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Automated Job Rejection

economicpopulist.org

1–10 of 41 posts

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#2
The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#3
The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating them as a matter of good SEO.

It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

Ripe for exploitation I'd say.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#4

The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

My guess is that it's a device that an employer would use to manipulate the employees who are filling in "temporarily" -- so that the employees feel something is being done and they'll only be doing the extra work for "a little while." So they can say, "we really are trying, but the work you do is so valuable, just not that many people can do it."

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#5

The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

Sometimes there is an internal candidate that will get the job, yet it still has to be posted for some arcane rule/law... Or so I hear.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#6

The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating them as a matter of good SEO. It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses. Ripe for exploitation I'd say.

> It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve, thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.

Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#7
I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some arbitrary rules.

I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#8

The interview and the article state that "In some cases employers do not want to hire anyone at all, they think it's cheaper to leave positions unfilled!". If it is cheaper to leave a position vacant, why bother listing it as open? Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate it?

Both the article and the interview say that employers "think" that it's cheaper to leave the position unfilled, typically because of lousy cost accounting systems that do not give an accurate picture of the reduced system throughput (and thus the foregone revenue). Most companies optimize locally, which results in de-optimizing the whole system -- a department saves some money by not hiring a new systems administrator until the next fiscal year, and the whole company suffers decreased effectiveness.

Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#9
post #7

I think the automated resume filtering systems are interesting. Previous stories, about how to hire people, have told how the nice people involved in hiring did the exact thing these systems do, only manually. They take a big stack of resumes and filter 95% straight into the trash, based on some arbitrary rules. I don't like the idea of these automated systems, but I also don't see how this is any different.

I've used an automated resume filtering systems in the past. They worked quite well. I'd absolutely do it again.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_tha...

It certainly did filter quite a few people straight to the trash, based mainly on an inability to fizzbuz.

Re: Automated Job Rejection

#10

The more I hear about these stupid HR systems, the more I see manipulating them as a matter of good SEO. It's a system that rewards people that stuff keywords - effectively echoing the job requirements and adding the industry's buzzwords. It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses. Ripe for exploitation I'd say.

While any keyword filtering regime can be exploited, as apparent by the SEO cottage industry enabled by Google Pagerank, et al, I still find the underlying question unresolved of whether such filtering is ultimately useful to would-be employers.

That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.

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