You’re Doing it Wrong Part 4: Human Resources

ATSs, Interviews, Corporate Fit, Experience in Industry are all worthless

Introduction

We are taking a step back from healthcare and health insurance to bring you a new series: You’re Doing it Wrong.  In this 15-part series we will discuss all the things that the bizdiots do that are counterproductive and raise the cost of their own products and services and consequently the cost to you, dear reader, the consumer.  This fourth installment is a kind of litmus test that shows that bizdiot thinking is rampant: MBAs hiring Human Resources (HR) professionals to adjudicate things they don’t and can’t understand and then trying to automate horse trading.  People aren’t commodities.  You can’t judge their value to the company in any terms but their ability to do the job.

We are taking a break from healthcare because there is no new real news.  The AI hype is just getting worse and will never pan out; the EMR vendors haven't realized that you can't document encounters with text or language; insurance companies rip off everyone, so we are stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.  If you need your weekly dose of healthcare, read our article Sentia Health's EMR Video Demonstration.  

The Situation

HR is useless and trying to not only do a job that doesn’t need to be done but introducing software and tools and processes to automate those things that don’t need to be done.

Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

There are dozens of big business solutions that cost millions to simply keep track of a résumé.  Most of them ask you to upload a resume and then either type it all in again or look at the broken parsing machine to see where it messed up entering the resume into some database. You have my résumé; you don’t need me to either type it in nor verify it.

Since it is presumed that the bizdiot run company now has all your experience and skill in the database, they attempt to match keywords to what they think the ideal candidate should have done.  Keywords are not the measure of an applicant.  The very thought behind this is ill considered.  It presupposes not only that an individual can be broken down into keywords, but that the keywords themselves have any value.  The entire ATS is a bad idea executed badly.

All you need from an applicant is a résumé.  They don’t even need a well written resume, just something that shows how they can get the job done.    

Interviews

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”  

“You have three kinds of fruit in three boxes…”  

“Tell me about a time when…”
“Why should we hire you over other applicants?”

“What kind of animal would you be and why?”

It is official.  The Karens have taken over the world.  The only thing that matters at work is the work.  None of these questions are designed to illuminate anything about how successful the candidate would be at actually doing the work.

Corporate Fit

“Corporate Fit” presupposes a culture that is functional.  Your corporate culture is not functional and if you succeed it is in spite of your canned values, mores, mission statements and whatever your website says.  Once more, none of this has anything to do with getting the job done.  Would you rather have a “cultural fit” or someone who stands up and shouts “the emperor has no clothes” and then proceeds to prove it.  Cheerleaders are great at sporting events, but not even necessary there and certainly not relevant in business.

Specific Experience

“Do you have experience in the healthcare industry?"  No, I do not have experience in the telecom industry, nor do I want experience in the insurance industry and anyone that is still doing banking and finance by hand in 2026 needs to have his head examined.  How uninformed does the “HR Professional” have to be to ask that (those) irrelevant questions?  

Again, you want problem solvers.  You want people who come up with innovative solutions to interesting problems.  Problem solvers will challenge your pre-conceived notions and make you think about what you are doing and how to do it better, not automate brass polishing on the Titanic or come up with a better spreadsheet.

“The Situation” Conclusions

HR only exists to have something to point at when the company gets sued.  “Look, we did sensitivity training, so employees know what to say and what not to say.”  The correct response is to hire that training out, as cheaply as possible and not have an HR department at all.  

Further, requiring an applicant to provide a résumé and then having to type it all in again manually, is just silly.  Finally, the real people you want are not going to put up with Karen and her tin pot dictator rules.  Do you think Barack Obama or Bill Gates is going to fill out your silly HR questionnaire?

The Logical Conclusion

Companies with big powerful HR people and departments will fail.  Read the title again.  You’re doing it wrong. You are spending millions on systems and processes and people to do a job that doesn’t need to be done.  If you want to avoid litigation, hire out your HR training to the lowest bidder so you will have something to point at if you do get sued.

The Short Answer

Get rid of HR and HR thinking.  Let the hiring managers make hiring decisions about who they can and can’t work with and what skills they want and need.  I would say that asking for JavaScript experience is a bad question that probably won’t go away, but at least you don’t have several more layers of process and people between the asker and the answerer that are completely superfluous.

The Slightly Longer Answer

Let’s dive into what we actually should be doing outside of “get rid of HR”

Application Tracking systems are expensive, the solution to a non-existent problem and as such, should be wholly uninstalled.  Your site should have a list of jobs and a single button next to each with the instructions “upload your résumé.”

Interviews should be a discussion about how applicants solve problems.  Sometimes that solution is “push the broom across the floor.”  Hire that janitor immediately, you have better things to do then interview 300 janitors.

There is only one question that has any real relevance and that is “Tell me about your favorite project, why it is your favorite and what problem it solved?”  This shows a real-world example of how your applicant actually tackles and solves problems.

Every other question is worthless designed for thinking on your feet, which is irrelevant unless you are a fighter pilot, and you aren’t, and even then, you would have hundreds of hours of training to commit action to muscle memory, so not even really then.  

Corporate fit is a made-up feel-good thing that has no relevance in the desert of the real. The people who are actually getting the work done are just as likely to NOT get along with HR’s corporate fit candidate.  What if the hiring manager actually does things, can do the jobs of his reports and has the correct “this is work” attitude?  About the first time the “corporate fit” candidate does something stupid that can be corrected with a stern talking to they are going to get their warm, fuzzy, squishy little feelings hurt and quit or bring suit or generally blame everyone but themselves for demonstrated bad behavior.  Suddenly your warm, fuzzy, squishy feelings are a real financial liability. Hire the people that can do the work and don’t worry about the illusion of ‘corporate fit.”

In several cases in my personal “work for someone else” life, I was given the grand tour of the facilities to “get to know how we do things here.”  I don’t need to know “how you do things here.”  I already know you are doing it wrong or you wouldn't need me.  Your situation is not special, you didn’t reinvent the wheel, and it doesn’t require an explanation.  What it requires is replacement.  This is why we say specific industry experience is meaningless.  You don’t want someone who is already dogmatized to the general, average mistakes of your industry.  You want those fresh eyes to tell you that the emperor is naked, or to tell you that even the guys that built JavaScript are sick and tired of it and think it should go away.

Conclusions

Just like the title said: You’re Doing it Wrong.  You can spend your money on HR if you want to, but hear me now, someone is going to NOT spend their money on HR and price their products that much lower than yours and then you will be consigned to the annals of history.  Do the same old thing that the consulting companies tell everyone to do and get the same thing that everyone gets.  Be the one who is different and innovative and price your products without the HR slop before your competition does and puts you out of business.

Remember, this is part four of a fifteen-part series about how businesses are being run incorrectly by unthinking, lemming bizdiots.  We are demonstrating not only the problems of modern business, but real, viable solutions.

 I will be putting out one or maybe two articles per week.  If you liked what you read contact us here, on our site, SentiaHealth.com, our parent company SentiaSystems.com, or send us an email to info@sentiasystems.com or info@sentiahealth.com.