[PLUG-TALK] Why good people can't get jobs ...

[Keith Lofstrom]

Sorry I didn't join you folks for the "employment" Advanced Topics
on Tuesday night - I was getting a presentation ready for Wednesday. 

I ran across this interview, which may be germane to the discussion:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-bad-jobsor-no-jobshappen-to-good-workers

http://tinyurl.com/buc56ht

One of the messages is that new tech employers used to grow by
poaching experienced employees from large old firms.  And they
never learned how to groom college hires, or properly select
and train applicants, so now that all the poachable employees
are gone, they complain that they can't find anybody.

Another message is that employers sift through thousands of 
online resumes with software programmed with a series of yes/no
questions applied to buzzwords and numbers in the resumes.
Typically, there are no matches or bad matches, and the 
employers moan that there are no qualified applicants.

There might be dozens of applicants in the pile who could be
stellar contributors in a year, but they are drowned out by
noise, missed by stupid software, and ignored by employers who
are looking for prebuilt components for a stupid staffing model.

----

That smells like an opportunity to me.  Some coding geeks get
together with HR experts (most of whom got laid off) and some
experienced older managers (also laid off) and design a model
and supporting software to help employers find appropriate
people, developing expertise in successful placement.

That is what recruiting firms are supposed to do, but they
seem to be using stupid software and bad models, too.

At a local level, I can imagine a school like Portland State 
setting up a multi-department project to develop code and
models to do this, with the medium term goal of finding the
best possible placement for all their graduates and alumni.

----

Ah well, I can dream.  There are people who make things happen,
people who watch things happen, people who whine about what
happens, and people oblivious to what happens.  Far too many
people in categories 3 and 4.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs