Various Things That Are Terrible About The Hiring Process

This is from the candidate side.

I resigned from a gig at TCU a few months back. I’ve had some freelance work, and some small gigs, for the last 2–3 months — but nothing major. So, I’ve been kicking tires on jobs. In 17–20 years of working, this is probably my fourth or fifth hiring process as a candidate, and my second in a recessionary environment (other one would be 2008). Hiring sucks, and I’ve written about that before. Exactly how much does it suck? A lot. Let’s go through some reasons:

The concept of hiring makes no sense in alignment with the concept of higher education: Higher education brands itself around come here, learn lots of different things, meet different people, and those diversified experiences will prepare you for a lucrative career in moving around widgets and documents. Nice. But the thing is, most companies hire from a very specific list of buzzwords, keywords, and pre-determined bullet points. They want people who can “hit the ground running.” They basically want someone who has done this exact same thing before. How does that align with the idea of diversified experiences in life?

There are too many outsourced recruiters: This isn’t some MAGA xenophobia thing, and it might be tied to my general unattractiveness as a candidate for some jobs. (I don’t…