human resources

Listening to the gut feeling

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It’s probably a weird hobby, but I tend to go to a lot of job interviews, even when I am not  actively searching for a job. Sure, I don’t apply for anything I wouldn’t want or for which I am not qualified (obviously I wouldn’t be invited to an interview without qualifications). I have probably written somewhere before that I think keeping the interview skills sharp is important, and even if I can’t claim to be brilliant at interviewing skills, despite my keeping my “hat in the ring”, I would be even worse if I weren’t actively practicing.

Because this is a common enough occurrence in my life, as a hobby, I give the process and the part of the process that involves gut feeling, a lot of thought. Possibly I am more interested in worklife/human resource linguistic anthropology than in getting jobs. I’ve written before about red flags and alarm bells experienced in interview situations. Sometimes, though, things are even more subtle. You get a sense for a company culture by the small things you see and observe. You might be wrong about the impression you get, but ultimately those impressions matter. You probably aren’t going to feel particularly comfortable in these places if you do get these inexplicable feelings or unusual observations.

I am thinking now about a few other examples. I had a great series of interviews with a company but to start with they rescheduled interviews multiple times throughout the process. I am flexible, so this was okay, especially when we were doing Skype calls and could be flexible. But then they invited me for some final interviews, which required moving around a lot of my schedule and traveling at the last minute. I flew to the city where the company was located. And late in the evening the night before the interview, they emailed to ask if I would mind postponing an entire day. Not just a few hours but an entire day. I already had my tickets to return home in the evening, after the originally scheduled interview. Looking back, maybe I should have said no. Instead I agreed to the change but told them that it was really inconvenient.

In the end, even though the interviews went well, I noticed as soon as I went to the offices that everyone I saw in the office except for a receptionist, everyone I talked to, everyone who was referred to as being a part of the global organization, was a man. And when they talked about their customers, they kept referring to the men who use these products and their wives. It may well be that the majority of their customers are men, but the framing was (unintentionally) gender imbalanced. And later, when they called to tell me it had been a hard decision, narrowed down to one other person and me, they ultimately hired the other person – a man. I don’t necessarily think that was conscious or had anything to do with it, but it was something that I clearly observed. The gender imbalance coupled with the multiple last-minute shifts in schedule led me to think that it was a good thing that things didn’t work out.

Photo by Rostyslav Savchyn on Unsplash

 

 

 

Holding court: Leveling the hiring playing field

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In my day, I have done a lot of freelance work in the fuzzy areas of human resources, recruiting, resume/CV editing and coaching. That’s involved a lot of digging into a whole host of things that are related but not central to hiring and candidate marketability. For example, employment law, discrimination and similar topics. This has tangentially led me to a lot of material about gender inequality.

Just today I stumbled onto an article about a job ad that was so ridiculous that it has gone global in its blatant sexism. It encourages women in particular to apply for the content writing/SEO management job because the incumbent will be required to fill in for the receptionist. There’s nothing wrong, as the article points out, with wanting to bring more women into the tech sphere (as most of the job duties described would do) – but the receptionist part is… well, insulting to everyone. (Discouraging, subtly or not, women from going into tech and scientific fields is not a unique phenomenon by any means – inspiring whole white papers on the subject. But it’s far from isolated to technology disciplines. It’s everywhere.)

Much has been made in recent years about the potential benefit to job candidates of “blind applications” in which only qualifications (stripped of any mention of gender, name or other identifying detail) are presented without the applicant’s name. (This is also true in a lot of cases for any group of people – studies have been done to find out whether “name blind” applications will reduce or eliminate racial/cultural discrimination). Anonymized applications, according to IZA World of Labor, will help level the playing field but cannot eliminate all forms of discrimination (what can? There are theories on this, too, such as implementing skills-based, gamified recruiting, competitions, etc. that can also strip away bias). It’s impossible to completely eliminate discrimination when, for example, the discrimination can just be moved to a later point in the hiring process or when contextual information that remains in an application can influence bias (e.g. graduation years/dates, for example. Age discrimination, too, is real).

When I wrote that discrimination is everywhere, and is rampant in technology, check out this article from Slate about the Nancy Lieberman. If you look only at the qualifications for a potential new NBA head coach, she is head and shoulders (forgive the lameness of using that term in relation to basketball) above the others in the list, particularly if you’ve removed all mention of timeframes, gender, etc. She is experienced and decorated. I imagine there are naysayers who won’t accept comparing “women’s sports” and “men’s sports” like for like, but that’s easily negated when you consider that many head coaches have never played professionally in ANY league.

“And while this shouldn’t need saying, it unfortunately does: There would be so many reasons beyond gender to pick Lieberman. She has been committed to the game of basketball for decades. Her passion for the game and ability to convey its nuances are a gift. Lieberman has probably forgotten more about basketball than some coaches will ever know. The award that is bestowed upon the nation’s top women’s collegiate point guard annually has her name on it.

The above blind résumés offer an objective look at why it is time for more women to get opportunities in all of professional sports—they belong there and would have a chance to help teams. The myth that an NBA head co ach had to actually have played in the NBA—one of the last arguments of opponents of female NBA coaches—has long ago been dispelled. Four of the above NBA assistant coaches never played in the NBA, and all are qualified to some degree or another for a head coaching job. Almost half of the current 30 head coaches in the NBA never played in a single game in the league. Two of those coaches—Gregg Popovich and Erik Spoelstra—have won a combined seven NBA championships.

In today’s professional climate it has generally become accepted that an applicant for an open position will be judged on merit, experience, and ability to complete a job without facing discrimination based on race, gender, religious beliefs, or inclusion in any other protected class.”

 

The changing workscape: HR – no recourse, no resource

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I will be blunt – when it comes to recruitment and hiring, human resources (HR) is a crock. A lot of time, it is just dumb. Not dumb in the sense that there is no value to HR whatsoever – but dumb in the sense that it is incomplete and inadequate for the functions it tries to perform. It reminds me of the tech talk surrounding the challenges faced by network and cable operators and their becoming “dumb pipes“, e.g. delivering the technology while content providers – and everyone but them – make use of their pipe and profit from it. HR is a kind of dumb pipe sometimes, performing a lot of functions, delivering what they are supposed to – but somewhere the value and content is not what it should be.

I make this blanket statement knowing that it is not always true and that sometimes HR departments are very tightly integrated with the entire company and departmental aims – enough to understand what a company needs (at least to the level that they can screen out clearly unqualified candidates). However, I have experienced just as many HR departments that function as though they are an island, cut off from the rest of the company, completely out of touch both with the needs for which they are trying to find a match and with what the company actually does. (And HR has other responsibilities that are important and better focus areas for them than recruitment, in many cases. Employee relations and development once people are onboard, for example, particularly in environments that have a lot of legal stuff going on.)

Both the employer and potential employee(s) lose out in the HR-led, HR-centric recruitment scenario. Employers may not get to see the applications of candidates who may not have all the right buzzwords in their applications but who do possess the right skill set and broad experience that illustrates an aptitude for whatever kind of work for which they are applying. I think this HR-as-gatekeeper approach often means that the employer does not see the full range of what is available to them – the less integrated an HR department is, the less likely they can adequately screen applications and pass on the best of what is available.

Potential employees also lose out, of course, because in many cases, there are very few avenues by which they can bypass HR. I read an article today about how “jacks-of-all-trades” don’t get hired – often don’t even get interviews. Yes, arguably, there is an art to writing applications, resumes, cover letters, and any applicant in this market knows that you really need to tailor your application package for each job, so creating a three-page resume that delves into all the things you can do versus tailoring an application for the specific job for which you are applying and highlighting your skills and achievements within that field is not the best strategy. Being a jack-of-all-trades and trying to capture all that information and experience in one one-size-fits-all application doesn’t work and probably never will.

But what struck me is that many of the comments on this article focused on the inefficacy of HR. In a case where an applicant does have a very interesting, rich resume filled with his jack-of-all-trades background, an HR specialist might discard the application because it was a bit rough around the edges and because it did not explicitly address specific points in the job ad. This is their job and probably all that time and volume allow for. That said, if non-HR people (departmental staff/management) were actively involved in the hiring and resume-review process, chances of the jack-of-all-trade generalist resume being noticed are probably much higher. Someone working in the department/area for which the job opening is advertised would have much greater insight into the current and future needs of the team and might identify considerably more valuable traits and skills in the applicants’ materials that HR would not be looking for.

Perhaps there is some mutual responsibility here – not wanting to make HR the scapegoat because it has its place and time in the corporate landscape. But removing the HR-as-linebacker function (particularly in cases where HR is really out of touch) and involving departmental resources from the very beginning could open consideration a little wider. Meanwhile, applicants have to take the time, care and responsibility to tailor each application individually.

Likewise, most professional people are essentially jacks-of-all-trades; finding the two or three key strengths in one’s professional skills arsenal does pay off. Example – at my core, I am a writer. I have worked in technical writing, marketing, communications (internal and external), have worked in huge global companies and in tiny little companies as well as my own businesses. This work has crossed industries and sectors and required tremendous adaptation, adoption of new skills and learning whole new industries from the beginning (my most recent jump was from the IT/browser industry to medtech/healthcare with no life sciences or medical experience at all, but I jumped in and learned). This is likely the reality for most professionals – agility and readiness to keep learning and changing. Being able to tailor each application to elevate those key skills that pertain directly to the job to which you are applying, and then adding an “attractive garnish” by including useful and complementary aspects of the other, but less related, skills, will probably produce more results – or at least open a few more doors for interviews.

Maybe this is what HR screeners are not able to discern or appropriately value when reviewing more complicated resumes – this readiness to learn and change and the evidence of it.