Did Rube Goldberg Invent Our Modern Day Hiring Process?

For those of you who may never have heard of Rube Goldberg, here is a brief bio,

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor and author with a degree in engineering from the University of California Berkeley. He was a founding member of the National Cartoonist Society.

Best known for his “inventions”, Rube’s early years as an engineer informed his most acclaimed work. A Rube Goldberg contraption – an elaborate set of arms, wheels, gears, handles, cups and rods, put in motion by balls, canary cages, pails, boots, bathtubs, paddles and live animals – takes a simple task and makes it extraordinarily complicated. He had solutions for How To Get The Cotton Out Of An Aspirin Bottle, imagined a Self-Operating Napkin, and created a Simple Alarm Clock – to name just a few of his hilariously depicted drawings.

Goldberg’s cartoons always showed the solution to a simple task through a series of steps, A, B, C etc. Here then are the steps most companies take to fill a position.

How to Hire Great People

A.   Write and post a job description that has little or nothing to do with what the person hired will be doing and rarely mentions why the position is open. Ask candidates to send a resume and cover letter if they are interested. All candidates are INTERESTED!

B.   Receive 1000s of resumes and cover letters (that your posting requested) and act shocked and amazed when your ATS system becomes full and your phone begins ringing off the hook.

C.   Devise various filters to help you get a handle on the influx of resumes. These could include eliminating any candidate who was honest enough to say that he/she is currently unemployed; eliminating anyone who indicates on their resume that they are not degreed (even though for most positions in a company having a degree has very little to do with how successful a candidate will be); very subtly determine how old a candidate is by looking at the date attended or graduated college.

D.   Ignore the 1000s of candidates who did not meet your criteria, thereby costing your company many potential customers for your company’s products or services.

E.   Contact the few that remain and begin presenting them to your hiring managers.

F.    Let weeks go by before your hiring managers decide to schedule interviews and discover that many of the few candidates left have taken themselves off the market.

G.   Settle for those that remain, interview and hire.

H.   After 3 – 6 months begin the process again for this same position. The reason that it is open is that the candidate hired through your process did not measure up.

Sound familiar? Sounds like the perfect description of a Rub Goldberg from Webster’s New World Dictionary, “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation.

Our task as recruiters, talent managers, recruiting consultants should be to help our companies recruit, hire and retain the best talent for every position. The “simple” part of this operation is to understand what any position requires the candidate to actually do and only search for those who can do it. The hard part of the process is selling those identified to consider the position, interview, accept an offer and contribute long term to your company’s success.

Rube Goldberg would love our modern day hiring process and if he had depicted it in one of his cartoons everyone would have laughed and appreciated the joke.

R.I.P. Rube!

 

 

Views: 287

Comment by Jeff Yocom on April 27, 2011 at 6:38pm

Good post, Nick.

As an agency recruiter, your comment about "our task as recruiters" highlights the fact that I tend to deal with two types of clients - those that allow me to be consultative and to provide the full extent of my expertise to the process to navigate through hiccups, obstacles and road-blocks (because I've been there before and "seen the end of the movie") OR those that ultimately don't either want or listen to my guidance. In a perfect world, I would only work with one of those groups but I don't anticipate having that luxury any time soon.

Comment by Nick Tubach on April 28, 2011 at 10:41am

Jeff, thanks for the comment. If there were more agency recruiters out there like you the whole perception of "recruiters" would be quite different. The profession suffers from an image problem caused by way too many people claiming to be "recruiters" many of whom view what they are doing as a temporary job while they continue to look for that "real" job. Professional recruiters, like you, should command the same respect from their clients for their knowledge and expertise as do  other professions, such as doctors, lawyers, financial planners, CPAs, etc. 

I know that it is never easy to turn business away or fire a customer. But every time we do decide to work with that other client you mentioned, the one who doesn't respect your or your profession, the more we contribute to that unprofessional perception, the more we tarnish our image. It is not an easy decision to make, and I applaud the efforts of all good recruiters like you for at least trying.

Comment

You need to be a member of RecruitingBlogs to add comments!

Join RecruitingBlogs

Subscribe

All the recruiting news you see here, delivered straight to your inbox.

Just enter your e-mail address below

Webinar

RecruitingBlogs on Twitter

© 2024   All Rights Reserved   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Service