What Santa didn't leave under the HR Christmas tree this year...

I had some specific HR items I wanted Santa to deal with this Holiday season but I didn’t see them among my gifts under the tree. Here's my wish list for Santa. Buckle in - this could be a rough sleigh ride folks!

Wellbeing-washing

I get a lot of calls on this subject. Wellbeing-washing occurs when an employer paints a very rosy picture of all of the things they do to improve an employee’s life (e.g., provide mentoring, counseling, unlimited vacation, etc.) but conveniently skip over all of things that they do that inflict misery on these same employees. 

For example, it does an employee no good when an employer offers time off for charitable deeds or unlimited vacation when they demand that this employee must work ‘mandatory’ 80-hour weeks. This is a chronic problem in corporate accounting roles and in retail management ranks.  Similarly, a firm that offers all kinds of continuing education opportunities to employees but consistently cancels their scheduled training as there is a never-ending number of ‘fire drills’ that require an employee’s immediate attention. 

You’d think that HR analytic vendors would be on top of this but scant few are. Since there are technologies that see an employee’s schedule, know when they are logged in, know when they’re in the building, etc., it shouldn’t be hard for HR to identify which employees are burning the midnight oil (and then some).  Likewise, an analytic tool should be able to spot employees whose training or other career development opportunities are being ‘rescheduled’ repeatedly. 

So, Santa, can you bring us some analytic tools that detect these adverse managerial actions that contradict the stated goals of well-being programs? Additionally, can these tools detect which departments are woefully understaffed (e.g., if 10 accounting staff are routinely working 80-hour weeks, then the company needs additional capacity to cover the 400 hours per week that are understaffed)? 

Indirect ageism

I love how recruiters claim they don’t discriminate against older jobseekers but they actually and routinely do so via indirect discrimination. What’s indirect discrimination? It happens this way:

• Recruiters don’t want to consider older workers so they disregard any applicant who asks for a salary in the upper half of the pay scale. This is designed to remove the most experienced and qualified people from the applicant pool. Those capable people are most likely the most senior applicants and therefore the most expensive to employ. If you exclude these people, you may end up only hiring young workers. 
• Recruiters say they’re concerned that an older worker won’t want to work for a younger manager. Rather than confirm that, the recruiter just removes the candidate from consideration. While the recruiter thinks they are sparing the candidate from an uncomfortable work situation, it’s presumptuous and still age discrimination. 
• Overqualified candidates are often dropped from consideration as recruiters believe that they won’t want a lower-skilled job or because they believe the candidate will leave in a short time to pursue a different, more challenging, opportunity elsewhere. Both rationales assume facts not in evidence. The recruiter is making life-changing assumptions about applicants without appropriate facts/data. And given that the overqualified candidate is one with oodles of experience, it suggests that this is likely an older jobseeker that is being discriminated against.
• Recruiters can also look for signs that an applicant is older than what they want to employ. They reject applicants with the following characteristics:
  • The candidate’s college degree was awarded more than two decades ago. That could mean the applicant is 42 years old or older. This application is headed for the circular file.
  • The candidate still has a land line phone number or AOL email account. Can you say older applicant? 
  • The candidate may need some schedule flexibility to care for an older parent. If their parent is that old, then, obviously, the jobseeker just has to be old, too.

HR analytic vendors might look for EXPLICIT ageism and aren’t always looking at the more subtle, indirect ways that recruiters or line managers can discriminate. If analytics don’t know why someone was excluded from consideration, how can they actually alert executives to the real issues? 

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek piece noted:

Ageism can go both ways, too. Don’t judge anyone’s abilities based on their age. “If we assume that someone is too young to be a supervisor or too old to go to medical school, then we’re condoning ageism, not challenging it,” Gendron says.

We need Santa to create TA solutions that require recruiters to explicitly state why they are rejecting any older jobseeker. Those insincere emails some recruiters send to older jobseekers (e.g., “We’ve decided to go with a candidate we believe is a better fit”) are legal but they obscure the real reason(s) someone was cut from the process. Those excuses are also more fiction than reality. How can a recruiter assess who is a better fit if no one knows exactly how recruiters are actually deciding who is in/out? The fact that no one actually knows why they were dropped from consideration (usually without anyone looking at the application or someone only spending 5-6 seconds scanning it) means this process is an opaque black box designed to shield recruiters from litigation but not to help the employer actually get the best person for the job. 

It's telling that the talent acquisition process has no feedback mechanism. There’s no way for applicants to know why they were discarded from consideration and, more importantly, no opportunity for them to appeal the decision. I know recruiters would object to this as it would create more work for them but how can anyone improve a process without feedback? Santa needs to put in some real overtime here to fix this mess. 

Side gigs are good/side gigs are bad

An adjunct to the Indirect Ageism point above is the two-faced approach Recruiters have when it comes to side gigs. When younger workers have side gigs/hustles, that shows that they are eager, hustling, entrepreneurial people. Yes, they may need these side jobs because their employer won’t give them enough hours to work or won’t pay them a livable wage. But, if an older worker does consulting work, has some part-time work, etc., then they are a flight risk that should be avoided.  One recent Twitter exchange that HR analyst/influencer Sarah White led noted that:

It further came out that many of the TA (talent acquisition) team regularly declined candidates who had been consultants, fractional execs, or self-employed. They looked exclusively and (sic) job title and not at the actual experience or skills match of what was happening.

I know this one first hand. After I left Accenture, a recruiter told me that I was “virtually unemployable”. She said that firms view former consulting partners as people who won’t roll up their shirt sleeves and get their hands dirty doing actual work. Mind you, I was only in my mid-40s at this time, but apparently my extensive global experience was now somehow toxic. To this day, I still don’t understand how a recruiter’s non-fact-based opinion, especially a broad erroneous generalization like this, is allowed to exist, isn’t caught by HR analytic tools, or, is supported by top management.

Other recruiters see consultants as people “who couldn’t get hired into a traditional job”. These jobseekers would have been employed but for some defect that makes them incapable or unwilling to work in a traditional job or role. This prejudice is not only unfounded but is not supported by any evidence I’ve seen.  In truth, the reason a person went into these non-standard jobs could be that:

• The economy was in the tank when this person started their job search and consulting/self-employment route was the only option for them. 
• The person needed some personal flexibility in their schedule for a time (e.g., dealing with an elder parent or unwell child) but found few employers open to this. Consulting/self-employment was the only option at that time. 

Bad recruiters don’t even take the time to find out why someone chose a career path unlike one they prefer candidates to possess. No, the only candidates they want are people who fit a very narrow, predefined career path. Any deviation from this means the jobseeker did something ‘wrong’ and must be dropped from consideration. 

Like Sarah posted, these recruiters are NOT looking at the skills, experience and capabilities these jobseekers can bring to an employer. 

If there’s any justice in this, it could be that the most experienced people out there will not even apply at these discriminatory firms. Why? A LinkedIn poster noted:

Many likely don’t want to slog through the age-biased, demeaning recruiting that is typical once one passes 50 years old, magnified 100X after age 60. Many have side gigs that generate passive income that offer enough financial security to live a scaled down, modest lifestyle and does not necessitate having to be a slave to a company only to live paycheck to paycheck.

Still don’t think this is a problem? A recent Kiplinger Retirement Report noted:

Nearly 60 years after workplace age discrimination was outlawed, two out of three workers aged 45 to 74 say they have experienced age discrimination at work, according to AARP. And a study published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) found more than 90% of people between 50 and 80 experienced some level of ageism in their lives.

Santa needs his elves in analytic software firms to double up their efforts here. For example, eliminating verbiage in an applicant’s resume or applicant that might suggest one’s age is a solid first step, but, if the company’s average worker is under 30-years old, then there’s some age discrimination occurring elsewhere. Why can’t analytic vendors find these sources of discrimination? 

Getting a grip on quitting

For all the talk regarding the need to create a great employee experience and/or a great recruiting/Day One experience, employers are still facing an epidemic of employee quitting and new hire quitting.  Steve Goldberg (@SBGHRTech) recently tweeted:

30% of all employees leave voluntarily within their first 90 days (Jobvite survey). 28% of all employees do not feel connected to their company’s mission (Gallup survey).

This phenomenon isn’t isolated to one demographic group (e.g., Gen Z workers). Nope. It cuts across a number of employee demographics and, surprisingly, older workers have some additional challenges. 

A significant number of older workers can’t be enticed back into the workforce once they’ve quit a previous employer. According to a USA Today piece: 

Perhaps more tellingly, 60.5% of retirees say they wouldn’t return to work under any circumstances, up from a low of 48.1% in May 2022, the Morning Consult survey shows.

That piece concludes with this sobering conclusion:

Don’t count on retirees to solve pandemic-related labor shortages that have eased substantially across the nation but persist in industries such as health care and education.

We need better analytics as well as better processes. Something’s not right, folks. Either companies are: hiring the wrong people, not adequately training them, exposing them to poor managers, not making their initial work experiences positive ones, or, providing them a work experience that doesn’t match what was promised in the application process (e.g., promised a great work/life balance but makes people work extreme hours). Santa needs to bring us analytic tools that help firms determine the causal factors (including bad bosses) that are triggering this needless attrition.

It’s time to get imaginative

We’re NOT winning the War for Talent and we won’t until companies develop a different HR game plan and solutions. Small incremental adjustments to decades old HR processes are not cutting it. Big problems often need big, radically different solutions. 

One of the top issues in the War for Talent is the access to talent. Too many firms are ignoring large pools of potential talent. These companies won’t hire their own alumni (who already know the company, its products, its processes, etc.). They won’t hire older workers. They won’t re-skill their existing workforce. They won’t look at people in the top-half of the salary range. They won’t consider over qualified people either. Instead of expanding the potential labor pool, too many firms are contracting theirs. Compounding this problem, too many firms are not being imaginative enough to look at skills instead of just matching against a static experience profile.  

The last capacity issue is that too many firms have overfished the same talent pool. Some key talent sources (e.g., top business schools) have far too few graduates to match the employer demand while other sources get far too few potential employers. 

Imaginative solutions are needed now. Can tech vendors provide more? That’s doubtful as most tech firms like to create solutions that look and feel very familiar to those currently in use at prospective customers. If a solution is too avantgarde, then no one will buy it (or so vendors believe). So, what the market often gets are slight improvements to tired, ineffective old solutions. Can Santa’s sleigh full of gifts bring some more enlightened thinking to these big problems?

My take

Technology changes/improvements won’t solve many of the above issues by themselves. Many of these problems are caused by or are exacerbated by bad leaders. People are triggering a number of the discriminatory acts. Technology vendors must decide if they will enable, obscure or highlight potentially discriminatory acts or dodgy leaders. People are refusing to interview certain jobseekers because of pre-existing, but unfounded/unproven, assumptions. People, including business leaders, are slow to change. People, it seems, are a huge part of the above problems. Yet, new HR tech that doesn’t address and fully deal with the people issues in these matters will fail. 

We need HR technology to move beyond mere transaction processing. HR technology needs to spot not just tacit, explicit discrimination, bad hiring practices, etc. It also has to seek out and deal with more sub rosa actions. HR systems need to explore the intent behind certain people-based business decisions not just the transaction being processed.

Well, I know what I’ll likely be asking for Santa again next year – more of the same. Let’s all hope that I’ll be able to strike some of those things off my list beforehand.