Let me try and set this up.
When you go into an advanced education setting, the general promise or equation therein is “You will spend money, but you will get new knowledge that will make you more attractive to the job market.”
Now, you can argue with that statement and say the end goal is NOT the job market, and maybe you’re right. Maybe people just want to learn data analytics to, well, learn data analytics. But by and large the idea is to make yourself more employer-friendly, if we’re being real. No one goes into debt with no promise on the back-end, in the most general terms.
But then what happens a lot when you get that new degree or that new knowledge?
Those who can hire you only want to know the bullet points you’ve already, exactly done.
Seems like you just got sold a raw bag of onions.
My story on this
I went to graduate school in 2012 for organizational development. Broadly-speaking, it was a terrible idea.
I think about how dumb it was all the time. I was 32 or so, and I surrounded myself with 22-23 year-olds, which was a challenge. I had mostly worked in writing and marketing beforehand, and now I was trying to essentially do HR, and every time I had an interview, some interviewer was like “OK, well, you’re in this program, buuuuut….”
It was all kind of a mess. They wanted to know I had done specific stuff before. I had not. If I was 22, and fresh out of school, maybe it would have mattered less — because they subsequently could have paid me less. But because I’m older and getting a Masters, they are like “Oh, we gotta pay this dude but he isn’t hitting bullet points? Fuck this!”
I ended up moving to Texas for … a marketing job.
Probably could have done that without the thousands in debt, but again, it’s my stupidity. It’s on me.
The bigger point here
Forget my story, because you probably don’t care. The bigger point here is this — >
- We say that “critical thinking” and “adaptability” and “knowledge-gaining” and even “curiosity” matter.
- In reality, we hire based on a checklist of what the person has already done.
A money quote
From an article called “Hire for skills, not talent:”
So the next time you’re filling a job, shift how you evaluate applicants.
Lucas explains, “We need to not only look at ‘Does this person already know how to do something?’ but ‘Can she learn it’?”
Yep. Who really cares about “already know” when the whole promise of education is “can learn and adapt?” That’s why you went into debt, for chrissakes! To prove that investment!
The next elephant in the room
How do you measure for “can he/she learn something?”
This is a tough one. The most obvious answers are — >
- Ask them about past experiences where they had to learn something
- Give them a completely random topic and see what they can present back to you
- Quizzes or assessments
Here are the problems — >
- The candidates will lie.
- Most organizations would never do this because they’re too concerned with immediate task work and whether you can “hit the ground running”
- Eh, generic.
Now factor into time-to-hire. A lot of recruiters and HR types are under the gun from decision-makers and the only way they know to prove their worth is to say, “Well, we turned around this hire fast, boss!” But understanding a candidate takes time. You need to invest. Unfortunately, we don’t often do that. We get caught in “sense of urgency” stuff, as with most biz units. It’s not easy.
Remember — > a lot of recruiting processes alienate the best people. They don’t attempt to get the best people. This would be wholly accurate.
How else could we hire?
Off of skills and curiosity, not bulleted lists. Admittedly, though, this is hard and takes people out of their pre-existing comfort zone. Most people don’t want that, and hiring is largely a box-check and not a strategic advantage. Don’t believe me? Then why does it reside in HR and not business development? Hahaha.
Alright, have a good rest of the week y’all … and riddle me this. Why are we still hiring the way we do? Just laziness?
I don’t have a lot of pre-recession employment experience thanks to my age (I’m in my early 30s) but it did seem like it was easier to get a job before 2008 without experience than in the ensuing years since.
My hypothesis is that after the recession, many companies adopted austerity/extreme risk aversion policies that extended to hiring practices, and a fear of being “disrupted”/going under/drowning thanks to extreme competition for limited capital led to companies wanting to only hire experienced people as some sort of bulwark against failure.
What never made sense to me about this practice, though, is why someone who’s already done a job for a defined number of years would want to make what is essentially a lateral move without knowing what the new salary might be. So, let’s say you’ve hiring a Development Coordinator for a nonprofit and “require” 3 years of experience as a development coordinator. Why would someone who’s already done the same job for 3 years want to move in to the same role at a different company without knowing anything about the compensation package or work environment? Seems like companies are banking on labor’s dissatisfaction with their current employers and hoping that people are fed up enough with their situations to take anything that mildly resembles it for maybe a marginal pay increase or slightly better work conditions. This seems to be happening alongside companies’ desire to not hire “job hoppers”, however, despite this paradigm REQUIRING people to hop every 2-3 years.
If I’ve read this trend correctly, it’s fairly incoherent and out of touch with the current conditions of the US labor market. We’re finally starting to see some revelations that some of the most celebrated ideas of the past 10 years (e.g. the “skills gap”) were complete fabrications and resulted from companies making up reasons to make hiring processes more challenging to take advantage of a lousy labor market. Smart companies (in the nonprofit sector at least) are realizing that throwing out words like “requirements” and being hard on what they’re looking for in candidates is a losing strategy; they’re investing more in retention and extending compensation packages to include things like retirement contributions.