Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training The alleged "talent shortage" depriving companies of workers can be attributed in part to corporate disinterest in paying for job training programs, and to automated recruitment systems that overlook potential hires, a research paper argues. In a report [PDF] published over the weekend, "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent," …
I've figured out why I'm not valued - I'm disagreeable.
Those new terms / memes you're jazzed about? Old, rehashed.
That new development strategy you're reorganizing around? Seen it, failed.
The new management structure that'll save the company? Didn't before, won't now.
The new language / technology you're rewriting your core product in and betting the company on? Looks familiar, from old horror stories.
The new product line you've diverted all development into? Wrong direction, you'll be selling to passenger pigeons.
My real value? I've seen so much. So much bad. I could tell you where not to go. I could tell you what not to do. I _could_ prevent your future pain.
But no, you just say I sound difficult and won't hire me.
Difficult? Easiest thing in the world is to watch your pain and demise from a distance and add another story to the stock of experience.
I've seen too much. You've not seen enough. Someday, after more time, you'll be valuable. And unhireable. We'll laugh together, uncontemporaneously.
Maybe in summary the decision maker for the recruitment has been promoted to young. (S)he's grown overpaid before they grown wise and sufficiently cynical to avoid the pitfalls, and the traps in the for of new architectures and new management methods laid for them by the big multinationals.
I've not encountered that --- I'm in my late 50s and haven't found getting new jobs a problem the last few times I've got fed up with manglement or been in a project team which got dropped.
My impression is that experience is valued. It's a bit annoying that experience in things that I'd prefer to move away from attracts recruiters who're looking for people with that experience (currently golang --- that's not my rant about it in another article's threads today, but although it's got some good ideas in it, it's still a language aimed at people who find the conditional operator too complicated for them, and that sets the tone for the way it's used).
Actually, looking for people who already have the specific skills you [think you] want isn't necessarily going to get you the best; looking for people who can learn new skills quickly is probably better in many cases.
It probably helps that I have a degree and PhD in Computer Science!
"Actually, looking for people who already have the specific skills you [think you] want isn't necessarily going to get you the best; looking for people who can learn new skills quickly is probably better in many cases."
Can't upvote this enough, this should be tattooed somewhere prominent on everyone in IT recruitment.
I spent a long time contracting and have lost count of the times that the skills required were totally out of whack with the initial job description:
"so you want someone who can BASH script and knows Python, but the absolutely vital Biztalk system is having trouble (using C# naturally) and now the treasury system can't get info from the bank feeds, so can I have a look?"
Or a system using an obscure version of UNIX has fallen off the support grid but now the regulators may want to look at original experimental data on the original system, so can you please get it running again, we have the admin id and password but nothing else? (you find out it's using Visual Fortran and TCL).
Or "look I know we hired you for App support but our only web developer has been stolen by head office and we need you to take over development, you know Javascript and Oracle right?" (Thanks "for Dummies series")
Just a sample of real life incidents I've had in my career, and actually rather fun at the time, but would not have been doable without being OS agnostic, having some flexibility and a curiosity about different programming/scripting languages.
"I've not encountered that --- I'm in my late 50s and haven't found getting new jobs a problem the last few times I've got fed up with manglement or been in a project team which got dropped."
A few years back, our corporate masters decided to be magnanimous and started offering "long service" bonuses. The first one becomes valid after 5 years of employment. Any company who thinks 5 years is "long service" clearly has problems. On the oither hand, if they think 5 years is a long time, there should be no problems hiring older, more experienced people if the biggest aspiration is to keep them working for 5 years.
I've also seem both employers and recruiters discriminate against loyal and longer service employees because "they don't have enough experience" because they didn't jump from one employer to the next like mayflies.
Same here. I was hired at age 60 for my last job, from which I retired.
If you have the skillset an employer needs, especially if it's hard to find, and if you can come across as somewhat knowledgeable and personable in an interview - you'll probably do well.
Experience and a broad background that augment those skills - that is valuable to employers, and to you.
I'm a white, straight, over-40 male. I've had a manager tell me that I could not be considered for a position "until we've considered all the diversity candidates". It's not just age discrimination, it's also race, sex, and sexual preference. Worst part is that technically those are legal as long as they call it "affirmative action".
Worst. Policy. Ever.
<rant>
Talk about shooting themselves in the foot. You want a competitive disadvantage? There it is.
How about hiring the best person for the job if that person comes along, instead of deliberately rejecting skilled candidates just to hit some arbitrary diversity percentage. If you're struggling to attract a diversity range matching the demographic in your region, maybe consider why that is. But FFS don't reject perfectly good people just because you've already hit your artifically self-imposed 80% white-male-under-50 "limit".
</rant>
"I'm a white, straight, over-40 male."
Then you've had 30+ years benefiting from the racism and sexism that pervades society and our industry. It's probable that for some of the jobs you (and I) have had there were better qualified/experienced women or non-white people available, but they were screened out by a society, education and work culture that was (and still, mostly, is) sexist and racist. At least there's something positive behind the affirmative action that might be holding you back as opposed to having your UCCA form or CV chucked in the bin just because you were black and/or female.
You missed the point - I *did* have my "CV chucked in the bin" due to my race and gender. As for having 30+ years benefiting from it, nope. Public school in a very mixed-race area, public university where I paid full tuition, couldn't get a job matching my major, so worked my way up from technician.
"Public school in a very mixed-race area, public university where I paid full tuition, couldn't get a job matching my major, so worked my way up from technician."
I'm guessing you are American?, "Public school" in the UK has a very different meaning, which is private, white, privileged, parents are stupidly rich (calm down anyone went to a minor public school which didn't cost megabucks, just saying in the UK most people would think of Eaton or something)
I've got 47 years of good, widely varied experience, but I'm not qualified for anything because I don't have the proper degree. I've known a lot of good people with physics, math, and music degrees, so they get passed up too. (Mine's in philosophy.) And, of course, I'm too old to actually know anything. Very disappointing.
Try having no degree at all
32 years of IT experience with large Corporates including a number of large Government projects and about 12 years in printing and the police before that.
Strangely not having a degree does not seem to have hampered my ability to fix problems or write code.
HR have become fixated on IT degrees, I continually see "Must have a good degree in Computer Science".
In the past I've worked with some great programmers with degrees in subjects such as art or economics, and some absolutely useless Computer Science grads.
This is just laziness of the highest order by companies
"Must have a good degree in Computer Science".
It's a fairly efficient way of legally filtering "older workers", who will have the equivalent experience and better, and therefore demand a higher salary, but are less likely to have the educational rubber stamp.
Having said that, I don't think it's been called computer science for a long time.
Or a degree clueless recruiters don't understand.....
Mate has a physics degree but was rejected applying to teach GCSE maths!
BUT recruiters insisted his science degree meant they could put him forward to teach biology, even though he hadn't done any biology since he was 14 (and then probably just turned to page 136 to draw little moustaches on the sperm's anyway).
At one early employer (aerospace/defense), some of the best programmers I encountered were people with Physics degrees. And they were writing in Jovial... not something they learned as a student. Of course, this was back in the days when companies actually offered training
>HR have become fixated on IT degrees, I continually see "Must have a good degree in Computer >Science".
Weirdly, they seem to have coupled that with never asking for proof of qualifications. I've not been asked in something like 25 years and having moved house a few times I couldn't tell you where my various certificates are anyway.
I was discussing something similar with a friend the other day; not only do we not remember the bulk of the content that we learned >30 years ago, we can't even remember *how many* qualifications we have.
No degree here - left school at 15 with no qualifications of any sort. Straight into an apprenticeship, local Tech and night-school. Consequently I have multiple City & Guilds type qualifications, but most agencies and HR people haven't even heard of them, let alone know if they're relevant.
Apparently I also didn't have the "necessary technical knowledge" to modify a piece of hardware I designed and built 25 years ago.
True, I don't have <current-buzzword> on my CV, but I do have <previous-buzzword> from when the technique was called that 20 years ago. Oh and it didn't work then either.
</rant>
I'm so glad not to have to deal with agencies now that I'm "retired" - and busier than ever...
"Apparently I also didn't have the "necessary technical knowledge" to modify a piece of hardware I designed and built 25 years ago."
Lol that is outrageously funny
Reminds me of an interview I read with a top commodities trader who had HR ask for a job description and then was presented a job profile saying "Must have a first in economics" his response "mate, if I had a degree in economics I'd be over qualified for this job!!"
An acquaintance's sister, some years ago took a break from nursing. She'd been a nurse educator, running courses for training nurses. Under the rules she had to sit an exam before she could return, despite her years of experience and high level knowledge.
When she got to the exam it was one she'd written herself.
That's why those 'professional CV services' write & tweak the CV against one or more of these HR software.
Not sure how many different programs are out there and how different they are but there is not much to lose to 'pad' the CV to prevent being rejected by questionable piece of code.
As long as the padding is clearly labeled so human readers can clearly spot it, is all fair game. I did it and definitely will keep doing it. Can't prove it works, but it's worth a shot
It's been going on for ever. Years ago, before t'internet, we'd put out a job ad in the press and loads of the CVs we'd get through agencies would play the ad-wording back. We ended up having a word the main agencies and, effectively, giving a couple of them all our recruitment with the agreement that they wouldn't dick around with applicants CVs or coach them for the interviews.
When I first had responsibilty for recruitment we ran ads in the tech. and national press (remember Thursday's Telegraph?!) and we'd get hundreds of CVs. There were barely enough hours in the day to open the envelopes, never mind read and evaluate them. I once needed three engineers (different disciplines) and remember going home with 75 CVs to read - and that was after HR had whittled the initial response down to 25 per post. Agencies were the only practical way, and building up relationships with a couple worked - or it worked for us in the sense that we'd get half a dozen CVs most of which resulted in interviews and the posts being filled.
It's worse than that. The HR department cannot possibly assess what they don't know, and the only thing they do know is how to file CVs and personnel records.
You think an HR drone knows anything about programming ? Or automotive engineering ?
They don't. So they are given bullet points to check off, and it's a damn sight easier to check [Computer Science Degree] than it is to actually ask the years of experience, the successes and failures, and get a general idea of the actual competence of the candidate.
HR is basically the last place you want to go to evaluate a candidate. Get one of the experienced people who actually work in the department and know exactly the profile they need, bring him/her in to evaluate the candidate and you'll have a much better indicator of if or not that person can fill the position.
If an interviewer *knows* you have the experience and can do the job, they will still hesitate to employ you...... because if you do fuck up, then it is 'their' fault.
On the other hand, if they employ a (poorer?) candidate who has a degree and all the paperwork, then if they were to fuck up the interviewer can say "It isn't my fault, I checked they were qualified".
It's all about passing the blame init.
Back in the "golden days" where people sorted applications we had to wait a whole year before a rejected applicant (luckily) tried again. He had previously missed one keyword in his application that was interchangeable with another word that he did use. His talents were as scarce as hen's teeth.
OH yes, I used to be employed by the School Psychological Service in the 80s.
They had a temp admin who'd done the job well and was wanted. The post became permanent with the usual "You have to apply for your own job" bollox. Naively her application simply said something along the lines of "I've been doing the job for two years. I'm very good at it".
An external candidate submitted a list of bullet points extracted from the job description etc. "I can do this. I can do this I can do this...".So she got the job, not the one who really knew what she was doing.
They lost a brilliant admin- the one they got was crap and was gone within the year.
"Here's the job description. If you think you can do it tell us why. Applications close on $DATE and none will be considered before then.
"Applications will be reviewed by people who know what they're talking about, not HR, and who can spot BS a mile away. If there are too many to go through them all we'll pull out a sample at random until we get the sort of person we're looking for.
"You might be a good fit but someone who's good enough might get considered first and offered the job. It's a matter of chance but we think it's at least as fair as drawing up a short-list by looking for reasons to exclude you. If you don't like it, don't apply. If you do apply and you're the person we need, good luck."
I wonder if anyone would have the wit to do that.
The operative word is "do", not "write".
It's designed to: a) avoid the pre-filtering by some Turing failure; b) avoid opening all the envelopes unless the very last one is that of the only viable candidate; c) be fair in that none of the applications are checked before closing so someone who takes time over their application isn't disadvantaged; d) try to cut down on the number of applications by warning off the bull-shitters (although this might fail for Dunning-Krugger reasons); e) lean towards actual experience rather than paper qualifications and f) be upfront about the whole process.
In other words, these systems appear to be set up to minimize the workload of recruiters and hiring managers by excluding marginally less qualified job seekers rather than to maximize the supply of potential job applicants.
In another time or place, this would be called "workshy": disliking work and trying to avoid it when possible.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/workshy
Automated filtering systems are of use (I hesitate to say value) when applicants exceed posts by a significant number. Remember all those stories of recruiting managers using all sorts of fairly random, often horrifying, strategies to thin the pile.
But once the pendulum swings the logic (if there was any) of doing this vanishes. At that point the aim is to find candidates, not lose them. it's no longer "Which of these is the best"? But which of these can or indeed could do what we need.
Also, in the 70s many of my school mates went to be apprentices in local companies round North Manchester. Ferranti, Connoly's Cables, ICI etc. But then across the years these businesses (Or their new owners) decided it was cheaper to poach trained people. So they stopped training their own and then the others stopped too because what was the point if their trained people upped and left.
It was industry cutting its own throats when they thought they were cutting the competitors'.
Remember all those stories of recruiting managers using all sorts of fairly random, often horrifying, strategies to thin the pile.
I can't remember if it was David Brent, but I did cackle at a scene where a hiring manager picked a random half of applications and dumped them in the bin, with the comment "well, I don't want anyone who's unlucky"
Then why the hell are you all still using this dumb useless system of HR people operating cv keyword filtering software?
They deserve every mediocrity they get : there is no shortage of talented and skilled people, merely a glut of unimaginative corporate desk warmers too stupid to recruit them. I learnt long ago to only work for people in software development who have actually written software themselves.
Why do they persist in using a system they know is broken?
To Clarify:
One "They" is the manager who managed to wangle a hiring slot for a needed task.
But another "They" is involved. That "They" does this for the same reason they buy utterly crap development tools and demand the company standardize on them. Same reason "They" continue to buy parts with a high defect rate from a known-shady vendor...
That second "They" are the folks a step or more above the first "They". Decisions are made based on what their nephew says about the latest hot methodology and what their golfing partner promises are temporary issues.
Or a brown envelope...
(Aside - It's a bit amusing that the mention of this HR CV-scanning plague is in the rough temporal neighborhood of an article about flinging boobytrapped Office files. At least a few of those scanning services require all CVS to be in Word (tm) form. Yeah, even for Linux kernel devs)
Clearly the CV scanning system is assigning scores based on some sort or analysis of the CV. If the employers say "send me 50 CVs of candidates" then surely it's not beyond the wit of an agency to send the best 50, even if they can't find enough to pass the usual specified threshold. It sounds like the agencies are only sending CVs of applicants who pass the 95% threshold of their algorithm, or something like that, and so artificially creating a scarcity by eliminating those people who can't or don't know how to create a CV to "pass" the arbitrary screening process.
But that doesn't account for the adverts that want "5 years experience in ${new technology that only appeared 2 years ago}". So the only people that can pass the sift are the bullsh**ers - honest one's will get rejected for only having 2 years where 5 is required.
And it doesn't account for the adverts that want lots of experience in loads of different things - i.e. the sort of thing many of us could do after a few decades in the industry. But then you realise the pay is for a first line helldesk droid. So honest people fail the sift because they aren't experts in a gazzillion different things, experienced people don't apply because they can see through the bull**it, and only the bull**ers get through because they blatantly pad their CVs with "creative wording".
And as the bull**iters get more brazen, the hiring droids over-egg the requirements even more to compensate, and they stop even more capable and honest people from passing the sift.
While the ATS seems to do this checkbox ticking, it's even worse when the hiring manager sits there checking things off during the interview. Normally I loathe dealing with HR. In that case, The time spent with HR was the enjoyable part of interviewing with that company. My blood pressure rose considerably as I watched the manager ticks things off -- or fail to tick things off -- on his clipboard. No questions about how I handled this or that but a rapid fire series of questions like "Have you used <technology>... how long have you used <technology>." I was tempted to ask if he could simply hand me the clipboard so I could fill it out myself.
employers have had the whip hand since the seventies, meaning lots of applicants for every job. this problem was solved by selecting for arse lickers and office politicians. the wheels have come off this bus, but I rather think the end of furlough plus post covid austerity will work in the employers favour.
mercifully I'm out of all that crap now.
article is being published in completely the wrong place.
This is el-reg, a known hang out of us techie types, the IT support crew(in all its forms) and the just plain weird
It should be landing in "Human resources monthly" or "Managing weekly" or even the guardian(yuck).
We all know the problem in technical recruitment is that the types who end up in this line of employment tend to be the not good at expressing themselves, the smart guy full of ideas , but not howto pad out a CV. we are the problem solvers who can stare at 100 lines of densely typed C++/Java/Python/Assembly/PLC ladder logic(delete as not applicable) and spot the missing minus sign. then go "that code is bollocks" and rewrite it to be 10 lines that runs 100 times faster.
We do not fit into a neat square HR designed hole, and HR has utterly no idea what we do beyond a few buzzwords supplied by the manglement, which they use to craft a job ad for an agency to add their flair to it resulting in me wasting my time today with a replacement "engineer" who filled the tick boxes and yet could'nt even do a simple test setup.....
But if recruitment's being done properly then HR have very little to do with it. The PM and Engineering/Technical Lead write the role description, the job description and use them to derive the person spec. from which should translate into qualifications, experience, personality, etc. Only then do they start to talking to HR who do little more than check that it complies with legislation and put it out to agencies. Any ads should be run by the PM/Eng/Tech first and HR should be taking a back seat at interviews, letting relevant team members interview them. Once the tech team has decided that someone is a potential then that's when HR do the reference checking, background, security, etc. before possibly going to second interview. That's how it used to work when I had a proper job and anyone trying to hire by letting HR do most of the heavy lifting will reap what they sow.
Yes but we all know how this ends
"I need someone fluent in ISO machine tool langauge and mastercam experience, additional training will be given in our specific needs"
HR get hold of it
"We need someone with CNC experience and mastercam '21, and able to set up machine tools and robotic handlers, training availble"
Agency gets hold of it
"Client needs someone with 5 years mastercam 2021 experience, 5 years CNC operatoring, training on robotic handlers will be required"
Guy in street with the skills I need
"Naw I dont fit in those tick boxes.."
That's fine but HR in some companies control the hiring wage.
Had interviews where the hiring manager was visibly excited and asking how soon could I start, etc.'
Next interview with HR, much sucking of teeth and ums and arrs over rate, phone call from the agent later that day "they think you're too expensive..."
Valid point, and can, I have little doubt, be replicated in forums for Psychologists, Designers, Architects. Surveyors, Physiotherapists and lord knows what else. But, most of these kinds of professions have at least a few people who are also techies, with significant levels of training and experience.. If only, like in Education or many small companies, because they are old enough to have got started when there was no outside tech support.. I doubt there are many Software Engineers with Physiotherapy or Surveying backgrounds. (I know there will be some, of course).
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