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U.S.Laws May Make Online Job Hunting Harder

Posted by Zonk on from the hunting-down-that-scourge dept.

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.'"

3 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. Might be difficult.... by SIGALRM · · Score: 5, Insightful
    According to this definition, an applicant must "express interest" in the job... That "expression of interest" must show that he or she has all the qualifications for the job listed in the company's job description (not just some or most of them)...
    By this definition, it's going to be difficult to "express interest" in the job listings for most tech companies, which are often loaded with specific qualifications (i.e. "Perl, JavaScript 1.0, Quark, MS Office, and Doom 3 experience"). I've never been to an interview for a job I eventually landed where I met 100% of their qualifications.
    --
    Sigs cause cancer.
    1. Re:Might be difficult.... by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's cynical, but I believe they do this to make all of their applicants underqualified. That gives them a reason to pay them less than top of the scale. Where they list the job as $50,000-$75,000, you don't have the required 14 years of .Net experience so you're going to have to accept the $52,000.

      On the other hand, I know that some managers just don't understand it well enough to write a good position description. I've had to write several PDs (sometimes for a job I was leaving, sometimes for a position I was hiring, and finally sometimes because the higher-ups didn't like my level of job security). It's usually best done by someone who can do the job himself, but the next best thing is to define the roles and very basic requirements - will need to create web applications in a Linux-based environment.

      Just because it could be done in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, or Java doesn't mean you have to list all of those. And if the language hasn't been selected yet, why bother listing it at all? There are excellent developers with PHP and Ruby experience that will be turned off from the suggestion that they need to use Java.

  2. Ok, I'm lost. by Kawolski · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From TFA: To comply with these new rules and get the most diversity, employers will have an incentive to keep the pool of applicants for each job relatively small and as random as possible.

    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.