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4.5
_Why Good People Can't Get Jobs_ by Peter Cappelli started out as a series of articles that grew into a book. The book itself is short & very easy to read.For all that, it's not an intellectual lightweight. It details a lot of challenges for both employers and employees in getting hired.The biggest overall problems are an overreliance on technology and an unwillingness to spend time or money on training. So prospective employees find it very difficult to get hired because they likely up against a computer algorithm which prescans their resume and is looking for very specific terms, qualifications and experience. If their resume doesn't include those specific terms, their resume is kicked out. The search terms are only as good as the hiring manager (or possibly human resources manager) who selected the terms to search for in the first place. Which leads to rather ludicrous events such as 25 000 people applying for a position and yet the computer algorithm said not a single one of those 25 000 was even qualified for the job.Unwillingness to spend money on training is a separate problem and gets into a much more complicated issue of so many individual actors acting in exactly the same way they have all made the system as a whole less efficient. Because employers want someone who is a drop-in fit, they don't want someone straight from college who has knowledge of theory but no actual work experience. So most employers want someone who has "3-5 years" work experience in the field, often a narrowly defined field (maybe not just a profession but a particular specialist subset of that profession) so anyone who does meet those requirements is expensive to hire as everyone is looking for that same narrow range of experience, and while that perfect employee is being searched for the position remains open. Often, the position remains open for so long that actually hiring someone without prior experience and training them would have take less time than waiting for the perfect employee with prior experience.This gets into another larger organizational problem that Cappelli identifies for most employers -- they have no method of assigning a cost to leaving a position open. They can tell down to a cent how much it will cost to fill a position, and will have a detailed analysis of how much it costs to make a certain part in-house versus buying it premade from an outside vendor. But the cost of leaving a position unfilled by anybody because they want to find a "perfect" candidate? That cost is never looked at. At one point he even issues a challenge to any executives reading his book, to go to their HR department and ask for evidence that the last round of layoffs saved more money than they cost, what does it cost to leave a position vacant and have any positions been left open too long. Cappelli's point is not that executives might get a *wrong* answer, but that they will likely find they cannot get *any* answer. Most companies have no methodology for calculating those costs, so it is easy to see the immediate & visible cost of filling a position but also easy to ignore the long-term & hidden cost of leaving a position vacant.There is a long discussion about lack of training in companies today, and also in general a lack of apprenticeship programs and lack of collaboration between employers who want to fill positions that require college graduates and the colleges that produce those graduates. Cappelli likens it to outsourcing production of a key component and then neglecting to tell the outsourcing vendors the component had been outsourced to them.Cappelli takes a hard look at the claim that colleges are turning out graduates who don't know enough & are therefore unemployable. He does a good job of convincing the reader this is likely not the case as much as it is made out to be: for multiple decades now when employers list the qualities in employees they are most concerned about, it is things like ability to work with others, punctuality, accountability, problem-solving skills & work ethic that are at the tops of their lists. But none of these are things that are taught in college, nor are they things colleges are expected to teach. And again this comes back to close collaboration between employers and schools, or establishing apprenticeship or training programs, or more vocational schools. But to simply say "it is the colleges' fault" is more than a bit misleading in his opinion.Not all is doom & gloom, Cappelli does have examples of companies that have found ways to make training and apprenticeship programs both affordable and beneficial for all concerned. He says many companies are reluctant to offer training programs as no one else in their industry does so any money spent on training will likely walk out the door as employees are poached away by other companies. But he says one company accepted that and found that filling positions with trainees was better than leaving them completely unfilled. He also gave an example of a trucking firm that had a free training class for drivers; prospective drivers weren't charged for it, but also had to take it on their own time. And if after the end of three months they trainees for that driving program passed, they got hired, ensuring a steady supply of prospective new hires for the firm.There are also some tips at the end of one section about things that will cause problems or glitches for resume-scanning software.It was a very good book and I think it is one prospective employees should take a look at and prospective employers should read a couple of times.
