As you transition from a full-time role into life as a freelancer, you will undoubtedly have many unanswered questions, some of which you’re too embarrassed to ask! So, to save you from awkward conversations and ensure you have the information you need to get started, we answer eight frequently asked questions about the freelancing life that you probably didn’t want to ask us!

How do I get started as a freelancer?

Let’s start at the beginning. When entering the freelance lifestyle for the first time, knowing where to start can not be easy. But the truth is that you can find clients armed with a PC and internet connection, providing you know where to look! As soon as you’ve decided on the service you will offer your clients, launch your profile on RadialHub and start marketing yourself. You will be amazed at how quickly you will find clients.

Do I need to work for free at the start?

This is tough to answer, but we don’t encourage working for free. It’s better to price yourself a little on the cheap side and at least be remunerated for your time on your projects. Working for free for clients you don’t know is exploitative and something you should avoid. While doing the odd job for family and friends at the start is okay, be confident in your ability and charge what you think is fair for your time.

Should I quit my job?

This one is entirely up to you. Some freelancers start their careers as a side hustle, while others jump into the deep end and cut all ties with their current jobs to work on their freelancing endeavors full-time. You have to make this decision depending on your circumstances. If you have enough money in the bank and won’t put yourself under financial pressure by quitting your job, go for it! But if you need the financial security of a salaried role while you look for new clients, it’s best to start freelancing in your spare time.

Will I find enough clients to support my livelihood?

New freelancers are often anxious about finding clients, which is understandable. After all, when you enter an industry for the first time, it’s daunting and challenging to know where your work will come from. But as you win your first few clients and deliver exceptional work, you will find a snowball effect. The more you deliver great work and receive positive feedback, the more clients will come your way.

Can I set my hours?

Yes! One of the most liberating things about freelancing is that you can work whenever you like. But we always urge caution when you’re deciding when and how often to work. Just because you can work whenever you want, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Failing to set office hours and thinking that you can work at any time of the day or night will lead you to work too much and will cause you to burn out. Consider how much you want to work and set your office hours accordingly.

How much does the average freelancer earn?

Although there are many things to consider, the average earnings for freelancers in North America currently sit around the $20 per hour mark. But you can reasonably expect to increase your earnings as you become more experienced and boost your skills. One of the most attractive things about freelancing is that the sky is very much the limit, and you can build your business beyond your wildest dreams!

How do I find help to run my freelance business?

There’s a common misconception that working as a freelancer means you’re alone. But in reality, help is only a click away! As you soon discover, you will be responsible for your accounts, finances, marketing, and administration. And as your client base grows, so do the demands on your time. Consider searching on RadialHub for accountants and personal assistants who can support you to work more efficiently and ultimately help you run your freelancing business.

I want to travel while freelancing – Is it possible?

It might not have escaped your attention that the digital nomad lifestyle is taking the world by storm! Providing you have a stable internet connection and a laptop; you can work from anywhere in the world. But if you plan to work as a freelancer while on the road, lay your plans well in advance to ensure that you can work and deliver your projects ahead of the agreed deadlines.

Final Thoughts

We hope that we’ve answered some of your questions about freelancing and that you can now dive in and get started! The world is your oyster as a freelancer, so get started today and enjoy the liberation of being your boss and setting your working schedule!

The post Top Eight Things You Wanted to Know About Freelancing But Were Too Embarrassed to Ask first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post How to Save $100 on Top-Selling Bose Kitchen Audio System first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post Best Smart Surround Earphones for Your Next Workout Session first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post The Smart Wireless Earphones for DJ’s Are a Real Breakthrough first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post Discover the 9 Best Songs to Stream & Share Right Now first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post Air Hogs Drone Gives You a Bird’s-Eye View in VR Mode first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post This New Underwater Drone Is Your Own Personal Submarine first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

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There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

The post Intruder in Your Home? The Alarm Will Release the Drones first appeared on Techy Punch.

There are more employers that claim soft skills are hard to find than hard skills

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make it possible for employers to post new positions online and manage the hundreds of applicants who typically respond to each opportunity. No human hiring manager reviews hundreds of applications.

Instead, the ATS produces a manageable number of viable candidates for the hiring manager to review. How does the ATS do this? It’s not magic, but rather a keyword-based filter, comparing resumes to the posted job description, and passing through candidates who appear to be a better match.

The keyword-based filter at the top of the hiring funnel of most employers has a number of interesting knock-on effects. One is the phenomenon of resume spam: candidates who literally copy the job description in white font into their resume in order to get past the screen. A second is an over-emphasis on technical skills.

Faced with the need to differentiate hundreds candidates for every online posting, employers have added many new job requirements most of which are technical.

According to Burning Glass, technical skills now dominate in terms of the sheer number of competencies demanded in job descriptions more than cognitive and soft skills combined for virtually every career.

While the dominance of technical skills in job descriptions is probably a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to come up with 10 technical requirements for a job than 10 different ways of saying problem solving or communication skills, this is the reality Millennials face in being seen by hiring managers. Because if they don’t have these technical skills, they’re not making it through the ATS filter. And if they’re not making through the ATS filter, they’re effectively invisible to employers.

Does this mean there’s a soft skills shortage or that Millennials are all late, disorganized poor communicators? The punctual, organized and well-spoken Millennials whom employers should want have played by the rules and completed college degrees.

But because nearly all colleges and universities continue to live in a bubble, floating high above the mundane concerns of the labor market, and because they continue to believe that the job of higher education is to prepare students for their fifth job.

Colleges have not seriously undertaken to provide last mile technical training to students. So all these Millennials are missing.

The first is giving all Millennials a chance to become visible to employers through last-mile technical training

The second is that employers need to escape the tyranny of the keyword-based filter at the top of their hiring funnel. Employers need to demand that their ATS vendors like Taleo (Oracle) incorporate new technologies that allow them to screen (and search) on competencies rather than keywords.

The shift to competency-based hiring is inevitable and will broaden the top of the funnel to include candidates with great soft skills, and likely more diverse backgrounds than the current pedigree- and degree-based hiring system allows.

Gyroscope founder Anand Sharma seems pretty content when we meet up for a walk to The Mill, a hip cafe known for its $4 toast in San Francisco’s NOPA neighborhood. It’s a rare sunny day in the city and his startup is growing.

His self-tracking platform with a sleek UI has added a genetics and step tracking component and soon blood tracking. He’s also closed on a small sum of angel funding from key investors like Periscope founder Keyvon Beykpour.

Even Jack Dorsey has started using Gyroscope, he tells me. Sharma’s worked for well over two years! He called it AprilZero then but the idea grew to include friends and soon anyone who wanted to track themselves on a range of different metrics relating to health and wellness.

The plan now includes where you go, what you eat, how many times you go running in a year and how much time you spend staring at the screen in front of you.

The platform seems like an outgrowth of the quantified self movement a movement pairing technology with personal data to help you improve your life in some mental or physical way. But Sharma shrugs off the suggestion.

I don’t like to place myself in that category, he says. Mainly because those guys are little weird. He’s not wrong. The movement, also known as life logging, conjures up images of folks wearing six different health tracking bands, sensors on their heads and measuring every little detail of their actions in every part of their life for what sometimes is very unclear.

But Sharma, whom we’ve written about before when he was just getting started, has shaped the platform up quite a bit since starting out. Gyroscope is in the App Store now!

He has thought about productivity components like how much time you spend surfing the internet each day and added a bit of a competitive enhancement to the platform, allowing you to compare how many steps you took compared to your friends on the platform.

He’s also launching a feature this summer called Insights, an AI component that aims to help you make connections between certain behaviors and what you log on the platform. Sharma tells me it would work by drawing these connections and then sending push notifications to motivate and remind those using Gyroscope to do something relating to their goals.

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