To Hire or Not to Hire
The hiring process can be overwhelming regardless of whether you’re the candidate or the employer. “Hiring may be in practice the task that those in charge of the hiring decisions are most likely to want to avoid” (Gershon). But hiring is a necessary process to keep a business running. After reading Gershon’s chapter on what it takes to be a hiring manager I was surprised to learn about the tension that can arise between hiring managers, recruiters, and HR managers. Everyone wants to make sure their own job is done properly while also finding a new employee to hire. The task of a hiring manager can be a daunting one. They have to compare candidates against each other based on one page resumes and predict how their personalities would fit in with company culture; all while performing their normal duties. “Hiring managers rarely have time to do justice to the complexity of what it means to hire” (Gershon).
In my informational interviews, I asked both Jim Lord and Julie Gilless what their processes are for hiring new employees. They both said they use online job sites to post available positions, review the applicants with the review committee, then narrow that pool down to a few candidates to bring in for interviews. I expected that they post open positions online because a lot of business use some kind of online job board to find candidates. Using the Internet to recruit candidates can make the process easier. It allows the employers to reach more applicants and helps consolidate all the applications into one place. But, as mentioned in the chapter, online job sites can limit how the position is described. “Job boards, in order to enable keyword searches, forced job descriptions to include standardized terminology that often didn’t reflect what those hiring were actually looking for” (Gershon). I also asked what they each felt was the biggest challenge to making hiring decisions. Finding a candidate with the right amount of experience was a problem they both faced. Julie mentioned that a candidate with too much experience is just as difficult since they may be overqualified for what the position requires. Another challenge Jim mentioned is making sure a potential new hire would be a good fit for the company. “Hiring is a moment in which people are most consciously trying to address the question of who they are as a working community in order to understand whether an individual will fit” (Gershon). Someone’s personality and how they interact with others is just as important as the skills on their resume. If their personality does not mix well with the company culture it could cause problems down the road.
Gershon, Ilana. “The Decision Makers: What it Means to be a Hiring Manager” Down and out in the New Economy How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today, The University of Chicago Press, 2017,
