Rant: Generation Y: Please stop lying on your resumes

[Saint Nick]

Too many Urkles.

 

[SP33Demon]

My wife and I have had discussions about the "Generation Y entitlement mentality" and arrived at this conclusion:

Most Generation Yers were preteens and teens during the large booms of the late 90s and mid-2000's. Many families were able to live in a financial state they normally wouldn't be able to afford because of easy credit or high tech jobs that didn't exist before. At the same time, rapidly evolving technology has given Generation Yers some pretty awesome shit none of the rest of us have had when we were kids. Naturally, because their parents were making and spending more than they normally would have because of the .com and housing bubbles, these kids were spoiled more than usual.

There is probably some truth in that.

 

[techforums]

Guess I'll go talk to every Generation Y person in the world about this topic.

 

[RearAdmiral]

Dear Baby Boomer,

Human Resources is a joke. If thats where you ended up in life, be prepared to deal with the consequences.

lol old people

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Another interview tip. Have a five year plan starting with the position your applying for. Space out the positions though and be realistic. You likely will not be going from support to the head of international sales in 5 years. However it is still good to hear where you would like to eventually end up.

I've never understood questions like this, to be honest. If you're a technical person, I can see why you might ask "Over the next 5 years, what kind of technologies could you see yourself learning?"

The whole "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" question is pointless. If your top candidate said "I want to be a manager in 5 years" and you are fairly certain that you aren't going to have that kind of a position open in 5 years, are you still going to hire him? Or if your candidate says "I plan to stay in this position," are you not going to hire him?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

That's the dumbest thing I have read all week, by quite a margin.

Actually, vi edit's story is a perfect example of what you should look for, particularly if you're hiring entry level support people. At my last job, I helped interview candidates for positions ranging from help desk to network engineer. Particularly in the case of help desk, we weren't necessarily looking for the "right" answer to our questions; we wanted the candidate to talk through their thought process on solving problems. We didn't let them get away with one line answers, either -- if they answered it in a sentence, we threw out more obstacles to see how they would work around the issues.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

We want that creepy fucker who will write our scripts for us so our AutoCAD files open twice as fast and take half as much hard drive space.

Hey, wait a minute -- didn't you say earlier that you were writing AutoCAD scripts for your company? Are you the creepy guy? :awe:

 

[Gibson486]

I've never understood questions like this, to be honest. If you're a technical person, I can see why you might ask "Over the next 5 years, what kind of technologies could you see yourself learning?"

The whole "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" question is pointless. If your top candidate said "I want to be a manager in 5 years" and you are fairly certain that you aren't going to have that kind of a position open in 5 years, are you still going to hire him? Or if your candidate says "I plan to stay in this position," are you not going to hire him?

I agree....

I cannot stand it when they ask new grads that question....what the hell do they know? Also, with the market the way it is now, everyone is just gonna say what the interviewer wants to hear.

On a related note, we interviewed this guy for a position. I saw his resume and said, "There is no way he did what he said with the experience he has". Everyone was like,"Oh, but he has his masters". Yeah, we did not offer him a job.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

On a related note, we interviewed this guy for a position. I saw his resume and said, "There is no way he did what he said with the experience he has". Everyone was like,"Oh, but he has his masters". Yeah, we did not offer him a job.

Education inflation is a big problem these days and because of it, companies are hopping on the bandwagon. It is short-sighted in my opinion, because 1) Experience trumps education for probably 99% of all jobs out there and 2) Companies thinking that they can get a better educated worker for bargain-basement prices are going to find out the definition of "high turnover" once the economy improves. And that doesn't even mention that for many degrees (I'm looking at you, MBA), experience more than makes up for not having it.

 

[PingSpike]

My wife and I have had discussions about the "Generation Y entitlement mentality" and arrived at this conclusion:

Most Generation Yers were preteens and teens during the large booms of the late 90s and mid-2000's. Many families were able to live in a financial state they normally wouldn't be able to afford because of easy credit or high tech jobs that didn't exist before. At the same time, rapidly evolving technology has given Generation Yers some pretty awesome shit none of the rest of us have had when we were kids. Naturally, because their parents were making and spending more than they normally would have because of the .com and housing bubbles, these kids were spoiled more than usual.

Probably a lot of truth in this. I'd say throughout history the reason people didn't avoid spoiling their children because of some grand wisdom of old...they did it because they were poor as shit and couldn't if they wanted too.

The sad part is, even then we were mostly pretending to be rich as a country. Those kids were raised to think things were grand, so now that they're out there in a real world they are even more ill prepared for the reality of a situation facing them.

 

[Rage187]

EXCUSE ME?!

<-- HR Lady.

Thankfully, in my organization, I don't do ANY hiring. We make the hiring manager do all the interviews, pick the candidates, come up with their own questions (since they should know what they want) and we'll sit in if necessary. It's not our fault if they pick out a dud, and they come to us going "oh maybe we should have listened to you when you told us that dude was weird. Can we get rid of him?"

I love my HR department and the recruiters. Without them, how many of us would be working where we are? Exactly, be nice to them.

 

[AreaCode707]

Dear Fellow Gen Y/Z/Whatever:

STFU.

HR people generally don't have 70-hour crunch weeks. Software developers do.

Who's the smart one, then?

You've clearly never been running a payroll cycle. Or performance management program. Or recruiting. HR people are generally very overloaded because they're not a profit center and it makes fiscal sense to squeeze every last drop of work out of them.

<--- HR systems project manager

 

[Gillbot]

Why do HR requests list XXX degree or equivalent experience, then turn down a prospective candidate right away for lack of said degree?

 

[ShawnD1]

Too many Urkles.

Urkle built a cloning machine. You can never have too many people as smart as him.

The whole "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" question is pointless. If your top candidate said "I want to be a manager in 5 years" and you are fairly certain that you aren't going to have that kind of a position open in 5 years, are you still going to hire him? Or if your candidate says "I plan to stay in this position," are you not going to hire him?

I don't get it either. If you're expecting management in 5 years, you're dreaming. If you're not expecting to move up, you probably suck. If you're planning on moving to a different job or different company within that time, then why are we having this interview?

The other part is that most people have no clue where they will be in 5 years. I was still in college finishing up a chemistry degree 5 years ago. Since then I've worked in labs, gone back to school, and I'm in a totally different profession. My best friend was planning to start a master's degree 5 years ago; he is now working in a factory and not using his education at all. My brother was doing the exact same job he does right now, but he was getting paid less. Maybe that's a 5 year goal - get better at whatever I'm already doing and get paid more.

 

[Rage187]

Here is what I look for in the 5 year answers.

If you are applying for a support job but your 5 year plan has you working in chemical engineering. Then we see your time here as very limited as your career track will have to significantly change before you are where you want to be.

If you say you want to be CEO or some other unrealistic goal, then we see you aren't being, well..realistic.

Good answers make sense. When we interview candidates, we aren't looking at you to just fill this position, but positions down the road in other departments. So if you tell us your goal is to be in marketing, sales, design, whatever; then we see you are a good investment for the future and you are much more likely to get the job.

 

[hanoverphist]

yeah i'd make the argument that (properly) running a WoW guild is just as intense as any real-world project or group management. i've never played WoW though so this is just from secondhand speak.

i still play WoW on occasion, and the guild im in is primarily over 20 age. the guild leader is a 40+ yr old professional that holds a very good job. he also has been leader for a few games, not just wOw. some of us have been playing games together since diablo and d2 back in 95 or 96. it seems like a pretty hard thing to maintain for a long time, so far we have been pretty successful. im not a raider, and i dont even have a lvl 80 yet but i play when i can and do what i want. no pressure.

 

[Rage187]

I didn't get this question from a candidate but one of our recruiters did.

"is there going to be a drug test?"


At first you think "why would anyone ask this?" but then I thought, at least this person doesn't want to waste anyone's time. I don't think I would disqualify someone for this question, but there would be some followup questions to see if this was either a brilliant question on their part, showing they were trying to stop the train before it hit the broken track or that they had a momentary lapse in judgement.

 

[Saint Nick]

That's why you're WINSLOW.

 

[sjwaste]

Here is what I look for in the 5 year answers.

If you are applying for a support job but your 5 year plan has you working in chemical engineering. Then we see your time here as very limited as your career track will have to significantly change before you are where you want to be.

If you say you want to be CEO or some other unrealistic goal, then we see you aren't being, well..realistic.

Good answers make sense. When we interview candidates, we aren't looking at you to just fill this position, but positions down the road in other departments. So if you tell us your goal is to be in marketing, sales, design, whatever; then we see you are a good investment for the future and you are much more likely to get the job.

What function do you manage/hire for?

 

[AreaCode707]

Why do HR requests list XXX degree or equivalent experience, then turn down a prospective candidate right away for lack of said degree?

Hiring managers write the requirements usually, not recruiters.

 

[Gillbot]

Hiring managers write the requirements usually, not recruiters.

I understand, but why put that in there if you won't even consider letting people past the pre-screen without the degree?

 

[Ns1]

I didn't get this question from a candidate but one of our recruiters did.

"is there going to be a drug test?"

I ask people who work at the company that BEFORE I apply.

 

[SarcasticDwarf]

Folks, don't blame HR. Unless you are in the government, HR is doing exactly what the hiring manager tells them to do. I was fortunate to have had a boss early in my career who let me help with filling our vacancies, and first hand, HR was screening exactly what they should. At least with the person that we usually worked with, if there was a resume on the edge, it always got referred through for us to look at. When we gave broad criteria, they did a nice job sending through people that somehow fit it. And I'm talking the "I need someone who can learn and think on their feet" type requirements.

This all depends on the company and what policies HR has instituted. At my current (20k+ employees) company HR controls everything and the hiring manager has effectively no input prior to the interview. Here is our procedure:

1. Manager gets approval from his VP, hiring committee, HR, and the Pope to hire someone and asks HR to start the process.
2. HR asks him what the position is. The position MUST match an existing job title + description already in the system. Creating a new job title (or new level) takes several years.
3. Hiring manager unhappily accepts the closest job title, which may not pay in the right range or have a description that is at all applicable to the position.
4. Position is posted a month or two later. Why? Hell if I know.
5. People apply. Since the job descriptions are all very, very generic you get a wide range of applicants, most of which would be a lousy fit. 99% of the applicants who would be great and would have applied to a good job posting do not apply.
6. HR screens the applicants. Since they go by the flawed job description, they usually weed out the best candidates for one reason or another.
7. Time for the interviews!
8. You find an awesome candidate. You tell HR.
9. HR sends the person's resume and job posting to the HR pay team who determine what range you can offer at within the pay band. Their determination has nothing whatsoever to do with how good the person is or their skills, but instead is determined by how well it matches the (flawed) job posting. The best candidate in the industry who doesn't meet the exact education desirables and who has <10 years of experience will be at the absolute bottom of the pay band.
10. Person is offered the position, hopefully accepts, etc, etc.

 

[ShawnD1]

I didn't get this question from a candidate but one of our recruiters did.

"is there going to be a drug test?"

Only a stoner would care. The Marijuana&#8482; stays in your body for about a month because it's fat soluble. Coke fiends really don't give a shit. More hardcore drugs like coke and meth are more water soluble and they don't stay in the system longer than a week. A quick google search says coke can only be detected for 2-4 days usually. All they need to do is stop doing coke from the day they got the interview and they can pass your silly piss test. Potheads can't.

If you actually cared about filtering out drug users, you would do a hair analysis. It cost like 10x as much but it dates back months.

 

[AreaCode707]

This all depends on the company and what policies HR has instituted. At my current (20k+ employees) company HR controls everything and the hiring manager has effectively no input prior to the interview. Here is our procedure:

Not saying your process is a good one (seems to suck, and probably partly because of the people involved) but I bet you these are some of the reasons this stuff exists:

1. Manager gets approval from his VP, hiring committee, HR, and the Pope to hire someone and asks HR to start the process.

At some point the CEO asked someone, "how big is our company"?
Someone said, "xx people."
The CEO said, "what if we filled all our empty positions today?"
Someone went into your recruiting system and said, "xx people times 4." The CEO said, "WTF??? That's not right. What the hell are you doing down there in recruiting?"
Someone said, "Recruiting on everything we've been asked to fill."
The CEO said, "We can't afford all those hires so you're wasting a ton of time, you inefficient fuckers. Go make sure it's all real positions."

Recruiting then spends 6 months trying to get hiring managers to respond and confirm whether they are real positions. They close a bunch of outdated junk. Now you're down to only real positions. This gets presented to the CEO.

CEO: "Finance, can we afford all these positions?"
Finance: "Oh totally not. We'd go bankrupt if we hired all these people."
CEO: "Recruiting, why are you hiring for all this stuff we can't afford? Work with Finance and figure out how to budget for headcount and only recruit for budgeted positions."

Finance and Recruiting work out a budget and process to make sure everyone stays in budget. Now you need to get approval from everyone and God to make sure your position is being prioritized appropriately compared to all the other positions in the company because $$ is a limited resource.

2. HR asks him what the position is. The position MUST match an existing job title + description already in the system. Creating a new job title (or new level) takes several years.

This happens because back in the day when this wasn't being done, a Business Systems Analyst turned to his buddy, a Systems Business Analyst and they started comparing compensation and found out that one makes $60k a year and the other makes $45k a year, doing the same job. They complain.

This gets raised up the chain, big old fuss because clearly this isn't fair, and find out that these two guys were hired at the same time by different managers who had totally different views on salary. A little more investigation shows that the market rate for a BSA is actually $55k. This makes the underpaid guy happy but now you've got a probably with the overpaid guy.

So now you've got a Compensation team that analyzes job descriptions and duties, runs a pretty serious analysis to figure out how much that role should be paid per the market and the area. Because you can't pay a BSA in Iowa the same as you pay a BSA in San Jose. Either you're making one rich or the other one is starving.

Assume you have a company of 30k people. You probably have 6k open positions (conservatively, depending on your line of business.) How many of those managers want to create a new title and job description? Your comp team is maybe 5 people. Most requests that are coming in are going to generally fit one of the 4k job titles they already have in the system, and they have to figure out which ones actually won't so they can run their analysis.

Managers may be absolutely convinced they have the one unique position in the company that needs to be leveled, but if you take the manager's word for it every time you go right back to your BSA scenario above, which is bad for retention, bad for using company money efficiently, and bad for everybody involved.

And honestly, managers don't always have the perspective to KNOW if there's a title/description/comp set that matches their requirements. Managers don't spend all day staring at the big list of data; there's no reason they should be able to know at a glance if there's a design that matches their needs.

3. Hiring manager unhappily accepts the closest job title, which may not pay in the right range or have a description that is at all applicable to the position.

Titles are a matter of label. Managers should be picking the position that matches the description/comp range and who cares what the comp title is? Every company I know uses a different set of formal titles and comp titles. So one company calls someone a "specialist" and another calls them a "coordinator". The manager may have a preference, the candidate may have a preference, but honestly it had to be standardized one way or the other in order to have an adjoining set of data attached to it and it doesn't truly matter since you can call the person by any darn title you want.

4. Position is posted a month or two later. Why? Hell if I know.
Well, we all know recruiters are useless and a drain on company resources, right? So we should hire as few of them as possible, since they're basically a waste of space and don't produce any real product.

Oh wait, that means that you now have a recruiting department where each recruiter is handling 80 requisitions instead of the industry recommended 15 per person. But seriously, it's just a posting. That's what admins and temps are for!

Except your recruiting team has 10 people to an admin. So to go through the job board data entry process, which requires a hundred clicks or so, and given that there is a queue of 400 requisitions, all of which are prioritized lower than the 15 offer letters that need to be hand-crafted by the 2pm mail time because nobody wants to give HR $750k for a system that would generate them automatically, your requisition has to wait. That and half the job descriptions submitted were two lines and need to be sent back for more data, plus the html to make the description readable may need to be hand-added if you're posting on something like Monster, oh and you have to add the employment branding and info about the company, you're now talking 20 minutes per posting.

5. People apply. Since the job descriptions are all very, very generic you get a wide range of applicants, most of which would be a lousy fit. 99% of the applicants who would be great and would have applied to a good job posting do not apply.
Back to your overworked recruiters. They are trying to go after passive candidates, they know that is exactly what you want, and they are working the social networks (and pissing off everyone that's ever handed them a business card), cold calling into companies when they have 5 minutes but also trying to be legally compliant so they don't get sued by your competitors. Did you know employee referrals are typically 40+% of a company's hires? The recruiters do, and they are always trying to walk the fine line of begging for referrals and pissing of their client groups.

6. HR screens the applicants. Since they go by the flawed job description, they usually weed out the best candidates for one reason or another.

HR isn't an expert in your field; give them a list of exactly what they should ask. And it does sound like the #1 broken thing in your company's process is that the hiring managers don't write the posted job descriptions. That's a crock.

7. Time for the interviews!
Wherein HR is hoping to God that the socially-awkward brilliant person on your team who was (rightly) too busy to attend interviewer training doesn't ask the candidate if they have kids, causing a lawsuit.

8. You find an awesome candidate. You tell HR.
9. HR sends the person's resume and job posting to the HR pay team who determine what range you can offer at within the pay band. Their determination has nothing whatsoever to do with how good the person is or their skills, but instead is determined by how well it matches the (flawed) job posting. The best candidate in the industry who doesn't meet the exact education desirables and who has <10 years of experience will be at the absolute bottom of the pay band.

You found the perfect candidate, SUPER qualified, and you're delighted, you'd offer just about anything. So you offer, they counter, you go up, they accept, they start. A year later they're overqualified and leave. Or you brought them in at the top of their pay grade (which is in line with what other people doing that job are making) and you can't increase their salary even though they've done great work and they get pissed. Or you increase their salary, they later switch teams and suddenly they are paid way more than people doing their same job.

Your difficulty finding the candidate does not necessarily correlate to the candidate's worth. Time of year, condition of the job market, dumb luck, these all feed into you picking that candidate.

10. Person is offered the position, hopefully accepts, etc, etc.
And, if HR did their job right, you've got someone who is mid-level in their role with room to grow, learn, earn raises, be happy at the company, moderately satisfied with their pay, and will be a long term good employee.

If HR did their job wrong, you have a specialty player who does the job great for 6 months and gets bored, causes dissension in the team because they're compensated more than they should be, has tons of problems in all the systems because his title/pay data doesn't line up with anything, and quits a few months later because the company is incompetent and has done nothing to grow, challenge or take care of him.

I'm not saying your company made all the right choices for all the right reasons. It sounds like a lot of dumbfvckery in general. But be sure to separate out the dumb decisions from the necessary decisions. Requiring standard comp titles and pay ranges is a necessary decision that benefits the company and employees in the long term. Having HR write generic job descriptions is a dumbfvck decision that should be rescinded.