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You've ignored the point of the post you're replying to. You're looking at the credential as a employee signalling tool, not a tool for other parties to satisfy
by ABCLAW 10y ago
You've ignored the point of the post you're replying to. You're looking at the credential as a employee signalling tool, not a tool for other parties to satisfy a business need.
Your HR department needs avenues to sift through referrals and comparison points. If an individual has the certificate and compares equally with a non-certificate candidate, the first individual has signaled, through the certificate, that he is interested in the field, as well as willing to invest time and resources into advancing in that field. This is the flipside of the employee signalling.
If an applicant applies without the certificate to a post which requires it, he will recognize his cover letter/interview should make a point of demonstrating competence in the area of the certificate. This is an instance of employer signalling.
If an applicant fakes having acquired the certificate and there is an easy way to determine whether or not he is faking, then HR now has an easy sieve for removing employees willing to misrepresent their skills to obtain the job. This is a step in the HR QA process.
Some employers work outside the 'work for hire' states. If they contain a certificate requirement in a job posting with enumerated skills, they can point to ineptitude in the certificate skillset as reasons for dismissal depending on the jurisdiction they're in. This is a tool in legal's toolbox.
Perhaps the certificate system is the result of the collaboration of a number of employers attempting to pool credential and training requirements for an industry, then create requirements for credentialing into legislation to control the industry pipeline of workers. This is a method of signalling to legislators or restricting competitors by indirect means.
And so on.
Additionally, your fact pattern has a small problem: expert acting as hiring managers who have knowledge of the problems with the certificate are free to adjust their screening procedure to obtain more fully vetted candidates. The only time avoiding the certificate entirely is when the signal it provides is negative.
This doesn't mean that certs are useful, merely that they might be useful to stakeholders you aren't considering.
- pmichaud 10y agoI did ignore that mostly, you're right. My basic claim is that on average this is actually true: > The only time avoiding the certificate entirely is when the signal it provides is negative. And further, I think all your examples are perfectly valid, real-world examples that I don't dispute exist and that lots of people find important. I also think perfectly good and reasonable people operate in the reality of their industries and play ball with these things when necessary. AND I think all the use cases you mentioned are bad for the system overall. As in, they are real, and in a practical sense we can't just ignore them, but ideally we wouldn't have them. HR using negative signals for filtering is bad. Job requirements tailored to the actual job are good. Broad and mostly arbitrary requirements from a third party are bad. Applicants to a well specified job also know to address weaknesses in their cover letter. Specific and well-specified requirements are also useful in legal disputes. Using arbitrary requirements to provide legal for firing people is bad. Employers colluding to control the training pipeline using arbitrary requirements encoded in law is bad. I agree with you that they useful in the real world, but I'm arguing that that usefulness is evidence that the system is worse than it could be.
- flukus 10y ago> Your HR department needs avenues to sift through referrals and comparison points. If an individual has the certificate and compares equally with a non-certificate candidate, the first individual has signaled, through the certificate, that he is interested in the field, as well as willing to invest time and resources into advancing in that field. This is the flipside of the employee signalling. The real root of the issue here is that HR can't do their job. An unintended side effect of all this signalling is that future employees will be glad to get filtered out because they don't want to work somewhere that hired on certification instead of competence.
- vertere 10y ago> The only time avoiding the certificate entirely is when the signal it provides is negative. It is possible for the same action send a positive signal when done by some people and a negative signal when done by others. Specifically there can be 'contersignaling' [0], which is basically signaling that you don't need to signal. [0]: https://kelley.iu.edu/riharbau/cs-randfinal.pdf https://kelley.iu.edu/riharbau/cs-randfinal.pdf