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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

Who says the CO remote employee requires special treatment? That would be a terrible leadership decision. The easy and obvious approach would be to treat all employees under the CO standard. It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally. Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally. I have a hard time believing most companies aren’t already doing this with the exception maybe of retail/labor-intensive positions where employees aren’t regularly using a computer. Certainly most companies hiring remote workers would be though.

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Context: startup, 50ish employees.

We don't necessarily want to advertise all open positions to an internal selection process, particularly more senior managers.

The record keeping requirements in CO are concerning, particularly job description records. In particular, we don't yet have a full time HR person (there is a dedicated person, but that person has other job duties).

There's 49 other states.

edit: one more reason. We had a failing exec. Not enough to merit immediate firing, but failing enough that it was clear he or she was not going to last through the next round. We needed that person to continue doing a mildly-failing job while we found a replacement, due to lack of another person who could take on those responsibilities.

Not sure how you manage something like that with an internal hiring announcement.

Yeah, I don't quite get the rub here. The corporations I've worked for always post jobs internally first and normally they email the entire org with open positions. In general I've found most corporations want to hire internally since it's cheaper overall.

I think it depends on the company.

In a past organization a friend was HR at, there were branch office jobs and corporate jobs. Officially you could get promoted to the corporate office. Unofficially, don't bother as they optimized for different things for each hiring pool.

So they tried to keep the corporate jobs only available to the corporate people as otherwise the branch people would get excited and then end up having their dreams dashed from repeatedly applying and having their resumes chucked while an external hire filled their job.

Yeah, you especially don't want to proactively push out a bunch of job postings to people who have exactly zero chance of landing the position because the decision has already been made.

That too.

Plenty of job postings exist merely for compliance. So all you are doing is wasting a lot of time.

The worst is when the hiring managers have to go thru with interviewing N people who applied to comply with policy.

Many organizations just aren’t structured that way. I had a coworker who worked alone on what was a small project, gradually transitioning to a technical leadership role over the project as it got larger, until eventually he became the manager of the team that owns it. So he got a promotion opportunity, but there was never an opening as such; it would be pretty unfair for the company to open up applications for anyone to come in and take his project away.

I don't know how HR departments typically deal with this sort of thing. There's an obvious downside to posting a bunch of job openings that have effectively already been filled. The same applies to outside hires that effectively have had positions created for them (and job descriptions written with them in mind).

We have something like 15,000 employees and 20 some odd brand companies that operate largely independently. There is no reasonable way for us to wrangle every single opening into a single process to comply with a CO law (times all the other jurisdictions who’d like to put their own thumbprint on it).

I would always rather take a qualified internal candidate rather than spend months to land someone outside. So, I do shop jobs internally now, but Even without reading the CO law, I’m pretty sure I’m not fully complying with it if I had an employee in CO.

I can't see why the number of employees or companies complicates this. I work for an enterprise with over 60,000 employees and they have decided to apply the Colorado standard to all job openings.

Editing This was poor word choice in the morning; I should say I can clearly see how the size or scope of a company could complicate this. I just don't have any sympathy for them; you adapt your processes to match the desired state.

At that size, I imagine you're already operating across several states, and HR already has processes in place to deal with differing regulatory requirements. Adding the latest CO rules to these processes isn't all that onerous in the overall scheme of things. It's not like "post a minimum salary" and "post listings internally" are crazy or complicated ideas.

>Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally.

Please. No more emails.

>It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally.

One of the problems that happens (today) with this is that companies decide to hire someone external for a position essentially created for them. So they may create a job posting as a formality. But it's effectively a fake posting. No one else actually has a shot at an interview, much less getting the position.

Ah the CEO's golfing buddy's son or daughter.

Don't try this in Northern Ireland btw. I know of US mangers getting into some serious hot water over not advertising the job in Catholic and Protestant publications.

Or just someone senior people have worked with before in some capacity. I had a job description written for me in my current US role.

Hey -- opened your profile because I was curious. If you're working on a company and interested in chatting, email in my profile.

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