Definitely worth reading this, I’ll comment on it later, but I wanted to get it up here when I saw it.
Update: Ted makes some good points, but I think he misses the underlying problem: Sales! The problem with sales, and specifically sales people, is they are detached from reality. Sales people are notoriously disorganized, and they are ridiculously positive. They are positive in the face of the most horrifying adversity. Now, in sales that’s a good thing. The problem is in any non-pure sales position, and especially one that requires management of any kind, it’s a recipe for utter failure.
Being positive all the time means a psychotic disregard for opportunity cost. Sales people will pursue every method to make a sale, and the one time out of a hundred it works, they’ll say, “See, see, I told you it works!” And they will ignore the costs of the 99 times it failed, even if the cumulative cost of those failures is greater than the profit for the one success. And if you have an industry controlled by sales people, like recruiting, it will be ridiculously slow to change, its participants will be psychotically averse to admitting error, they will all be psychotically averse to criticism and evidence based approaches that question the validity of their methods, and none of them will see a problem until it is so huge that it’s ready to destroy them.
That’s basically the state of recruiting today. It’s dominated by agencies, those agencies are in the main run by Sales! types who will bend over backwards to fellate the Almighty Client, however ridiculous and moronic their demands are. When objective reality intrudes into the situation, they get confused at best, petulant and obnoxious at worst. For example, if the prevailing wage for an Account Receivable person with 5 years of experience and a degree is X, and the Almighty Client wants one at 50% of X without compromising any on the person – same requirements for education, experience, etc. – it’s not a moronic white elephant hunt. Nope, it’s a ‘challenge.’ The client is ‘challenging,’ not a fucking idiot.
Right now, the hiring process is essentially controlled by people who think it’s a pure sales process, when in fact it’s more of a supply chain process. The Sales! types always want to concentrate on intangibles; culture, chemistry, job satisfaction, etc., etc., etc. They never want to concentrate on objective reality: skill set and measurable ability within it, company structure, reporting relationships, time frames for delivery, etc., etc., etc. Nor do they ever, ever, under any circumstances, want to talk about price, otherwise known as wages. Because the Almighty Client doesn’t want to pay them, and therefore you’re not getting any.
We need to get the Sales! types out of control of the recruiting industry or it will die a spectacular death from them pushing it too far, pushing salaries too low, indulging the ridiculous requests of Almighty Clients who want people at rock bottom wages for 80 hour weeks, no benefits, no time off, etc., etc., etc. People will get fed up with the bullshit and eventually hiring will come under the thumb of some bureau of the government who regulates every aspect of it, and quite frankly if this profession can’t kick these assholes out and get its collective shit together, we deserve no less a fate.
