Posted On: Thursday - April 19th 2018 7:31AM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Big-Biz Stupidity
(Continued from this post, as Exhibit A from the Peak Stupidity legal department was just an interlude.)
One thing I promised to disucss, back in the 1st post of the series on the scourge of "Human Resources", is computer selection of prospective employees, hence the Artificial Stupidity topic key is attached. You would think this may be a good thing. I had discussed how HR people normally don't know a whole lot about the jobs that they are there to hire people for. Why NOT let
How about let the manager looking for an employee just get the information he needs and hire whomever he wants? That's way too old-school, I guess, and the reader may well ask, what about in today's economy, when there may be 2,000 applicants for some technical job? OK, I can see the need for some computer screening. It makes sense to have some on-line info with basic numbers and qualifications that can be screened to weed out most of the applicants as just not qualified - they'd be a waste of time to talk to on the phone. The problem is that these HR people (damn them, again?!) are involved in this process too.
There is no way, without inside information, to know whether you, the applicant, may be missing some simple things on your resume, which the software has a a real boner for. The HR people, as written about earlier, only know the buzzwords, but don't understand the technical fields. They have no idea what people will really be doing with their time, meaning also no idea what the resume shows the applicant having done before during his work history. It's really not any better sometime, and can even be worse, because bugging the hell out of a software program does not have the same effect as bugging the hell out of some HR lady, until she caves.
The 2nd thing that is going on, is that I believe the on-line application processes are designed as a way to weed people out just based on difficulty of use. It's the modern method versus what used to be a look at the grammar, spelling, and manner of speech of an applicant. Yeah, it still never had anything directly to do with the job, unless it was for a book editor or a press spokesman. However, the old way was a measure of written/verbal skills, meaning part (ONLY) of general intelligence. Now, I guess, getting through the on-line process is your test. I did this a few years ago. While well qualified and having good experience for the technical position, I failed miserably on the on-line process - I guess, cause I never heard back, and I had emailed to get help to finish the on-line shit!
I think things involving corporate employment, at any larger than the family or 20-person business level, have gotten pretty miserable. Back to my on-line experience, I did have thoughts of just driving over to the workplace in question and trying to talk to people. It wasn't very far away. I figured, probably rightly, that the best that would happen is that after telling me that everything is on-line and they can't help me, they might just direct me to a desktop computer in the lobby to go through the same crap I did at home! I suppose it's always been more "It's not who what you know, it's who you
More discussion of modern computer testing in general has been on the future-post list for a while, so that'll be coming.
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