Forget your CV: Apply Like an Entrepreneur

by Lora Koycheva and Rafael Hostettler

Fascinating document, the CV... 

Highly condensed and incredibly curated documents meant to represent an applicant in the most competitive and complimentary light, they often have the paradoxical task to both demonstrate that one “fits right in” and has the necessary credentials and experience to do a job, and to make one stand out above others. CVs are incredibly costly artifacts, reflecting the pricetag of becoming a professional. Just imagine how much time and money is spent on a single line in your CV, such as “speaks 4 languages,” “MBA,” or “PhD.” What goes in the CV varies, of course, by professional context and even due to cultural norms, but despite their variations, CVs remain the undisputed staple of professional life, attesting and representing one´s professional self, and the singularly most widely used tool for entry into any domain which requires an application. 

 Tick off the Right Box to Be Outside the Box?

Yet is the CV the appropriate kind of representation for all business contexts? Is it antithetical to showcase and hint at the kinds of mindset,spirit, and practice, that is required in innovation and entrepreneurship? The question is not a trivial one, especially if you are of the conviction, as we are, that entrepreneurs are not born, but made. To those of you who follow the topic and live the realities of it day in and day out, entrepreneurship and innovation form a very special realm of opportunity recognition, coping with failure, embracing and utilizing uncertainty, and acting out of the box. So what kind of “presentation of self” would such a life merit and require?

Especially in the context of academic entrepreneurship, the question is exacerbated by a paradox of sorts: that as you are preparing students to become professionals, and giving them the right tools, skills, mindset for a traditional professional career (right as you are “disciplining” them to “tick off the right box,” “fit in,” and “get on track and stay on track” - all not coincidentally expressions of controlled constraint), how do you also encourage them to explore their entrepreneurial potential, think out of the box, and act outside of their comfort zones? How do you balance these two counter-valent dynamics out? These questions occupied our minds as we were preparing a new selection procedure for a cult 2-week makeathon class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) - Think.Make.Start (or TMS as it is known) of which one of us, Rafael, is a co-creator, and the other one, Lora, is a coach. 

Now entering its tenth edition, TMS is a format that relies on the collaboration of interdisciplinary team members, drawn from informatics, mechatronics, business, and that special “other” category - sometimes affectionately called unicorn, sometimes hustler. Furthermore, the makeathon requires the ability to work in a very compressed time-frame: only in the span of 2 weeks, individual participants must find teammates and form teams; identify a business opportunity, prototype several iterations of a mechatronic solution, all the while finding a business model, checking its viability with potential customers and preparing a pitch for Demo day and presenting to potential investors. All in all, not for the faint hearted -- much like entrepreneurship itself. And although in the past, a few startups have come out of the format, high rates of team dissolution and almost-immediate discontinuing of work has plagued the format. 

TMS is purposefully aimed at recreating the intensities of entrepreneurship, as much as possible, in the university context. As a consequence, it requires people with a certain “can do,” “let´s try it” attitude, willing to take whatever task is upcoming and go with it, rather than having lengthy discussions about the details of it. Incidentally, this is also what is often generally to be expected from a cofounder in a startup, which of course lies at the heart of the format’s definition. Due to its popular status, the makeathon often garners significant amount of applications due to not only credits which can count towards the official curriculum, but also the opportunity to form a startup.

Now, how do you select for people with this attitude? In the past we as the organizers have been selecting based on previously done group projects and the impact and contribution of each individual to those projects. 

Moving Beyond “Fit”

So we looked at CVs. We checked that those who were selected were capable and fitting to the demands of the format. We kept running into a number of issues. When dealing with applicants with limited professional experience (students), most CVs were identical in essence: same classes, same internship circuit, down to the same generic phrases used in their motivation letters (“highly motivated!”), especially in the case of management students. But if this uniformity of self presentation was already a problem, in many ways there was a larger one lurking just behind it. Skillset is not always co-terminous with attitude. “Can do” is not co-eval with “will do.” 

Concurrently with those two problems, all of which were playing out at the individual level, another issue interfered continuously with creating more startups: improving the teaming up process in only a few days (an unicorn task in an of itself even with ampler amounts of time, given how many of us are hunting for the right and ever-elusive recipe). Two weeks are a short time to go from “never before met” to “co-founders.” 

 Not trivially, the question “How do you select people with a can-do attitude” - or, as we thought of it “fit-for-challenge” -- aligned with the question “How do you jump start people to think in terms of teammates and teaming up already at a stage where they are focused on how they themselves come across?.” We realized that the second question is also one of “fit”- put differently, “person-people fit.”

Finally, given the uncertainties and unpredictabilities of the entrepreneurial journey, we also continuously questioned our own role in selecting people in TMS. To compound the issues surrounding “fit,” we realized that by actively selecting people in and out during applicant selection, we were enforcing our own interpretation of what and who would be a good “fit” -- all of it in theory.

“Fit” is, of course, a long-standing concept in management research. In entrepreneurship research in particular there is a long and venerable tradition of looking at “traits” and “personalities” and how they affect various components of venturing - from team formation, to business intentions, to venture performance. In the context of academic venturing specifically, however, where encouraging entrepreneurship demands that no normative judgement is passed on a priori on whether someone is a good “fit,” how does one approach the question of both recognizing and encouraging trying what entrepreneurship is about? 

Less Theory, More Practice

 A roboticist and an entrepreneur, one of us, Rafael, identifies as the ultimate “prototype” person: in whatever one wants to build, there are far too many variables, so the fastest and most efficient way is trying and learning from trying. In turn as an anthropologist immersing herself in other people´s realities in order to understand them (what is known as “participant observation”), Lora subscribes to a view of anthropological inquiry as a form of apprenticeship: you cannot know something unless you have at least some sort of practical experience with it. 

Thus both of us approach the challenges of the unknowns complex systems throw at us - whether they be robots or cultures - from a practice perspective. 

In the spirit of “we practice what we preach,” we took the chance to prototype a new application system which allows people to show their entrepreneurial spirit, to start thinking in terms of teams and teammates, and to remove us as coaches from interfering with “fit”. We scrapped application by CV and selection by coaches, and instituted instead a “show us what represents who you are best” application with a vote by applicant peers.

Show, don’t tell, and vote on your peers

Passing the power of selection to the applicants requires a system which is resilient against manipulation, as it is to be expected that applicants will try to game it. And while a certain disrespect for rules is common to most entrepreneurs, it should not be consciously made part of the system that such a disregard trivially lets users achieve an advantage.

With this in mind, the new process was set up as follows. Every applicant would submit a URL to their application. Where this URL would lead was purposefully left up to the applicant. The application prompt was “Compose what you think expresses best who you are and what you do. It can be a short video (<90 sec), a homepage, a portfolio, a pitchdeck, a piece of code, or your winning recipe for the perfect team in which you were the master chef (< 10MB).” Some chose to simply show their CVs, often looping back to their LinkedIn or Github profiles and yet other submitted video applications. Some of those videos were past project videos whereas others were custom tailored introductions reflecting a large time investment in preparation for the application.

Once all the participants had submitted their application, every applicant got to review materials of 10 others. Here, they were presented only with the link provided from another potential TMS participant. Then they got to sort those links relative to their preference, thereby everyone would create a relative ranking preventing a general down-ranking of others. All votes for each candidate are then averaged and this way every applicant was assigned scores from 1 to 10, and they were ranked by their scores.

Applicants could self select into one of four categories: hardware (mechanical, electrical, power engineering, for example), software (informatics, game design), business, and problem expert (architecture, sports science, STS for example). In the end, the same number of students from each category got selected, independent on the number of applications per category, ensuring that we get well balanced teams from the skills perspective.

One aspect we debated was whether it would be opportune to do the voting only within those categories or on the full pool of applicants - meaning should e.g. a business major vote on a mechanical engineer? Arguments for it were that a general non-tech participant would have a hard time to gauge the capabilities of the tech participant and vice-versa. A counter-argument was that the interdisciplinary nature of the course would require that participants collaborate across those categories anyway, and they thus should be able to choose all of their peers. Furthermore, we were concerned that in smaller groups it would become possible to upvote one’s friends, an effect we were actively counteracting by using a deterministic random-like shuffling of the applications to make sure that no two subsequent applicants get to vote on each other.

In TMS #9 the full pool of applicants got to vote on each other. Looking back, one effect whose magnitude we underestimated however, was the imbalance between the categories. Traditionally, we had up to four times as many applicants from management than from the engineering sciences, which usually had no effects on our selection except that it was much tougher to get into the course for management students versus electrical engineers. As this time, management students got to vote on all the participants they got exceedingly more influence than they should have had. We believe that this crucially biased the selection of students towards those which were able to present themselves better towards a non-technical audience. In TMS #10 voting was changed to in-category, and applicants only got to vote on other applicants self-identifying to the same category. 

Finally, to exemplify our approach, we are enclosing two real applications of two applicants from TMS #9, with their very gracious permission to share their application materials. Who do you think was voted in and out? Who would you have voted in? Is the CV the wrong application document where recognizing - and encouraging - the entrepreneurial potential is concerned? We would love to hear your thoughts.

Lora Koycheva, PhD, is a sociocultural anthropologist and a Senior Research Associate in the Entrepreneurship Research Institute at the Technical University of Munich, where she works on topics of identity and culture in team formation in the academic spin-off context. Her research is generously supported by the Joachim Herz Foundation, within the framework of the project Forschen und Gruenden: Unternehmensgründungen aus Wissenschaft & Forschung - Kriterien für den Erfolg. The opinion expressed here is hers alone, and does not represent that of the Foundation or any party associated with the Foundation.

 Rafael Hostettler, MSc, is an entrepreneur, a co-founder of Think. Make. Start and Medical Templates AG, as well as a PhD Candidate in Robotics and Embedded Systems at the Technical University of Munich. He is also the General Manager of the anthropomimetic robotics research startup Devanthro UG - the Roboy Company.