« Customer [un]satisfaction | Main | A Heart-Warming Valentine's Day Story »
February 07, 2006
Nationalized Hiring Processes?
My daily slashdot news crawl came across this CNN article that outlines a federally-mandated universal hiring process for all companies employing 50 or more people.
What I'm trying to figure out is how this accomplishes anything for anybody besides creating extra work in the hiring process. We're under the 50-person mark, so it won't effect us, but I just don't see how this could possibly accomplish it's goal (ensuring "diversity" in the workplace).
The basic idea is that employers are supposed to look at "qualifications" only -- they're not supposed to (or, really, even allowed to) consider anything other than job requirements, and they're not allowed to hire people that don't already fulfill 100% of the requirements. If a job description asks for "three years of X", and you have two-and-a-half... they're apparently not legally allowed to even consider you for the position.
Since I've yet to see the job description that didn't ask for way more than any one person could possibly have, it sounds like large companies are going to be doing essentially 0 hiring until they rewrite all their job descriptions. (That's not going to happen, which means, more likely, that just about everybody will either ignore, or partially ignore, the law... and some examples will be made, and then we'll probably just get back to business...).
And all this is so that the federal government can supposedly protect all the minorities from unfair managers who won't hire them. Except that people aren't machines... most positions seem to require more than a robot-with-X-qualifications...
I just don't know what the government was thinking... or if they were at all... And why haven't I heard about this before?
America just keeps sounding more and more like the EU and less and less like the America we used to be...
— The Shelanman
Posted by andrew at February 7, 2006 02:14 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)