The dehumanization of human resources
I realize that businesses want to draw talent from the largest pool possible, and to do so available positions are often advertised simultaneously across several job market websites with audiences larger than what almost any company could reach on their own. Certainly some steps of the application process must be automated when dealing with, what I can only imagine, is a relatively high number of applicants. Websites like Indeed.com have even automated the phone interview process, having applicants take a robo-call and recording their responses to questions selected by the employer. The result, in my own experience, is an often bleak, one-sided, discouraging and depressing bout of dysfunctional online dating, except the relationship you're looking for is with your future employer.
Are there any HR people on Tildes? If so, I'm curious what this whole process looks like on your side and how it differs from say, twenty years ago. Is the process better? Are the people you hire better? How, on your end, could this process be improved? And most importantly, do you have any advice for getting through this increasingly frustrating first step?
Im not HR but wanted to contribute one bit.
I worked for a recruiting company (doing IT) 14 years ago.
The automation process, as far as I know, began then.
They had a tool where they could filter applicants by the zip code on their resume.
The employer set the radius and if you were too far out your application never even got looked at.
Im pretty sure this process continues to this day.
Not a big problem for people who never want to leave their area, but for someone like me who is a bit of a rubber tramp, it helps to know someone close to the area you want to be.
I got my current job in Maryland because I put my sisters address in Virginia while I still worked in upstate New York.
If we wanted to re-humanize human resources, we'd stop calling it "human resources" and go back to using words like "personnel". Likewise, we'd get rid of the phrase "human capital".
Aren't human resources the personnel that deal with the other personnel? And since you mentioned it, maybe the thing that makes modern hiring practices interesting is how, when, and where human capital fits into the process.
I should lend you my shades, so you can see for yourself that the HR people are anything but human. :)
Touché.
The very name "human resources" implies that humans are merely resources for a company to utilise - just like raw materials or money. We're not people ("personnel"), we're resources of the human kind, as opposed to resources of the material kind or resources of the financial kind.
You're referring to the human resources department, whose job it is to manage the human resources of whatever organization they work for.
Not an HR person per say, but I am chair of the hiring committee at a company with a few dozen people.
I will say that, consistently, the best people we have hired have been referrals from existing employees. This has consistently been my experience, it's the feedback I get from the CEO (who has been doing this for 30 years), and it was even what my grandfather told me when I first started taking on management roles. It also helps that it's cheaper. My firm pays a $10,000 bonus to a referrer on the first anniversary of their referral's hire date. For comparison, hiring an experienced quant through a recruiter can cost on the order of $100k-$200k on top of the quant's compensation. I bring this up because recruiters are the second choice after referrals, and you are basically paying them for access to their vetted social network. Of course, if you do this, you want to find the recruiter through, you guessed it, a referral.
The issue is, for some reason that I don't understand, as a company gets larger, the ability to hire based on referrals breaks down. My theory is that companies often start this way, but since the original employees were referred by existing employees, their social circles overlap too much and they eventually exhaust their referral networks. Our natural inclination is to try to apply tools to solve this problem, and eventually, the tools themselves become a burden and, worse still, you are hiring people who are good at figuring out the tools you use to hire people but not necessarily at the job you want them to do.
So my advice to someone approaching it from the employee side is to be the sort of person your friends would want to refer for a job, and (although this sounds a bit mercenary) expand your social circle to include people who work in the industry you want to work in. Next step is to meet recruiters and work through them.
The faceless HR machine you've identified is just that, a machine, and generally speaking, they are most concerned with acting as gatekeepers and finding reasons NOT to hire you. The reason for this is their role as gatekeepers/filter is to winnow potentially hundreds or thousands of applications down to a reasonable number (say half a dozen to a dozen) that a manager can work with and productively interview. If you make it through the HR department you are 80% of the way there because managers find themselves in situations where they really need the headcount as long as the person is halfway competent, and they tend to be looking for reasons TO hire you, whereas HR seeks the opposite. This again plays back to referrals, as if you have an advocate inside the system, you can often circumvent HR entirely.
Interestingly, I have heard an anecdote about a company (Canadian bank in this instance) doing something like what you said. Allegedly one of their HR people just randomized all the applications and arbitrarily rejected half.
I strongly suspect nobody really has any idea what they're doing beyond building referrals networks. Much of the work that was done on this earlier in the 20th century envisions scenarios like an assembly line, where there is a minimum threshold for employee performance but not a significant difference between anyone who overcomes that. Management traditionally relied much more on referrals and social networks. In contemporary environments, this just isn't the case - particularly software development where it is not uncommon to have the best performers outperform the average by an order of magnitude.
So I have a masters degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management so I can shed some light on some of the questions.
I have worked for two different companies since I left my graduate program, both in the analyst capacity. 20 years ago you had to either mail resumes, get a referral, do real-life networking, fill out paper applications, etc. It was very much a more in-depth and grueling process from the candidate's perspectives and a lot of paper to both sort through and store from the employer's perspective. The process today is much more data-driven. For example, the talent acquisition department typically works by:
Now, along the way, the job analysis that is conducted is to design the hiring process and choose which selection processes best fit the company's culture and is best for evaluation. Depending on how invested the company is in selecting the right talent in a legally defensible manner, they will have multiple tools to use for selection including assessments that are reliable and valid, standardized interview guides, and a clear cut evaluation tool that trims down the candidate pool.
Statistics are gathered in various aspects such as where candidates drop off the most in an application, where the most hires are directed from, what are the best sources for talent, how long does a requisition age for a typical job in a typical field before hiring someone, costs until an employee makes money for the company, etc.
You can only get so far with stats and getting the process down to a science. You still have implicit biases that every hiring manager will have, internal company forces pushing hiring managers towards a potential candidate, candidate losing interest or being offered a better job with better compensation, and so on. You choose the best person that applies for your job in the amount of time that you really need them to start work. Sometimes these work out and sometimes they don't.
Organizations need to better utilize data to make better decisions while also treating candidates with respect for their time and effort when applying. A personalized message for a rejection is much better than an auto-disposition. Sometimes this isn't possible when there are 1000+ applicants on a single requisition and one recruiter filtering them out to find the diamond in the rough. I think a two step application process works great where you submit your resume to a recruiter and if they would like to move forward with you, you then fill out the necessary background info that takes forever. Also, making sure you have integrations built with all major job boards in your applicant tracking system so that a resume can be accurately uploaded and parsed or you can connect your linkedin/careerbuilder/indeed accounts to the application process and the recruiter moves on from there.
Feel free to ask me any more questions you have!
I sent this interview guide to another user earlier today and you are more than welcome to use it. I answer each question out loud and try to have someone ask me those questions so the interaction between me and the other person is present and I get more confident talking about myself:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11VznpNw9NjLcH1K44tU8K_LVd-5TXK9w/view?usp=sharing
In my experience with hiring (both sides), the automated setup came about to handle the large influx of applications and to try and find "the right one" as well as making it easier for people to find jobs that fit for them. This led to the key-wording habits in resumes and job descriptions. This helped connect more people to more jobs for the benefit of both - but then became TOO easy in a way and now people just scatter shot and you're looking at an undergrad with no previous experience wanting to get the Director of IT Security job because they got their CCNA and Security+ from a bootcamp. The keywords are there but...
Most of the sites have made it possible to get decent results based on that language and other parameters for you ahead of time with some of the extra info and test they provide but still... lots of jobs and applicants to go through.
Then... at least for IT recently, it seems to have evolved into Contract to Hire being more common and to let the contractors handle the vetting process and a 6mo contract is enough to see if this guy isn't an asshole and then they gets hired. Of course, some are better than others; I like smaller, newer ones for more personal attention and less dicking me over as hiring or job seeker, and larger ones for more job opportunities or larger application pool. The regular problem I've had either place is varying degrees of honesty because in the end, the applicant is their product and if one doesn't work they've always got another way to swap out for ya' so sometimes you can get trumped up as an applicant or the job is trumped up to make you take it even though it sucks.
Where I'm at in St. Louis MO, a lot of it is who you know because it's a smaller town and the IT crowd is limited and businesses change a lot so there's employee reshuffling (particularly through the larger places for experience and then off to a smaller place for a career and then back if the smaller place folds). So often there's a back channel call about one or another application or it's just put out there that there's an opening in case anybody knows someone who is looking for work.
I have a whole viewpoint about IT not really needing techies anymore - at least not like what is traditionally thought of as a techie particularly when you run across non-techies and what they think makes someone "good at computers" - but that's a bit outside this specific thread, but to me , that change is why lots of techies are having harder times with finding jobs...
Or they string them along by extending the contract and dangling the benefits of being a full-time employee?
That's not common really. It is literally a contract with a specific date on it when it's "Contract to Hire" vs "Contract with option to Hire". For example, I'm currently in my 4th month of a 6mo contract to hire position and at month 5 I'll basically have a conversation about my conversion. It's typically used like a probationary period.
I've dealt with open ended contracts at other places and those really depended on the company. Some had definite dates and times and others were just kinda "soon" or "eventually" and those sucked. Stringing people along on the contract isn't common - usually it's a conversation about budgets or availability and you can decide at that point if it's worth sticking around. Maybe find a different contract. :)
I may have had bad luck, but it happened to me twice! That's why I'm a bit wary of any 6 months to start contract; the money's gotta be good for that to make sense.
When I read the title I thought you were talking more about something like CGP Grey's famous video Humans Need Not Apply, I was kinda disappointed. =/
But, I honestly think the process of digitizing the application process and making human resources automated is wrong. I will not work for a company that does it, period.
I have applied for numerous jobs, given them my resume and cover letter, had them be interested in me, only to ask me to fill out an online application and take a survey first before they will even talk to me and then I walk.
Positive human interaction and involvement is one of the most important things needed to have a healthy workplace, any job that looks at applicants as a just a list of digital information and not a person is not worth having.
=/
I wish I could afford to be as stalwart as you say you are. I'm in complete agreement in regards to positive human interaction, and coming from several small business environments, it's what I'm accustomed to, current experiences aside.
I am at a place in my life where I refuse to work for any major corporations.
I work for local businesses, am self employed or take government jobs.
It may seem extreme, but it has had a very positive impact on my life.
I'm not in HR, but am in the curious position of both hiring a person for an IT role and seeking a new position myself. Comparing the current HR process (post job description, expect manager to make a good choice from a pile of resumes and interviews) against the one I'm facing (multiple documents, phone interview, multiple tests before in-person interview) makes for an interesting contrast.
I don't believe the HR department in my current company is particularly effective; we've long exhausted the available pool of internal referrals, recruiting dollars are scarce, and the fact that hiring managers can't edit the canned job descriptions leads to a great deal of wasted time.
On the receiving end of a somewhat more sophisticated applicant filtering process, the startling thing is how nebulous and flexible the description is for the job I'm seeking; it's as if they have a great many selection criteria, but still have no clue as to what kind of applicant will be successful in the role.
You would think that in the age of unlimited personal and personnel data, this wouldn't be such a hard problem.