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Headhunters Can't Tell Anything From Facebook Profiles
New submitter sfcat writes "Companies, headhunters and recruiters increasingly are using social media sites like Facebook to evaluate potential employees. Most of this is due to a 2012 paper from Northern Illinois Univ. that claimed that employee performance could be effectively evaluated from their social media profiles. Now a series of papers from other institutions reveal exactly the opposite result. 'Recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles correlate essentially zero with job performance,' write the researchers, led by Chad H. Van Iddekinge of FSU (abstract). Not only did the research show the ineffectiveness of using social media in evaluating potential employees, it also showed a measurable biases of the recruiters against minorities (African-American and Latino) and against men in general."
So a profession with no psychology background can't successfully evaluate peoples' personal statements and associations as a proxy for their professional competence? They're failing to do what even actual psychologists struggle with?
Wow. Who'd have seen that coming.
I could have told you the biases off the top of my head. The anti-minority, anti-male headhunter is nothing new. Most headhunters are female and white, though several headhunter companies I have done business with are minority run and almost exclusively monochromatic (i.e. all black, all hispanic). They all have biases in general against men, BUT this seesaws to the other side as they are hiring for increasingly technical or executive positions as they rather play the odds that the person is hired and they get their commission.
Headhunting and HR both crack me up from an ethical standpoint. They are generally paid a notch higher at each position for similar work than others in the company, precisely because they discuss / are aware of pay levels throughout the company. Second, they are the biggest hen houses of racism, sexism, and gossip. In my experience they also have the highest consistency of just one or two "<insert race> <insert backup race> male" twofer/threefers to not seem like there is a problem.
Disclosure: The MSP I used to work at hosts some recruiting / temporary worker management applications.
Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.
So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.
Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.
So what does it say about people who don't have a facebook profile? I'm guessing that we're scary dangerous people, who are terrorists and working to subvert the government. /sarc
Actually might not be far from the truth these days in the minds of some flappy headed nutbags.
Om, nomnomnom...
This article only reinforces the value of social media in evaluating future job performance in the human resources industry. I'll explain!
Since there is zero correlation, it is like reading tea leaves and a headhunter can reach any interpretation possible. Meanwhile, the zero correlation means any tea leaf reading cannot be falsified.
Arbitrary opinions and no valid way of measurement --- which makes the interpretations completely subject to whim! It is the perfect industry, possibly only surpassed by the "how to write a successful resume" sector of the economy!
With no right or wrong answers, what's not to LOVE!!!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
...no one is doing actual data analysis. From what I'm seeing in the story, recruiters are 'sort of getting a feel for' candidtes by looking at fb, twitter, and other social media pages, rather than using standardized analysis to do some variety of a Briggs-Meyer analysis of the candidates and compare those results with the requirements of the job posting they are looking to match the candidates up with. Granted I don't expect that any of the recruiters involved have even the slightest idea of how to match up profiles to requirements, but from the sounds of these 'Ratings' they are right up there with figuring out if someone who's sent you a FB friend invite is someone you want to have as a friend there.
You never know...
Is it antisocial behavior to not have any FB account at all?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have a profile on a business social network. I am a physicist (PHD) , and have worked a long time in science.
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 20 seconds can figure that out.
I have a solid electronics/condensed matter/analog measurement background.
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 40 seconds can figure that out.
But as it happens, i am a curious guy with diverse programming skills, which I have been using *from time to time*, but i know enough to talk to IT experts who really know what they are doing
Everybody looking at my profile for longer than 1 minute can figure that out.
So what i typically get/got is:
-we need a junior PHP programmer (yeah, sure - come on, admit you just searched for "PHP" and ignored the other skills, which you never heard about)
-do you like a job as *expert* for [Skill X, which was listed explicitely as "little experience"] (Oh, you like to sell anybody to you customer. At least you read my profile, but, thanks, no)
-in the interview (after beeing asked by the headhunter to apply): why do you apply here? (Yeah, because the company you hired to look for me "found" me - obviously they did not infrom you at all about the previous conversation.)
And what i see in the company i work for:
-I get a profile from our internal headhunters, whithout any infromation how that got onto my table.
-I should evaluate people for things of which i have no idea at all, but "it sounded similar" (to the HR intern)
-50% of hour HR seem to be interns. The HR has probably the highest rotation rate in the company; even the management has a felt half-life time of a year (sure, thats going to work out)
isn't it like 52% of americans are female? i vaguely remember that statistic from the ads for the Man Show.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
What on Earth are you talking about? If you unfairly bias your hiring choices toward hiring women, that means it's unfairly harder for a man to get the job, i.e. it puts men at a disadvantage.
I suppose a don't-hire-any-black-people policy wouldn't disadvantage anyone, either?
Christ, do I really have to spell it out?
And in 2007 there was a (UK) government paper on man made climate change, it used the most optimistic assumptions for economic benefits and the lowest costs and used variable discounting figures by Nick Stern, he got the title lord. Added 5% MMCC levy to everybody's energy bills. By 2013 he was found to have made a mistake, as government papers are not subject to peer review.
No, it means you're hip and "in" with the youth culture.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Like anything else, social networking info is a possible source of useful info. As long as you understand the limitations.
I doubt that the average headhunter is good at evaluating much of anything, social networking or no. But that goes for the average {most professions} too ...
Don't fuck feminism - you might cause it to reproduce.
Everybody knows that the handshaking and the first impression at the start of a interview detemines 75% of the talk. Looking at the facebook first impression is equal. Any test would give better results.
Feminism is using birth control because feminism is too focused on its career to consider reproducing.
This is the real question: How the hell do you know you're even looking up the right person at all? Why does their social / sexual / personal / family life have any bearing on how they conduct their professional life at all?
As such, I put more information about my life under my pseudonyms than I ever do under my full name on Facebook (which, generally, gets you a photo of me and nothing else, because I work in IT and know how to use the privacy controls).
Any employer that ever tells me they looked me up on social networks is going to have a very hard time of it. I consider it an utter breach of privacy and trust. Employ me on what you know of my professional life. Don't judge me by what rumours you hear of my personal life.
And this is modded funny? Controversial, agreed, but funny?
The dominating strain of feminism doesn't give a #$%# about equality and non-discrimination in general. It's one-way only, men be damned. Sure, there's a lot more discrimination against females in general, but in cases where it works the other way around you'd expect those who constantly babble about "equal rights" to side with discriminated men, at least verbally. Not a chance.
Example from my country: in a divorce as a man you have practically zero chance for the kids to stay with you, even if the mother is absolutely unfit to care for them. Worse, your visiting hours tend to be minimal. How many females will you find in the group fighting for fathers' rights? Guess. "We want equal rights" - yeah, sure...
Yeah, fuck this form of feminism.
My first instinct about the use of social media for job applicants has nothing to do with job performance, but feels more like a social background check -- is this person a "partier" or some kind of political "radical"?
My next thought is that maybe they use it as background for salary negotiations -- does this person have a big family/kids which would be expensive for insurance? Are they overextended financially and can be coerced into accepting a lower salary?
So far I have only met one, with a background in psychology, who could determine anything at all.
Most recruiters are completely clueless. They don't know _anything_. They know nothing about the world outside of their bubble. They have no idea what the company needs. They have no idea what the slave wants. They just randomly match and mix.
Now add to that that usually only the bad companies outsource hiring (at least in Germany) and you will get bad employees matched with bad employers.
The NSA would like to see your friends, friends of friends and track submitted photographs. Within 1-2-3 hops they hope to map out entire support structures, fellow travellers and even detect self radicalisation early.
The public, private, contractor web 2.0 tracking partnership is more a long term boondoggle over generations of contacted indicators.
Its now really a thought experiment between the NSA and GCHQ. Are people so honest with web 2.0 that the info they submit is NSA useful or will the older wiser UK view of knowing your been watched spoil the gathering of indicators?
Over time people understand how much of what they put down on web 2.0 will be searchable when job seeking. Knowing you will be searched for might make many people present a bland profile?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I dread a future where not living my social life electronically is frowned upon
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The NSA isn't extrapolating solely from an FB account. They've got all kinds of other records. That's kinda why privacy advocates are pissed at them. Moreover they don't respond to one of their guys thinking "hey that shit look suspicious," by sending asking for a warrant to arrest you, they do it by sending their info to the FBI/DoJ where somebody who can interpret Facebook profiles can decide what to do. In other words even if the NSA guy has no idea when Arab pro-Palestinean rhetoric should scare him, and when it's just something somebody says because they're venting about the total lack of a peace treaty, odds are somebody else in the system can.
OTOH these headhunters will see a pic of a dude with cheap alcohol, and instead of thinking "hey this guy is just like me when I was his age, I'll bet he parties as hard as he works" they'll think "this dude is a thug," and *poof* his chance of landing the job goes to zero. They don't send the account to some other guy. They don't even know whether this particular account belongs to the guy they're headhunting. Black names sound unique, but an awful lot of them are just different combinations of the same have-dozen or so syllables (Tre-, -von-, -dre, De-, and Del- are all very popular; I know a Delvonte) plus a little creative spelling; so you can't be sure. Just look at all the social media accounts for guys named Trayvon Martin from Florida.
I get contacted on linkedin a few times a month by recruiters. Half the time it is people who work for companies and actually want to talk to me. The other half it is third-party head-hunters, and what they want is for me to tell them anyone who may be interested: ie, they contact me, a stranger, and ask me to do their job for them. Of course, they usually offer a finder's fee of some sort, but if a recruiter/headhunter doesn't have his or her own bag of tricks, or even an hr professional subscription to LinkedIn, then what good is he/her?
As for recruiting internally, I have had to coach the recruiters at the company I work for as to what the look for, what type of candidate is acceptable for different departments, etc. I nearly have the company record on employee referrals, and now managers in other departments will often times come to me and ask if I know anyone rather than relying on "talent acquisition" to find them someone suitable. But hell, at $2500 a pop, its almost like a nice little part-time job, so they can keep being as useless as they want to be as far as I'm concerned. There's never going to be a substitute for a vouch from a trusted source, no matter what type of "screening" HR ever gets a hold of.
I am rather skeptical when it comes to the conclusions drawn from various studies in social sciences myself, but 18 months seems pretty quick for a follow up study. If you read the article (or the paper), you'll see that they first had recruiters judge the facebook profiles of candidates and then, 12 months later, followed up with the companies that hired students to gain information on their actual performance as perceived by the employer.
Clearly, you need to let a significant amount of time pass after them being hired to be able to get some data on their actual performance. A year seems quite reasonable hear, and that gives you a lower bound on the time it will take you to complete such a study. Giving them some extra time for study design, evaluating the results and publishing them (which includes a peer review phase), 18 months seems quite fast - they certainly did not waste any time!
HR eiter in-company, or out-company (headhunter) loves to play God. Yes they manage payroll, taxes, paperwork, and even a little bit of personalities and do a stellar job. Who doesn't appreciate someone who minimizes potential beef with the IRS. When they play HR they do great, but when they pretend to read minds or futures, they do less well.
Consider engineers, for example. The HR folks are not engineers. They typically are afraid of equations, so algebra, calculus, and differential equations - prerequisites for engineering - are off the table. The only things left are to hope someone else who hasn't used their degree in 15 years (engineering managers) can tell the difference. (It is a good bet that if you haven't used Diff-Eq in 5 years, you aren't any good at it anymore.) HR can try to "hack it" using indirect indicators, GPA, keywords in the resume. As far as I have seen they can be somewhat easily bluffed by a pretty face of a good talker. The problem with that is that it puts folks who are pretty boys with good talk where it should put butt-kicking rock-stars who are going to change the world.
One of my favorite articles, for its lack of implementation or even serious consideration is the ignoble winner: "The Peter Principle revisited". http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
This article gives a really basic, but extensible, framework against things like "frequency of review cycle" can be compared with actual ability to differentiate talent or maximize it in the organization. Use of the structure shows that there are organizational policies and structures that can actually reject talent. You can put in the 100% people, perfect talents, and the performance of the overall organization goes down. If you input some simple parameters you can determine that there is a peak after organizational performance goes down, and never returns to the peak.
This is a sandbox problem that could educate these folks because it gives them some great levers for getting to data-driven understanding.
If you're posting often on social media, you're probably not doing much in the way of anything called work.
I think that HR departments should be prevented from examining any social media for hiring but that said, I look at different people's facebook pages and I can tell if they are a complete tool, looser, go getter, nutcase, or criminal. When I am buying something through an online classified I will check that person's email for a FB match. It is great to get a picture of them to identify them at the coffeeshop etc. But many of these people have pictures of themselves infront of their weed stash, treating women like crap, holding guns(Odd in Canada) or just 100 pictures of themselves drinking like it's a sport.
Also their politics usually come clear through FB, I am not saying that you should hire based on politics but if people are putting up pictures that say Obama is going to make it illegal to be white and get a bank loan, or that Romney is going to make Mormonism the state religion; then they are a tool.
Sure, fuck this form of feminism... but where the hell is it dominating? I mean, outside of right wing talk show fantasy world? I have never run into an actual person who holds this belief.
The real world still does have a way to go to get to actual gender equality. That includes figuring out how to get there or what it even means. And it will need to go both ways. I would wager the majority of feminists would agree with that.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
It does if there are only two dollars in the whole world, and more than two people.
(I have never heard this saying and cannot fathom any sense from it)
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Maybe it's just Sturgeon's Law, but most recruiters couldn't get a clue in a clue sanctuary while doused in clue scent.
You could take a typical recruiter, drop them in the middle of Facebook HQ, and tell them to find some PHP experts, and they'd come back with a janitor, two administrators, and a high school kid who was visiting.
You could give them the resumes of the top people in the world, mixed with some from recent San Quentin parolees, and they'd do no better than chance at picking the good ones.
Facebook may or may not be a way to judge potential employees. But even if it were, most recruiters couldn't do it.
Yeah! Fuck that man-hating feminism ... that is actually an extremely rare form of feminism that in no way represents the majority of feminists ... but it's fun to define a group by its few extremist members ... Yeah!
I have never met an actual person who holds this belief either, yet I've met, worked with and am friends with dozens of fathers who have been victims of it.
I have never run into an actual person who holds this belief.
I have, many, many times over. It's extremely frustrating.
These are individuals who believe that somebody assigned the male gender at birth has some kind of fundamentally male "stuff," and somebody assigned the female gender at birth has some kind of fundamentally female "stuff." Then they go on and extrapolate from there into snips, snails, puppy dog tails, sugar, spice, and everything nice. For example, these individuals often bristle at the "dead-beat dad," but the concept of a dead-beat mom hasn't even occurred to them. Our welfare system and family courts play into this. If you're a Mother, then you can count on the state providing for you: welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, and garnishing the wages of the father. Nobody expects that you make $20-$30 per hour, say, to earn assistance. If you're a male who was tricked into impregnating a Mother, well, you better hope you make at least $30/hour, because anything less than that is being a "dead-beat."
Here's one way you can tease out the anti-male and womyn-born-womyn victimhood bias in our culture. Read the article "My Hair Is My Accomplishment." Then ask yourself these questions. Womyn-born-womyn can choose to wear their hair short or long, but why do they choose long? How do we view an assigned male who wears his or her hair long? Who forces womyn-born-womyn to put on uncomfortable heels in the morning? That article blames all assigned males, but think about those things critically.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Cool, but the reason I wrote "in my country" is I'm not from US. Besides, I'm not looking for help (no children, no divorce), just giving an example of a rather systemic and widespread form of discrimination against men, in case some reader couldn't think of one.
I've met them and plenty of them. Most were not that extreme but rather ordinary and mostly well educated women. Here's a couple of rather common beliefs and opinions:
* Discussing discrimination against men is bad since it brings the focus away from the issue of discrimination against women.
* Male discrimination is always "less bad" since men are a part of the patriarchal power structure (it's their own fault basically)
* Bringing more women into male dominated jobs is good because they are more empathic, honest, understanding etc and will do wonders for the company culture. Bringing more men into female dominated jobs is bad because men are less honest, emphatic etc which means they will do a poor job when those skills are required. Also, a man who actually wants to work with a traditionally female job must be... strange (men working in kindergarten == pedophiles!)
It's not dominating but it is very common.
Heh, first time in my life someone referred to me as right wing! One more proof how simple right/left divides are useless in practice.
I have met feminists who freely express this view. We didn't talk much, of course - I'm male, so my opinion didn't matter to them. Yet, they are quite rare (although, like most extremists, very vocal).
The real problem I described is generally not visible in speech, publications, etc. It shows in actual actions. It is a (probably subconscious) bias in many active feminists, who tend to disregard any anti-male discrimination, ignore it, treat as an attack, a "first world problem" or just "not their problem". I think it requires quite a lot of self-consciousness to fight biases like this.
Mix this bias in normal, less active feminist masses with the typical hyperactivity of the small group of extremists (in this case hardcore anti-male feminists) and you get exactly this face of feminism. Take this to academia, have a more formal discussion in a mixed group and you'll find the extremists very lonely, with most actual feminists probably declaring support for true equal rights.
Declaration vs. action. Cold reason vs. subconscious.
Do you know this slight feeling of shame when something surprises you and you suddenly realize the only reason it was surprising was that you subconsciously applied some stereotype you consciously find unfair? That's what I'm talking about. Our brains simplify. In this case conscious belief in equal rights and prevalence of anti-female discrimination results in prevalence of pro-female actions, which train your subconscious brain. No wonder it ends up believing "female - good, male - bad".
"Dominating" strain of feminism? Anecdotal evidence is all fine and good to talk about injustice, but if you're going to make such a sweeping statement, do it with numbers. Citation please?
*I* don't. I capture them alive and put them outside.
I took inspiration from the pharma industry; better to sell insulin than a cure for diabetes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1) Back in the day when it was universities-only, "what happened on Facebook, stayed on Facebook". So students were candid on Facebook, making it useful to analyze their personalities.
2) Then Facebook opened up to the public, and (potential) employers could view (potential) employees' posts durung their university days. So many students used their privacy settings to hide the bad stuff, and were able to remain candid on Facebook.
3) Then (potential) employers started demanding Facebook passwords. People started sanitizing their Facebook pages, either manually, or with apps like Facewash http://lifehacker.com/5978872/facewash-makes-sure-your-facebook-profile-is-clean-and-interview+ready ( now renamed http://www.simplewa.sh/ )
A lot of Facebook pages are now glorified Linked-In clones sanitized for employer viewing, because people are scared of being fire/rejected-for-employment.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Unless Jeffery is a transgender, that doesn't really serve as a valid counterpoint to "guess how many females you will find in the group fighting for fathers' rights".
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Are you on drugs or just generally low-intelligence? In a limited system giving something to somebody removes the same something collectively from everybody else. If you are pro-Nazi, it certainly damages everybody that is for freedom. And yes, that is an appropriate comparison for many factions of modern "feminism".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Nonsense. 18 months is perfectly normal if you actually want well-founded results. In fact, it is particularly fast. Even in engineering, you usually need a lot longer to conclusively falsify something. In the hard sciences, it can take decades.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
With my private life but have a shit hemorrhage if I mix their business with my private life. Perhaps it is OK if I take the kids and pets to work now. Mother fucking piles of shit all of them.
This seems to be a common theme, but recruiters on LinkedIn, who have easy access to prefiltered data right from my own fingers, can't even manage to comprehend that.
My info: EE/CS, no interest in management, no interest in relocating from west coast.
Recruiter: Hey Sarusa, plz call me about this great ME (Mechanical Engineer) management opportunity in Madison, Wisconsin that just opened up.
I'm not making that one up. I wish I were. Ones that bad happen rarely, but weaker forms of that happen constantly.
Come to think of it, in my case it is. Antisocial with regard to the FB-crowd that I do not want to be associated with. Does that mean I cannot deal with younger colleagues? No, as long as they actually want to learn things and have some interest in their job, it will just work fine.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Speaking of HR, am I the only one that thinks HR should have nothing to do with the hiring of workers? HR is there to provide company information, set up 401k's, get appropriate documentation to/from workers, etc. Companies are still stupid enough to put the trust in what is usually a high school graduate in determining, e.g. which engineer to hire, which upper level manager to hire, which embedded system designer to hire, which surgeon to hire,... are you seeing my point? Even if they have a degree, it's not in the field you are hiring for. You are letting your company be run by a bunch of high school graduates. Are you still wondering why you can't make your quarterly profit estimates? Are you still wondering why all the people that are being hired aren't quite as good as they used to be? It's not because there are less truly qualified candidates out there. It because you will never get to see them until you have a qualified person/department that can truly find them for you. Yes Virginia, that means actually reading the resumes. It means having more than 3 interviews per job. "We can't afford that!", you exclaim. Again you are back to not getting the right people. If you don't get the right people you are going to fail. Tough times call for getting the right candidates to fill your positions. Not just holding on to dumb luck/resume filters/etc. to find them. If you truly want to make it, to make that quarterly/yearly profit estimate, HR can't be part of it, other than gathering and disseminating information to the potential hire.
These people you describe don't sound like feminists to me. Your very first point about considering men inferior goes against the most fundamental tenant of feminism, on which the entire philosophy is based.
These people sound like your oppression fantasy opponents. Maybe they are real people you somehow found, maybe you just assumed some of hand comment implied all this stuff. Like most people I have never encountered anyone like that, outside of some crap daytime TV controversy show.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
with the first two words of the headline -- didn't need to read anything else.
Right, because you certainly aren't hostile towards women you perceive as having a subconscious bias against you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It used to be that feminists also were concerned with "male liberation" as well. I see none of that now. And there are indeed a selection of strange extremist types that tend to poison the well. If you want to see some of the disturbing ideas out there just google "piv feminism". These people are so far from the goals of feminism that it should be regarded as deviant. But it isn't. I've experienced a little bit of it myself, but I tend to regard people who have this attitude as a waste of space, so not worth thinking about. But it can bite in situations that matter ... but then that is people, people are not always reasonable or rational.
Bitter and proud of it.
They can't tell, but can they tell that they can't tell?
I'd wager several pounds that the answer is "no". http://www.xenodochy.org/ex/quotes/knowsnot.html
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...as a matter of policy is not a company I would ever care to work for, or even do business with. Employers need to stop being Big Brother, because they're appallingly awful at it.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
It's quite hard for me to recall any meaningful case of sexist discrimination against me, personally. Also, somehow I tend to get along well with most people, including some women with rather negative opinion about the male gender in general. Biases show most in non-personal contacts, once you get to know someone the bias is overruled by experiences with that person (even hardcore rasists sometimes accept someone of a different race as a "positive exception"). I'm writing about problems I observe, not experience.
And your firm expectation of hostility isn't a clear bias? The mote in thy brother's eye...
This leads me to see the following problems that make you unfit for hiring in a high-unemployment market where employers can pick-and-choose:
I am quite fit for employment. All of my previous employers have been very, very happy with my work. What I am not an expert at is selling myself. Part of that stems from an inability to lie or stretch the truth as well as many others.
1. You seem uninterested in jobs that might require you to stretch and learn other skills
Bzzz. Wrong.
I knew nothing about web development before I did it. I knew nothing about databases before I did it. I knew nothing about teaching people before I did it. I knew nothing about GUIs before I did it. I knew nothing about multi-threading before I did it. I excelled at every single one of these things. Better than others who do these specific things all day long? No. Better than most of the rest of my team? Yes. Am I superior to my teammates? No. We each had our strengths and weaknesses. As I said, being a jack of all trades is a strength and weakness at the same time.
2. You see some jobs as "beneath you", which is not a mindset employers want when they seek problem solvers
If it doesn't involve programming, then you are correct: I'm not interested. I can do other things, but it is a waste of my talent and a step in the wrong direction for me career wise if I do those other things full time. Sometimes, I do many other things besides programming. It sometimes takes a person who understands something about networking and operating systems to get a program to work properly.
3. You seem too dumb to remove the Java stuff (which you claim is a problem) from your resume
Too dumb? Now you're insulting me. Go back and look at Java. A lot of it has nothing to do with web development. I've done a lot of java programming over the years and none of it required me to stick a ".jsp" on the end of a file name.
4. You exhibit a truly annoying "poke my eye out with a blunt stick" (that would be a "downer" on any team) attitude when you hit a minor obstacle of your own making which you could easliy alleviate
Humor. Try it some time. A lot of people at multiple jobs were very sorry to hear me announce that I was moving on because I kept them laughing throughout the day.
Need I go on? You need to SERIUOSLY re-think things if you ever want things to look up
And the final rebut: I do think and re-think about things a lot -- whether it is programming or job hunting or the way I exercise. Why do you think I posted something here at Slashdot? I was looking for people to chime in and offer advice. I don't claim to be the most intelligent creature on the planet so maybe someone has an idea that I hadn't thought of.
Thanks for the "upbeat" advice you gave. I'll do what I've always done with such advice. Complain about it for a few minutes then ignore it and move on. People like you are a huge problem when it comes to job hunting. Stay the hell out of my way. I'm looking to make a positive impact on the world and I don't need you to slow me down.
I have never run into an actual person who holds this belief.
If you're a Mother, then you can count on the state providing for you: welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, and garnishing the wages of the father. Nobody expects that you make $20-$30 per hour, say, to earn assistance. If you're a male who was tricked into impregnating a Mother, well, you better hope you make at least $30/hour, because anything less than that is being a "dead-beat."
This stems from the social norm that expects men to earn more than women. Attacking the problem at its roots seems the best way to achieve equality for both sides.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
"A recent paper by doccus on /. summarized that HR managers who based their hiring practices on unsupported studies that were soon countered tended to get fired far more quickly " ;-)
Interesting points.
Is there a reason you're spelling it "womyn"?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If anything, he was apologizing for his subconscious biases, dude.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
This comment is entirely false. Do I need to say anything else? Every statement made in this post, feminism believes the opposite of that. Advocating for male rape victims? Feminism. Advocating for equality in divorce settlements (btw 50% of disputed custody cases end with the dad winning; it's just that so many are undisputed the figures are skewed)? Feminism. Babbling about equal rights while discriminating against men: not even close to any feminist I have ever read, met or even heard about. What?
"How many females will you find in the group fighting for fathers' rights?"
I don't know, but I can tell you it includes ALL FEMINISTS.
Seriously slashdot, what the fuck. This is why I swear not to ever come back here once a week.
These jackasses can't even seem to figure out what I do for a living from my LinkedIn profile. Keyword spamming asshats.
But doesn't this bias come from a majority male area - the courts. It's not like feminists have been lobbying the court system to get this outcome, it's one that's perpetuated (generally) by men against men.
Feminists aren't going to spend time fighting for your rights in this case because they have other issues to worry about, such as why the court/justice system is still so predominantely male.
Yes, there are plenty of examples of men being denied custody even though it's pretty clear the woman is causing damage. Don't blame that shit on feminists though.
FB captures users emotions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plutchik-wheel.svg
Emotions vary depending on environment.
Casteism