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How not to advertise for a job in London

programmingisterrible.com

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Re: How not to advertise for a job in London

#71

Post by vidarh »

deeviant wrote: post #69
rada wrote: post #50

If you were as confused by the "Magic Pitch" requirement as I was, here is an explanation from the startup itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqYXP1Azsk&t=1m18s Essentially, they want candidates to pitch to employers using a short video. The idea of candidate videos has been floated about since before YouTube. I remember discussing it with a large job board owner over 10 years ago, and several times since, and…

Is that really the reason why? I'm pretty sure you would get somebody's age, race and gender just by reading their resume/CV, which most job boards allow potential hiring companies to peruse.

The difference is how easy it will be for a candidate to make the claim that you must have known about what protected classes they belong to when you discarded them as a candidate.

If all you have is the CV, possibly anonymised, you can feign ignorance or genuinely be ignorant of the candidates age, race and gender in a way that will be absolutely impossible to pull off if you've seen them on video.

Re: How not to advertise for a job in London

#72

Post by frobozz »

snoopy121 wrote: post #67

Yo I actually know the dude from school...feel like I owe him a bit of a defense after his minute of twitter infamy :) I'd understand the anger if this were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company practicing age-based discrimination, but in this case there's no they , there's literally just a guy plus some coder friends of his, getting a bit excited about startup plans. The dude's 23 (plus or minus) himself, and decid…

I agree that Hanlon's Razor should be applied here, and yes, this twitterstorm should know its limits (see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tw... and http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled...)

However, I'd like to take you up on two points:

> I'd understand the anger if this were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company practicing age-based discrimination

Are you claiming that small companies should be free to discriminate against protected characteristics with impunity, and that only large companies should be held to account for bad behaviour? Where do you draw the line?

> decidedly not versed in HR laws

As far as I can see, Career Harbour claims to be a revolutionary recruitment company, xiangyu_wu claims to be its founder and CEO.

In order to make those claims, one must have at least a cursory knowledge of the law and customs pertaining to recruitment. "Know the rules well so that you can break them effectively"

Although I can't back this up with quotes now, as the site has disappeared, I think I read that they wanted to "disrupt" recruitment and were targeting the milkround market, by allowing applicants to apply to all the big names with just one form. They may not be a Big Company themselves, but they are pitching themselves as the gateway to them. Were I to apply to PWC or KPMG or whoever through them (with a "magicpitch" video), I wouldn't be surprised to find that they'd not even sent it on, due to the shortage and greyness of my hair and colour of my skin.

Also, (again, I can't back it up, because his own tweets have vanished) it looks like some of the ire comes not just from the awful ad itself, but from his attempt to defend it (e.g. https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/57606722316234752...). That said, in his defence, he has "had a change of heart", which may mean that he is repentant.

Anyway, if, as he wishes his employees to be, he is a "nice dude" who "celebrates failure" and can "accept difficult challenges as opportunity for growth" and "deal with setbacks and failure on a continuous basis", this event will be bread-and-butter for him.

Re: How not to advertise for a job in London

#73

Post by mauricemir »

mgkimsal wrote: post #20

Whether it's illegal or not, I sort of wish more employers would just advertise like this anyway - just tell me you're really only interested in a 23 year old, so I can avoid wasting both our time. Theoretically, the market will reward them with ... whatever comes of having a bunch of 23 year olds running mission-critical aspects of your business. Might be massive success, might be failure, but let them get on with i…

And when the year olds ends up in court/tribuneral in front of an experienced lawyer who will rip him or her to shreds.

Industrial Tribunerals (labor courts) are not nice places trust me on this i know an EX GC who specialized in this area.

Re: How not to advertise for a job in London

#75

Post by mauricemir »

noir_lord wrote: post #47
vkjv wrote: post #25

Out of curiosity, are these discrimination laws hard and fast in in the UK? At least, in the U.S., most of these laws explicitly only affect a company above a certain number of employees.

They apply whether you have 1 employee or 50,000.

Individual ones do collective ones consultation of redundancy and so on do have a minimum size.

Though some elements of the Tory party and Ukip want to do away with all those laws

Re: How not to advertise for a job in London

#76

Post by mgkimsal »

ownagefool wrote: post #45
mgkimsal wrote: post #20

Whether it's illegal or not, I sort of wish more employers would just advertise like this anyway - just tell me you're really only interested in a 23 year old, so I can avoid wasting both our time. Theoretically, the market will reward them with ... whatever comes of having a bunch of 23 year olds running mission-critical aspects of your business. Might be massive success, might be failure, but let them get on with i…

Yeah, I don't mind. But they're either asking for a freaking genius or a liar, and since they're asking for a bunch of stuff that isn't really pertinent I'm willing to bet they pay like crap too. They'll get the liar and they'll probably deserve it.

Theoretically, they'll get the liars, and they'll suffer s a business for that. In practice, I've seen this happen, but everyone else suffers too, and it's a long drawn out process for the incompetence to surface, and often brings down others too.
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