35 ms·

Yet another "hiring is broken" play

by edoceo 10y ago

lj3 10y ago
That would be less disheartening if any of the "hiring is broken, let's fix it" companies actually tried to fix it instead of just streamlining and/or automating the existing, broken systems
- SmellTheGlove 10y ago
  Fixing it is hard, and the fix as a product doesn't scale, as you're working directly with/against internal politics.
  - lj3 10y ago
    I didn't say it would be easy, but if they're not even going to attempt to fix the issue, they should stop saying they are.
    - TrevorJ 10y ago
      It really depends on which end of the transaction you are talking about. If you are willing to insulate the job seeker from the broken stuff then you've 'fixed' that half of the problem from their perspective. In a perfect world, a total rethinking of the whole process would be much better but unless you can get N number of companies to buy in to that, then solving the problem through an abstraction layer might be the best bet.
      - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
        The abstraction layer requires the company to buy in (politically, not just monetarily). If you've been around the Fortune 500 at all, it's very common to have large-ish, very powerful HR organizations. Taking something very fundamental away from them - the candidate pipeline - would be really unpalatable and controversial because it takes away about half the organization and a good chunk of the supply side. You aren't wrong, I'm just stating why it's not happening.
    - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
      No, and I'm not criticizing you or anything. I'm just saying it isn't the least bit easy in the sense that a lot of these startups have chosen to go after the parts of the process where they can get some kind of foothold and make money. Even if you can get the company to buy into the broken nature of its talent pipeline, there's a lot of human capital consulting out there and the top tier firms haven't quite bought in to the talent pipeline as a(n external) service concept yet. While the natural idea might be to get into the human capital consulting game to fix this, it's really hard for little firms to get into large companies, because as they say, nobody ever got fired for bringing in Mercer, Aon Hewitt, Towers Watson, Deloitte, etc (the "top" HC consulting firms). If you can't tell, I care about this quite a bit. It impacts my long term effectiveness as a manager.
SmellTheGlove 10y ago
Hiring is broken. It's just broken into many pieces, especially as you get to larger organizations. The first disconnect occurs when management wants something, but HR loses it in translation, and that job description is classified and immutable for the next decade. So it gets posted, and everyone complains that the "right candidates" aren't applying. Well, that's because we can't actually write job descriptions to tell candidates what we're actually trying to do. If by some miracle I get to post a job the way I want to describe it, I have the option of receiving every resume that comes in or letting HR screen, whereby they interpret what I want and probably trash a lot of quality candidates. Because they were doing Java instead of Python or didn't include SQL or something like that. So I tend to do my own screening, looking for evidence of critical thinking, curiosity and potential, which takes some time. Maybe I found my candidate and I've hired them. I mentioned I'm big on potential, critical thinking and curiosity. I think I'm a pretty good manager and people developer, and I'd even like to think that those who have passed through my team have learned a lot. Naturally I don't have the sort of pay scale or rapid advancement culture to work with, so I eventually lose them to someone who does. (As an aside, I used to work with a great HR recruiter, who could really deliver the right candidates - naturally she went somewhere else to get paid more!) And then we start over. So I like the idea of startups like Triplebyte and such, who I can maybe trust to think like me and get me a few candidates for a last round interview and a hire. Naturally, my large, old school company will have none of that :) From the candidate perspective, these same issues manifest differently, but share the same root causes. I can see why startups who understand the process on the inside are starting to try and monetize their knowledge of the game. Personally, I'm a pretty big fan of Jobscan - it's a really helpful tool to help you adjust the language in your resume to match the keywords from the job posting, which is useful in getting your resume into the hands of an actual human to read. From there, you may still run into the above issues, but the first hurdle has been cleared.

Yet another "hiring is broken" play

by edoceo 10y ago

Yet another "hiring is broken" play

lj3 10y ago

That would be less disheartening if any of the "hiring is broken, let's fix it" companies actually tried to fix it instead of just streamlining and/or automating the existing, broken systems

SmellTheGlove 10y ago
Fixing it is hard, and the fix as a product doesn't scale, as you're working directly with/against internal politics.
- lj3 10y ago
  I didn't say it would be easy, but if they're not even going to attempt to fix the issue, they should stop saying they are.
  - TrevorJ 10y ago
    It really depends on which end of the transaction you are talking about. If you are willing to insulate the job seeker from the broken stuff then you've 'fixed' that half of the problem from their perspective. In a perfect world, a total rethinking of the whole process would be much better but unless you can get N number of companies to buy in to that, then solving the problem through an abstraction layer might be the best bet.
    - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
      The abstraction layer requires the company to buy in (politically, not just monetarily). If you've been around the Fortune 500 at all, it's very common to have large-ish, very powerful HR organizations. Taking something very fundamental away from them - the candidate pipeline - would be really unpalatable and controversial because it takes away about half the organization and a good chunk of the supply side. You aren't wrong, I'm just stating why it's not happening.
  - SmellTheGlove 10y ago
    No, and I'm not criticizing you or anything. I'm just saying it isn't the least bit easy in the sense that a lot of these startups have chosen to go after the parts of the process where they can get some kind of foothold and make money. Even if you can get the company to buy into the broken nature of its talent pipeline, there's a lot of human capital consulting out there and the top tier firms haven't quite bought in to the talent pipeline as a(n external) service concept yet. While the natural idea might be to get into the human capital consulting game to fix this, it's really hard for little firms to get into large companies, because as they say, nobody ever got fired for bringing in Mercer, Aon Hewitt, Towers Watson, Deloitte, etc (the "top" HC consulting firms). If you can't tell, I care about this quite a bit. It impacts my long term effectiveness as a manager.

SmellTheGlove 10y ago

Hiring is broken. It's just broken into many pieces, especially as you get to larger organizations. The first disconnect occurs when management wants something, but HR loses it in translation, and that job description is classified and immutable for the next decade. So it gets posted, and everyone complains that the "right candidates" aren't applying. Well, that's because we can't actually write job descriptions to tell candidates what we're actually trying to do. If by some miracle I get to post a job the way I want to describe it, I have the option of receiving every resume that comes in or letting HR screen, whereby they interpret what I want and probably trash a lot of quality candidates. Because they were doing Java instead of Python or didn't include SQL or something like that. So I tend to do my own screening, looking for evidence of critical thinking, curiosity and potential, which takes some time. Maybe I found my candidate and I've hired them. I mentioned I'm big on potential, critical thinking and curiosity. I think I'm a pretty good manager and people developer, and I'd even like to think that those who have passed through my team have learned a lot. Naturally I don't have the sort of pay scale or rapid advancement culture to work with, so I eventually lose them to someone who does. (As an aside, I used to work with a great HR recruiter, who could really deliver the right candidates - naturally she went somewhere else to get paid more!) And then we start over. So I like the idea of startups like Triplebyte and such, who I can maybe trust to think like me and get me a few candidates for a last round interview and a hire. Naturally, my large, old school company will have none of that :) From the candidate perspective, these same issues manifest differently, but share the same root causes. I can see why startups who understand the process on the inside are starting to try and monetize their knowledge of the game. Personally, I'm a pretty big fan of Jobscan - it's a really helpful tool to help you adjust the language in your resume to match the keywords from the job posting, which is useful in getting your resume into the hands of an actual human to read. From there, you may still run into the above issues, but the first hurdle has been cleared.