Slashdot Mirror
U.S.Laws May Make Online Job Hunting Harder
j00bar writes "CNN/Fortune is reporting that applying for a job online is going to get harder. 'New federal guidelines meant to standardize how employers track data on the diversity of their job-applicant pool are taking effect starting today for jobs at federal contractors -- and similar rules will kick in later this year at U.S. companies with more than 50 employees. And resumes and search approaches that worked perfectly well before may no longer do the trick.'"
Sigs cause cancer.
So in order to get a more diverse and random selection of applicants, we're going to shrink the qualified applicant pool by making it more difficult to apply for a job? Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to increase diversity? I would think that if you want a more diverse selection, you would want to increase the qualified applicant pool so you have more people to choose from.
It is our place and decision to run online employment boards how we see fit and put up descriptions of our jobs and post our skills to our own likings. We are free to find the people who we think may be good at the job by looking at their resume
Plus, what the crap, if I "apply" for a job online they look at my resume and they talk to me, they setup and interview. Now if some @#*(%& employer hires an employee purely based off what is said of a bleeding website then they deserve a crappy employee.
IMHO, of course.
Menya zovut Shnur
Instead of online job applications remaining relatively unbiased by age, race, culture, or even gender in some cases, now US guidelines are going to require that you specify if your are a minority, culture preference, a woman, your age, and other statistics that will force employers not to hire the best candidates, but to fulfill diversity quotas.
Good one.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Searching and applying for jobs online is already difficult enough. With applicant pools numbering in the thousands for many jobs, it's already a royal pain in the ass to get in for an interview. Aside from that, even if you do get an interview it might be one of those "well, we know we won't hire this one but we need to interview X number of people" and you end up being asked such illustrious questions as "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?" (yes, an actual interview question for a part-time job at $8.50/hr).
Keep your resume up-to-the-minute current. "The rules allow companies to pick a random pool of applicants by searching the job boards for 'most recent' qualified applicants," Crispin notes. "In those cases, no one will even look at a resume that is more than two or three weeks old." Yikes.
Oh whatever, if the company is looking for someone with experience that most don't have they are going to look closely at the resumes. If anyone can do the job in the applicant pool they aren't going to care one way or the other.
For the jobs that I have interviewed for through monster.com and careerbuilder.com applications, I have received a few offers -- none of which bettered my current job security and benefits (the pay was better).
We don't need laws to make it more difficult to find work -- we need laws that make the jobs we have better than they already are.
To totally hose a good system to make it "fair" to people. Sorry, applying for jobs is not a "random" process. Both the worker and the company want what is best for them. picking people at "random" hurts the applicant and the company by bad pairings. way to go dc, inefficency is key!
This is a big deal and the only reference is this story. I could find nothing else. The story doesn't answer the diversity subject. BS I say.
There are a lot of scare phrases in that article which are typically used to drum up business for consultants. I would talk to your Legal Dept (for a bigger employer) or CPA (for a small employer) before trashing every resume in the Inbox.
sPh
...another excuse for businesses to outsource. I can see the comments now: "There aren't any qualified applicants out there, so we're forced to seek the expertise elsewhere".
Hey, lawmakers, how about similar restrictions on outsource criteria? Perhaps something along the lines of less than 10% of the workforce can be under the age of 10, half the workforce must be female, etc.
"With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker." - President Bush, Feb.1, 2006
It is also illegal to hire an illegal alien in the US. How many businesses got fined for doing that last year nation wide? The answer is somewhere between 1 and 0. This will be ignored.
My God folks, the article offers no clue whatsoever about where this supposed set of rules is coming from. No Legislative reference, no Government department - Nothing.
Then it spins into a collection of rather bizarre "tips" for job applicants, most of which don't really seem to have anything to do with the alleged changes in government hiring practices, or even reality.
Even for slashdot this is pretty weak.
Three Squirrels
So you're saying that because generations of EUROPEAN whites engaged in villainous acts, it's ok to punish their ancestors?
What's that saying about two wrongs...
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I think we can all see from real-world examples such as Wal-mart how necessary this is. Corporations are out to make a dollar, the only reason they have in the current market to keep their workforce diversified is to avoid getting sued. Hopefully this will make sure that more subtle discrimination is kept in check.
What nonsense. If a corporation was only hiring people "to make a dollar," then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible. You know, hiring people based on their actual merit. For that matter, if "making a dollar" is partly accomplished by lowering your overhead, then hiring the people willing to work for the least (in non-demanding retail positions, for example) would also be standard practice... and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants. So, no need to worry about quotas, right?
Or, am I confused about what you think is the "subtle discrimination" as it relates to how a corporation "makes a buck?" How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck? Or are you making a very sly, dubious, stealthy comment implying that minorities aren't as able to help an employer make a buck? Make some damn sense, or be more honest about your biases.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I always claim "asian" because my grandparents were from Siberia.
Oh, and just because I hate it, it's NIGGER.
When you say "N-word" as some lame attempt to avoid using it, you empower the "n-word" in exactly the same way. Stop doing that.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
...an overbearing, overweening, unresponsive , unaccountable government.
*You* elected 'em.
Think before voting, next time.
Try holding your fave politicians ACCOUNTABLE for once. Sure, career bureaucrats are responsible, but they are told what to do BY CONGRESS.
- A disgusted native-American male-lesbian libertarian activist
In spite of:
.NET, VB, SQL Development
- 20 years professional experience.
- 7 years IT manager
- C, C++, C#,
- 10+ years project management
No interviews or contact whatsoever.
The only way to really get response is through personal and direct contacts with firm you are interested in.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
My ancestors were European peasants as far back as we can trace it (the 30 years war, around the time of the Mayflower). They did not enslave or harm anybody, they were mostly trying to scrape together a living while armies marauded through Europe, and I would say that that's the typical European ancestry. You can't blame your troubles on me or my ancestors.
But many of those "white Europeans" that you are so fond of complaining about didn't come to the US to rape and pillage, they were facing starvation or execution (often for petty offenses) in Europe and were effectively also slaves in the US; when they finally managed to free themselves, of course, they did whatever it took to survive. Likewise, many (most?) of those Africans that were sent to the US as slaves weren't captured and transported by white Europeans, they were enslaved and shipped over to the US by other Africans.
Finally, I ask you: what notions of human rights and liberty have non-Europeans produced? Prior to the age of European empires, much of the world consisted of traditional tribal cultures, and the few big cultures like India and China were ossified, stratified, and had made racism and classism an integral part of their culture. If you view Islam as a non-European culture, then it has perhaps the closest claim of any of the other cultures to recognizing human rights and liberty, but that's a distant second to what European philosophers and humanists produced.
Take a 1 mile walk from a primarily black and latino flatlands Oakland Ca school, where the average school size is 600 -700 kids in a K-5 elementary school and where the average teacher at some schools has LESS THAN TWO FRICKIN YEARS of teaching experience and where some 5th grade kids I know have had first year teachers every day they have been in school, to a primarily white and asian hills school where average school size is 350 kids and average teacher experience is upwards of 15 years, and where the teacher salary differential means the average DISTRICT spending is over $1,000 per year per kid more and outside funding is also nearly $1,000 per student per year greater, and then tell me about institutional racism. Get as outraged about that as you are about 'institutional racism aagaisnt whites', and I may believe you actually care about institutional racism, and are not just whining about a minor bit of personal barrier you marginally encounter after being given a massive advantage agaisnt many, many potentially competitive kids who get destroyed in those institutionally disadvantaged schools. Until then (and yes, I'm being disruptively rude here; live with it. This kind of shit pissed me off.) just f*ck off.
these companies aren't that stupid. They know that no one credible either has those skill sets due to calendaring issues, nor would they take a job that cheap. It is so they can meet the fed requirements for using H1B's. The fed doofuses looking at it don't know, that's all they have to fake out, not any legit job applicant who would know those are BS requirements. They can say they made due dilligence to try and find a legal resident to take their job and were "forced" to import half a dozen foreign imports who they put up in a cheap apartment someplace for cheap bucks.
I usually check "Other" and write in "Human".
-Jed