Software is Breaking the World

Bureaucratic imperatives

It turns out that one of the reasons for the so-called labor shortage is the, the software used to screen applications are rejecting the vast majority of qualified applicants:

A scroll through business media or even a stroll through your local downtown is enough to reveal just how desperate companies are to hire right now. "Help Wanted" signs adorn nearly every shop window, and the press is full of stories of companies offering extraordinary perks to attract talent.

Given the incredible difficulty of hiring during "the Great Resignation," you'd therefore probably be pretty shocked to hear that many of America's most respected businesses are turning away millions of qualified applicants for no good reason at all. But that's just what recent research from Harvard and Accenture found.

The report, titled "Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent," digs into why the process of matching job seekers to available openings has been going so slowly. And while the research turns up a number of issues, the lion's share of the blame falls on companies' recruiting practices, particularly due to specific job descriptions and automated hiring software that unnecessarily screens out many qualified candidates.

First, the researchers note that companies often do a less than stellar job of writing job descriptions. Instead of thinking critically about the handful of competencies crucial to perform the role, they often adapt existing descriptions, or throw every "nice to have" item they can think of into their job ads.

These epic, over-prescriptive job descriptions certainly deter some job seekers from even sending in a resume, but the real problem occurs when these bloated lists of requirements are fed into automated hiring software. Thanks to these systems, millions of resumes are tossed because of gaps in employment history, or other "problems" that aren't really problems at all.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, lead Harvard researcher Joseph Fuller "cited examples of hospitals scanning resumes of registered nurses for 'computer programming,' when what they need is someone who can enter patient data into a computer. Power companies, he said, scan for a customer-service background when hiring people to repair electric transmission lines. Some retail clerks won't make it past a hiring system if they don't have 'floor-buffing' experience."

There are two issues behind this:

• Poorly written software that comes from people who might have coding skills, but have no meaningful experience in the industries who use that software nor the skills required.
• Personnel departments who take over too much of the hiring and screening, because otherwise there would be no reason to employ them.  They have little or no understanding of the actual skills needed for the position that they advertise, but still have an outsize role in screening applicants.

It should be noted that if what both IT and personnel departments have in common is that if they function competently and efficiently, they are essentially invisible, and so they have no incentive to be competent and efficient.

Instead, they have an incentive to insert themselves in the process in the most noticeable (i.e. obstructive) way possible.  To do otherwise would mean that they could not protect, to quote Mel Brooks, their "Phony baloney jobs."