Month: March 2017

‘Inconceivable!’

People sometimes aren’t very careful about the way they use words. One of those words, is “experience”.

Picture the scene (you’ve probably been there before): you’ve just been told by someone who has never met you, and who has perhaps glanced briefly over your CV, that you really don’t have enough or the right kind of “experience” for a particular job, and therefore they won’t be ‘progressing’ you through to the next stage …

Now consider a problem: why is it that highly skilled people are having trouble finding work that matches their skills, at the same time as employers are having trouble finding people with those same skills? Could it have something to do with the potentially confused way we are defining “experience” in the recruitment process?

What is experience? If we look it up in the dictionary, the key emphasis is on skills and knowledge. It’s about what we can do, or know how to do.

The way experience is often defined during the recruitment process, however, often seems to lean more heavily on things like the number of years employed in a certain capacity. Presumably because that’s easier to measure and verify.

However, seldom does the question get asked, just what does that actually mean? (Whether in terms of skill level or knowledge, or more importantly, how one candidate compares to another in terms of practical ability.)

In the verbal confusion, the meaning and substance of the word itself – what you can do or know how to do – gets lost.

Result? Skilled people who don’t make it through the initial screening stage, and employers complaining about their inability to find skilled people. And all the while, those same skilled people are being put off ever applying for that company again by recruiters telling them they don’t have the necessary “experience”.

As Inigo Montoya famously said in the movie The Princess Bride, ‘You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means …’

Could it be that these potential employees have a great deal more experience than these recruiters have ever guessed at? Or would that just be ‘inconceivable’ …

Screening Out

Screened out. You tailored your CV to the job description, you made the best application you could, and still – screened out. Is this a familiar story to you?

For those of us with web analytics, LinkedIn profile-viewing figures, and a tendency to ask inconvenient questions, it’s possible to gain some quite illuminating (although seldom very elevating) insights into the recruitment and screening processes prevailing at many well-known companies.

And for whatever reason, I can’t help wondering if there’s something wrong with their whole approach.

Do recruiters sift through to find interesting applications or do they try to toss as many as possible out and see what remains? The way recruiters talk, would seem to indicate the latter.

What’s the difference, you might ask? (Glad you did.) It’s the difference between the baby and the bathwater: the recruitment process has become so fixated with throwing out the bathwater, it’s forgotten to look after the baby.

I collect examples of copywriting howlers (or if not howlers, then, at least, sloppy work, simple punctuation mistakes, things that fall outside reasonable matters of taste and judgement), things that have been published, and widely (often by companies “with a cast of thousands”). The results are not edifying.

Sometimes I have to wonder, if recruiters themselves are “screening out” – because from the look of things, many of them are just not paying attention.

How is it that candidates with highly sought-after transferrable skills get routinely ignored for jobs for which they are well qualified? Not “not offered the job” or “not interviewed by the hiring manager”, but “not even making it past the initial screening”.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the cat (who has nine lives, after all) seems to have done for Curiosity. Is this a reflection on companies’ recruiting processes? Or is it a reflection on recruiters?

Has recruitment come to this, that the old cliché ‘You’re not paid to think!’, has become a commonplace?

On one level, you can sort of understand it, on another it’s completely baffling.

Yes, it can make sense to semi-automate some processes, especially, say, if you’re overwhelmed with applicants and you need some method of sifting the most-qualified for more-detailed consideration.

But surely if a candidate has skills and abilities that are high-level and uncommon, and in short supply, the presumption should be, let’s see who else is interested before discounting them.

Maybe this reflects a deeper trend, one of failing to see, or be interested in, the extraordinary potential gains that come from treating individuals as human beings, rather than as mere replaceable (and disposable) widgets in a machine they’ve lost the drawings for.

That’s a challenge in the meantime for those who find their lives short-circuited or put on hold by the caprices of a flawed process. Not because of any misguided feelings of entitlement on their part, but because they just want an honest chance, and with the process as it stands, they don’t often get one.