Anyone who has applied for jobs (particularly with Governments, it seems) will be familiar with the hoop-jumping and insane amount of paperwork to apply for a position that- it will often invariably turn out- has already been promised to the person currently filling the role on a temporary basis/Susan from Accounting/Ashok the Intern/etc, and as such, they’ve got no intention of hiring an external candidate and are only advertising the position because they’re legally required to.
I can’t help but think that the legal requirement to advertise every. single. vacancy should be scrapped, and that the only positions legally required to be advertised are the truly vacant- there’s no-one in line for the job, no-one doing it “temporarily” who actually wants (or can do) the job. As in, every person who applies for that job knows they (theoretically) have some chance of actually getting it, assuming they’re qualified.
Certainly, this would save a lot of work for HR (they’re not going through screeds of resumes from every Tom, Dick, and Harriet applying for the job regardless of whether they can do it or not), for qualified job seekers (who aren’t wasting their time and resources doing up applications for near-phantom jobs), and for companies (who aren’t having to pay to advertise jobs that they’ve already got someone for).
So, do you think that companies should be required to advertise jobs they’ve already got someone for (as they currently are), or is it time for a change?
Companies, AFAIK, don’t have any such legal obligation.
Governments and public institutions do, and should. It is illegal to promise someone a government job, and hiring should not be left to the personal whims of department managers.
But it was done. The way it was done when I was a Fed is that the manager tried to get the job description so specific that almost no one except the “pet” candidate would qualify. Sometimes that was more or less impossible because the pet was an unskilled moron. Anyway, the job would come open for as brief a time as legally required, and all would hope that a truly qualified person wouldn’t see it. If there was an application from a much better candidate for a job than the pet, they would decide not to hire anyone, close the position and wait six months or so before posting again. Hopefully the really good candidate would have found something else in the meantime.
A good HR department can prevent this kind of shit from happening. Unfortunately many of them collude with management to make it more the norm rather than the exception.
While companies may not be legally obligated to do this, in some their rules say that they do anyhow, though sometimes the post may be limited to internal people. There are plenty of good reasons for the policy. Besides the obvious favoritism, a lazy manager might promote someone near by, when there is a better qualified person elsewhere in the company, who can be found with small small effort.
But if you think posts for a favorite candidate are laughers, try writing one for an H1B being converted to Green Card status.
Most of the jobs are taken before being advertised, but there are thousands posted, so you could get lucky. Situation is much worse at State and Local levels where the oversight is even worse.
Even in NSW, where I believe the OP resides, the state government is under no obligation to advertise jobs it is just one of the methods available to fill the job.
It’s not useless. It just takes a long time to first, find the right job for you (for which you qualify); then, jump through all the application hoops; then, go through the extensive interview process (maybe as many as four or five interviews); then, hope that no hiring freeze is put into place when you are this close to getting hired (happened to my hubby). Etc. etc. etc.
Yes, there are thousands of jobs on the site. But it seems like everyone wants a federal job. And for each job they post, preference is given to people who are already federal employees. Other preference is given with various agencies. For instance, to work at the VA hospital, yeah, anyone can apply, but preference is given to actual veterans. If they can’t fill the position with a veteran, then preference falls to other federal employees who aren’t veterans. Then it would be open to the public at large. But they’re all posted on there anyway.
Actually, applying for fed jobs isn’t too much different from playing the lottery. . .:eek:
Actually, I’m in Queensland, and I’ve been told by several sources that there’s either a legislative requirement or a Government Policy (which is near enough to the same thing) that all positions be advertised externally, even if they’ve already got someone in mind for the position.
My understanding is that this is a legacy of the early post Bjelke-Petersen years, but even so, it’s still frustrating to spend a great deal of time and effort applying for jobs that really aren’t available to external candidates. Personally, I’d prefer they didn’t bother with the charade that there was a job opening for external applicants unless they really were looking for someone and there was nobody currently in the department who could/would do the job.
The hoops, impossible or contradictory job requirements, and guess-the-magic-number games that need to be jumped through to get a Government job here makes me truly wonder how the Government manages to employ anyone sometimes.
I agree with the OP. They should just do it like they used to do and hired the brother-in-law or whatnot. At least with that system, they didn’t waste MY time filling out the apps and going to useless interviews just so they could hire the family member while they satisfied their own masturbatory fantasies about how “fair” they were while being decidedly unfair.
My favorite trick in this regard is a job description where you must know some custom, 3rd party software application that was written specifically for that particular government agency six months ago. Something that nobody in the world could possibly know unless you have worked in that one office in the last six months.
Yet, our elected officials pat themselves on the back about how fair the process is. Ridiculous.
But none of these reasons are served by soliciting applications for a position that is already guaranteed to go to someone else, as the OP stipulated. Unless the decision makers are actually compelled to consider the other applicants, it is a cruel waste of their time (and secondarily, a waste of the organization’s resources).
On the other hand, employers should have some leeway in who they hire. Taking existing relationships and company loyalty into account is not always a bad thing. The best candidate on paper and in an interview may not be a good fit within a particular work group.
Not quite “promised”. They have “pre-selected” an insider- encouraged them to apply and so forth. Sometimes it happens that the preferred candidate decides they don’t want the job after all and withdraws (in which case the opening is often but not always canceled). But yes, your chances are tiny for a single position.
usajobs.gov is not useless for finding jobs at all, as quite a few positions are “mass hirings”. For example, IRS agents are often hired in groups. Now sure, in that class of 20 or even 200, there may be a good number of insiders, but they really want outsiders to apply and get hired.
My point was that in general the position should not be promised to anyone else (unless it is a promotion from within the group). The situation should not come up. (And in my experience there is no solicitation for jobs being filled by group members.)
The requirement should be to actually look at the resumes coming in, not to force a company to hire from them. In reality, there will always be favoritism, but without the requirement it will always be fixed and even a great candidate won’t have a shot.
I don’t know a single person who has managed to get a full-time job in the Civil Service here, and the hiring process is so long the one or two I know who have gotten an interview eventually give up and get a job in the private sector because it was taking forever (quite literally months), and this was for a mid-level management positions that they were patently qualified for.
I secured a publicly-advertised public-sector job in WA as an exeternal applicant, in competition against what I believe was the “favoured” insider who was already acting in post.
Public sector recruitment processes in Australia are tedious and bureaucratic, and there’s no doubt that it helps to have some guidance in how to apply and how to present. It’s quite different from the typical private sector recruitment process. But - in marked contrast to the private sector, in my experience - there is a serious and structured effort to be objective about the requirements of the position, to be fair to all the applicants, and to appoint the best qualified applicant.
Some years ago we actually hired a great candidate whose resume came in response to an H1B posting. Not instead of the person we wanted, but in addition to. So, it can happen.
I once had a somewhat similar situation come up in the private sector (big corporation).
We had an opening for administrative assistant and we knew that a certain word processor on our staff wanted to switch into this job. But everyone already knew her and there were concerns about her attitude, and we pretty much decided that she would not be hired for the AA job. But people felt she should be “allowed to apply” and go through the interview process, because we “had to be fair”.
I felt this was a phony fairness, and in reality she was just being allowed to get her hopes up and wasting her time and energy only to be disapointed later. But I was surprised to find that this viewpoint was not well received. People seemed to think they were being genuinely fair to this person by wasting her time in this manner. Plus, some people suggested, there might be legal issues involved. And when I really pressed the issue, the main opponent of hiring her (a pretty high up guy in our division) allowed that well actually you never know maybe there’s some remote possibility that she could change his mind. Right.
(As it turned out, she interviewed, and was not hired, based on the same issue that was originally discussed.)
If I recall correctly, my wife was once hired for a job where her first task was to interview the other candidates for her position. Given that she already had the job, this was a total waste of her time and theirs - but form had to be followed.
(I say “if I recall correctly” because it was before we were married, and we’re coming up on 25 years…)
Since I’ve had my time wasted and hopes dashed recently, I tend to agree with the OP. I applied for an internal transfer within our huge corporation - a somewhat sideways move, but a change is as good as a holiday. Long story short, the job went to the guy who had been doing the role “temporarily” since the previous guy left. Now I have no idea whether I was in with a shot or not, but I could certainly have done without all the rigmarole (including having to discuss it with my boss because it was internal) if it was a done deal.
That being said, unless the annointed one is ideal for the role it’s always a good idea to see who else is around. Having the rule that every position is advertised is also a good way to avoid the unpleasantness of having to tell someone who thinks they are entitled to a position that you are looking externally (because you don’t think they are good enough).
But really, if is a fait accompli, it’s much kinder for all concerned, and certainly cheaper, to just fill the position and be done with it.
Perhaps to avoid the Bjelke-Petersen era type of corruption (I still shudder when I read his name) there should be a formal waiver system where a nominally independent role can assess whether the natural successor for a job is good enough to warrant bypassing the normal recruiting processes.
I think like many things the “requirement” is a rather blunt tool with good intentions driving it.
There would be very few people that would like to see a return to daddy getting son an entry level job upon graduation, then due to “internal” only job postings son advances through ranks even if he is incompetent. The requirement to list all jobs goes some way towards getting round this - it at least makes people consider, andd more importantly justify, their decisions.
I think it is largely like anti-discrimination legislation in that regard - if you are a sexist pig, you are still going to hire who you want for the job, but the legislation at least makes you think about your attitudes and have some sort of rational judgement for it.
That, I think, is a really good idea. Avoids the worst of the nepotism/cronyism, but also saves a lot of hassle for everyone by being able to say “The person temporarily filling this job is fine, make them permanent” or whatever.