No matter how beautifully we may present ourselves, the current hiring process makes finding work a challenge. In 2005, a firm ran a “mystery shopper” experiment with more than 100 healthcare employers. Professionals posing as job candidates applied for work with tailored resumes showing skills that matched or exceeded the posted job requirements. Yet 88% of the candidates were rejected. Even perfect applicants don’t get interviews.

One reason is that employers can easily be flooded with hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of applications. So they often narrow down the candidate pool by using keywords from resumes as well as degrees from highly ranked colleges. Sheeroy Desai, CEO of Gild, a company with a platform that matches employers with candidates, has observed those biases in person. “You see filters like, ‘A lot of the people at our company came from Ivy League schools, so we are only going to look at people from Ivy League schools,’” Desai says. “It seems reasonable, but it’s actually really arbitrary.”

Another hiring myth, especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, is the belief that all employees should fit well with a company’s specific culture. Max Levchin, co-founder and former CTO of PayPal, tells a story of a time when PayPal rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests but who said he liked to play hoops. “No PayPal people would ever have used the word hoops,” Levchin told a class of would-be entrepreneurs. “Probably no one even knew how to play hoops. Basketball would be bad enough. But hoops?”

Levchin thought he was telling a success story about hiring for startups. But he was also telling a story about a type of bias that hurts employers as well as job candidates. “Usually when people talk about hiring for fit or culture fit, it’s a shortcut for saying I want to like you,” says Ji-A Min, a research analyst for Ideal Candidate, a Toronto-based company that uses predictive analytics to help employers hire sales professionals. “That’s where hiring breaks down and all these biases are introduced.”

Google is one of the few companies to go public about the flaws in the traditional hiring process. Except for recent college graduates, the company no longer asks candidates for transcripts or grade-point averages. It found that neither grades nor interviews predicted success. “Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, told a New York Times reporter in 2013. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess.”

Nicholson had never been a recruiter before he was hired at FutureAdvisor to run communications. When he became responsible for hiring as well, he quickly discovered that tech companies have no real idea how to find the best candidates. “If the only information we are asking for doesn’t correlate to what we want, how do we get the right information?”

Searching for an answer to that question led Nicholson to Allen. “Recruiting is wasteful and repetitive and harmful to people,” Nicholson told me. “Its main product is rejection.” This belief made him willing to gamble on Staffup Weekend, with the hope that sponsoring the event might help his company hire in a less biased, more effective and more humane way.

On Sunday morning, the day we are supposed to complete our project, I arrive ready to work. It’s shortly before 8 am, when we have been promised access to the building, and I’m the first person there. The clock ticks past eight. I really want that door to open, so our group can meet its deadline.

A few moments later a man from another team arrives. Like me, this guy is unemployed. Unlike me, he was homeless for many years and still struggles to get by. Both of us are eager to get back to work. For free. On projects that may not have a future. But we’re okay with that.

The day becomes a blur as teams work frantically to complete as much of their projects as possible before time runs out. Eventually the deadline arrives. It’s show time.

Fifteen of us are left at this point, down from the 25 who had showed up Saturday morning. One by one, each team gathers by a podium to show samples of their work. Ms. UX and Mr. Programmer do most of the talking for our project. They did the bulk of the work, so I speak last mainly to note how well we worked together to create a basic but functioning website and to thank these two capable strangers who helped create an unexpectedly well-functioning, professional team.

As Staffup Weekend comes to a close, there’s a palpable feeling of satisfaction and connection among many of us in the room. Several of us are visibly emotional by the end of the presentations. As I say goodbye, I’m proud of my team’s work and of the attendees as a whole.

That feel-good moment doesn’t last long. On my way to the bathroom, I hear a woman weeping in the hall. She tells me how she’d opened up to Allen about her personal struggles and many efforts to land a job, and was upset that he responded by saying, “Don’t tell me about your problems, tell me about your solutions.”

This highly educated, unemployed woman tells me she is running out of places to couch surf. Soon she may be sleeping outdoors. This woman’s problem is not Allen’s problem, nor Nicholson’s problem. It is, however, a national problem.

Employers, in general, refuse to hire the unemployed. They don’t like us and they don’t want us. Not even Brooke Allen seems to like us, and he’s trying to help. According to a series of recent studies, people are biased against those who have been unemployed for as little as four weeks as well as those who were laid off through no fault of their own. As Ben Stein opined a few years back, “The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.”

Staffup Weekend put the lie to Stein’s pronouncement. As Nicholson later wrote me, “The fact that people stayed for 48 hours to work on something put them head and shoulders above the thousands of applications we receive, because the participants are people who show up and see things through.”

Was Staffup Weekend a success? A few attendees I spoke to were keenly disappointed that the event didn’t provide concrete feedback about the work they’d done. Others expressed great satisfaction with the overall experience, even if it had not led to an actual job interview.

Nicholson told me that working on Staffup Weekend had been rewarding for him personally. It must have been frustrating as well. After the event, he offered interviews to several attendees, who declined. His company hired one attendee, but that person soon left for a better offer elsewhere. Nicholson also recommended some attendees to his company’s client-service and engineering teams, which rejected them.

“Doing something new and getting others to join you is hard,” Nicholson reflects. One of the great ironies of Staffup Weekend is that Allen’s hiring approach sounds great to anyone unemployed, newly graduated or in transition from one career to another. It doesn’t necessarily sound great to actual hiring managers.

That does not make Staffup Weekend a failure.

To me, Staffup Weekend succeeded on several levels. It brought together a group of strangers who quickly developed effective teams that met their deadlines and built several things from scratch. It allowed FutureAdvisor to identify several job candidates at a fraction of the cost of traditional recruiting. It gave me and other attendees a forum for exercising our skills and having them appreciated. That felt great. Moreover, many of us—including the sponsor and organizer—met people we value and continue to value months after the event. None of this could have happened without the combined efforts of Allen and Nicholson.

Staffup Weekend had its flaws, of course. Early on, Allen should have acknowledged the incredible challenges that even highly skilled unemployed people face in getting hired. But that’s easy to fix, and my hope is that Staffup Weekend, or some version of it, will continue. Because few employers seem to have noticed just how badly the traditional hiring process serves them.

In short, it’s time for hiring 2.0. Future Staffup Weekends can accomplish only so much. So I’d like to propose a new event: Smartup Weekend, a new event designed to connect hiring managers to reality: They know less than they think. Great candidates are out there but managers don’t see them. Because they haven’t gone to the right college. Are too old. Unemployed. Or play hoops.

Smartup Weekend may wind up a flop, but the need to fix hiring is real. Who wants in?

Illustrations by Cristóbal Schmal

Follow Backchannel: Twitter | Facebook