Automated Job Rejection (opens in new tab)

I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated requirements if necessary.

To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.

No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.

I hope that they replaced or repaired the automated system. How did it turn out?

I've had firms contact me to tell me they've passed me over for consideration ... for positions I've never applied for. Apparently even rejecting various pseudonyms I've generated.

Which I suppose is the flipside of your situation.

but but but.... everyone would sue the company because they didn't get the job!

At least, that's the argument I've heard from HR people as to why applicants aren't contacted back. However... whether you contact me or not, I still don't have the job, and if I'm inclined to sue, I'll do it regardless of whether you show me basic courtesy or not.

But they're not talking about startups. They're talking about large corporations that could sustain training of new employees.

Both the article and the interview say that employers "think" that it's cheaper to leave the position unfilled, typically because of lousy cost accounting systems that do not give an accurate picture of the reduced system throughput (and thus the foregone revenue). Most companies optimize locally, which results in de-optimizing the whole system -- a department saves some money by not hiring a new systems administrator until the next fiscal year, and the whole company suffers decreased effectiveness.

Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.

My guess is that it's a device that an employer would use to manipulate the employees who are filling in "temporarily" -- so that the employees feel something is being done and they'll only be doing the extra work for "a little while." So they can say, "we really are trying, but the work you do is so valuable, just not that many people can do it."

Sometimes there is an internal candidate that will get the job, yet it still has to be posted for some arcane rule/law... Or so I hear.

I don't want to be mean or anything ( and probably it will go against the HN crowd) but you're part of the problem. Basically it's the reliance on computerized system to assess somebody's skills that is at the root of the problem.

I know it seems horrendous to a lot of people that thinks that computers are the solution to every problem but as of the current state of technology, it just does not work. I have been in the position of an applicant recently and the tests are just plain ridiculous. From the "IQ-Test" at Bloomberg for engineers to the automated "solve our problem and get hired" websites the system is just bloated with these cheap ( and shi* ) solutions.

It's time for companies to put some money on the table to hire real people doing real interviews to candidates. Any company that don't involve somebody at step 1 of the recruitment process to assist you and that claims that "Employees are first!", I say: bullshit!

Well we'll see, but we're designing this specifically to eliminate people who DEFINITELY can't do the job specified and then let the rest of the process be done by actual humans. If you don't let people who can't do the job BS you into an interview, you can afford to do more interviews with a higher confidence of actually finding a suitable candidate.

If I desired not to be civil I'd say "you're part of the problem assuming a tough problem can't be solved for some abstract reason" but since I want to be civil I won't say that.

> It's also a system that rewards people who take a shotgun approach to applications, rather than individually crafted responses.

One of the main purposes of these systems is to deal with the massive amount of shotgun applications that companies are receiving. Of course, this means that more targeted applications do not receive the consideration they deserve, thereby incentivising job seekers to use a shotgun approach.

Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.

While any keyword filtering regime can be exploited, as apparent by the SEO cottage industry enabled by Google Pagerank, et al, I still find the underlying question unresolved of whether such filtering is ultimately useful to would-be employers.

That is, are employers wanting appropriately skilled candidates, or are they wanting individuals who happen to exceptionally savvy to the flavor of 'SEO' used by headhunters? One can't assume these groups will always overlap.

I know that was a joke, but in situations like this there are two separate measures of error; precision and recall. Precision is how many of the results marked as relevant really were (measure of false positives), recall is how many of the actually relevant results were correctly considered relevant (measure of false negatives).

Any system can trivially have perfect precision by saying all results are not relevant, or perfect recall by saying all results are relevant. Your system would have 100% precision and 0% recall.

That only works so long as the rules given to the filtering program are accurate and feasible, and if a single failed requirement DNE complete rejection. Management drawing completely overboard reqs for the filter means the filter becomes meaningless.

I've used an automated resume filtering systems in the past. They worked quite well. I'd absolutely do it again.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/one_hiring_filter_tha...

It certainly did filter quite a few people straight to the trash, based mainly on an inability to fizzbuz.