Is HR Really Blocking New Hire Processes?
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This came up in another thread and I've asked this several times. I hear over and over again that college and certificates are a "must have" because "HR uses filters and won't even let hiring managers see your resume unless you pass these filters" and college and low level, non-applicable certs (like A+) are always mentioned as the things that are required - basically the assumption is that they always filter for the lowest level and ignore people who are good.
I hear this a lot. Yet, in the real world, I know of no one that has been hampered by this and having worked in many very large companies (two in the Fortune 10, one more in the Fortune 20, many in the Fortune 500), having worked for tons of consultancies and all over the country - I've never found these to be true. I've been a hiring manager or have assisted in hiring processes and have been a career counselour for one of the big ones and in all of those cases, neither was there any hard "no degree or no non-IT cert, no hire" rules, but HR was never in between candidates and hiring managers.
It happens, of that there is no doubt, there are shops that don't respect themselves and care more about filtering out the lowest level people than finding good people, but how many of those really survive and thrive? How many are truly large and competitive? Some, surely, but is it a significant percentage of the industry? I've not seen this on Wall St, in Silicon Valley, in hospitals, in start ups, in manufacturing... nowhere.
And of people that I would find mostly comparable to one another, those without degrees always seem to be more stable, making more money. It is always the college grads claiming that they would have been filtered out and that it was the degree, not their skills, that got them the job. But these aren't things that they can really know. But every person without a degree knows for sure that their lack of a degree didn't stop them from getting their job, since they have it.
Are people really finding, mostly from watching internal processes, that HR is both "inline" between candidates and hiring managers and that HR filters those not allowing hiring managers to see candidates that they would like to see based on arbitrary rules that HR imposes? I've never seen an enterprise HR department work against the departments like this. It seems like one of those things that IT just says and repeats, but what HR department in the real world is actively sabotaging their businesses instead of trying to support them and what management is allowing that to happen in a successful business?
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Many SMBs do. Most government agencies. Heck even RackSpace does but, even though Rackspace is a large player It's still somewhat of an SMB in terms of actually business size.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Many SMBs do. Most government agencies. Heck even RackSpace does but, even though Rackspace is a large player It's still somewhat of an SMB in terms of actually business size.
SMBs, yes, but how many SMBs even have HR? That alone is a small percentage, I think. And then what percentage of SMB HR are really doing this?
Government, yes, that's a given.
Rackspace does not do this, I have friends from there who did not need it. They might say it or people might repeat it, but in the real world they don't do it.
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I can only speak to the job postings that I see around here - if not HR putting the requirement for a college degree, then it's a manager who just wants to limit their employee hiring pool to much.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Rackspace does not do this, I have friends from there who did not need it. They might say it or people might repeat it, but in the real world they don't do it.
Maybe it depends on which location. They require degrees all the time on their posting even for linux admins. And I hear from many turned down for that.
I've never worked for an SMB that does not have HR, but the smallest "SMB" I worked for was 300ish users.
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@Dashrender said:
I can only speak to the job postings that I see around here - if not HR putting the requirement for a college degree, then it's a manager who just wants to limit their employee hiring pool to much.
Job POSTINGS don't tell us anything. I'll agree that they all say it. But the question is, is it actually a requirement and is it a requirement coming from HR? I see it on postings all the time, but never see a posting where it actually applies to the job itself and once someone applies, no one is looking at that stuff.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I've never worked for an SMB that does not have HR, but the smallest "SMB" I worked for was 300ish users.
That's on the large (and rare) side of SMBs. It's very much an SMB, but it is in the top 1-2% of them by person count. The vast majority are small, very small.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
I've never worked for an SMB that does not have HR, but the smallest "SMB" I worked for was 300ish users.
That's on the large (and rare) side of SMBs. It's very much an SMB, but it is in the top 1-2% of them by person count. The vast majority are small, very small.
I got offers at others much smaller but until I could make more than the commission sales job I was doing (and very happy with) I wasn't about to leave just to get an IT job. The small ones were piss poor pay.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Maybe it depends on which location. They require degrees all the time on their posting even for linux admins. And I hear from many turned down for that.
That's a really tough one. They were told that that is why they were turned down, it's a handy way to excuse someone that you don't want to hurt their feelings and you don't want them to keep applying as getting a degree is an effort and takes time. But I know that RS doesn't have that requirement so they were definitely lied to (and Linux Admin specifically.)
What they probably leave out, and what they probably aren't told, is that if they had good credentials and experience instead of the degree, they would have gotten the job. Lacking a degree or other experience to justify not having one, they didn't get a job. Lots of people just state that as "not having a degree" since that would have fixed it, but leave out that having good skills or experience would also have fixed it.
That someone was interviewed without a degree and considered at all pretty much proves that a degree wasn't necessary.
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When go job hunting, I will ignore the requirements, a lot of times, if it is a job I feel I am a good candidate for.
You want me to have a masters degreee, 5 years experience, 5 Cisco certifications and an A+ Certification... and the job is for a PHP developer... Yeah, right. I'd put my application in for that. I even got a call back for a job like that as well. I wasn't picked for it, but I did get the interview, lol.
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@dafyre said:
When go job hunting, I will ignore the requirements, a lot of times, if it is a job I feel I am a good candidate for.
You want me to have a masters degreee, 5 years experience, 5 Cisco certifications and an A+ Certification... and the job is for a PHP developer... Yeah, right. I'd put my application in for that. I even got a call back for a job like that as well. I wasn't picked for it, but I did get the interview, lol.
I don't. Job requirements tell me a lot about the company. My current one, I was interviewing them in the interviews as much if not more than they were interviewing me! haha. They noticed that too.
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What I have seen is HR may place these rules on job openings. However I have never seen someone with skills and experience not have these rules bent if not broken if the manager wants to hire an individual. I think the only time this is ever an issue is entry level straight out of college jobs. Again, if someone would have just worked in the field for 4 years, they could probably get the HR rules broken if the manager really wanted to bring them on board.
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@dafyre said:
When go job hunting, I will ignore the requirements, a lot of times, if it is a job I feel I am a good candidate for.
You want me to have a masters degreee, 5 years experience, 5 Cisco certifications and an A+ Certification... and the job is for a PHP developer... Yeah, right. I'd put my application in for that. I even got a call back for a job like that as well. I wasn't picked for it, but I did get the interview, lol.
Exactly, everyone (or nearly everyone) knows that those are wishlists or copied from somewhere or some boilerplate. No one has those creds and no one getting interviews has them. Often those are added by someone down the line with no involvement, like a posting agency.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@dafyre said:
When go job hunting, I will ignore the requirements, a lot of times, if it is a job I feel I am a good candidate for.
You want me to have a masters degreee, 5 years experience, 5 Cisco certifications and an A+ Certification... and the job is for a PHP developer... Yeah, right. I'd put my application in for that. I even got a call back for a job like that as well. I wasn't picked for it, but I did get the interview, lol.
I don't. Job requirements tell me a lot about the company. My current one, I was interviewing them in the interviews as much if not more than they were interviewing me! haha. They noticed that too.
This is true. Just because the requirements are silly and can be ignored from a "will they hire me" standpoint, it doesn't mean that you as the candidate should not see it as a horrible reflection on the company. How important is this job to them if the job posting didn't get even a cursory inspection and no common sense was applied? Do you really want to work for a company that sees itself in that way?
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@s.hackleman said:
What I have seen is HR may place these rules on job openings. However I have never seen someone with skills and experience not have these rules bent if not broken if the manager wants to hire an individual. I think the only time this is ever an issue is entry level straight out of college jobs. Again, if someone would have just worked in the field for 4 years, they could probably get the HR rules broken if the manager really wanted to bring them on board.
Then... is it a rule?
Guidance as a standard and a rule or filter are quite different things.
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In the UK pretty much all SMB IT hiring is done via a recruitment agency and recruitment agencies will filter our non-graduates for a huge number of IT positions. Whether this is at the request of their clients or not, I don't know, but it is a fact.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
In the UK pretty much all SMB IT hiring is done via a recruitment agency and recruitment agencies will filter our non-graduates for a huge number of IT positions. Whether this is at the request of their clients or not, I don't know, but it is a fact.
Ah, now that is interesting. In the US it is extremely rare (AFAIK) for SMBs to use agencies. The agencies are exclusive to the large business and enterprise space and I've worked with nearly all and none filter by degrees that I have ever dealt with. And I've dealt with everyone of any size in the US.
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So SMBs in the UK actually find the agencies to be good in bringing in candidates? The agencies are widely seen as one of the failures of IT in the US.
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Well, I've tried recently to cut them out and have advertised on Monster.com instead, but haven't been very successful so I've now brought some in and they've been ok at finding candidates.
By ok, I mean marginally better than doing it myself!
We've had some good success using Monster.com for non-IT roles though, including recruiting my boss the Finance Director, so we've saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last couple of years alone as a result of not paying any agency fees.
So how do US SMBs recruit?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Well, I've tried recently to cut them out and have advertised on Monster.com instead, but haven't been very successful so I've now brought some in and they've been ok at finding candidates.
By ok, I mean marginally better than doing it myself!
We've had some good success using Monster.com for non-IT roles though, including recruiting my boss the Finance Director, so we've saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last couple of years alone as a result of not paying any agency fees.
So how do US SMBs recruit?
From my experience through word-of-mouth. The person doing the hiring mentions it to someone they are acquainted with who knows someone who is "good with computers".
