Once again, let me being by assuring everyone that I have no
issues, ethical or otherwise, with the constructs that prevent insects from
flying into your house, upon which you watch movies, or with which your
t-shirts are decorated; the screening I refer to today is the use of test
questions asked of job applicants in advance of your interviewing them. This is
hardly a new practice; the use of telephone screenings predates the existence of
the Internet and most of its current users, and the use of intermediaries to
lower the number of applicants you personally have to speak with predates the
Industrial Revolution and possibly the rise of human civilization. But given
the new technologies being used for these procedures, and the potential for
abuse in the Internet era, it seemed worth discussing further…
With the rise of Internet job search services like Monster
and Career Builder the traditional task of weeding out the applicant pool has
expanded by several orders of magnitude – because so has the size of that pool.
Before these systems were available it took time and cost money to apply for a
job – there was the cost of typing a cover letter and the expense of printing a
copy of your resume on nice paper, not to mention postage to get it there.
Consequently, most job seekers were limited in the number of resumes they could
send out, and would elect to concentrate their resources on jobs for which they
actually qualified. Today, applying for a job is as cheap and simple as pushing
a button, and millions of people apparently do this without even bothering to
look at the job description…
To counter this, many companies have taken to using
automated systems that can use the incoming applications and materials to
create a database, which they then mine for applicants who might actually prove
suitable for the job. Unfortunately, some of these work better than others, and
even very good human resources software is far from perfect, resulting in many
applicants who would otherwise be ideal being excluded on the basis of minutiae
like formatting and font size, while many others who should never have applied
in the first place end up clogging up the works. Clearly there is a saving in
salaries to be realized by not having to pay people to dig through this
mountain of useless resumes, but if the optimal applicant is not selected for
interview (and therefore not hired) there will be a non-zero cost as well…
Then there’s the use of telephone or Internet-based testing.
Phone interviews clearly offer an opportunity to use human discretion and
judgment when evaluating applicants, but they put hearing-impaired applicants
and anyone who particularly dislikes telephone conversations (it’s more common
than you might think) at a significant disadvantage. Internet-based assessment
tests eliminate the awkwardness of trying to persuade someone who can’t see you
(and whom you can’t see) to hire you, but they impart a significant
disadvantage to anyone who can’t see well, can’t type well, or does not perform
well on standardized tests (computerized or otherwise). In fact, some of the
number-sequence and reading-based questions are so disproportionately difficult
to some applicants (dyslexics, for example) as to be questionable under the
Americans with Disabilities Act…
All of which leads me to ask: do we have an ethical
responsibility to give all applicants an equal chance to be selected for
interview, and an equal chance to make their case for why they should be hired?
If so, does that responsibility over-ride our fiduciary responsibility to our
ownership group to contain recruiting costs? Can we ethically use electronic
and/or telephone screenings knowing that some worthwhile people will be denied
the opportunity to work for us because they will be unjustly screened out? Can
we responsibly use such methods knowing that in some cases the best applicants
will be incorrectly screened out, resulting in financial loss to our company?
Or should we just leave matters up to the hiring managers involved, and let
them make the choices they are being employed by the company to make anyway?
It’s worth thinking about…
No comments:
Post a Comment