Not that they know they are. But, hey thanks! Ann Althouse and Dr. Helen both have job related posts up today, so I’m just going to blog off their blogging. Talk about lazy!
(Then again, I realize that most of my readers read this at work, so no finger pointing about laziness. You should be working! And how do I know this? Because from December 22 through January 1 my hits were pathetic. Then come January 2–the first big back to work day, and they are up very high. Same phenomenon all over the blogosphere. But, I’m digressing again. I should have made staying on the same subject one of my New Year’s Resolutions.)
Anyway, Althouse posts about a NYT article on Google’s new hiring practice. It sounds cool to me. Here’s a quote from the Original Article:
Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.
I think that is so cool. I hope it works for them.
“As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people,” said Laszlo Bock, Google’s vice president for people operations. “With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates.”
I seriously believe this is a problem. Some people are fabulous workers, but simply don’t interview well. Some people are great in interviewing and terrible workers. I’ll be interested to see how it all turns out. Knowing Google, I suspect it will.
Dr. Helen blogs about Queen Bees in the workforce. A study was done in Spain where men and women were presented with profiles and asked to assess the candidates:
The study found that when presented with applications for promotion, women were more likely than men to assess the female candidate as less qualified than the male one…
The study says: “Female participants had a stronger tendency than male participants to view the female candidates as less qualified than the male candidate . . . they also thought that the female candidate would fare worse in the future in her job than the male candidate.”
Interesting. It certainly was that way in Jr. High. Are women more of a threat to other women? In my professional career, I’ve only had one male supervisor, (welcome to HR) so I don’t really feel qualified to make an over-arching judgment. I have had fabulous female bosses and really, really lousy ones. Some of the female managers I know will do anything to keep their people down. Some will do anything to bring them up.
I would be interested in seeing more studies like this.