The Entire Industry of Corporate Recruiting and HR is Ridiculous

In My Humble Opinion
1

First of all, this isn’t really a rant about my job search. It’s going well enough precisely because I have more or less been avoiding the entire Corporate Recruiting-HR-Job Search Industrial Complex as much as possible. However, I do find myself, on occassion, getting calls from recruiters and my previous employer was kind enough to give everyone who was laid off free access to a professional job placement service for three months.

Conventional wisdom implies that when one is looking for a job, they perform the following steps:

  1. Write a well crafted resume
  2. Go to the want-ads, job boards, company web site job postings and other sources of leads that hiring managers have so dilligently posted
  3. Talk to a knowledgable recruiter who will use the latest technology to match your career goals and talents with a job that perfectly suits you
  4. Eventually your perfectly tailored resume will be an exact match for your ideal job and you will be called in for an interview by an HR rep who probably has little knowledge about the job, the skills required or anything else about what will actually qualify you for the job
  5. Talk to one or more hiring managers who will proceed to ask you probing questions testing your technical abilities and aptitude for the position
  6. As the most prepared and best qualified candidate, you will get the job and then proceed to salary negotiations
  7. Profit!

And clearly this is all complete bullshit. If any of this worked, “networking” wouldn’t be the most widely successful strategy. Networking really means “I don’t feel like going through all that bullshit with HR, let’s just hire this guy I know.” So clearly the best strategy is to be that guy he knows.

So this is what I have seen in my career:

  1. Everyone gives the same trite, contradictory advice so that your resume “stands out”. Of course, if everyone’s resume stands out in the same way, no one really does. They don’t want resumes to stand out. Would I get hired if I wrote my resume on a florescent orange painted 2x2ft slab of concrete? Or sent a 4’ high poster to HR? No. Every recruiter, job search book author, career consulting, HR employee and everyone else associated with the Corporate Recruiting-HR-Job Search Industrial Complex advises you to craft your resume in the same “action word” style that everyone else uses.

  2. Clearly the internet has created an oportunity for thousands of people to swamp HR with resumes for positions they are nowhere near qualified for. So it is not surprising that most don’t bother to post ads anywhere. Maybe the bigger ones go through the motions as part of some compliance thing.

  3. Some recruiters are ok but this last woman who called me the other day was a complete simpleton. She clearly had no idea about anything having to do with the industry she was representing and she laughed like an idiot. Stupid questions like “can you provide managerial references” or “can you pass a drug test”. Can you?!! I’m not some kid right out of school. I didn’t care what job she had, I didn’t want her representing me.

  4. So I’m talking to my new complementary career counselor the other day. She’s going over my resume which has already been looked over and critiqued by 4 or 5 other professionals. Of course she has to add her nonsensical feedback. Right…because if I shorten that paragraph, or rephrase this “objectives” section, that will make all the difference. “I see you had a lot of jobs” Well what would be an ideal number of jobs? One? Ten? How many years should I stay at a job? Maybe the only companies I can get hired at are run so poorly they have massive layoffs 18 months after I’m hired? Do you really care about what I did at a bunch of tech startups from 1996-2001?

The point is, at this stage the goal is to prove to some HR drone who will arbitrarily review your resume like a sorority girl selecting pledges for fall rush. She will know nothing about anything other than how well your resume conforms to what I described in Step 1.

  1. Here is the difficult part. Because in spite of what the job search books say, there is a good chance the person interviewing you a) doesn’t give a shit, b) doesn’t want to be there c) really doesn’t know how to interview d) is going to judge you on mostly superficial stuff anyway, provided you don’t say anything stupid.

  2. And ultimately it will come down to whether they like you or not. It’s almost as if companies would be better off not going through the motions of a formal, well thought out recruiting process and just treat hiring like some sort of fraternity rush event (which many do). You will have no idea if you didn’t get hired because you are too agressive, not quiet, too technical, too salesy, not salesy enough, not technical enough, too corporate looking, not corporate looking enough, too old, too young, too not White, or the hiring manager’s friend from college is also interested in the job.
    So I think I’ll stick to calling old college buddies, former coworkers and other networking contacts.

2

All that, and don’t wear a polo shirt to any interviews. :wink:

3

I think this should be on 60 minutes or some other such show. I’ve felt this way for sometime now. Especially about the internet applications overloading the system.

4

Nor should you. You want to make a good impression and stand out by wearing the same dark blue or gray suit and white shirt & tie as every single other candidate.

5

When I posted my resume on Monster I was contact by over 200 “recruiters” within 24 hours. All of them were opportunists, who wanted to “represent” me for the same 12-15 positions -> also advertised on Monster.

Are there seriously any people making money this way?

I didn’t get a job until I ditched my recruiter. I think in this economy the companies see no reason to pay their fees. Why should they when 756 people just sent resumes just on the corporate website posting?

6

A couple of years ago, I think, msmith537, I read a post of yours in which you said that the HR yahoos at your then-current company had no idea how to access the bank of resumes in their computer. And this wasn’t the first time I had heard such a rumor.

Warned by this, when an absolutely ideal position for my husband came up, we not only submitted an application through the employer’s online job application process, we did a lot of research and found the name of the head of the department which was hiring. We sent a carefully and professionally crafted personal letter to that guy as well.

Well, my husband got the job and this week is his one-year anniversary. There’s no way of knowing if the letter turned the scales but I felt a lot more secure when we weren’t completely relying on their online process. God knows how many resumes exist in that big company’s computer system.

7

Excellent rant, and I agree with all of it. However, networking isn’t just about the hiring manager hiring someone he knows (there are seldom enough of them to go around.) Networking is about you becoming someone the hiring manager knows so he hires you.
I’ve gotten several people jobs through their networking with me. It does work. Even better, it works well because most people are too lazy to do it.

8

That’s true. I was trying to hire people into our group and wanted to access resumes submitted through our corporate web site. No one could tell me how to access them. Even worse that our corporate recruiters were telling every candidate at campus job fairs they should apply online.

9

I’ve had extremely good luck with my recruiter. My last two jobs and something like ten interviews were found by her, and she also helped me negotiate the moving and hiring bonuses.

Of course, it helps that I’m in a very specific field. Before I became so in-demand, I couldn’t find a good recruiter at all.

10

**msmith537 **- our skills sets and work histories seem to have some overlap. If you want to network, my email is in my profile.

HR and recruiting processes, such as they are, are indeed a lot of trouble - but that is true about pretty much any human endeavor where the bureaucracy overtakes the main purpose…

11

That is all true. I will only speak to three headhunters these days because I trust them (as much as you can trust a headhunter which is about the same as a used car salesman). I get calls from India and I just tell them that I already have a job at a made-up company and to call me back in 15 years. You can run into a serious problem with double submissions of your resume. The companies don’t know who to pay a commission to if you get hired so they usually just avoid the hassle and ignore you.

My best luck getting jobs has been one interview and being hired on the spot because of some desperate situation. The longer the process drags out, the worse it gets. It costs actual money to go through a long interview process which you probably don’t have that much of if you are unemployed.

12

This is also the logic used to calculate credit scores. You either have too many or too few credit cards / accounts. You either don’t use the cards enough, or you use them too frequently. Sometimes you may use them the right amount, but you use them for the wrong things. You pay off things too slowly, except when you pay them off too fast. You want to have a lot of open available credit, unless of course you have too much. Etc.

13

It’s the resume bullshit that got me. Every single “recruiter” that I talked with wanted me to alter my resume. Every single one.

I finally said, “Y’know, this is a good resume. It lists my abilities and my accomplishments, and it is written and formatted in a style that accurately reflects my personality. I won’t alter it, please send it to your client as is.” I would hope that the fact that I got the job demonstrated something to the kid doing the critiquing, but I’m not holding my breath.

14

Unfortunately, what I’ve seen of Corporate HR over the length of my career (since 1980) is that the field consists of mostly 20-something women that would have been Secretaries in days gone by, but are now shunted into HR. They have ZERO experience in any kind of job other than HR. They know nothing at all about the jobs they’re hiring for, they know nothing at all about being on the wrong end of the stick.

They spend 10 years doing lowly menial paper pushing in HR, glazing over resumes and listening to other people bitch, with no power or authority to do anything, no life experience, and no work experience of being on the other side of the desk.

Then they get promoted to senior HR positions, where they finally have the authority to do something about something, but they still have zero experience being on the other side of the desk and, after 10 years of hearing only the bad shit, no longer have any empathy.

This is not a recipe for Good HR.

15

H/R is there to protect the company’s interest from it’s own employees, in reality. Oh yes they go on about finding good candidates and things but that ain’t how it works.

I’ve worked in H/R and my job consisted of 9.95% of finding ways to protect the company from employees who want or may choose to sue it, or find some other reason to make trouble.

The H/R staff I worked with have never been effective. When I used to hire I got so sick of getting handed candidates for interviews that were so bad, I gave up and said, let me pick the resumes first.

16

Sorry for the hijack, but this is a question I have been meaning to ask. I have certainly noticed that this is how H/R works today. Has it always been that way or is it a more recent thing? I don’t remember it being like this when I first started working, but then again I had just started working – what did I know?

17

Your OP is a work of Art, but I wanted to add my hearty endorsement to this part of it.

So what if you’ve had a lot of jobs? Does it really matter if you worked at several McJobs 10 years ago when you were an undergrad? Is it your fault that several places you worked at went belly-up? What does it matter where you worked a decade ago anyway?

Government Jobs are particularly bad at this, demanding you list every job you’ve ever had. I’m sorry, I just don’t remember the supervisor’s name from a local tourist attraction I worked at over the summer holidays 1998-1999, and even if I did remember their name, there’s almost no chance they still work there, and in the staggeringly unlikely event they are still working there, there’s even less chance they’ll remember who I am.

Similarly, it’s a bit pointless listing a beachside cafe you worked at years ago that no longer exists because they demolished it and built luxury apartments on top of it, IMHO.

I’m convinced most jobs come from networking these days, FWIW.

18

My brother once went to an interview for International Finance Manager wearing clean white jeans, a clean new heavyweight-cotton white T-shirt with no emblems or publicity, white running shoes, a red bandanna and an orange sash which had been red when it was new as a belt.

The interviewer, once he’d been able to stop laughing, opened a desk drawer and showed Bro his own white jeans, red bandanna and white not-so-new T-shirt.

[spoiler]Interview in Pamplona during the Sanfermines, Bro lives in a town nearby, but not close enough to go change in between the interview and meeting our cousins for lunch. He figured if someone from Pamplona takes offence at seeing someone in traditional red-and-white during the Sanfermines, that someone should get tarred, feathered and driven out of town.

He did get the job, it’s the one he currently has.[/spoiler]

A few years back I was in a position similar to the OP. Female engineer with 10 years experience in international environments and the “helpful” woman from the agency wanted me to scrounge my CV into one page and wear a pencil-skirt navy blue suit and while blouse to interviews. She had problems understanding that engineers don’t usually dress like that, at least in Spain, therefore it wouldn’t make sense to dress like that for an interview.

How do you convince people that you’re a bellwhether? By dressing like a woolly sheep…

19

At the risk of being the “telemarketer” from famous posts gone by, I have to defend my profession a bit. Currently i am a professional recruiter in an agency (headhunter), and I have been in a coporate recruiting/ HR role as well. As a matter of fact, due to the economy, I lost my job as a corporate recruiter about 16 months ago, so I got to go through the whole job search process from the other side of the desk as well, and it can be ridiculous.

To answer someone’s question, it is really difficult to make money as an agency recruiter right now, but if you are a recruiter, that is most likely where you are working, since not many corporations are viable enough right now to have a recruiting staff.

This falls to an HR asst or generalist who is probably juggling a dozen other things, including trying to protect their company from themselves or a former employee who got laid off, and is desperate for money, so he/she is looking to sue the former employer any way they can. Couple this with improperly trained people outside of HR that have the ability to make hiring and firing decisions, and it becomes a nightmare quickly. Reading every single word of your resume is not their highest priority in many cases.

Chances are, if they have posted a job, then they have had an incredible crush of responses from both qualified and delusional candidates. If they are the average recruiter, they probably don’t have much idea of what the job actually does, but they have been told the highlights by a hiring manager, so they are looking for the magic words, along with decent tenures, and other red flags that can get your resume kicked to the curb. With the market being as full of candidates as it is, employers are being ten times as picky as they have been in a long time, and most likely they are not going to take the time to give you the chance to explain yourself or your short tenures/ change of career path from nurse to engineer to call center manager. Is it the right way to do things? Probably not, but there has to be some efficiency.

From an agency/ career coach perspective, there are a few motivations for ahving you tailor your resume. Above all else, they want to save themselves the time of doing it for you. Their clients are most likely looking for 7-10 key phrases that demonstrate experience or competency, and they don’t want to send them a resume without those on it. They may also be working for an account manager in their own agency that will not send a resume without these 7-10 things on it. The other side of this is that the recruiter wants to see your commitment to this job, so they ask you to put the investment in. It may seem like a manipulative thing to do, and it is to a degree, but if you are in recruiting, you have encountered enough flakes that you have to test the commitment of the candidate to follow through.

As far as the references/ drug test questions- the recruiter has an information sheet they are filling out. they don’t like to ask these questions, because they know they sound like a moron to people who can provide refs, and people who can pass a drug test, etc. However, the one time that they do not ask this, they are going to get burned. It happens more than you would expect too. We have had several people fail drug screens in the past few months, including an engineer who tested positive for cocaine.

The ideal number of jobs depends on your field and what the client is looking for. A good recruiter will undrstand that there is some volatility inherent to certain sectors, and even certain jobs. However, it is the candidate’s responsibility to justify anything that looks like a red flag. In most cases. the recruiter is getting paid by the client, not by the candidate, so they do not feel like they owe you one single thing. It is their job to screen people out, and get the right fit in front of the hiring manager with the least amount of questions attached. If they present someone’s resume to a client that has some job-hopping, the client is going to ask about it, and the recruiter needs to have a good answer, and this answer has to be backed up by the candidate if they get an interview.

Point 5 can be very correct- many people have no idea how to conduct an interview, it is not an area that a lot of people have extensive training in, even if they are professional recruiters. And yes, they are looking for superficial clues and hoe a person’s personality will mesh into the organizational culture. I have turned away many people who were very qualified based on their lack of ability to interact with anything that has a funtioning brain. If you appear annoyed by dumb questions, then chances are they are going to kick you to the curb.

Interview dress should be professional, always 2 steps higher than what you would wear on the job, unless you typicall are weraing a suit and tie daily. Yes, it may not be typically what is worn day to day, but interviewing is also not what you will be doing day to day on the job, it’s a special occasion. If you come in for an interview dressed like you are going to work, then you are sending the message that you don’t care enough about the opportunity to step up your game for it. The only case this is really understandable is if you are coming directly from a job, or in case of a special occasion, like referenced above.

20

After reading this thread, I’m going to go down to the “Talent Acquisition” department here and buy them all lunch. They’re awesome. They put up a opening for a Construction Supervisor and got 350 resumes the first day. Then they work all hours into the night reading resumes to cull out the handful who are actually qualified for the job. Then they do phone screening interviews to weed out those who exaggerated on their resumes, then spend days trying to corall the hiring manager to do interviews. Etc, etc.

Anyway, I (as a hiring manager) just did an interview this morning and the recruiter was fantastic. Apparently she’s an exception though, so I need to go thank her.