Hiring Practices: What is your perspective?

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

What is your perspective on hiring practices at the work place. Do you think that, given two or more candidates, the only thing that should matter in the analysis is the qualifications and utility said candidate can serve to the business? If you have two candidates, should anything matter in your choosing outside of wheth or or not the most utility-serving candidate is chosen? ON what level is dicrimination ok? I know in some cases, discrimination is not deemed bad, such as charging some people more for a haircut or for insurance based on cost to cover, but what about if you had to choose between two candidates for a job, and one would cost more to employ for less benefit due to reliability issues, less work, more coverage costs etc then the other potential worker.

What ought one do?



I would think that equality should be given where equality is due, no, and the person with the most qualifications/merit should get the job, but outside that, what if there are issues that would prevent that person from doing as good a job as another person? I have no opinion on this yet, so I am trying to learn.

[Sam Or I]

Personality. Your company is a team. If you do not get along with a person, how the heck are you suppost to work with them.

Appearance, what kind of image does the company want to project?

Work Ethic, obvious.

I think it is perfectly legitamit for an employer to descriminate for the cost of the employ. They are trying to run a successful buisness.

I fall conservitive on the buisness side of things. If you are running a small company (Lets say less than 15 employees.) A person that cost more than the average employee will often hurt the company.

[Darth Wong]

I'm going to reveal a dirty little secret: qualifications are not as important as people think they are. They are more important in terms of what they say about you as a person; it is the person they are hiring, and the skills are of secondary importance. In the majority of cases, whatever skills you developed in your last place of employment were fairly specific to that place of employment and will not translate well to your new employer anyway, so you will require extensive re-training and a lengthy adjustment period no matter how well skilled and qualified you are. And the more complex the job, the more true that tends to be.

Of course, in some cases qualifications are a legal requirement, to avoid liability (as in the case of an MD or a P.Eng or a licensed welder). In other cases, large companies have across-the-board requirements. But excepting those kinds of cases, qualifications are only important insofar as they reveal the kind of person you are: how smart you are, how willing you are to work hard, etc.

So when I hear people saying that job applicants should be judged solely by their qualifications, I always cringe a little. A real person hiring a real job applicant uses all kinds of "gut instinct" criteria to decide whether this person is going to fit well into the team, and to be quite honest, if I were working for some big company hiring, say, a tooling designer, and I was faced with a guy who had better qualifications on paper but rubbed me the wrong way, I would probably choose the other guy. And the idea of some person far away looking at pieces of paper and deciding that I was unfair is quite frankly bullshit.

[Admiral Valdemar]

That is all true above. My dad has gone over applicants to the company he works at as chief engineer and he's turned down masters of engineering holders and fresh graduates with all the modern knowledge given them at uni. He needs people with real-world experience and also the proper personality to fit in. Qualifications tell someone that you can attain a certain standard of study and discipline, but little else. If you're an arrogant snob who won't fit in, even great credentials won't get you the job. This is all necessary now because of the baseline being a degree now in whatever field for most new people wanting a career.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Oh, I do mean the latter too. The ability to do your job, to work on the job and fit into the mold competently--to be reliable. That is also what I mean by qualifications. I didn't mean only a degree or something.

I was a bit vague. Assuming equal competency, then, it would be valid to look at things such as: tardiness at previous job, ability to get along with co-workers, productivity, personal days taken etc. You should pick the one that gives the greatest utility to your business? That's what I thought, but I was bushwacked on another forum because someone tried to say that would mean you ought to hire non-parents over parents. (Which puzzled me), since I found a study that stated parents tend to work more hours per week on average than non-parents.

I don't know if the study referred to female or male parents though. I will have to check again (it was a pdf, so I only read half so far)

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Edit: I would think qualifications would be approached by the employer holistically, as you said, looking at a myriad of things for the benefit of the company.

[Darth Wong]

Oh, I do mean the latter too. The ability to do your job, to work on the job and fit into the mold competently--to be reliable. That is also what I mean by qualifications. I didn't mean only a degree or something.

I was a bit vague. Assuming equal competency, then, it would be valid to look at things such as: tardiness at previous job, ability to get along with co-workers, productivity, personal days taken etc.

There are also a lot of intangibles. I shit you not when I say that I met a guy once who refused to hire an otherwise promising job candidate because he had a cold, clammy handshake. You have to keep in mind that a business takes a big risk when they hire a new employee. They have the right, restricted by discrimination laws, to pick based on any bizarre criteria they like.

You should pick the one that gives the greatest utility to your business? That's what I thought, but I was bushwacked on another forum because someone tried to say that would mean you ought to hire non-parents over parents. (Which puzzled me), since I found a study that stated parents tend to work more hours per week on average than non-parents.

A lot of non-parents feel that they are the victims of discrimination because parents will (successfully) demand to take time off for their childrens' activities and family events, whereas their bosses are much less sympathetic when non-parents ask for time off to go cruising around town with their drinking buddies. I would say that this is just a case of the boss recognizing different levels of priority (family = a legitimate need, drinking = wasting your fucking time) among people trying to take time off. But parents tend to be older, more responsible and more experienced, hence will often have better results. Nevertheless, in certain kinds of jobs where insane hours rather than maturity and experience are more valued, a lot of companies do indeed prefer non-parents over parents. Some companies even prefer guys who are totally unattached, ie- single. There is nothing illegal about this, and a parent will probably not get hired by such a company.

I don't know if the study referred to female or male parents though. I will have to check again (it was a pdf, so I only read half so far)

Don't let somebody trap you into pretending that it is or should be illegal to prefer non-parents over parents. I am a parent, but I recognize that some companies want mindless automatons to work shitloads of hours with little regard for the quality of time they're getting. That may actually be appropriate for certain kinds of work, but it's not the kind of job I want.

[Broomstick]

A lot of non-parents feel that they are the victims of discrimination because parents will (successfully) demand to take time off for their childrens' activities and family events, whereas their bosses are much less sympathetic when non-parents ask for time off to go cruising around town with their drinking buddies. I would say that this is just a case of the boss recognizing different levels of priority (family = a legitimate need, drinking = wasting your fucking time) among people trying to take time off. But parents tend to be older, more responsible and more experienced, hence will often have better results.

And then there are some of us non-parents who, because we aren't parents, wind up taking care of the family elders...

Which is why I wanted to smack the supervisor-bitch earlier this year who said "Why should we give you family leave to take care of your parents? You have sisters, right? Why can't they do it?" Um.... because both my sisters have children to worry about, one of the two is divorced and single parent, the other is in medical school (!) in addition to juggling her family needs, and really I'm the one for whom it is least inconvenient (but still it's a royal pain in the ass) to put my entire life on hold, move 500 km away, and take care of two invalids for however many weeks it takes for them to either get better or die. (They both got better, by the way, although for about a week the "die" part wasn't just hyperbole).

Although I will acknowledge that a LOT of non-parents are feckless, hedonistic bastards, care of an invalid parent quite frequently does fall to the non-parent child, in which case they have just as much family responsibility as anyone raising children.

Truth is, I don't care who you are, someone is going to look at you at some point and deem you unsuitable for a particular job. Sometimes it's a reason that makes sense, sometimes it's out and out bigotry.