Human Resources is a lovely discipline occupied by thousands of wonderfully insightful, intelligent people. Formally, the field is referred to as Industrial/Organizational Psychology (or the name on your degree). The science behind Human Resources aims to make organizations more productive while ensuring productive and healthy lives for its workers. Translation: workers happy, company thrives. They even used to call it personnel!
But then the HR folks wanted a part of the technological revolution and they upgraded themselves in a big way. A marriage formed between HR + IT and it formed a whole new world (HRIS). But somehow, the technology tornado swept through and sucked the Human out of Human Resources.
The HR departments are no longer filled with “people people.” Instead, the pressure to keep up with the Technology Joneses has forced traditional HR folks into bits and bytes decoders.
Back in the day … and by back in the day, I mean back in the day when I first graduated college (1996), I was still thinking about the quality of paper upon which I printed my resume. I wore a navy suit with pantyhose and pumps. I carried a leather portfolio and sent a handwritten thank you note.
Today our job hunt begins and ends with the computer; it is our porthole into the market. We log on to let the world know that we’re looking. We have to be our own email marketers and drive our own viral campaigns. We network online, we apply online, we click to send our saved resumes, and then upload yet another cover letter. We always email to follow up. We summarize decades of experience with a maximum number of characters and we send it out into the online abyss.
I worked at a recruitment advertising agency for seven years, so you figure I’d be able to navigate some sort of back end armed with the inside scoop. Wrong. Turns out I don’t have the formula any more than anyone else does.
Most large companies have applicant tracking systems (ATS), which are databases designed to hold and process the millions of resumes. When you are applying to a job online or via email, your resume is automatically going into this database. Often you may be applying to a position that isn’t even available; the company just wants to build a “pipeline” of candidates.
When the company is ready to hire someone, the first order of business is to have the HR folks search through this ATS. The hiring manager provides the HR person with cryptic keywords and then they go into the massive database, laden with millions of our career histories, and conducts a keyword search. Code given, code entered, resumes served.
If you know the correct code that will yield your resume, hooray for you. The rest of us better figure out the code. The current economy means companies can get the best bang for their buck; employees come cheap. It’s the simple principle of supply and demand.
When I worked for the recruitment advertising agency, my clients often wanted me to advertise hard-to-fill jobs on very obscure Web sites. One client was seeking a highly specialized nurse. The position was so distinct, there was only eighteen known practitioners in the country. I thought a better approach would be to call the eighteen nurses and give them a personal pitch. The client preferred to psychologically guess which Web sites they might be visiting. In this instance, technology brainwashed (and trumped) the human.
The online job-hunting marketplace has gotten so overwhelming, they created a search engine to further simplify the process. Or so you think. These one-stop shops (like Indeed and Simply Hired) let you enter a title and a location and voila—jobs at a click. But how many of these jobs are legit?
It’s often the same job on different sites. The job boards have gotten very nepotistic and have created relationships and partnerships all over the place. When a company advertises on one site, they get a dozen others as a bonus. What this means for a job hunter is same job, different www.
