What I find amazing is the push back, often from HR about hiring someone who’s demonstrated effectiveness as a contractor. There is this need for whatever reason to still post the job and go through the interview process to be “fair”, when as you point out, the last thing that interviews are is fair. I’ve seen this basically everywhere I’ve worked in IT.
Indeed. But the idea behind much HR behavior, at least in my experience, comes down to CYA: making sure that you can't be held accountable for bad hires because you "did everything right". So CV, interviews, credit checks (why? is this for a loan?), background checks, references, tests, etc.—all exist so that they can say, after they hired the person they liked, "but everything looked good!"
It's worse than nonsense. It is demeaning to the candidate. It tells them that they are a commodity and the company is just shopping around to see which one has the best reviews.
It's slavery, frankly. What do people with bad credit do? How do they get their credit back if they can't get a job? What do people with criminal records do? How do they stay out of prison if they can't get a job? And who pays for this? All of us.
But business doesn't care. As long as unemployment is high and life without a job for all but the wealthy is torture, employees will have to compete to see who can best mold themselves to fit the company's desires.
Nothing in this inspires workers to do well. Nothing taps into their natural creativity and desire to do meaningful work. It is an astonishingly inefficient system, not just in the hiring process but also in the entire world of work: dispirited drones doing bullshit work producing crap that no one really wants or needs just to get a paycheck, and at grave expense to all life on Earth.
What I find amazing is the push back, often from HR about hiring someone who’s demonstrated effectiveness as a contractor. There is this need for whatever reason to still post the job and go through the interview process to be “fair”, when as you point out, the last thing that interviews are is fair. I’ve seen this basically everywhere I’ve worked in IT.
Indeed. But the idea behind much HR behavior, at least in my experience, comes down to CYA: making sure that you can't be held accountable for bad hires because you "did everything right". So CV, interviews, credit checks (why? is this for a loan?), background checks, references, tests, etc.—all exist so that they can say, after they hired the person they liked, "but everything looked good!"
It's worse than nonsense. It is demeaning to the candidate. It tells them that they are a commodity and the company is just shopping around to see which one has the best reviews.
It's slavery, frankly. What do people with bad credit do? How do they get their credit back if they can't get a job? What do people with criminal records do? How do they stay out of prison if they can't get a job? And who pays for this? All of us.
But business doesn't care. As long as unemployment is high and life without a job for all but the wealthy is torture, employees will have to compete to see who can best mold themselves to fit the company's desires.
Nothing in this inspires workers to do well. Nothing taps into their natural creativity and desire to do meaningful work. It is an astonishingly inefficient system, not just in the hiring process but also in the entire world of work: dispirited drones doing bullshit work producing crap that no one really wants or needs just to get a paycheck, and at grave expense to all life on Earth.
There has to be a better way.