There’s a disaster going on in the employment industry every second. Employers and job applicants are being treated like morons. Billions of dollars are being wasted on ridiculous, mindless, unnecessary, and inefficient processes every year, if not every month.

If you search the words “resume+seconds” on Google, you get a lot of results. These results indicate that nobody, meaning absolutely nobody, looks at all those carefully crafted resumes for more than a few seconds. This is utterly inexcusable, as well as almost unbelievably incompetent.

I’ve been working in the employment industry for many years in the US, Europe and Australia. I’ve worked for top brands and top sites. The so-called “culture of the job market”, and I use the expression with the utmost derision, is unfit to flush down a toilet when it comes to managing hiring. This insular process is so far out of touch with basic realities it's astonishing - And it's getting worse.

Consider this situation – A senior executive or job applicant with a Ph.D. receives six ( or maybe even ten) seconds of attention from somebody/something who may or may not have the business or professional qualifications to serve fries at McDonald’s.

How is this efficient? Does the person vetting the applications have an MBA? Do they have a doctorate in the job applicant’s discipline? What level of management scrutiny, if any, is being applied? Does management have to babysit every job application to make sure they get the right people?

Could these six second wonders possibly have a clue what they’re doing?

Worse, the mythology of doing so little, and doing it so badly, is perpetrated by the global job sites, with hack writers glibly telling the world "we only glance at your resume for a few seconds". Some industry you have there, Neanderthals.

Think about it – How much of two pages can you read in six seconds? You’d be lucky to get to 40 words, out of the average 600 word resume and cover letter job application. This means that you are quality checking less than 10% of the actual information you receive.

Consider any quality control process which only does an 8% sampling rate – Are the remaining 92% left to chance, or do you just wait for the lawsuits?

Excuses

The excuses for this incredible pantomime of ineptitude are many, with answers in brackets –

• The Application Tracking System manages applicant profiles using keywords and algorithms (No it doesn’t; all it does is a very simple word search, supposedly creating a profile. It is extremely unlikely that a professional profile can simply be relegated to a handful of keywords.)
• All we have to do is confirm that the ATS profiles for the top 10 – 20 candidates meet employer job criteria (All the employer needs to do is outsource this work to significantly reduce hiring costs.)
• We don’t have the time to go through every resume and make comparisons between top professionals (…And what the hell, may one ask, are you employed to do? If it’s not too delicate a subject.)

What is abundantly clear is that absolutely no attention is being paid to the needs of employers, the needs of job applicants, or anybody but the mindless process of bureaucratic hiring.

A few very basic questions:

Can you accurately and effectively assess a professional job application in 10 seconds?

Can you assess an application for the position of assistant janitor in 10 seconds?

Put simply, the only job application you are likely to be able to accurately assess in under a minute is an application for a paper route. It is beyond credibility that even a highly experienced person would be able to accurately assess any resume and cover letter in anything less than five minutes.

It is impossible to take seriously even the theory that this ridiculous, slapdash process is, or could ever be, efficient. In the conventional job advertisement hiring process, the entire method of hiring is so slow and so expensive as to effectively cause financial losses to employers. Picking a name out of a hat would be far more efficient and far less wasteful than this process.

The other side of the problem is much less impressive. At a time when the entire job market is changing drastically, when regular employment is going to become a thing of the past, this pathetic bureaucratic travesty is the global standard of hiring methodologies.

It is necessary to go into some detail at this point to explain why this culture is so implausible, as well as unacceptable at all stages of the hiring process:

• Application Tracking Systems are not infallible.
• Keywords are not infallible.
• Phone interviews are not infallible.
• Job criteria and job descriptions are not infallible, particularly at higher levels.
• Formulaic processes of any kind, by definition, are not infallible.

Yes, you’ve guessed it – Bonehead middle management strikes again. Obvious issues, obvious solutions, and they make a career out of not solving the problems. This mindset is one of the reasons why doing any kind of business is so expensive.

Waste and more waste, and you’re paying for it

On the other side of the equation - Applicants are wasting an unbelievably large amount of time applying for jobs which they have absolutely no hope of getting, thanks to this system of hiring.

This is why – Interestingly, people usually only apply for jobs which they have a reasonable chance of getting. These are the jobs which they do have experience and are at least credibly qualified.

There may be a few “number crunching” applications. These come from people forced to make applications simply to meet make up numbers to receive welfare benefits. (Another innovation from the terminally insane fossil-people managing employment policy.) The majority of applications are bona fide. So all these people, the majority of whom could actually do the jobs, are effectively being ignored.

Their applications are cluttering the net, cluttering employer databases, and using up vast amounts of time, and the only people benefiting are telecommunications companies and electricity suppliers. Everybody else is losing money, thanks to this cockamamie, bone lazy, do-nothing culture.

… But the fun doesn’t stop there. Societies also pay for this worthless process. People who can’t get jobs can’t spend money. Businesses suffer, revenues suffer, and a demand for more taxes and higher prices to make up for costs naturally results.

It’s easy to prove this stupidity – All you need to do is assess the real costs of hiring. Compare this to the basic process of picking up the phone and getting somebody who can do a job. The current hiring process can take anything up to 3 months, and cost tens of thousands of dollars. The basic phone call approach, (which strangely enough is how the best recruiters operate), really costs basically the price of the phone call and any documentation required. The net real cost could hardly scratch a hundred dollars, and recruiters make money on this basis.

The bottom line – If you’re only spending six seconds checking out who you hire, you deserve what you get. Vet these jobs properly for once, and keep track of the cost of your hiring process. You’ll find that you come up with a much more efficient process very quickly indeed.