Why complacency and lack of innovation ruined the job market…

First off, I expect this post to create buzz and criticism. After all, the words that follow take a harsh stance at human resources, recruiting and online job search providers. I decided not to back up my opinions with hard data because one, statistics can be manipulated in any sides favor and two, if you don’t have your head in the clouds it’s pretty straight forward to see with your own eyes. Nonetheless, I expect critics to attack me on this front, but I’ll put forth a few questions to consider as you read.

What is the major problem with finding a job candidate for employers? Is it a lack of qualified candidates as the media suggests or a lack of skill in actual recruiting techniques to find those people? What has changed given the technological advances in modern day recruiting?

I’m writing this post out of disgust. I’ve followed the job market over the past 10 years, not looking purely at employment data, but the procedural changes in recruiting, the role of recruiters, and the actual quality of jobs displayed by so-called career sites. What I’ve witnessed is an overwhelming amount of incompetency and severe lack of transparency into the process leaving job seekers to wonder why the hell can’t they find a job let alone land one.

So what am I left to conclude from all of this hoopla? Complacency and laziness are big factors in the job market. You have the human resources department which is perhaps the worst functional area in corporate America searching for candidates when they themselves don’t understand the role for which they are seeking. If HR professionals are the entry way into any company, how can these people be the most incompetent staff members of the team?

The other major factor I’ve concluded is lack of innovation, which is where I expect all the naysayers to tell me I’m wrong. The internet opened the door for companies to openly post jobs online, eliminating the need for classified job postings in newspapers. Huge step in accessibility that I agree. The next wave was sites like Monster and CareerBuilder that aggregated these postings and made them “searchable.” And more recently the evolution of online networking a la LinkedIn and other more advanced career sites such as Indeed, SimplyHired and HireArt have given way to new methods for recruiting…or so we think.

But has there been any real innovation. A job seeker applies online with their resume today. It enters a database and if you match a percentage of key words in some arbitrary algorithm you may move up in the pile of “potential interviewees.” Or you pay for a premium membership to LinkedIn or Doostang which you’re told moves your resume up in the stack, however when you review your applied jobs you see that the employer never even opened it. So where is the value you’ve supposedly paid for? Where is the confirmation from the companies that these premium subscriptions give you any edge? There isn’t any, hence why these companies never release any of that information.

Now you go to new career sites like SimplyHired and Indeed, also using algorithmic searches to match candidates with jobs. But when you haves site that basically scrub a job posting from another website, the relevancy of results is comprised. If there’s no true separation in field queries a la searching based on company description versus a job description you essentially get spammed jobs that don’t relate to your interests because as mentioned above, you may not be looking for a specific type of company but nonetheless searches take into the company description. Flip it around on specific job details, experience and background and your search fields comprise ambiguous terminology that we’re all familiar with (e.g. Experience: 2-5 years, Associate, mid-level, Experienced, junior management). How can the job seeker expect any consistency in job results when career sites and companies share no common metrics? It’s archaic, not user friendly (job seeker friendly) and opaque.

Moving on to new age sites like VentureLoop and HireArt the process becomes even more opaque. Zero feedback throughout the “stages” and some arbitrary third party (these sites) determine your worthiness to pass along a resume to the actual employer. I blame the laziness of the employer and lack of transparency into the process for the shortcomings of sites like these.

And lastly recruiters and outsourced HR, the worst of the bunch. I won’t mention specific companies because it can be generalized across the landscape. As soon as a job seeker applies for a position posted by a recruiter and is considered worthy to contact they are asked about their background and job interests. But it’s a double edge sword with recruiting because at the very same time these people are compensated based on filling positions sent to them. So if you don’t feel like it’s the right fit for you as the job seeker, the recruiter doesn’t care to continue the relationship since they are motivated by filling their posted roles vs. your interested roles. I’ve had very explicit conversations with numerous recruiters over the years detailing what I’m interested in doing versus what they are offering. The overwhelming number of times where contact was ceased after expressing zero interest in a role they’re pushing on me was all but too common.

I wrote this post because I truly believe that recruiting, human resources and job hunting has deteriorated to such a feeble level that any real economic or job recovery is a dream at best for the next five years. There’s been a progressively dumbing down in the process, elimination of touch (human interaction) and serial complacency in corporate America that we’ve all been victim to. More importantly, you have bandwagon services that gain all the momentum of the job market circa LinkedIn, where it’s been shown they are nothing more than average middlemen, more concerned about advertising revenues than placement services.

So it seems word of mouth and who you know remain the best possible means for landing a job in this America…a process all too corrupt in itself. Do I have faith in a better outcome? Sure. But faith does not right the ship nor cures the incessant problems undermining the job market in this country. Critique, criticize, yell from rooftops, or whatever…at the very least get your head out of the sand.