Doing it Wrong

For many years now I’ve been railing against human resources practices that make no bloody sense, mostly because I’m a management professional and such things offend me, but also because I’ve seen far too many cases where failure of this fundamental business function has eventually brought down an otherwise sound company. Regular readers of this space (assuming I have readers) have heard me pointing out that no position in any company is there because the owners are wonderful people and want to contribute money to someone for no particular reason – all jobs exist because doing them will either generate money for the organization (through production, sales, research or what have you) or prevent the organization from losing money (through fines, lawsuits, taxes, etc.). All of that is true enough – and this is why working managers so often have issues with the Human Resources department taking too long to get them the replacement personnel they need. But that may still only be the tip of the proverbial iceberg…

If you have ever posted a resume onto Monster, or Career Builder, or even networking sites like Linked-In, you’ve probably already had the experience of getting sent dozens of “opportunities” that have nothing to do with any career path you’ve ever considered, simply because a single keyword in your file matches something in the description. These are frequently harmless accidents made by badly-defined searches, such as when a Program Manager gets sent job listings for an HTML programmer or a Manager of a Java programming project, but increasingly we’re seeing it used fraudulently, to flood users with offers for “opportunities” with commission-only sales jobs, MLM schemes, “purchase-required” management positions, and outright scams (to the extent there is any distinction between those categories). Or worse still, as a means of targeting millions of people with outright SPAM messages about for-profit colleges and training programs no one could possibly want…

Almost as bad, in my opinion, are those occasions when you apply directly for a posted job on a company website and are unable to get the attention of a recruiter because the site is being bombarded by tens of thousands of “applicants” who are simply applying for every posting they find, regardless of whether they have any qualifications whatsoever. Given this huge volume of slush, many HR departments have no choice but to search the applications by keyword, and if their search isn’t quite wide enough (e.g. if you missed the one specific term they are basing all of their searches on when you wrote your resume) they may not be able to find you amid all of the noise…

A post from the Ask the Headhunter column on the PBS News Hour site points out that the situation is being compounded by the fact that most of the time the companies that are looking for new personnel aren’t writing good job descriptions in the first place, or using selection methods that make any bloody sense once they do get applicants in for interview. We already knew that college GPA and scores from GMAT or SAT exams don’t predict job performance, but recent studies indicate that even in-house placement tests, or the puzzle questions so beloved of new-age employers like Google, offer no indication of how well a given applicant will perform if they are actually hired. And even that fails to consider those cases where the new hire ends up doing exactly none of the tasks detailed in description of the job for which they’ve applied…

It would appear that the PBS News commentator has a point when he claims that the recruiting and hiring system in America (and possibly other Western countries) is broken. The real question seems to be what, apart from hiring good people without any specific experience, skills or training and finding things for them to do – in effect, hiring people with good minds and growing our own specific personnel – can we possibly do about this?

(To be Continued…)