work with. There's going to be a pattern somewhere.
If this is happening with multiple interviews and organizations of various size and type, your best bet is to try and identify the factor and see if there's something you can change about yourself to whatever degree that's acceptable to you and/or possible. If you're primarily applying to the same kinds of organizations (let's say small tech startups in the bay area, just to give an example), maybe you'd be happier or more successful looking at a different industry/size/location.
A guarantee of a job would be ballsy and impressive though. Obviously much more risky. If you're a recruiter working for the company, It's probably trivially easy to guarantee to find a hire. It would be game changing if you could somehow figure out how to work for the candidate and guarantee a job. I wonder how much I'd be willing to pay for such a guarantee. Probably in the thousands of dollars range depending on the job.
We're definitely working towards that. Right now we don't have the capacity to extensively prepare people for interviews to reduce the variability there - but should get there soon
Noticed that too. Incredibly tone deaf. Kind of like a CEO saying "If I ever had to worry about cleaning my house, I'd choose e-Maids!!"
EDIT: And just to soften/clarify, I think the service sounds like a great idea--there is plenty of room for any attempt to make the horrible hiring process work better.
Just terrible wording on that quote--<head shake>!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentat