The Talent You’re Overlooking
“Software is eating the world,” Marc Andreessen famously wrote ten years ago. This applies to all industries, including Human Resources, with tools such as resume scanners, applicant tracking systems, and employee management systems.
There are many benefits afforded to the rise of software and automation in hiring including improved efficiency and new insights — however, there are major downsides to these tools.
Harvard Business School just released a provocative study about some of these hiring methods. Their conclusion: current hiring practices exclude more than 27 million workers from hiring discussions in the U.S. alone.
These o verlooked workers, who are never given a chance, have the skills and motivation to succeed in the very jobs they are being excluded from, just at a time when employers are lamenting about worker shortages. In addition, these exclusionary practices exacerbate biases against women, minorities, and those with non-traditional career paths.
This is probably not news to anyone who has lived through the hiring obstacle course. Ask either side, hiring managers or workers, and they would both agree the hiring process is broken. Hiring managers are forced to make mission critical team decisions with incomplete information based on a résumé and a few hours of interviews. Workers are reduced to data points who succeed by writing or saying the “magic words” that get them through the filters.
