Why Good People Can't Get Jobs by Peter Cappelli

Author:Peter Cappelli [Cappelli, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: Something Is Wrong with the Hiring Process

Why can’t good people get hired? As we’ve just seen, the problem does not appear to lie entirely with the individual. There still is a big oversupply of candidates, employers can afford to be picky, and applicants need to be overqualified to have a shot at getting a scarce job. To the extent that employers have concerns about the skills of applicants, they focus on the skills associated with work experience. Lots of reasons argue for improving education, but on balance, employers are not complaining about the academic preparation of applicants. What’s more, students appear to be going where the jobs are in terms of educational choices. Nor does the problem seem to lie solely on the demand side. Jobs exist, even in this recovering economy, and some of them, employers say, go begging.

If not specifically with supply or demand, then where does the problem lie? Well, one large impediment is the point of connection between the two sides of the jobs equation: the hiring process itself.

As most anyone who has recently applied for a job knows, hiring has changed dramatically in recent years. The Internet has replaced job advertisements in newspapers, one of the key factors driving the financial decline of the latter, and software has replaced most recruiters. Because job applications are done online, applicants rarely talk to anyone, even by e-mail, during the hiring process.

One upside of this automation is that applying for jobs has been made considerably easier, an outcome that was intended in the 1990s, when these systems were born and employers were competing to attract applicants. But there has been an unintended downside: that ease, combined with the huge pool of job seekers, now means that employers are overwhelmed with job applications. At the same time, human resources (HR) departments have been pushed to cut costs, especially their own head count. The only way to meet those two demands has been to move even further toward automating the entire hiring process.

Elaine Orler of Talent Function helps companies build these automated systems, and she describes how they work. First, hiring managers write up descriptions of the job they need to fill. Since hiring managers frequently cannot agree on exactly what they want, the description ends up being vague, a practice that inevitably encourages still more people to apply for the position. Of course, good job descriptions should have “qualifying requirements” that have to be met before an application can even go forward—the requirement, for example, that an applicant have a particular certificate associated with skills training—but, some argue, federal antidiscrimination regulations often pull in the opposite direction. Because such qualifying requirements may be disproportionately associated with protected groups in the population, some employers are afraid to take the risk of imposing requirements that might be sensible but appear to discriminate. So they let virtually everyone apply, and the system becomes clogged with its own largess of applications.

At the same time they are encouraging a tsunami of applications,

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