IT Hiring: We Don't Want the Best

I have a relative that works for Canadian call center. One day the company experimented with new software that would push through calls to the operators who were clearing their queues the fastest. What happened? The response time slowed and queues became more back logged. Nobody wanted to be the best performer because they would be punished with additional work with no extra pay. The automated optimization strategy had the opposite effect of what the call center expected.

To process large numbers of resumes, some large Canadian companies are resorting to recruiter software. I recently visited Research in Motion (RIM) web site, the Blackberry company, to apply for a GUI developer job. Sure enough, a click took me to a page that wanted me to fill in the blanks for the job requirements. Several buttons were missing:

• Click "Book" if you've written a book on this subject

• Click "Award" if you've won awards for your designs

• Click "Top 50" if you've worked for one of the top 50 companies in the province

• Click "Loyalty" if you've never left a job for a more lucrative one

• Click "Honesty" if you've never broken a promise or contract

People have hundreds or thousands of skills. The value of a skill is based on mutual need. How can applicants be reasonable expected to rate skills for different positions? Yet RIM's software asked me to list my top 15 skills and rank them in order for all possible RIM jobs.

The automated resume handling software works on the "best fit" mentality: that the person whose skills most closely match what the company is looking for is the best candidate. The best fit strategy sounds like a good idea: the software simply has to fill in holes in the company with the people who fit the holes best.

This kind of logic ignores human nature in the same way as the call center optimization software. "Best fit" has no notion of honest and loyal people. It has no notion of acquiring exceptional people as an investment. And it encourages dishonestly by getting people to enter data exactly tuned to a particular job posting. That is, a best fit strategy results in dishonesty, disloyalty, deception and poor quality candidates. At best, the status quo of the company is maintained. At worst, the quality of the company staff actually goes down.

There is also no notion of equivalent skills. The difference between basic class declarations in Java and C#/.Net? In C#, the ending semi-colon is optional. Is it worth favouring one programmer over another because of a semi-colon without considering the rest of their resume? The cost of NOT hiring someone is not easy for software to compute.

The automated optimization strategy had the opposite effect of what the these companies expect.

The final irony is that companies that pull resumes out at random may actually have a better chance of getting good staff.

In my unpublished book, "The Big Online Book of Linux Startups", I talk about how hiring policies of human resource departments are fail to recognize the best candidates. Check it out if you want more information on this subject.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

June 10, 2005