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U.S.Laws May Make Online Job Hunting Harder 433

j00bar writes "CNN/Fortune is reporting that applying for a job online is going to get harder. 'New federal guidelines meant to standardize how employers track data on the diversity of their job-applicant pool are taking effect starting today for jobs at federal contractors -- and similar rules will kick in later this year at U.S. companies with more than 50 employees. And resumes and search approaches that worked perfectly well before may no longer do the trick.'"
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U.S.Laws May Make Online Job Hunting Harder

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  • by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @02:58PM (#14661765) Journal
    According to this definition, an applicant must "express interest" in the job... That "expression of interest" must show that he or she has all the qualifications for the job listed in the company's job description (not just some or most of them)...
    By this definition, it's going to be difficult to "express interest" in the job listings for most tech companies, which are often loaded with specific qualifications (i.e. "Perl, JavaScript 1.0, Quark, MS Office, and Doom 3 experience"). I've never been to an interview for a job I eventually landed where I met 100% of their qualifications.
  • Ok, I'm lost. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kawolski ( 939414 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @02:58PM (#14661776)
    From TFA: To comply with these new rules and get the most diversity, employers will have an incentive to keep the pool of applicants for each job relatively small and as random as possible.

    So in order to get a more diverse and random selection of applicants, we're going to shrink the qualified applicant pool by making it more difficult to apply for a job? Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to increase diversity? I would think that if you want a more diverse selection, you would want to increase the qualified applicant pool so you have more people to choose from.

  • by Soviet Assassin ( 815206 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [nissassateivos]> on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:00PM (#14661791) Homepage
    I mean, seriously, its like none of their freakin business. Doesnt this help kill 'free enterprise' or deminish capitalism? This is like communist USSR here.

    It is our place and decision to run online employment boards how we see fit and put up descriptions of our jobs and post our skills to our own likings. We are free to find the people who we think may be good at the job by looking at their resume

    Plus, what the crap, if I "apply" for a job online they look at my resume and they talk to me, they setup and interview. Now if some @#*(%& employer hires an employee purely based off what is said of a bleeding website then they deserve a crappy employee.

    IMHO, of course.

  • So in other words (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheSkepticalOptimist ( 898384 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:01PM (#14661796)
    Instead of online job applications remaining relatively unbiased by age, race, culture, or even gender in some cases, now US guidelines are going to require that you specify if your are a minority, culture preference, a woman, your age, and other statistics that will force employers not to hire the best candidates, but to fulfill diversity quotas.

    Good one.
  • by garcia ( 6573 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:01PM (#14661803)
    Searching and applying for jobs online is already difficult enough. With applicant pools numbering in the thousands for many jobs, it's already a royal pain in the ass to get in for an interview. Aside from that, even if you do get an interview it might be one of those "well, we know we won't hire this one but we need to interview X number of people" and you end up being asked such illustrious questions as "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?" (yes, an actual interview question for a part-time job at $8.50/hr).

    Keep your resume up-to-the-minute current. "The rules allow companies to pick a random pool of applicants by searching the job boards for 'most recent' qualified applicants," Crispin notes. "In those cases, no one will even look at a resume that is more than two or three weeks old." Yikes.

    Oh whatever, if the company is looking for someone with experience that most don't have they are going to look closely at the resumes. If anyone can do the job in the applicant pool they aren't going to care one way or the other.

    For the jobs that I have interviewed for through monster.com and careerbuilder.com applications, I have received a few offers -- none of which bettered my current job security and benefits (the pay was better).

    We don't need laws to make it more difficult to find work -- we need laws that make the jobs we have better than they already are.
  • by hsmith ( 818216 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:01PM (#14661805)
    To totally hose a good system to make it "fair" to people. Sorry, applying for jobs is not a "random" process. Both the worker and the company want what is best for them. picking people at "random" hurts the applicant and the company by bad pairings. way to go dc, inefficency is key!
  • by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:03PM (#14661828) Homepage Journal
    I agree.
    This may mean that companies have to stop from the absurd practice of over specifing what they need.

    The jobs I have really excelled at have been the ones where I didn't have all the qualifications.

  • I agree. All we need is a bunch of new government regulations to make it harder for employers and employees to get together.

    Has someone looked at the low unemployment rates recently and decided something had to be done to raise them, or what?
  • I think this is BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trailerparkcassanova ( 469342 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:04PM (#14661844)
    This is a big deal and the only reference is this story. I could find nothing else. The story doesn't answer the diversity subject. BS I say.

  • Scare phrases (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:07PM (#14661883)
    There are a lot of scare phrases in that article which are typically used to drum up business for consultants. I would talk to your Legal Dept (for a bigger employer) or CPA (for a small employer) before trashing every resume in the Inbox.

    sPh
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:08PM (#14661892)
    ...another excuse for businesses to outsource. I can see the comments now: "There aren't any qualified applicants out there, so we're forced to seek the expertise elsewhere".

    Hey, lawmakers, how about similar restrictions on outsource criteria? Perhaps something along the lines of less than 10% of the workforce can be under the age of 10, half the workforce must be female, etc.

    "With open markets and a level playing field, no one can out-produce or out-compete the American worker." - President Bush, Feb.1, 2006
  • Big deal (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kpainter ( 901021 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:09PM (#14661907)
    It is also illegal to hire an illegal alien in the US. How many businesses got fined for doing that last year nation wide? The answer is somewhere between 1 and 0. This will be ignored.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:13PM (#14661958)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by SIGALRM ( 784769 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:13PM (#14661963) Journal
    This may mean that companies have to stop from the absurd practice of over specifing what they need.
    The ones that make me laugh are the "4 years of XML/SOAP" requirements. Yeah, there are like 3 people in the country that qualify on that basis.
  • by rueger ( 210566 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:14PM (#14661976) Homepage
    My God folks, the article offers no clue whatsoever about where this supposed set of rules is coming from. No Legislative reference, no Government department - Nothing.

    Then it spins into a collection of rather bizarre "tips" for job applicants, most of which don't really seem to have anything to do with the alleged changes in government hiring practices, or even reality.

    Even for slashdot this is pretty weak.

  • by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:14PM (#14661978) Homepage Journal
    It's cynical, but I believe they do this to make all of their applicants underqualified. That gives them a reason to pay them less than top of the scale. Where they list the job as $50,000-$75,000, you don't have the required 14 years of .Net experience so you're going to have to accept the $52,000.

    On the other hand, I know that some managers just don't understand it well enough to write a good position description. I've had to write several PDs (sometimes for a job I was leaving, sometimes for a position I was hiring, and finally sometimes because the higher-ups didn't like my level of job security). It's usually best done by someone who can do the job himself, but the next best thing is to define the roles and very basic requirements - will need to create web applications in a Linux-based environment.

    Just because it could be done in PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, or Java doesn't mean you have to list all of those. And if the language hasn't been selected yet, why bother listing it at all? There are excellent developers with PHP and Ruby experience that will be turned off from the suggestion that they need to use Java.
  • Ah I see (Score:2, Insightful)

    by flyinwhitey ( 928430 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:20PM (#14662051)
    So you're saying that because generations of EUROPEAN whites engaged in villainous acts, it's ok to punish their ancestors?

    What's that saying about two wrongs...
  • by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:20PM (#14662052)
    I think we can all see from real-world examples such as Wal-mart how necessary this is. Corporations are out to make a dollar, the only reason they have in the current market to keep their workforce diversified is to avoid getting sued. Hopefully this will make sure that more subtle discrimination is kept in check.

    What nonsense. If a corporation was only hiring people "to make a dollar," then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible. You know, hiring people based on their actual merit. For that matter, if "making a dollar" is partly accomplished by lowering your overhead, then hiring the people willing to work for the least (in non-demanding retail positions, for example) would also be standard practice... and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants. So, no need to worry about quotas, right?

    Or, am I confused about what you think is the "subtle discrimination" as it relates to how a corporation "makes a buck?" How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck? Or are you making a very sly, dubious, stealthy comment implying that minorities aren't as able to help an employer make a buck? Make some damn sense, or be more honest about your biases.
  • by flyinwhitey ( 928430 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:23PM (#14662098)
    I always claim "asian" because my grandparents were from Siberia.

    Oh, and just because I hate it, it's NIGGER.

    When you say "N-word" as some lame attempt to avoid using it, you empower the "n-word" in exactly the same way. Stop doing that.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:30PM (#14662174)
    And notice how all the quotes come from Gerry Crispin, "founder and principal of CareerXRoads and a long-time Internet job hunting expert." No other sources are cited.

    CareerXRoads is a consulting firm. To me, this looks like Crispin is making a big deal out of a small regulation change to drum up business.
  • by BarnabyWilde ( 948425 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:33PM (#14662221)
    ...an overbearing, overweening, unresponsive , unaccountable government.

    *You* elected 'em.

    Think before voting, next time.

    Try holding your fave politicians ACCOUNTABLE for once. Sure, career bureaucrats are responsible, but they are told what to do BY CONGRESS.

    - A disgusted native-American male-lesbian libertarian activist
  • by ashitaka ( 27544 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @03:39PM (#14662273) Homepage
    In spite of:

    - 20 years professional experience.
    - 7 years IT manager
    - C, C++, C#, .NET, VB, SQL Development
    - 10+ years project management

    No interviews or contact whatsoever.

    The only way to really get response is through personal and direct contacts with firm you are interested in.
  • by Soviet Assassin ( 815206 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [nissassateivos]> on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @04:19PM (#14662738) Homepage
    I can see how that can be true, but how many people actually fully fit what the employer is looking for? To get a more "diverse" grouping of people, one would NOT want to be quite as specific. So in a sense, it is almost contradictory to be resctictive and trying to be diverse.

    Food for thought.

    Mmm, food..

  • by idlake ( 850372 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @04:22PM (#14662774)
    My ancestors were European peasants as far back as we can trace it (the 30 years war, around the time of the Mayflower). They did not enslave or harm anybody, they were mostly trying to scrape together a living while armies marauded through Europe, and I would say that that's the typical European ancestry. You can't blame your troubles on me or my ancestors.

    But many of those "white Europeans" that you are so fond of complaining about didn't come to the US to rape and pillage, they were facing starvation or execution (often for petty offenses) in Europe and were effectively also slaves in the US; when they finally managed to free themselves, of course, they did whatever it took to survive. Likewise, many (most?) of those Africans that were sent to the US as slaves weren't captured and transported by white Europeans, they were enslaved and shipped over to the US by other Africans.

    Finally, I ask you: what notions of human rights and liberty have non-Europeans produced? Prior to the age of European empires, much of the world consisted of traditional tribal cultures, and the few big cultures like India and China were ossified, stratified, and had made racism and classism an integral part of their culture. If you view Islam as a non-European culture, then it has perhaps the closest claim of any of the other cultures to recognizing human rights and liberty, but that's a distant second to what European philosophers and humanists produced.

  • by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @05:21PM (#14663412) Journal
    Why don't you just become an economist?

    Seems like the logical solution, since your chosen industry seems pretty unstable, and you seem to envy the stability that being an economist offers.
  • Re:Ok, I'm lost. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @06:14PM (#14663990) Homepage Journal
    "So in order to get a more diverse and random selection of applicants, we're going to shrink the qualified applicant pool by making it more difficult to apply for a job?"

    The answer is...it doesn't matter. What is should be "obvious" to everyone, according to the Feds, is that the more diverse you are in your employment pool, the greater quality and better worksmanship you get. This is one of the great P.C. truths!

    Geez..I don't get it. I think they should actually BAN the listing of race and sex on employment applications and records. You should get the job based on your qualification, period.

  • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @07:41PM (#14664764) Journal
    Just how many Africans owned ships capable of transporting slaves across the pond to the Americas? And let's be very clear here, yes slavery occured, but the kinds of claptrap that even the likes of Jefferson used to justify a state that defied every notion of liberty that had come out of the Enlightenment made even some people of the day uneasy. It was an atrocity, and one that plagues race relations to this very day, though some people seem to think the whole matter ought to be ignored in favor of a happy "we're all equals now" mantra.
  • by Intraloper ( 705415 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2006 @09:43PM (#14665802)
    Take a 1 mile walk from a primarily black and latino flatlands Oakland Ca school, where the average school size is 600 -700 kids in a K-5 elementary school and where the average teacher at some schools has LESS THAN TWO FRICKIN YEARS of teaching experience and where some 5th grade kids I know have had first year teachers every day they have been in school, to a primarily white and asian hills school where average school size is 350 kids and average teacher experience is upwards of 15 years, and where the teacher salary differential means the average DISTRICT spending is over $1,000 per year per kid more and outside funding is also nearly $1,000 per student per year greater, and then tell me about institutional racism. Get as outraged about that as you are about 'institutional racism aagaisnt whites', and I may believe you actually care about institutional racism, and are not just whining about a minor bit of personal barrier you marginally encounter after being given a massive advantage agaisnt many, many potentially competitive kids who get destroyed in those institutionally disadvantaged schools. Until then (and yes, I'm being disruptively rude here; live with it. This kind of shit pissed me off.) just f*ck off.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @12:17AM (#14666768)
    these companies aren't that stupid. They know that no one credible either has those skill sets due to calendaring issues, nor would they take a job that cheap. It is so they can meet the fed requirements for using H1B's. The fed doofuses looking at it don't know, that's all they have to fake out, not any legit job applicant who would know those are BS requirements. They can say they made due dilligence to try and find a legal resident to take their job and were "forced" to import half a dozen foreign imports who they put up in a cheap apartment someplace for cheap bucks.
  • by jswhitten ( 567815 ) <jswhitten@yahoo.com> on Wednesday February 08, 2006 @02:35PM (#14671354) Homepage
    I usually check "Other" and write in "Human".

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

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