Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
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Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#2> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?"
This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous. I don't think it makes sense to get the individual involved in trouble, but it isn't intellectually honest to pretend this is that strange or unreasonable. Offices are full of people who make things work in inefficient ways. Such is life. Improve the system if it fails, but there isn't any call to act surprised that the process is awkward.
I expect there is a lot of politics at play here.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#3The previous article that is linked to in the text is worth a read to:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_rec...
"ANRO decided to honor the 10 job offers it had made by mistake and used Oriel to tell the candidates. Unfortunately, a system error in Oriel meant it then erroneously sent that communication to an additional 16 candidates. ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too, and find the candidates posts."
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#4Honestly sometimes I just want to go back to paper. Laying out 24 recruitment folders with a cover sheet that has their score in the right order.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#5> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…
Copy Paste technician, fabulous, up there with Prompt engineer
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#6The previous article that is linked to in the text is worth a read to: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_rec... "ANRO decided to honor the 10 job offers it had made by mistake and used Oriel to tell the candidates. Unfortunately, a system error in Oriel meant it then erroneously sent that communication to an additional 16 candidates. ANRO decided to honor these 16 additional offers too, and fin…
But that's insane! These candidates hold people's lives in their hands, and they just hured unqualified candidates!
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#7> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…
That's not what they're saying. They're formally accusing management of not doing their jobs.
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#8> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…
>> often robust if the Copy Paste technician has a little bit of nous
This is faulty logic. Human error isn't an exceptional thing, it's extremely common and expected. There's an entire field of study dedicated to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_reliability
In many scenarios the right thing to do is just accept the error risk - as humans, we often don't need perfect execution but i don't think this is one of those.
The person quoted in the article gets it right: "We need senior management that know what they're doing, who realize that this is not, and never was, the way to run an HR system"
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#9[deleted]
Re: Royal College considers no confidence move after Excel recruitment debacle
#10> Proposing the motion at this week's meeting, Dr Marks said: "I'm no expert on HR software, but I do know that manually copying and pasting from seven different Excel sheets, all laid out in different ways, is bound to go wrong one day. So who set up the system? Who set up the QA processes and the staff training?" This sounds pretty standard to me. Spreadsheet stacks are actually effective - and often robust if the…
Excel stacks can be effective, but they need to be setup correctly and to have effective operational control. Royal College have a right to surprise - they are a client of ANRO and had to winkle the information out of them. Given the way things turned out, I think Dr Marks comments are also appropriate.