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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

If you’ve looked for a job recently you know the awful statistics: fewer than three out of every ten jobs are filled through normal channels.

Let me translate this for you: trying to get a job by sending your resume to Human Resources in response to an employment ad is a sucker bet.

The system is broken … badly broken … and the numbers prove it. What’s truly pitiful is that hiring managers don’t like the current state of affairs any more than job seekers do. If they did, the numbers would be very different.

Don’t believe me? Keep an eye out for “Ask the Headhunter: reinventing the interview to win the job” by Nick Corcodilos, which should be hitting the bookshelves this August. Nick has been in the headhunting game a long time, and has succeeded by ignoring most of the nonsense spouted by what he calls “the employment industry”. As Nick points out, “You will encounter many people who are not really the person who will hire you – they are the go-betweens who want you to hunt for a job in a way that’s convenient for them.”

Actually, he’s talking to both the applicant and the hiring manager, because when you’re hiring you’ll also deal with go-betweens.

That’s exactly what you want from HR, whether you’re looking or hiring: To connect the applicants most likely to succeed with the hiring managers who need them. Far too often, HR screens out the very people most likely to succeed instead: people who are stretching, who want a new challenge, who haven’t done the job you’re posting but who will do whatever it takes to succeed at it.

What’s the problem? In most companies, HR has an unstated mission: keep the company out of court. It does so in any number of ways: ensuring compliance with various employment laws; creating personnel handbooks so everyone “knows the rules”; helping managers define position requirements in terms of “objective” evaluation criteria; screening resumes to ensure hiring is done by strict skill-to-task matching … (which is now an automated process, give me strength!).

Keeping the company out of court is a Good Thing (GT, to use the acronym). Of course, people will sue you anyway, and in the meantime you’ve hired and promoted a lot of the wrong people, damaging your company’s ability to compete.

(Now before you flame me, let me draw a clear distinction between individual human resources professionals and the HR industry. I have quite a few friends who work in HR and as a whole they’re goodhearted people who seriously want to help both their employer and their coworkers succeed. Few are given a chance: their industry conspires to prevent it.)

Years ago a friend of mine, new to management, asked the most important consideration when hiring. “Hire a person, not a resume,” I told him. “The skills you’re looking for today won’t be the ones you’ll need next year, so find people with the right aptitude and a habit of succeeding. They’ll acquire whatever skills they need to succeed. Even better, they’ll do the jobs that need doing, not just the ones you think are important.”

I still think that was good advice. Here’s some more: when writing a job description be specific when it comes to attitude and tangible results, and as general as you can when defining skills. If you’re hiring a database administrator, for example, you don’t want someone who will turn into the “data police” and do want someone who thinks of the job as a way to make programmers more effective. Do you really care that her ten years of experience are in Sybase and Oracle while you use Informix?

Turn it around: if you’re a database administrator who knows Sybase and Oracle, do you avoid positions that will cause you to use Informix?

Nick Corcodilos will tell you more: that both applicant and hiring manager need to conduct interviews that are about doing the job. The applicant should do the job in the interview. The hiring manager should ask the applicant to do the job in the interview.

Because, in the end, you want to hire someone who can do the job, not someone who can do the interview.

Right?

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Facts are hazardous in this business, and I do my best to avoid them. Opinions are much safer.

Occasionally, though, something tangible belongs in the dialog, so here’s what an InfoWorld reader has to say. I’ve done a bit of editing to ensure anonymity. Otherwise, the text reads pretty much as I received it.

“I run IT for the Acme Corporation (yes, the one Wiley Coyote orders from). We’re semi-autonomous from the corporate DP department. DP wants to correct this condition. We don’t.

“My area manages 120 PCs, and have a total budget of $1.3 million, so there’s your $11K per PC. ‘Grand total’ includes a $400K tithe to DP (they figure their costs and send a non-negotiable bill). Do I split it out as ‘mainframe’ costs, ‘network’ costs, ‘PC service’ costs? No way. DP pretends to, but admits the numbers are largely made up.

“(I sometimes wonder how much is going to pay for their middle managers sitting around talking about ‘architecting the meta-data in the Zachmann Framework’, but then, I’m sometimes overly pragmatic.)

“Even in my own area, how do I separate the costs of projects from the infrastructure to make the projects work? Not everybody really needs networking, yet everybody gets Banyan, TCP/IP, SQL*Net middleware, because it’s cheaper, smarter, and pro-active to make sure anybody can run anything.

“And besides, the Big Bosses don’t want to hear breakdowns into cost categories they don’t understand in the first place. They take the grand total IT budget including all salaries and divide by the number of seats.

“And now the real bottom line for the big cheese: HE DOESN’T CARE. He has a $100 million/year business to run, so I’m 1.5% of his budget. He’s being nice to give me about 3% of his time, and he only gives me that because my area is ‘strategic’ and rapidly growing. As a line-business person, he’s much more concerned about the benefits than the costs, and he can see with his eyes closed that the benefits are much greater.

“It’s the full-time DP types who aren’t even connected to the business world who care about the costs. Every new machine, every new application, every new layer of middleware is another chore to them, another cost, another problem. They want to hold these down and speak much of simplification, homogenization, and limiting numbers of tool sets. Users agree in principle, but principles drop to the bottom of the priority list when a useful new application for their machine appears.

“I restrain the most enthusiastic end-users, but basically I’m on their side – even though their new uses are also new problems for me. I’m out in the business area and can also see the benefits.

“Sorry for the rant. I’m just trying point out the complexity. The accounting is the least interesting and important part.”

When you put your mental graphs on your mental wall, which of these measures do you chart: corporate value, IS costs, or your migraine level?

Look, I sympathize. Your headaches are my headaches. I feel your pain. (For that matter, my knee hurts, but that’s another subject.) Unfortunately, you’re paid to have headaches, and a reduction in your headache load doesn’t automatically translate to corporate value.

Reducing your costs doesn’t translate to corporate value either. If it did you’d resign immediately, reducing the cost of you to zero. You’d get rid of your headaches, too.

IS typically represents between 1% and 3% of a company’s total budget. Now be realistic here – how much of that can you really save by reducing your PC cost of ownership? The guess from here: even if you replace all your PCs with NCs and work really hard, your savings won’t amount to even a blip on the radar screen.

You have to decide where you’re going to focus your attention. You get much more leverage out of value creation than cost reduction. As reported last week, I once generated a 4,000% ROI with a single spreadsheet. Think of how much return you can generate by providing really great support for all of your company’s spreadsheet users.

And that’s just the tip of the old iceberg.

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