🤔Did you know that we haven’t been interviewing for jobs forever?

🤔Did you know that we haven’t been interviewing for jobs forever? For a very long-time life was about survival. For 195,000 years we were hunter gatherers. We lived in communal systems. There were no formalized work/jobs. Did you know that we invented slavery BEFORE we invented money? We enslaved people to do a lot of work. 
 
The oldest professions were toolmakers, bakers, farmers, builders hunters and butchers. Payment was based on a barter system. I made you a tool; you hunted and brought me some meat. 
 
Agriculture was invented in 10,000 to 12,000 years ago and money was formalized as IOU’s to farmers. 
 
5,000 years ago, slavery was the number way to get a job done. There was no such thing as a job interview or paychecks or pto. Unpaid slave labor is how work was done. 
 
Until the Romans decided that they wanted to protect the interesting jobs. They wanted slaves to do the dangerous jobs, and they wanted to do the cool jobs. So, they created guilds. Guilds were like unions. You had to be born into it. There was no way to get into a guild. If your dad was a ship builder your job was ship builder. But the Romans had a problem, what happened when a artisan only had daughters? Women weren’t allowed to work so they created apprenticeships. Which were not at all like modern internships but more like indentured servitude. More slavery. 
 
Slavery was how work was done until the late 1800’s. 
 
🏭When slavery was abolished worldwide in the 1800’s and the industrial revolution happened and we had a lot of factories that needed low skilled workers. The automobile and train were invented and then college became accessible for the average man. 
 
⛪️Fun fact, colleges before the 1600’s were mainly for the elite and men going into the ministry. Harvard’s first 500 graduates in 1642 all went into the ministry. 
 
🚂With a now mobile and educated workforce and more sophisticated jobs we needed a way to test applicants, and the job interview was born. 
 
💡Thomas Edison a prominent inventor in the early 1900’s created a list of 150 questions that he would ask men applying to work in his lab in Princeton, New Jersey. One of those applicants leaked the list to the New York Times and it was published on May 11, 1921. 
 
Edison’s list of questions was tough but in a modern context he was asking technical questions. The type of questions a modern company like Google might ask a candidate today. 
 
🤷🏼‍♀️And although 1921 is only 105 years ago, not much has changed. Applicants still complain that interview questions are silly, and companies still argue that there are no good applicants. 
 
But one thing remains true, the world is a better place because we have job interviews. Imagine the alternative. Slavery, Indentured servitude, jobs protected by guilds that you would have to be born into and not being allowed to apply because of your race or gender. #LearnOnTikTok #DidYouKnow #work #todayilearned #History