It seems that one of the next campaigns of the ‘Social Justice Warriors’ will be the elimination of management discretion in hiring:
The next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring–which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring–supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ–are coming soon.
The SJWs will certainly get around to insisting that promotions, as well as initial hiring, be handled in the same way.
You can be certain that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be far more favorable to this sort of thing than would a Donald Trump presidency.
If your aspiration is to be a robot, with your every action in life controlled by highly-detailed top-down rules, then you should by all means work fervently for a Clinton presidency.
Willie Brown, when he was Speaker of the California Assembly tried to get legislation requiring U of C to graduate all “students of color.”
Banning employers from checking and using criminal records is just a start,
One advantage for the mandarin class in such hiring is that it will have to be credentials-based, and the mandarin class is about nothing so much as gathering credentials. “Hire the first person who has a diploma from a top-ranked university, an internship at one of the following large tech companies, and three years’ experience with the following job title”. Self-taught programmers need not apply.
I know a guy who switched from being a flight instructor to selling airplanes…I asked him if he’d ever done Sales before, and he said, ‘Yeah, I used to sell horses.’ A little bit different, I remarked, and he said, “Pretty much you sell them to the same families, it’s just that the wife usually buys the horse and the husband usually buys the airplane.”
Don’t think he would have made it through the formalized hiring system.
Also see my related post about hunting for five-pound butterflies
It would help a lot if this would be immediately imposed on all Silicon Valley companies. They should obey the same rules they impose on every one else through their foundations and campaign contributions.
This is interesting also in the matter of college education. MY wife has a son who is a very successful builder of custom homes in Oregon. No college.
He has three sons. Two work with him and no college. The third works for his brother-in-law who restores old Porsches. The son was down last week with his wife and one son. We went up with them on Saturday to see the shop where the Porsches are rebuilt.
It’s the first, and probably only, time I will ever see a $25 million Porsche. They finished rebuilding it in time for the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, It was second.
It is the first Porsche to do the Le Mans race
I think it is the # 56 car in this article.
It has been restored exactly as it was when raced.
The shop is full of metal shaping tools and the grandson knows all of them and how to use them, He told us they usually do not hire experienced car people because it is too hard to get them to relearn how to do stuff. The shop has about 40 cars under restoration. I’ve seen a video of Jay Leno driving that car.
Anyway, interesting on the topic of hiring.
Just in passing, if credentials and protected class status control all hiring and promotion with no discretion on the part of the employer; then that does set up an interesting situation. Somewhere in every hierarchy, there has to be a list. Advancement is by where you are on the list. And noting that the rule of law is no longer operational in this country. So under that paradigm, would not the best route to promotion be the actual elimination of those above you on the list, and would not self-preservation be epitomized by eliminating those who are ambitious below you on the list.
“Oh Brave New World that has such people in’t.”
Possession of a backhoe and ownership of large, wild expanses of land may become a credential.
This just bad, as well as dumb.
“There are good reasons why HR acts like an arm of the government bureaucrats pressuring companies to hire more protected minorities and women–because that’s what they are, in many companies.”
This is an English sentence?
“We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies.”
And we toss in a very dead herring for good measure.
I guess like in Canada, psychology is the chiropractic of psychiatry. ;)
Another way to kill business – imagination, innovation, productivity. Sabotage: if we chose a belief system that would take us back to 1700 (or earlier), we couldn’t have a better one than we have slowly installed through the last decades. A few years ago it was possible to see the future of Venezuela by the example of Zimbabwe. In a true death spiral the partying Venezuelans of my youth have become citizens of a nation with infant mortality in a nationalized hospital, corrupt at core . (Aggregating the aggregator.)
The pull of a past that stood almost still for hundreds of years, sorted out in rigid classes, may be stronger than seemed possible. Ironically, that retreat – from modernity, the scientific method of testing what works and the remarkable sense that all have a right to respect and dignity, to a free market in which their opinions could be openly expressed and their products sold – is powered by forces that think of themselves as cutting edge.
Death first.
I tried nepotism once: I hired a cousin. He proved to be tremendous. At about the same time I knew a chap of similar background to my cousin. Said chap went on to become Prime Minister. My cousin was the better man, but people like him don’t go into politics.
I will observe that when I was young I thought such criteria as “collegiality” were tainted; I was not very thoughtful and had the thinking of the usual adolescent (far longer than adolescence) way. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen that a workplace runs much better if it is collegial. I learned by having a small business, by listening to backstabbing at times and laughter more of the time. I don’t think it is collegiality that is overrated, now; I do think fairness, reasonable standards of productivity, a dedication to the customer (or profession) encourage rather than oppose collegiality. It is hard to take the boss’s perspective – but it does move higher & become less petty. That was a good antidote for too long in academia and has helped draw me back to common sense – probably not often enough – when I returned to it. Not for nothing did Reynolds compare the sabotage to faculty meetings. Like a lot of management problems, more subsidiarity is probably an aid – and the scoffing in Hillary’s letters at such thinking is yet another worrisome attitude among the “ruling class.”
They will buy machinery instead of hiring people. No labor rules, no withholding, no workmens comp. No breaks, no bathroom rules, no whining. No lawsuits, no late employees, consistent quality.
“I will observe that when I was young I thought such criteria as “collegiality” were tainted”
We are having an issue about this where I work. Thank God it’s only a day or two a week.
New bureaucrats running things, Nitpickers.
“We have already seen Seattle pass an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies. And similar movements in hiring–supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ–are coming soon.”
As soon as Seattle really starts to see the real effects of its stupid hike in the minimum wage, we will almost certainly see something like this to counter its pernicious effects.
Let us never speak of this again, because you are only giving the damned fools who run this city ideas, and for the time being, I have to live here.
Tonestaple,
You are talking about the city where salting the roads during winter snow was prohibited because that would make Puget Sound salty.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/When-it-s-time-to-clear-roadways-Seattle-holds-1295741.php