Your IT Company's Biggest Enemy

oreillynet.com

9 points·rams··7 comments

It's not difficult to avoid the 'HR gateway' problem - just have HR concentrate on payroll, legal compliance issues, visas etc. & not interview or filter resumes. Interviewer should be the prospective recruit's direct manager, &/or someone who has/is or can do the job in question (wherever possible) and a seperate interview by someone else to confirm the first opinion. Is that rare? I've never hired any other way.

3. I only computed two years of a university degree in computer science.

I suggest you get some more hardware, perhaps you can compute the remaining two a little quicker.

Comma splice.

"... is the HR department."

Among the many reasons that I avoid corporate IT. Some of the smell tests are nattering on and on about responsibilities like attending meetings, preparing reports. It's like telling a doctor to scrub before surgery.

yep, a key reason I avoid BigCorp as well. But your comparison may be off: I have read recently (I think from HN) that forcing doctors and nurses to scrub before surgery reduces disease. I know, we all like to think the docs will do this with no oversight, but apparently not.

Indeed they don't, and this was featured on YC:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760477

This reminds me of that YC funded recruiting company (forgot the name--help!) that closed up shop and had their postmortem featured on HN recently. The conclusion was that HR departments aren't a profit center, so there's no motivation to innovate.

Maybe there should be a RFS for a better way to measure HR performance; that way, at least the pointy-haired bosses could be yelled at by their pointy-haired bosses when they score below industry average, or worse than last year.

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