Home Depot Hiring Syndrome

I love Home Depot. Since discovering my love of DIY, I am a regular in their aisles (and at our local Ace). It amazes me that for most of my home problems, there really is a product that solves it and it is a luxury to just find it on a store shelf.

But companies' expectation that people are interchangeable parts to be found off the shelf is a big part of why unemployment is so high. I spotted this observation in Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline blog over here and followed his link to an article about Peter Cappelli and his thoughts on hiring today. He refers to the current climate as the Home Depot Syndrome, in which employees are viewed like washing machine parts. Companies need simply take one off the shelf and replace the part in the machine. Of course, the business flaws with this type of hiring logic are clear--companies aren't washing machines that never change and people are more than just parts. But I think the analogy is accurate for the times. It does fit with my experience and the experience of other job seekers.

Take my former employer as an example. They've done some serious organizational slimming in the commercial ranks, combined with an intense recognition of the need for highly trained regulatory personnel with the "sudden" change in healthcare legislation. It seems that rather than anticipating the change in business strategy required and shifting priorities and resources over the years, they chose to to lop off sections and hire from outside the organization to fill roles they invented. Apparently, retraining  people within organizations is out of the question, so out they go. Many pharma and medical device companies are doing the same thing. This leads to a glut of commercial/customer-facing "talent" and a scarcity of regulatory "talent". Thus, a skills gap.

In addition, with the current unemployment numbers, companies are betting they will find exactly what they want for wages qualified people were making 15 years ago, no negotiation.

For the slots that are open, requirements are very exacting. Specific certifications are required (CQE, Six Sigma, LEAN, PMP, MBA's...) even if people filling similar roles do not have them. It's not to say that certifications are useless, just that there is more to an applicant than the sum of his/her certifications. Without a certain certification, a resume does not make it past the first screen.

Perhaps this practice portends the future. Should companies look at an individual candidate as a whole person again? Is there really any need to? Are we headed for a world where people are interchangeable parts? I sincerely doubt it, but we need the data showing what model works.

Who are creating these job requirements? Hiring managers who don't exactly know what they want so they pile on requirements and complicit Human Resources. With this unbeatable combination, you get a situations like these from the Capelli article:

• ..[a] staffing department failed to identify a qualified candidate for a “standard engineering position”—out of 25,000 applicants. 
• ...a software developer who was turned down for a job that involved operating a particular brand-name software-testing tool—despite the fact that he had actually built just such a tool himself.
• [The same software developer who was] deemed unqualified because “I didn’t have two years of experience using an extremely simple database report formatting tool, the sort of thing that would require just a couple hours for any half-decent database wrangler to master."

This problem is way bigger than me, but I can't help but wonder, "What can I do to make things better?" Aside from creating a wildly successful business that embodies my ideals of what a company should be and do, I don't know. Suggestions, anyone?