When I was a sales manager our BEST employees were referrals from existing employees.
I am sure that still happens in the workplace.
Anecdotally, I was working for a health care system. They were looking for a manager of their billing call center. I had experience running a group of call centers for a large bank (about 1,000 employees.) I had also run billing systems for a cable TV company providing bills to about a million customers a month. I figured I was modestly qualified.
I hit “enter” on my application in the Workday system. Literally before I turned around, I got a rejection email. When I contacted the HR director, they indicated that my experience was not good enough. I explained that on their way home, look at every house you pass. 6 out of 10 of those homes got a bill from my staff...every month....for fifteen years.
It came down to the fact that I did not have an MBA. The person they hired had an unrelated Masters, no call center experience. They were also a woman of color.
The last time I called them about a bill, I was on hold for 45 minutes.
HR Departments are not concerned with quality; they are concerned with quotas.
Like I said in post #26:
HR is not in the business of hiring good people. HR is in the business of presenting a hiring process which protects the company from discrimination lawsuits, which these days is far more costly to the company than hiring a few turkeys, or failing to hire people who could have been stars.
Professional headhunters that focus on one narrow industry are a great way to work around the system.
They call the hiring executive directly, and will have a track record of placing successful candidates with that company.
The good ones will be brutally honest with candidates about whether they are good fits for specific positions—no sense wasting everyone’s time.
They were also a woman of color.With 40 years of stellar experience and progressive responsibility in logistics and aircraft maintenance field, and 14 years as an adjunct professor in the subject area, I was passed over for a WOC with 5 years of work experience and less than a year in the field.
I bit the bullet, took on a 95 mile commute, and easily got a job that was three levels above the slot that I "wasn't qualified for."
She called me about two months later crying and said that they chose the wrong person.