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Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects
krygny sends this quote from The Economist:
"The internet browser you are using to read this blog post could help a potential employer decide whether or not you would do well at a job. How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects? When choosing among job applicants, employers may be swayed by a range of factors, knowingly and unknowingly. ... Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, has suggested that there are better ways to identify the right candidate for job. ... Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome) perform better and stay in their posts for 15% longer, on average."
Specifically, both being able to install a browser and staying in your job longer could easily be caused by a third factor, namely not being an idiot.
I am officially gone from
From the article "A study of 20,000 workers showed that more honest people tend to perform better and stay at the job longer. For some reason, however, they make less effective salespeople."
Anybody surprised by this?
Did you really feel you had to defend yourself?
I bet you still have to submit your resume as a .doc file, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Nothing. Because you couldn't have gotten your online application put into their proprietary system.
He won't... that's the point.
This is just another arbitrary way to "weed out" candidates. You wonder why the screeching that "the U.S. has no qualified candidates" to do jobs... this is one of the reasons. We have H.R. people that roundfile applications because of their own lack of knowledge.
...you find yourself stuck with IE6 on XP, and installing Firefox is a sackable offence.
You get 100+ qualified applicants for every job. Of course statistics are going to be used to narrow down the pool. If you share a characteristic with others that have a higher than average chance of being problematic, that is going to be a factor of whether or not you get considered for the position. If they do find another qualified candidate without any of those factors, it doesn't matter to them that you are also qualified. If they don't find another one, you're going to get a call anyway.
They simply do not have the time, opportunity, or justification to hold a magnifying glass up to every candidate that applies for a position. It's up to you to ensure that there are no silly reasons for them to discard you out of hand.
That said, though... this one is a little silly on their part.
I take it you haven't dealt much with the type of people most companies hire for the Personnel department.
From the 3 gov't agencies, two non-profits and half-dozen private companies I've worked for as evidence, it seems that looking good in a tight dress is the major qualification.
Sometimes it is rather arbitrary, such as: lives too far away, or uses an unprofessional sounding email address (for example: hotkitty@aol.com)
Is it the hotkitty or the aol part you find most unprofessional?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it