There is a moderately interesting point to be made here that automated candidate screening software is not a panacea, and while it can do a good job of filtering through the hundreds or thousands of applicants that might materialize for a single post, it might cause you to miss out on a good fit.
On the other hand, this article is laden with so much hyperbolic moralizing that it makes me take almost none of it seriously.
One of SeatGeek's founders (where I work) has written repeatedly about the insane problem of managing job applications [http://jackg.org/screening-with-an-arbitrary-test]. This is not a self-inflicted wound. We're talking dozens to hundreds of actually unqualified applicants for individual jobs, and the idea that a 15 person company is going to carry someone around for 6 months while they're "trained" is ludicrous.
It is absolutely true that there is a skills-gap in some industries. [Software is one of them]
It is absolutely true that a bad hire is more expensive than a non-hire.
It is absolutely true that some HR departments are breath-takingly incompetent, although most have a pretty good handle on their needs and cost structures, to be perfectly honest.
All that said, trying to spin this into a "the corporations are destroying the country!" story is beyond idiocy.
I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated requirements if necessary.
To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.
No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.
How about the fact that none of these employers even have the courtesy to contact the applicant at all? I'm not talking only about unsolicited resumes sent to H/R managers, but job applications submitted through the big websites like Dice, Monster, and Careerbuilder. Not even a "we'll keep you on file" like the old days.
I'm half-tempted to make a shame board to let applicants tally up how many unanswered candidates each company has.
I've had firms contact me to tell me they've passed me over for consideration ... for positions I've never applied for. Apparently even rejecting various pseudonyms I've generated.
Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.
but but but.... everyone would sue the company because they didn't get the job!
At least, that's the argument I've heard from HR people as to why applicants aren't contacted back. However... whether you contact me or not, I still don't have the job, and if I'm inclined to sue, I'll do it regardless of whether you show me basic courtesy or not.
The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating them as a matter of good SEO.
It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.
> It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.
One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve, thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.
While any keyword filtering regime can be exploited, as apparent by the SEO cottage industry enabled by Google Pagerank, et al, I still find the underlying question unresolved of whether such filtering is ultimately useful to would-be employers.
That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.
I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some arbitrary rules.
I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.
Just got hired to make software that ranks candidates based on more dynamic qualities, like the ability to answer basic logic problems or complete a task that the job may require. Could be cool.
I don't want to be mean or anything ( and probably it will go against the HN crowd) but you're part of the problem. Basically it's the reliance on computerized system to assess somebody's skills that is at the root of the problem.
I know it seems horrendous to a lot of people that thinks that computers are the solution to every problem but as of the current state of technology, it just does not work. I have been in the position of an applicant recently and the tests are just plain ridiculous. From the "IQ-Test" at Bloomberg for engineers to the automated "solve our problem and get hired" websites the system is just bloated with these cheap ( and shi* ) solutions.
It's time for companies to put some money on the table to hire real people doing real interviews to candidates. Any company that don't involve somebody at step 1 of the recruitment process to assist you and that claims that "Employees are first!", I say: bullshit!
Well we'll see, but we're designing this specifically to eliminate people who DEFINITELY can't do the job specified and then let the rest of the process be done by actual humans. If you don't let people who can't do the job BS you into an interview, you can afford to do more interviews with a higher confidence of actually finding a suitable candidate.
If I desired not to be civil I'd say "you're part of the problem assuming a tough problem can't be solved for some abstract reason" but since I want to be civil I won't say that.
One (optimistic) takeaway from this article for folks here is that this should show exactly how much of an advantage they can have in recruiting people (although obviously this isn't great news for people looking for a job).
Not to say that every big company has this sort of hiring inefficiency, but it seems like it's definitely a predisposition as you increase in size.
Most people seem to say that hiring is arguably the most important thing you do as a company. This shitty system can absolutely work to your advantage in trying to recruit talent.
I know that was a joke, but in situations like this there are two separate measures of error; precision and recall. Precision is how many of the results marked as relevant really were (measure of false positives), recall is how many of the actually relevant results were correctly considered relevant (measure of false negatives).
Any system can trivially have perfect precision by saying all results are not relevant, or perfect recall by saying all results are relevant. Your system would have 100% precision and 0% recall.
That only works so long as the rules given to the filtering program are accurate and feasible, and if a single failed requirement DNE complete rejection. Management drawing completely overboard reqs for the filter means the filter becomes meaningless.
I was reading a book recently that called getting arrested, "being put on the electronic plantation". This was just getting an arrest too, not even a conviction. The logic was that all the good jobs do background checks nowadays and won't even interview someone with an arrest. So someone working retail with an arrest wouldn't be able to move up to bank teller, for example. Now throw in that you can be arrested even in cases where you are innocent or in cases of identity theft...
The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?
Both the article and the interview say that employers "think" that it's cheaper to leave the position unfilled, typically because of lousy cost accounting systems that do not give an accurate picture of the reduced system throughput (and thus the foregone revenue). Most companies optimize locally, which results in de-optimizing the whole system -- a department saves some money by not hiring a new systems administrator until the next fiscal year, and the whole company suffers decreased effectiveness.
Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.
My guess is that it's a device that an employer would use to manipulate the employees who are filling in "temporarily" -- so that the employees feel something is being done and they'll only be doing the extra work for "a little while." So they can say, "we really are trying, but the work you do is so valuable, just not that many people can do it."
This reeks of principal-agent problems. HR departments at large firms are notoriously concerned with 1) folk knowledge about not getting sued (with a very tenuous relationship to reality, eg mgkimsal's comment), and 2) checking boxes. Since their actions have almost zero connection to outcomes, it's no wonder they play it safe / easy in hiring, and both firms and workers see shortages.
One way to start solving the problem is to make the department with the position responsible for filling it, either with their own man-hours, or via their own headhunting budget.
[+] [-] acslater00|13 years ago|reply
On the other hand, this article is laden with so much hyperbolic moralizing that it makes me take almost none of it seriously.
One of SeatGeek's founders (where I work) has written repeatedly about the insane problem of managing job applications [http://jackg.org/screening-with-an-arbitrary-test]. This is not a self-inflicted wound. We're talking dozens to hundreds of actually unqualified applicants for individual jobs, and the idea that a 15 person company is going to carry someone around for 6 months while they're "trained" is ludicrous.
It is absolutely true that there is a skills-gap in some industries. [Software is one of them]
It is absolutely true that a bad hire is more expensive than a non-hire.
It is absolutely true that some HR departments are breath-takingly incompetent, although most have a pretty good handle on their needs and cost structures, to be perfectly honest.
All that said, trying to spin this into a "the corporations are destroying the country!" story is beyond idiocy.
[+] [-] Apocryphon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incongruity|13 years ago|reply
I once had a job at a large institution created, for me, with requirements based solely on my resume.
The automated HR system decided I wasn't a match for the job. It took a month or two for them to be able to hire me after that fiasco.
[+] [-] cperciva|13 years ago|reply
To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.
No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.
[+] [-] legutierr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|13 years ago|reply
I'm half-tempted to make a shame board to let applicants tally up how many unanswered candidates each company has.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|13 years ago|reply
At least, that's the argument I've heard from HR people as to why applicants aren't contacted back. However... whether you contact me or not, I still don't have the job, and if I'm inclined to sue, I'll do it regardless of whether you show me basic courtesy or not.
[+] [-] redact207|13 years ago|reply
It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.
Ripe for exploitation I'd say.
[+] [-] greyerzer|13 years ago|reply
One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve, thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.
Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.
[+] [-] westbywest|13 years ago|reply
That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.
[+] [-] jared314|13 years ago|reply
I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|13 years ago|reply
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_tha...
It certainly did filter quite a few people straight to the trash, based mainly on an inability to fizzbuz.
[+] [-] tomasien|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victork2|13 years ago|reply
I know it seems horrendous to a lot of people that thinks that computers are the solution to every problem but as of the current state of technology, it just does not work. I have been in the position of an applicant recently and the tests are just plain ridiculous. From the "IQ-Test" at Bloomberg for engineers to the automated "solve our problem and get hired" websites the system is just bloated with these cheap ( and shi* ) solutions.
It's time for companies to put some money on the table to hire real people doing real interviews to candidates. Any company that don't involve somebody at step 1 of the recruitment process to assist you and that claims that "Employees are first!", I say: bullshit!
[+] [-] tomasien|13 years ago|reply
If I desired not to be civil I'd say "you're part of the problem assuming a tough problem can't be solved for some abstract reason" but since I want to be civil I won't say that.
[+] [-] m0nastic|13 years ago|reply
Not to say that every big company has this sort of hiring inefficiency, but it seems like it's definitely a predisposition as you increase in size.
Most people seem to say that hiring is arguably the most important thing you do as a company. This shitty system can absolutely work to your advantage in trying to recruit talent.
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
If there are 200 applicants for a position, software which eliminates all of the candidates only has 0.5% error.
That's pretty good AI.
[+] [-] esrauch|13 years ago|reply
Any system can trivially have perfect precision by saying all results are not relevant, or perfect recall by saying all results are relevant. Your system would have 100% precision and 0% recall.
[+] [-] rtkwe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyerzer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanstickle|13 years ago|reply
Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.
[+] [-] elptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] razzmataz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatmoney|13 years ago|reply
One way to start solving the problem is to make the department with the position responsible for filling it, either with their own man-hours, or via their own headhunting budget.