Is Hiring Fundamentally Broken?

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

For all of those who are looking for work, it has turned into a comedy
of errors, omissions, and no answers from anyone if you were even
considered for the position. When the rare thanks but no thanks message
comes through via e-mail it makes us have to stop and think about why
is it so hard to get anyone’s attention anymore when it comes to
finding a job.

Here is what the job market looks like in Seattle according to
Career Builder and Dice.com which usually have the best high technology
job listings. Dice shows 408 open jobs in the last 14 days for the
local zip code within 40 miles, many of them are across the length and
breadth of computer science, help desk, programming. Career Builder
shows over 1000 jobs open in the last 30 days, and they are also across
the length and breadth of the computer industry. The Washington
Technology Industry Alliance (usually a good source of reputable
information) has 269 current job openings in their database. This is
not a lack of jobs, in going through them, they are for real jobs with
a real company, and not just military openings. Some of the Career
Builder jobs are military but once you filter out the really obvious
bad always open positions there are still over 500 jobs open in the
last 30 days.

There is not a lack of jobs; the problem is that there is a lack of
being able to stand out from the pack. The last two jobs I have gotten
are not because I dutifully went to Dice, Career Builder or Monster.com
to find a job. What I found was through personal contacts, and someone
who could help me stand out from the maddening crowd of hundreds that
apply for each position even if they are not qualified to work the job.
Some of this over application is because people have to apply for X
number of jobs to continue getting unemployment insurance.
Realistically we should only be applying for jobs that we are qualified
for, but the job application process does not support that, it is too
easy to apply for any job rather than the one you are qualified for.

The other agitation factor is a lack of central coordination in the
job hunting process, Fast Company has a good discussion of it here,
but the article is also tied to a book so you have to take the advice
with a grain of salt, that the whole job hiring process is set to Puree
and demoralizing to the job hunter. I have been on both sides of the
fence, plowing through hundreds of resumes that suck from people who
will never qualify for the position they are applying for. Over my
career I have seen thousands of resumes that desperately needed to be
run through a spell checker (not that I am any great grammarian, but if
I notice something then it is truly a bad resume) and checked for
consistency. The job process is demoralizing to the people who have to
sit through interviews with people who look great on paper, but when
saying they are an expert in Biometrics do not know what the cross over
error rate is with Biometrics. (This is a CISSP study question by the
way). How many times have you had to go to some other site to fill in
yet another account on another employee portal to fill out yet another
resume formatting system? I have probably thousands of accounts over
the last 10 years at hundreds of companies because I can’t remember the
account or password and am not amused to see that they still have my
e-mail address in their system five years later.

This is not a system that is going to help anyone find a job yet we
all submissively fill out our forms, have our passwords sent to us, and
format our resumes to fit many different employers expectations
of what a good resume should be formatted like. Then we pray that we
will hear something back (with a 99% likelihood that we will hear
nothing) and forgetting we ever applied there two weeks later. There is
nothing quite so amusing as being in a telephone conversation with
someone I sent my resume to a two years ago and wants to know if I
would still be interested in the security engineer position they still
have open. The system is obviously broken, and not broken in way that
is going to help you find a job. Even Linkedin might not be the option
that is worth exploring because it is based on the same broken system
even if there is an inside track.

We need to address how we hire and what we do when we are reviewing
applications and when people are filling out for a job. While most jobs
are going to be found through personal contacts, with at least 400
unique viable jobs in the area, and the talk of the economy improving,
maybe it is time to stop looking at the hiring process with an
unquestioning viewpoint, and figure out how to fix the broken system
that we have learned to work with.