Comment Re:Ok, I'm lost. (Score 2, Informative) 433
Incidentally, these new rules actually make me less lost. One of my biggest frustrations in the past has been guessing as to what the government means by "applicant". Developing the reports that need to go to the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) has been an infuriating excercise for me in the past--I remember being pointed at several cabinets full of roughly categorized hardcopy resumes and official job application forms, along with countless electronic responses to job ads posted in various places, all of varying quality... and I was given a set of vague reporting requirements from the EEOC and told to work with a consultant and just "make it all go away".
Sadly, TFA (as others have pointed out) is not the greatest piece of reporting. The article makes the rules sound as if they're all brand new... and throws in a confusing and woefully incomplete statement about the statistics involved in recruiting--"diverse and random" is important, but the brief sentence devoted to it makes it sound as if companies are out there filling a hat with the names of anyone but white males and hiring the first people they pull out of the hat.
The new rules don't really introduce any drastically different practices--they mostly clarify guidelines that have existed for a long time. Now that the OFCCP has finally defined what they mean by "applicant", I'll be able to develop the reports they and other government agencies require without nearly as much guesswork as I had been forced to use before. And, contrary to the picture painted by TFA, the day-to-day process of posting jobs and filling positions won't really change. If anything, we'll be able to more accurately define the process and therefore be able to automate more of it, and keep human bias from affecting how the "applicant" pool is built--i.e., because no human will actually need to look at an "application" until sex/race data has been automatically stripped and stored in a separate table that users (HR/recruiters/managers) don't have access to, the users' personal biases will (hopefully) not enter into the process.
I know many of you probably won't believe me... but at least at my company, there's no great conspiracy where hiring is concerned... we're all just trying to make sure we get the right person in the right job without letting the position stay open forever. If the recruiters are doing their jobs right, the applicant pool should be sufficiently diverse to meet the government's requirements, and if the interviewers/managers are doing their jobs right, the people ultimately selected for jobs will be a representative cross-section of the applicant pool. The right people get the right jobs, the company gets good people in positions it needs filled, and no one gets sued. And, now that the government has made my job a little easier, I might get to go home after less than 4 hours of "casual" (unpaid) overtime more often.
