I came upon this via Dean Baker. It’s worth reading, as it explodes another of the memes that gets endlessly repeated until it becomes something everyone knows, when there’s precious little truth in it. In this case, it’s the fable that jobs are going begging in this country because our school systems are simply not producing quality people. A far more persuasive case can be made that American corporations are incompetent when it comes to hiring people. The article in question is a review of Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It a book by Peter Capelli, a prof at the Wharton Business School. The thrust of the book is that American corporations put needless impediments in the way of potential employees:
Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management, is a connoisseur of job-hunting stories gone wrong. One of his favorites was related to him by someone in a company whose staffing department failed to identify a qualified candidate for a “standard engineering position”—out of 25,000 applicants. Another comes from a software developer who was turned down for a job that involved operating a particular brand-name software-testing tool—despite the fact that he had actually built just such a tool himself. Adding insult to inanity, another time he was deemed unqualified because “I didn’t have two years of experience using an extremely simple database report formatting tool, the sort of thing that would require just a couple hours for any half-decent database wrangler to master.”
(via Penn Gazette | Home Depot Syndrom, the Purple Squirrel, and America’s Job Hunt Rabbit Hole)
It’s a lengthy review, and an isolated quote doesn’t do it justice. It’s hard to argue with the proposition that it makes no sense to automatically exclude an otherwise qualified job applicant from consideration because he or she had a low GPA in high school, as many of the computers that have take over the hiring process have been programmed to do. The prevailing philosophy appears to be that if a person isn’t 100% ready to perform every aspect of a job, no learning curve allowed, then he or she will not be considered. Just another way in which the younger generation of Americans is being royally screwed. As the article points out, important sectors of our economy were created by people who lacked the credentials to get jobs in their field today:
In a 2011 op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal, Cappelli remarked on a telling statistic from the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s: only 10 percent of the people in IT jobs had IT-related degrees. But a lot of the same people would probably have a hard time landing similar jobs today, because employers have increasingly adopted what Cappelli calls “a Home Depot view of the hiring process, in which filling a job vacancy is seen as akin to replacing a part in a washing machine.
The “skills gap” is a meme embraced to a greater or lesser extent by politicians in both parties, including Obama and Romney. This is yet another illustration of what I hereby christen CtBlue’s law: there is an inverse relationship between the validity of any given proposition and the extent to which that proposition is accepted by a bi-partisan consensus. Beware of bi-partisanship, and most especially, fear unanimity.
Post a Comment