A “Shortage” of Engineers? I Doubt It
Warning: I’m on a rant. Yesterday’s Wall St. Journal had an article called “Behind ‘Shortage’ of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy” (if I could figure out the URL, I would paste it in here, but I can’t figure out how to do that. Sharon Begley is the author, and the WSJ requires registration. If you’re not a subscriber, it costs money.)
Sure enough, Begley describes multiple cases of hiring-manager shortsightedness:
- Eliminating people without BSCS degrees (even though they had work experience in similar companies!)
- Some were overqualified
- Some weren’t familiar with a specific piece of software
Maybe it’s my head cold, but this seems completely nuts to me. They did all this reduce the number of phone screens from 200 resumes? Phooey on them.
Here’s one reason why, quoting from the article Companies often draw up extremely narrow job descriptions, recruiters and staffing managers say, causing searches to get drawn out. I supposed if you don’t analyze the job and write a real job description, you have to write a narrow job description and use filtering software to eliminate the multitude of candidates.
I don’t see why you can’t write a good job description, and if you want, put a test-like thing in place to screen candidates before you even review their resumes. Ah, but that would require real strategic and tactical help from the HR folks, which may not be possible in many organizations.When hiring becomes strategic, then people will invest some time in setting up a hiring process that works rather than one that dehumanizes candidates and increases the cost to the company.
6 comments November 17th, 2005