The Uber Effect: Opportunities for Jobseekers and Employers

Many people were saying back at the turn of the Millennium the Internet wouldn’t last. Can you imagine life without it today? We take it for granted like running water from a tap. The Internet is now part of the fabric of our lives whether we like it or not. How we engage with the online world is sometimes, but not always, a matter of choice. Which brings me to the meteoric rise of the unashamedly disruptive business, Uber.

My first Uber experience

I found myself in Manchester over Christmas staying with my eldest daughter and coming back late at night from a gig to see the greatest band in the world that nobody’s ever heard of. My travel options included a lengthy walk to the Metro station, short ride and another lengthy walk at the end; ditto bus journey if knew which one to take (I don’t know the city as well as I did when I lived there over 15 years ago). I couldn’t compete with the thronging hordes and flag down a black cab because I’d run out of money and didn’t have my cash card on me.

The Uber experience was a refreshingly easy and stress-free one. Download the app, register credit card details and get daughter to send me her ￡10 promo code. Enter desired destination, receive name of taxi driver and number plate, see the taxi’s current location and time of arrival on the map on my phone, wait and watch its progress towards my location. Get in taxi, confirm name and destination, arrive and listen for the ping on my mobile as the receipt lands telling me my account has been debited.

What’s all the fuss Uber?

Uber has many detractors, not least black cab drivers who spent years learning The Knowledge in London, and more frighteningly female passengers in India and people fleeing from the hostage scene in Sydney. On a more trivial level, one of my daughters also got a price shock on New Year’s Eve!

Does the moral dimension make you feel a little uneasy? The success of Uber suggests other things trump it in practice. Convenience and customer service top the list (uber all alles)– no middle (wo)men, no left hanging on the phone, no lack of information on progress, no need for cash, no asking for a written receipt, no unknowns like arrival time. All you need is a mobile and a bank account and you have the Martini effect – anytime, any place, anywhere.

As the Observer’s technology writer, John Naughton, has commented repeatedly, we tick that ‘I agree’ box for terms and conditions of myriad online platforms automatically without really worrying about who has access to our personal data and what they might do with it. All at the altar of convenience. Choices.

Drawing benefits

An employer provides a product or service to its customers or users. A job applicant is primarily the service provider to an employer. Many applicants would welcome a step change in the service provided by employers during the recruitment process. Many employees around the world would welcome a different kind of relationship with their employer.

Some in the job search field are predicting better use of technologies to benefit the jobseeker and make their life easier. Jenny Foss (@JobJenny) has spotted the new app Switch (New York) Bright (part of LinkedIn) and Wisewords (Canada). In the UK, check out Plotr.

If you want to be an employee or you are an existing one…

• How will you contribute to increasing convenience for an employer’s customers, for your boss and for your colleagues? Think about how you can show this before, during and after the job or promotion process.

If you want to work freelance, create a new business or social enterprise …

• What products or services can you offer that provide more convenience for people?
• What increased convenience in the way you do business can you create for your customers and suppliers?
• How can you run your business in a way that is more personally convenient (without loss of quality to your customers) so you focus on what is really important?

If you are an employer…

• How can you improve your recruitment practices to make them more convenient for job applicants and reduce your overheads at the same time? Video recruitment technology is offering a way forward. Next stop, the Internet of Things.
• How can you evolve your business model to provide a new deal for engagement? We are in an era where 50% of the US labour force is predicted to be working as contractors by 2020. Uber taps into the zeitgeist of providing its services through independents (taxi drivers), removing the huge overheads of employing them. Incentivised autonomy. Transactional and transformational in parallel.

Whatever your situation, seek to have an uberlasting personal impact and it might help you avoid drawing those other kind of benefits.

What do you see happening that mirrors the Uber effect? What do you see as the opportunities and the drawbacks of these approaches?

Photos: author and www.nonlineagency.co.uk

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David (@David_Shindler) is an independent coach, blogger and speaker, associate with several consultancies, founder of The Employability Hub (free resources for students and graduates), author of Learning to Leap: a guide to being more employable, Digital Bad Hair Days and co-author with Mark Babbitt of 21 Century Internships. His commitment and energy is in promoting lifelong personal and professional development and in tackling youth unemployment. He works with young people and professionals in education and business.

To read more of his work - visit the Learning to Leap blog.

And check out his other published articles on LinkedIn:

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