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[Chad Perrin]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 02:33:29PM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Chad Perrin <perrin at apotheon.com> wrote:
> > Indeed -- and the employer who bucks this trend does him/her self a huge
> > service, because large numbers of very skilled and/or talented people are
> > being rejected on entirely arbitrary criteria that have little or no
> > correlation to their ability to do the job.
> 
> Keep in mind in today's job market, and given Internet methods of
> advertising positions, the problem isn't in finding qualified people
> -- the problem is in whittling down the couple thousand or so resumes
> you get to a manageable pile.  You can afford to reject some qualified
> applicants in that process because there are always more looking.

That's not exactly true.  The problem is cutting out the people who only
*claim* to be qualified, and end up with the best candidate for the job
(or to get as close to that as possible).  The fact that most
organizations' "responsible" parties in the hiring process just punt on
that and go straight toward "I don't care if he's good at the job -- I
only care that I do things in a way that ensures I don't get blamed for
any failures" does not change that fact.

That also completely ignores the fact that many employers complain that
they can't find qualified candidates, ever, for skilled technical
positions.


> 
> Again, this is one of the reasons credit scoring is becoming so
> popular -- it's an almost automatic way to narrow down the pile.
> Another method in common use right now is to throw out applications
> from anyone who's currently unemployed, and only look at ones who
> already have a position and are looking to change jobs.

. . . which just reinforces the point that most organizations are
optimizing for finding people who land around the fiftieth percentile in
terms of a good fit for the job, when they could benefit much more from
getting somewhere up around the range of the ninety-eighth percentile.
Luckily for those who buck the trends, it's a lot easier to get someone
in that range than it should be, because many employers are cutting a lot
of those candidates out of their job searches based on essentially
arbitrary criteria.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]