Re: [OT] Re: Security Architect Needed in VA!

In article <9LTtg.10062$PO.9636@dukeread03>, M. Trimble <user@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, it looks like you have thoroughly confirmed my dark opinion of HR
departments. Instead of helping, they're hindering the process of finding
qualified applicants because a) there is an additional bureaucratic layer
between the hiring people and the applicants with its attendant
inefficiencies and sloth; b) they don't *really* know what the manager is
looking for; because of 'b', c) they have no clue what to look for in the
ideal candidate who doesn't match *exactly* the qualifications listed;

In the part of government I work for [in Canada], all the resumes
are turned over to local HR and are available to the manager
running the position.

However, if a given application does not exactly match the
qualifications of the job description, serious consideration
of the application becomes more difficult, in two related ways:

1) If we waive a listed requirement for one candidate, we are
required to waive that requirement for -all- the candidates.
And that might expand the interview pool beyond the feasible.

At the preliminary weeding-out stage, we are not -allowed- to make
subjective judgements about the depth of someone's skills or
experience: we can only make subjective judgements at an interview.
Thus, all we have to go on in order to decide who gets interviewed
(or at least tested) is the matter of whether the candidate listed
all the right keywords... and if after cutting the pack down to
just the ones with all the right words, the resulting pool is
about as big as we can handle, then the candidate(s) who
we -think- look great on paper but who missed a keyword or two
just don't make the second round.

For example, several years ago, I was manager for an entry level
hire in which we asked for a community college certificate as a
computer technician. One of the applicants had a PhD in computer
science and experience in running computer labs. A PhD in computer
science does not, however, offer formal training as a computer
technican and is thus not equivilent to what was in the job
description, so in order to have considered that candidate we would
have had to have waived the education requirement for all the
candidates. That would have doubled the number of people we would
have had to have interviewed. The others that would have had to have
been interviewed were obviously very weak candidates (e.g., some of
them had absolutely no on the job experience but had 1 1/2 weeks of
training in-class). Four interviewers times half a day per
candidate times 6 extra candidates... the candidate with the
missed-a-keyword great resume would have to have been -enough- better to
make up for the extra 12 working-days of effort that would have
been required to hold the extra interviews. Which was unlikely
to be the case for a completely entry-level position.

The goal, I am told, is not to get the absolute best possible
candidate into the position: that's simply not feasible most of the
time. The goal, instead, is to set requirements on the job description
that are appropriate for the position, and then to run a fair
competition amongst the candidates whose resumes demonstrate that
they meet the minimum conditions for the position. If a higher-
calibre of person was needed for the position, then the job description
should have had stricter requirements.


2) Closely related to the first point about not being able to
selectively waive qualification requirements, is that waiving
requirements is usually not considered fair. If, for example,
we specified Linux but we were to waive that and accept BSD
as well, then we have not been fair to the potential candidates
that had modified qualifications but took the listed
qualifications seriously and so did not apply because they knew
they didn't meet the -listed- Linux requirement. Therefore, if
the pool of candidates that meet the exact listed qualifications
would be "big enough" then, as described for (1) we are advised
to go with the exact listed qualifications; if the pool would
not be big enough, then rather than waiving a requirement, we
are recommended to re-run the competition with the qualifications
we would actually accept.


In connection with the point about the goal not being to get
the absolute best possible candidate into the position: for all
but the most specialized or high-level positions, we run regional
competitions, in which we specify the "geographic catch basin" of
current residences of candidates we are willing to consider. It just
isn't feasible to run a national or international competition for
a low- or mid- level position. Even just the cost to fly people in
for interviews...


It would be nice to be in a situation of having the resources to
persue and keep "the best of the best" but that's not at all
likely to happen for us; and that fact eventually trickles down to
literal reading of resumes.
.

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