Advice For Companies #1: Fire About Half Your Human Resources Department

 

Companies need a lot of help, so good thing I'm here.  I should probably charge a high consulting fee for this stuff, but I will be satisfied if companies just did less dumb shit.

One of the dumbest things companies do is to have their human resources folks waste time doing phone screeners.  I get why HR folks like doing these calls because they need to create work for themselves and justify their otherwise useless jobs, but why companies don't just fucking fire half their HR departments is beyond me.  You don't need to pay money for an HR peon to read people's resumes back at them.  You need someone to read the fucking resumes, pick a few good candidates to interview (if there are too many good candidates to manually pick, then just assign the resumes each a number and use Random.Org to pick a few--or if you like to waste paper and have more fun, print them all out and throw a dart a few times to narrow the field down), invite the chosen candidates in or have the hiring manager phone them (maybe that would also encourage the hiring manager to treat the employees he or she has already better so he or she can avoid having to do this because let's face it hiring and firing has a lot of costs, mainly needless if you do things better, to it--if you don't believe me, then maybe you'll believe The Harvard Business Review's thoughtful essay on the mess modern recruiting is:  https://hbr.org/2019/05/your-approach-to-hiring-is-all-wrong), and then hire one based on that.  Since the current process produces crappy results anyway (18% turnover?--I'd say 10% might be normal:  https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/human-resources/employee-turnover-statistics.shtml), there isn't much to lose here, and you'd save money doing it.

But, of course, companies won't do this.  They'll instead pay a hundred thousand dollars to buy some piece of shit artificial intelligence software to pick candidates for the HR folks to do phone screeners with and make the hiring process even more convoluted for everyone involved instead.

Let's go corporate America!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When To Halt The Job Search

Image
I think I got a gig.  We'll see . . .  The details still need to be ironed out.  This, however, brings us to an interesting question.  When does a candidate halt the job search?  The obvious answer is when one gets a job, but things are not always that clear.  The answer depends on one's circumstances.  If one is broke, then one had better keep chugging ahead applying for jobs until a start date for the new job is set.  I've even been in situations where the start date has been moved back.  Fortunately, I've never been in any situation where the start date evaporates or the job offer gets rescinded, but that likely has happened to someone. Conversely, if one has money, then it's time to halt the job search.  Even if things go awry, you can always start it up again.  Yeah, maybe you missed a couple of decent opportunities, but odds are the job will go forward and if you didn't halt the search, you would have missed out on an even rarer commodity:  time. Time is a
Read more

Good Candidates Go Fast

Image
Corporate America continues to be run badly.  If I ran a company and I needed to hire someone, so I could make more money because I'm not hiring someone unless it makes me more money than I will be shelling out for the hire, I would hire someone quickly.  Otherwise, I'm wasting money by leaving a needed position unfilled.  I'm either paying overtime or burning someone else out to cover it in the meantime or I'm just leaving potential revenue on the proverbial table, which may not show up on the accounting books but has a cost in revenue foregone or opportunity cost. Why then do I see garbage like the image posted above on LinkedIn?  I see this all the time.  A company advertises a job.  Presumably, unless they're wasting money paying HR morons to do stuff that doesn't need to be done, they need this position filled.  This position has been open for at least a month.  They keep relisting it once a week or so in order to put it on top of the help wanted pile.  It&
Read more

Indeed Vs. LinkedIn

Image
Looking for a job has changed quite a bit over the years.  I am old enough to remember the old days of going through the help wanted ads in the newspaper.  Then as the Internet became more central to American life, various job boards replaced it and one another.  Some of the old job boards such as CareerBuilder and Monster are still active, but Indeed seems to have become the dominant one these days.  Pardon the pun, but indeed, Indeed is the one I mainly use in my current job search.  There are some other sites I eventually will branch out to when I expand my search if the current parameters don't pan out (if they do pan out, then expect this blog to be abandoned, forever I hope, no offense . . . there appears to be no danger of that at the moment though so I may be with you dear readers for a long time), but Indeed has proved to be all I need at the moment.  I was using LinkedIn, but I analyzed my job applications and realized that all the responses have come from Indeed applicat
Read more