The essential problem in recruiting
Industrial selection
The recruiting process that was supposed to be efficient, professional, and exact—scientific— has degenerated into the inverse: an activity that is excessively time consuming and an often disappointing for both recruiters and applicants.
Instead of the rational process intended, we are engaged in a numbers game where more applications is seen as the only way for better matching, but the focus on numbers requires standardized processes and standardized job descriptions to handle the huge inflow of applications. (See this post on recruiting on Medium — “Use a scorecard.” “… hitting goals and meeting metrics.”)
The very nature of job applications change from earnest and personal, to something more akin to “marketing” devices that will pass through the process and “capture the attention” of whoever is at the end of it. Because of the sheer number of jobs a person now has to apply to to get an interview, they have to limit the work they put into each application and essentially send out the same application for hundreds of jobs.
When applying for jobs in your field, make sure you use key words relating to the job. For example, a mechanical engineer may use AutoCAD or Solidworks as a skill. This will help in getting those damn resumé parsers to catch your resumé. —reddit
Will your application, one among hundreds of others, ever be read or will it be junked immediately? Will it be “read” by a computer instead of a human being? A feeling of hopelessness sets in and even less time is spent on writing and matching applications.
Since these applications aren’t necessarily very substantial and more focused on style than substance, the first round of interviews is solely intended to screen out individuals — to uncover inconsistencies in their letters, CVs and life’s stories and uncover their “true” character.
It is this “true character” that is used to judge candidates against an imagined “ideal type” of a designer, researcher, engineer etc. The problem is that this is pure guesswork.
The low quality of the process’ outcome creates a separate system where pedigree—Ivy Leagues, internships at prestigious companies and previous job titles— or personal connections allow applicants and the companies to skip this arduous process altogether. This is now almost the only way to get a qualified job.
And so, the “professional” recruiting process paradoxically becomes almost entirely subjective and largely superficial.
Why?
Lack of communication
It is a feature of the industrial organization that its employees are specialized and siloed off into specific departments. The same goes for the company itself; it is hermetically sealed off from the rest of society.
Though its employees of course have families, friends, and acquaintances outside of their workplace, and though some meet plenty of people in their professional role, their responsibilities and permissions are highly circumscribed —they’re not fully allowed to speak on behalf of the company or represent it in their interactions with society at large.
Information flows to the center of the organization and from there communication with the outside world is planned, and then executed by marketing departments. Regular employees aren’t supposed to represent or speak on behalf of the company at all, much less to ask people to come to work for the company.
Like designers, engineers and product managers are disconnected from the people who actually use the products and leave the communication and market research to those in marketing, so is the HR department disconnected from those who might want to work there.
The problem is that HR is not part of the day-to-day dealings of the company. While they may have a lot of work to do, most of it is inwardly focused. They never meet potential recruits as part of their daily work routine — they don’t go to conferences, they don’t do side projects or “hacks” within the industry that might put them in touch with people, they don’t usually blog about their work (there’s really not much to blog about since most of it is confidential).
With no natural way of connecting with the outside world they are left job fairs and advertisements on job boards and the company’s website to draw attention to job openings.
Your resumé and the “numbers game”
Resumés can be delivered via the Internet and will cost you only your time, and you can’t beat the speed in which it’s delivered. However, like your marketing plan, you need to decide where your resumé needs to go. Too many job seekers aim at every target, whether or not there’s a job fit. Companies are bombarded with resumés, query letters, phone calls and walk-in traffic. Your resumé won’t get the attention it deserves if you get caught up in the “numbers game.” You will simply become one of thousands who pitched their resumé into a sea of resumés without regard to making a match. — A recruitment agency’s website
When the process is so highly focused on a single part, the application itself, the only way to improve its outcome would seem to be to increase the sheer number of applications.
Thanks to the digitization a single job post can now be syndicated by hundreds of websites and displayed to thousands of people and receive as many applications.
But what do you do when you received 200 or more applications for a single position?
A thorough read-through of each application and an interview with each applicant that seem to be a fit would be far too much work when the numbers are this large. Instead, computer programs are used to sort through letters and resumés looking for keywords, or a smaller number, say 10 or 20, of the applications are looked at manually while the rest is junked.
The self-reinforcing nature of the process
Mass application kind of works. I applied for 168 jobs on a Saturday. This took 10 hours. I received 3 phone interviews out of which were one of the companies I recently got hired into.—reddit
Applicants soon realize the nature of the game: to even have a chance to have their resumé looked at they need to apply to hundreds of jobs.
This together creates a new normal where the focus is on quantity, so applications become more standardized and less specific; of relatively lower quality.
By the time someone is actually invited to an interview, any type of “fit” or mutual interest is completely lost. The selection is now close to random.
“Screening out” candidates
Because of the lowered standard of applications, the need for the “negative” evaluations is increased. Your cover letter might say that you are upbeat, dependable and great at working in teams, but we all know this is just part of the charade.
The recruiter knows this too and he or she is now looking to uncover your “true” character, to find what’s beneath the degrees, the titles and the years of experience.
- Explain these inconsistencies in your letter/CV. (Did you make stuff up?)
- Why is there a gap in your employment history? (Are you lazy? Unwanted?)
- Why is your degree in that discipline but you want to work in this industry? (Do you lack direction? Are you indecisive?)
This is part of the reason why it’s so hard to get a job after being unemployed (or self-employed) for a while.
And so, recruitment becomes a process of putting up a facade, of being found out, of re-presenting oneself.
The essential character
What is sought underneath the polished surface is the ideal type: the team player, the natural born leader, the clear communicator. Or the revelation that you’re not one of these.
The new version of the process is not based on fit and mutual interest, but on the idea of essentialism:
Essentialism is the view that, for any specific entity, there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function.
Platonic idealism is the earliest known theory of how all known things and concepts have an essential reality behind them (an “Idea” or “Form”), an essence that makes those things and concepts what they are. …
The essential qualities of an object, so George Lakoff summarizes Aristotle’s highly influential view, are “those properties that make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing”.
The essential problem
But we know nothing about how the human mind works, personality is fluid, identity is negotiated and we all “contain multitudes.” The view of what a person’s “real” character is, is purely subjective and first and foremost relies on his or her background being relatable.
It is difficult to relate to those that are significantly different from ourselves and so anyone that strays from the company or industry norm is skipped over. Hence why people across all professions tend to conform: it’s the result of a normative recruiting process. (“Culture fit.”)
Short-circuit
The recruiting process of the industrial organization that started out as ostensibly “rational,” fact-based and competent, has degenerated into the complete opposite: a theater of quasi-psychology and impression management.
The unreality of it all is evidenced by the fact that there is now a reality show about hiring:
Inside Job takes on the other side of business—human resources—in a devious twist worthy of George Orwell. Each episode features a business that is hiring for a position; the applicants are invited to live at a house for a week with each other, while being filmed, as they go through more steps of the application process. But unbeknownst to them, one of their temporary roommates is actually someone from the company they’re trying to work for. At the end of the episode, all is revealed, and someone gets the position. —A.V. Club
To escape this absurd process, many people on both sides of the table prefer to utilize personal connections within the company.
If you know someone at the workplace, that can cancel out the need for the process outlined above. The ties don’t have to be strong, just strong enough so that you’re looked at as a human being rather than a new resource, so that there is some amount of familiarity and relatability.
A second alternative way is to instead of qualifications look for distinction— Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, internships at prestigious companies— in an attempt to find “higher quality” applicants, all along the same concept of essential traits.
Often these overlap: the person who gets into one of the “good” schools get access to various types of ways to interact with companies, alumni, and so on and form useful connections. And the person that gets into this school may have a greater social capital than someone who didn’t get in to begin with.
We’re now back at a situation where, in practice, social background is the only real predictor of a “successful career.”
How to do it better
Tighe’s trajectory is one that all future employees would follow: One by one, members of the DuckDuckGo community have gradually increased their involvement with the site—building plug-ins, recommending obscure data sources, even contributing code—eventually positioning themselves as no-brainer job applicants the next time the company is hiring. —Inside DuckDuckGo
We’ve really come to a point where the entire recruiting progress of industrial-era organizations has been proven to be both inefficient and backwards, and where it can finally be avoided completely. CVs shouldn’t be central documents in the process and they shouldn’t do all the initial talking. There should never be such a disconnect with the real world that ad hoc hiring processes become the norm. What they completely miss is the fact that the only really relevant characteristic is interest.
The digital organizations that are springing up are in constant contact with a community of people who are personally engaged with its products and ideas and interact with them every day as a natural part of work.
For them, hiring doesn’t even need job ads: they can just send a message to a user on its forums that they already know and ask if they’d like to become a paid member of the team. And everyone in the organization can suggest who to hire.
Everyone in a company has to act like a CTO (Chief Talent Officer). The only way that you are going to get the best talent to your company is to have an idea that is so new, so exciting, so edgy, that the stars who are looking for a challenge or an opportunity to make a difference can’t resist engaging in a conversation. —It’s always going to be about the people
You can find me on Somewhere — hopefully a better approach to recruiting.
EDIT: A little while after I published this, Experiment published an ad for a Product Manager on Medium. Brilliant.
