If you look all around you and you can’t spot the asshole …
Snark aside, you do have to wonder about some people. For example there’s the executive director where I currently work. He reports to the C-suite and manages the other directors, who then manage the managers who manage folks like me. He keeps insisting up and down that he does NOT want to have to review our externally-published documents in detail. He wants to be able to basically rubber-stamp an approval to publish on them. And yet he just can’t stop himself from reading them all in fine detail - and of course sending them back to us all marked up and full of questions, which puts us back at square one. We’re often criticized for the slow pace at which we accomplish things and this is one reason why - we can’t get communications out the door in a reasonable amount of time - and yet he Just. Can’t. Stop.
What makes you think you are in a position to determine if those rules makes sense? There may be regulatory or operational needs that you aren’t aware of. You might not be in a position to see the entire process.
What would rather do? Fill out the application form once or get asked to fill one out a hundred more times after you get fired for non-compliance?
The company isn’t asking you to commit war crimes. Just fill out the stupid form like you are told.
I mean seriously. 90% of the work anyone does is part of some sort of bureaucratic process.
Also, standard applications do ask for information that isn’t typically found on resumes, and the one that seems most important to me is “Reason for Leaving.” Anyone can get laid off from a job through no fault of their own, but pretty much every employer also knows that “laid off” can be a code word for “fired.” If an applicant has been “laid off” from almost every job he or she has had, that’s a definite red flag - and one that won’t pop up while reading a resume. A resume is basically a marketing piece, and it serves one purpose - to get you an interview. It’s not a fundamental hiring document as an application is.
I’ve never worked at a company where the job application form was actually part of the hiring decision-making process. Usually it’s just a form you hand to the receptionist while you’re waiting for your interview. The actual decision is made by the people who conduct the interview. And if they are doing their job properly, they will get into the details about why you are left those companies.
It’s been a while since I was job-hunting, but there was a time (like 25 years ago) when people would go to businesses that had advertised for help and simply fill out an application in hopes of being called in for an interview. They might also have dropped off a resume with it, if they had one. I’m not talking upper management positions here; the example I used was for a clerical job. As the hiring manager, I would review the applications and decide who among them I wanted to call in for an interview. By reading the applications, I could weed out people with, for example, repeated, consistent “layoffs,” or people whose previous income levels were widely separated from what the job I was hiring for was paying, and not waste their time or mine by having them in for an interview at all.
In the situation I described earlier in the thread, the woman was responding in person to my ad for an office clerk. I hadn’t asked her to come in for an interview; she had just shown up at the office to apply based on my newspaper ad. When asked to fill out an application, she argued that we didn’t need one, because her resume had all the information we needed. As has been widely discussed in this thread, that wasn’t her call to make. I’m the one doing the hiring, and I will decide what forms, information, etc. I need to make a hiring decision. If she demonstrates that she thinks she knows better than I do, as she did, then she is not going to get hired.
I guess the process might be a bit different today with applications over the internet being the initial contact. But while I’ve seen application sites that will auto-fill information from your resume into an online application, in many cases there is also additional information that needs to be filled in, including things like reason for leaving the job and previous pay levels. It would be up to the mechanics of the site as to whether you can even submit the online application without filling in all the required blanks, but even if you can, I’m thinking that failing to do so would significantly reduce your chances of getting called in for an interview.
You’re right that a good interviewer will question these things in person during the interview; that would be the case whether or not the information is provided on the application form. The problem is with the attitude of the person applying; if they want to argue that they know better what information I need than I do, I have to assume they will maintain the same difficult attitude in performing their duties should I hire them. That’s not someone I want to have to deal with having as an employee.
And it goes both ways: if I get an application form which still asks “military service fulfilled (Y/N)” in 2016, that is, 20 years after the military service joined the dodo… that’s telling me I’m not dealing with the most innovative company around. They might be a bit petrified, actually.
On the other hand, if I see a company whose program autofills stuff from my resume and asks me to review it, heck, that would be a few miles up from most online submission programs.
The process itself tells the candidate a lot about the company.
Well, obviously, if something gives you red flags about the company, you’re free to not apply, or to exit the hiring process at any point. Which, of course, guarantees that you won’t get the job. And that might be OK if you’ve determined that this isn’t a company you want to work for. I think, though, that there’s a presumption as we discuss this topic that the applicant actually *wants *to get the job.
At the same time, if you are eliminating companies based on being unwilling to fulfill requirements that the majority of companies are asking for, you will probably have a very hard time finding a job at all. At some point, personal economics may force you to make some compromises rather than starve to death on your own terms.
Or like some that I’ve seen: asking for date of high school graduation as well as major (who had a major in high school?!) or area of focus and GPA. On applications for senior-level professional jobs that require a college degree (so read: at least 8 years in the past)! High school grades have no relevance after someone has completed college and is well established in a career. You only make yourself look stupid by asking that stuff.
Nothing to do with military training really applies in the civilian workplace. For a DI bullying, at least psychologically, is a responsibility. Training to the highest possible stress levels is essential.