Employment Disaster: Tunnel-Visioned Hiring Practices are Hurting Everyone

Employers and job-seekers are suffering from the lack of insight and creativity we’re commonly accepting as part of current hiring processes.

Convenience and automation have made finding “the right fit” for a position nearly impossible while encouraging the dangerous inaccuracy that results from Search Engine Optimization.

In their efforts to streamline the candidate filtering process, HR departments are most often eliminating the candidates with the most positive potential. This creates a detrimental disservice not only for the job-seekers, but also for the employers themselves. This can be rectified, though.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have come under fire in recent years for lacking that “personal touch” that allows human hiring managers to recognize valuable personal characteristics and translatable skills that automated systems often miss.

In defense of their use of ATS, HR professionals argue that the sheer volume of applications they receive in response to job postings makes it impossible to manually sort through the pools of candidates.

Furthermore, the many and varied duties with which HR departments are routinely saddled directly decrease the amount of time and attention that HR staff can afford to allocate to hiring efforts.

Instead, HR representatives actively suggest that job seekers tailor their résumés so that they are optimized for ATS searches and filters. Basically, they promote a form of Search Engine Optimization as a strategy for job seekers who hope to catch the attention of employers.

The problem with this idea is that it inherently encourages inaccuracy in the initial steps of the decision-making process and eliminates the very details that could otherwise cause one candidate to stand out from another. Essentially, they’re being presented with a colorful cornucopia of individuals with…