U.S.Laws May Make Online Job Hunting Harder

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.'"

Might be difficult....

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.

Re:Might be difficult....

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.

Re:Might be difficult....

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.

Re:Might be difficult....

As best I can figure it, what happens is a manager tells a supervisor what skills are needed, the supervisor tells HR what levels of each skill are needed, and HR sticks arbitrary numbers in place of the skill levels because they don't have a clue what they're looking at.

"5 years of..." is the mantra of the human resources department. 5 years makes you experienced, 10 years qualifies you to lead a group, 15 years qualifies you to lead the department. I recall passing up one ad that required 15 years of Windows NT/2000 administration experience in 2001. I remember wondering if maybe NT was really that old and I'd missed something.

If we're lucky, this will push employers to scale down their listed requirements to something realistic. Like others here, I've never landed a job where I met anywhere near the listed requirements.

Required vs. Nice to have

When I write a job ad, I distinguish between what is required and what is an asset (e.g., "Shell scripting, Motif, and Snobol experience are all assets, but not required.").

For the applicant we are saying "let us know if you have these things, but still

Re:Might be difficult....

You don't meet our qualifications? [ridiculous...stings.com]

Required skills are:

Linux Operating Systems (RedHat, CentOS)
Linux Run Levels and Services Configuration (both xinetd and individual services)
Server/System Troubleshooting Skills
BASH scripting
Basic PERL
IPTables and Firewall Technologies
Load-Balancer Technologies
Intel Architecture Hardware Troubleshooting
Windows Server Administration
MSSQL, MySQL, and Sybase Administration
SSH Protocol Key Authentication
PHP Scripting
Apache Configuration
Mail Technologies (qmail, milters, spamassassin, clamav)
Tomcat Configuration
The importance of documentation and repeatable process.
Long-term architectural planning.
3 to 5 years of experience required

Job is located in downtown Portland
Job location is Portland, OR

Compensation: $15/hr

Re:Might be difficult....

Are you kidding me? Those are halfway reasonable. (Though not at that pay scale.) Some of the best postings were the ones that demanded:

• 20 Years of Java Experience
• 10 Years of Web Design in HTML 4.0 or XHTML
• 7 Years of C# Experience
• 8 Years of D (or some othe

Re:Might be difficult....

Lol! I actually DO meet those technical qualifications, but alas, I live in Georgia, where someone with those credentials could command 16, or even 17 dollars an hour...It's true!

Re:Might be difficult....

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.

Ok, I'm lost.

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.

Whatever happened to The Most Qualified Apllicant?

You would THINK that allowing companies to hire the most qualified applicants for the job would be sufficient.

Sorry, but you do not have a RIGHT to a job. And especially to any PARTICULAR job. You only have the right to compete for the position. But what's REALLY boggling my mind is this is coming out of an administration that is supposedly so far in bed with business interests, that the resultant child is several weeks overdue. . . .

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

"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, a

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

Diversity is just a code word for institutionalized racism against white people.

Nope. It's also used to turn highly-qualified Asian students away from the University of California system.

-jcr

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

Yeah, but all those black lesbian disabled 'Nam vets have to work somewhere....

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

I still don't see how a bit of bureaucracy is going to freeze out "straight, white, christian males". These are the sort of people who thrive on bureaucracy.

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

For all of those that say white entitlement doesn't exisit, they just aren't white, rich, and racisit enough. For all of us "super-whites" we have a special ceremony on our 12th birthday where we get our "White Entitlement Card." It gets us into to whatever school we want, exclusive clubs, and even a seat in the Senate. A representative from Big Oil even comes and fills up our SUVs that we got from our white friend that owns the car dealership that uses illegal mexican labor. You even get 5 "get out of jail free" times, they punch the card though so it sucks when you get to #6 and have to go to low security club-med type prison.

I can't explain the rest right now, one of my servants just informed me that my favorite endangered species platter is ready for lunch.

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

You stole my post from Fark word for word. I'm impressed someone kept it even.

Re:Ok, I'm lost.

Yup, I'm white, but let's see... I left home at 16. I didn't get any scholarship help, so I didn't get to go to college. I taught myself to program on school computers though. I got married young and my wife had some health problems. We were both working service sector and couldn't afford health care so we tried welfare... and I quote their response: "Well, we can't help you because you are white and you aren't pregnant. I suggest you get pregnant if you want health insurance." Needless to say, my wife went without health care because we were white.

I was lucky that a few years later, while I was bartending, A mexican man gave me a chance to program for a small company when I told him I had taught myself C++ years before. I became a software engineer and worked my way up. I am now a senior level engineer and make a nice middle class income. Suddenly though, I find myself attacked for being a "priveledged white man". WTF? Everything I earned I did through blood, sweat and tears in SPITE of the fact that I'm white, not because of it. I was poor and underpriveledged and didn't qualify for your scholarships or health care or anything else that the underpriveledged sometimes get because the color of my skin was wrong.

Somewhere along the line I must have misplaced my white priveledge coupon book because I missed out on all these favors I was supposed to receive. I'm not bitter or anything, just absolutely offended that people look at me as an excuse why they CAN'T be successfull because I'm white instead of seeing me as an example that anyone can make something of themselves regardless of origin.

think about what you're saying

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

Re:think about what you're saying

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 noti

So in other words

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.

Here is a question

What if claim that I am a African American, but I am actually white. Can they quantify and measure my race, will they sent to a local eugenics clinic to measure the size of my head or take my DNA to identify my race?

What would happen, if I just tell them that my grand-grand-grand father came from Africa so deep down I feel like I am part of a minority?

Actually I never check the "White" or "Caucasian" box on the race section on the forms, because putting myself in a race category just reinforces the fact that there are race categories and people are somehow treated differently because of it. Actually the word "Caucasian" comes directly from studies of eugenics at the turn of the century and I consider using it just as offensive as someone using the "n"-word, because it implies endorsing the values and attitudes of the time.

Re:Here is a question

I've always been fond of checking "other" and putting "spawn of Cthulu"

"Caucasian"

I never check off anything marked "Caucasian".. my ancestry is Italian and German.. nothing to do with the Caucasus.. I'm not Georgian or Ossetian or anything like that.

Besides, one of my German great-grandparents was a Jew, and one half of my Dad's Ital

Re:Here is a question

Speaking about the term Caucasian, here is an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine [annals.org] that talks about the history of the term, and how it is basically just as offensive to use as "negro".

The bottom line is that 'race is an unscientific construct'

Re:Here is a question

It is. There is not a quick, easy answer, but I think people should try to be objective and be educated about it.

I have thought about this issue quite a bit. What started it was that when I was a freshman in college in the Computer Science program, my un

Oh like it's not hard enough already!?

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.

Re:Oh like it's not hard enough already!?

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?

Re:Oh like it's not hard enough already!?

Unemployment rates are only low if you believe the stupid method the government uses to count the unemployed. Anyone over age X or under age Y pretty much doesn't count. Anyone that's been unemployed more than Z number of months doesn't count. That kind of

Leave it to the gov't

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!

um..

an applicant must "express interest" in the job

Surely you wouldnt work in a place you have no interest in!

I think this is BS

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.

Isn't it hard enough already?

It seems they are going to regulate this country to the point where it's impossible to find a job. When's the last time any of the people making all these stupid laws actually tried to get a job? In the olden days you could walk into a place with a help wanted sign and get a job that day and just work - maybe for just that day or maybe for twenty years. Now it's so expensive for companies to hire people and such a risk for them to give someone a try that they often don't fill vacancies for great periods of time and only then when they find an applicant that has exactly the needed skills and referenced. No more picking someone with some skills and the ability to learn and just training them. God no - they could turn out to be a moron or lazy and you can't fire them because it's such a nightmare to do so. The number of unemployed in this country is pretty huge and the time a lot of people can go unemployed can be many months and it all comes down to all the red-tape involved.

It's great to protect people from shitty employers but not a good idea to create so much red tape that you're keeping a significant number of your citizens from finding work. All this red tape is a good part of the reason temps and illegals are so popular as employees.

Scare phrases

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

TFA? Useless and Misleading.

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.

Teach HR to write real Tech Job listings

Back in 2000 I was searching for a job. I saw a listing. With all the other criteria there was one that said "7 years Windows 95 experience" WTF. That would mean someone would have to have been using Win95 since 1993. Now I know there were betas running around back then and I had one of them at the time but other than me and a few other techies would have actually have had that experience?

Also having to have exact skills to the job listing would increase the ammount of people lieing on their resumes which means that employers no long could trust that the resume was valid.


Support our Troops
Impeach our President

This will actually make matters much worse..

In many cases, government jobs are already required to be advertised widely, and candidates must be considered on the basis of their qualifications. This means, that if you have your golfing buddy in mind for the job, all you have to do is make sure the qualifications listed match his (and only his) profile. Now, if applicants have to conform to the qualifications 100% this is a much, much easier process. Imagine a wanted ad like "senior business consultant with 13 years experience in federal auditing blahblah and a minimum of 3, but no more that 4 weeks of experience in an abbatoir", or whatever crappy holiday job the schmuck had.

Of course, if you do want to give a lot of people a shot, you just state "requirements: carbon based lifeform, literacy" and "the following are a plus: ......"

So, really, this helps the government hiring cheats.

Law of unintended consequences again

Congress passes these ever more bigoted laws (in the name of diversity of course, gotta love NewSpeak) so they can feel good about having 'done something' about a problem that increasingly is made worse by more laws because it has been mostly solved. We long since passed the point where the negative impact of more laws were outweighed by the positive benefits. Thirty-forty years ago, yea, there were some serious problems still lingering in society. We talked a good "everybody is equal" but practice didn't match theory very well.

But these days we have, if anything, overshot equality and went to tribalism amok. These days it seems the only ones who quotes King's "I have a Dream" speech's line about judging everyone on their ideas instead of their skin is Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich because the entire 'Civil Rights' establishment has invested all their political capital on maintaining quotas and pretending to be victims while having all the trappings (limo, jets, mistresses, etc) of the wealthy. Listen up folks, when (in theory if not in practice) the left, the right and just about everyone in between are in agreement on an issue it really isn't much of an issue anymore. The only reason it is still an issue is because too many people have made an industry out of "Oprah Nation" style victimhood as career.

Actual Details from Ars Technica

Hurrah - someone with research skills!

The actual rule:
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/fedreg/final/200502017 6.htm [dol.gov]
Obligation To Solicit Race and Gender Data for Agency Enforcement Purposes

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060207-6127 .html [arstechnica.com]

Do you know what the OFCCP is? It is the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, and that little taste of bureaucratic alphabet soup is a part of the Department of Labor's Employment Standards Administration. The OFCCP's job is to ensure "that employers doing business with the Federal government comply with the laws and regulations requiring nondiscrimination." In essence, that makes the OFCCP one of the many departments that exist within the government to monitor activities and make sure things are done properly and fairly. A noble goal, to be sure, but the OFCCP has distinguished itself with a new rule going into effect this week regarding the tracking of those who apply for jobs on the Internet, and it may have repercussions for anyone using electronic means to search for a new career.

Online job hunting doesn't work anyway

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.

Hrmmmm...

Guess it's time to add the old "P.S. I'm deaf" to my applications? I've noticed in the past whenever I mention my hearing I get ZERO responses... when I leave it out I often get interviews or an email asking for more info. Regardless, once they find out I never hear back from them. I even had a friend who was a (non-tech) recruiter and showed it to someone at their office who covered the tech jobs. "Wow! Great stuff, can't wait to meet him!" then he HAD to say "Oh, but there is one little thing"... I never heard from them. Now he knows never to mention it either. So what shall I do? If diversity is required why aren't they all over me? Anybody with more experience on this kind of thing have some advice for me? How do you tell them?

Re:Hrmmmm...

My dad is an amputee, he has no hands. But he's never let that get in the way. He has the neatest "hand writing" I've ever seen. He's an analyst / programmer and he types with a pen and sometimes his elbow's. Sure he types a little slowly, but he gets more

READ THE PDF!

For the love of Mike, people, READ THE FRICKIN' PDF!

http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/fedreg/final/200502017 6.htm [dol.gov]

The rule is for FEDERAL CONTRACTORS!!! Hello, can anyone read around here. This does not apply to NON-FEDERAL CONTRACTORS. Again, READ THE PDF. It's prefereable to having morons posting comments.

Re:It only applies to FEDERAL JOBS

At first, then it is rolling out to all eomplyers with over 50 employees.

Re:It only applies to FEDERAL JOBS

We should rename this place "The land of chicken little" because the sky is always falling here...

Re:Good [using what twisted logic?]

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.

Re:No end to the red tape, as usual

Kind of makes you wonder why anyone bothers to vote for the GOP anymore.

Remember, it's not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes!

Re:Real qualifications

I have Advanced Cover Sheet, Level 2, certificate, please hire me!

No: It's dumping the self-taught from job market.

It also defines an applicant as someone who meets ALL the qualifications listed. This has the implication that if you miss on just one, an HR department can't consider you.

Drop out of college in the '70s just short of a degree to pursue your consulting pr

Re:You got what you asked for....

Welcome to Oklahoma! We are one of five states that does not allow write-ins (so I doubt if it is unconstitutional). Plus we have the distinction of being the only state where a candidate must be able to show a higher than 2% following in order to be liste