 Are employers hiring the right people for jobs? Are they even looking at the right criteria for candidates? Why is it so hard for quality, talented people to find work that can fulfill them? I think it's a problem with the entire process. The job market has changed dramatically with the invention of the internet and employers are still using the same process for finding people as they were 30 years ago. Submit a resume, we'll call you if you are one of the first few we receive and have a nice looking resume, with plenty of fluff. Here's my idea...
This seems to be an ongoing battle between me and my wife. She is responsible for hiring at her job and I happen to have some experience doing that myself. My brother-in-law, Greg, has an interesting perspective on the process as well, so we have had some in-depth discussions.
First, everyone can agree that the company wants to find the best candidate for the job, even though I believe this happens less than 1% of the time. We also agree that there isn't enough time in the day to interview/research every candidate. So the rest of this article is written with those two expectations in mind.
From the job seekers point of view, we submit resume after resume, blindly hoping to attract attention. Sure we put a lot of effort into our resume to make it sound as much like what they are looking for as possible, but the reality is, so did 90% of the other applicants. Now the ball is in the employers court.
From the employers perspective, we get hundreds of resumes within hours, because of simple submission methods on job market websites. Let's say we get 200 resumes day 1. Realistically, we will only look through about 50 of them. We quickly look at their previous jobs for companies that either compete with us (meaning they have relative experience) or companies that we recognize as ideal employers. We also look at their education. If they have a college degree, they stick out a little more, but why I'm not sure (my #1 problem) ...
So we get our 5 candidates (10% of the resumes we read, 2.5% of the resumes we received). We get interviews scheduled and wait.
Back to the employee, we now have an interview or we don't hear anything, ever (my #2 problem). For the interview, we want to be dressed well, calm, confident (not too confident) and form fitting. Things go well or they don't, either way, you will never know because the employer keeps that behind close doors. Understandable considering the lawsuits they can face by simply declining a candidate for a job.
Now as the employer, we pick our favorite candidate out of the 5, assuming we had more than 1 that did as well as we expected, which generally happens. We offer that person the job, they accept. Six months later, we can't figure out why they aren't working out.
Problem #1 - We value education as a means of validating what this person can do. The argument people try to make is that by getting a college degree, it says that you can finish a difficult task and adapt to a many different environments, yet still be successful.
My opinion is that your parents would have kicked you out and cut off your credit cards if you did poorly or even dropped out of school. It doesn't say you can't or won't be successful. I use this example a lot, but Bill Gates wouldn't be able to get a job based on his incompletion of college initally. Who wouldn't want William?
Problem #2 - Candidates hardly ever hear back from employers regarding the status of their application. I understand this would be a time consuming task, but it may be an important step in improving the likelyhood of finding a perfect match the next time we are looking. It's getting better, again, because of the automation of decline notices.
How do we fix it? Greg thinks we need to find people who love their jobs, rather than people who qualify to do them. He may be right. Everyone knows a happy employee is a great employee. The best way to do this seems to be a personallity test. Why not find out what your best employees are like, then look for someone similar? Seems to make sense to me.
My wife thinks the process works as well as it can, because of the sheer volume of applications received. So obviously we need to cut down on the number of applicants we have to weed through. That's going to be hard to automate, but there are ways to learn about candidates through a series of questions.
Problems exist with any process and you just have to use the one that works best for you. With these solutions we would probably lose some personallity diversity in the work place, which would have some drawbacks.
There isn't any way this is going to be solved by a few simple changes, but it is something that employers and applicants should be concerned with. Considering the rash of skilled labor workers we are about to have on our hands, with the pending collapse of the auto industry, we need to find the best of the best, even though many of those people aren't going to have the paper qualifications that you want to see. They are still good, valuable employees and should be considered for a number of different industries.
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