HR… Why I ask why?

In today’s market I have seen a very disturbing sight. With the influx of layoffs, and companies folding it seems that the bulk of IT hiring has been thrusted on shoulders of corporate Human Resource Teams… but is that the best solution?

Here are some scary facts you may desire to consider:

1) HR departments are starting to weed out any potential candidate that has posted more than one resume or application.
2) The average HR clerk or even manager have not a single clue as to what we in IT do for a company. They are given a job description at best, and they use that to weed out potential candidates.
3) The average HR staff member views IT as a resource not a component of the infrastructure for the root corporation… which we are.
4) HR staff member do not have the skill sets to interview a potential IT candidate.

So let’s look closer shall we… For the first point, this is completely a sign of laziness. Now granted the average posting for any company is receiving close to 2000 applications/resumes a day, so the volume of documents are HUGE. But, if anyone remembers back in the day, we were told to submit our resumes and applications multiple times to make sure you grab the hiring manager attention. So what if you submit an application to Company A and you hire a firm who will process a resume blast to hundreds of companies at a time, without informing you of which companies they submitted too… you could have just eliminated yourself from the process even if you are the best and brightest candidate on the market.

As for item 2, oh this has been a worry for IT Management for years. HR is a great tool for hiring production and administrative staff but what about technical based skill set required positions? You will draw a blank in about 95% of all corporations on that one. Basically HR will required a job description for the position and any of you out there know as well as I do we generally create a job description in “lay mans” terms so the average joe/josie can understand it. But this is the problem! We as management just eliminated a great deal of the best candidates… why? Simple… in our zeal to make the document easy to understand we eliminated the detail as to what we are looking for in a position. This is very hectic since IT management relays on HR for the initial screening of all candidates.

3) “IT fixes my computer… right?”. You are kidding yourself if you think HR staff sees what we do as anything other than that. Forget that IT is a very BROAD category… in IT you can have network infrastructure, you can have application development, application infrastructure, you can have server teams, and WAN teams as well as the all important helpdesk teams. So we fix computers, right? The correct answer is NO. For the majority of open positions in the market today infrastructure and application develop engineers lead the “need to fill” category, so you are relaying on a HR staff member who has no clue about IT to do your screening… you may desire to revisit number 2 and get the details out to your HR department before number 3 kills you.

4) Finally do you honestly expect an HR staff member to process the initial interview of your candidates? Are you kidding? Presently, according to a local executive placement service in the DFW area, there are about 40% of all initial interviews end up with not a single qualified candidate making it to the second round of interview. The main reason for this is the banter between candidate and interviewer. If the interviewer is unaware of the IT role in the company and have no clue what skill sets are required to accomplish any tasks on the job description how can they successfully interview a candidate. A simple question like ” do you understand the Cisco Operating System?” and the candidate answers “Yes, I understand all the latest IOS verisons as well as CATOS, and the SONIC Software addon”… I will guarantee you the HR staff member who is conducting the interview will not even be phased with the last part of that answer… they will see it as the candidate has a complete understanding.

So with these points you can see the frustration that is growing in the unemployed IT world. We are having a difficult time getting the best candidates through HR. How can we rectify this?