The Unemployables
The Unemployables
There’s a saying in recruitment that the best jobs are never advertised.
There’s another idea, not quite a saying as yet, that the best candidates are unemployable. Allow me to explain.
Most vacancies as advertised are shaped to fit the mediocre candidate. Any candidate with outstanding skills, experience, capabilities and insight is such a poor match for the position as advertised – with job description, education, certification and experience requirements, and all – they’ll never get past the first filters / gatekeepers (people with no understanding of what it really takes to excel in the job).
The outstandingly capable candidates are thus, for all intents and purposes, practically unemployable.
This leads to my regular refrain – the recruitment / hiring market is irredeemably broken.
Irredeemably broken? Yup. At least until those who unknowingly suffer the consequences of their organisations’ hiring mediocre candidates (CxOs, particularly) go to the gemba and begin to see what’s ACTUALLY happening in their name.
– Bob
Think Different
Let me tell you my story.
I qualified as a librarian many years ago, but ended up spending 30 years in the civil service, the last twenty in the HQ of one of the sectorial regulators, where I was not employed in any exceptionally high-flying capacity but was a fly on the wall for some quite interesting stuff. For fifteen of those years, I was engaged on the design of data collection tools, and served as tester and data wrangler for those tools.
Whilst in that job, I had a side hustle as the organisation’s senior trade union representative. This meant that I did a lot of negotiation, as well as acquiring skills in employment law, health & safety, and a lot of networking. As senior rep for a whole Government department (albeit a small one), I served on a number of regional and national union committees, although I also had many of the duties of a local branch official,.
I gave all that up in 2010 to try my hand at professional photography and journalism. I won two international photography awards, and had two books and a number of magazine articles published. But I couldn’t make any money at it; so two years in, a friend suggested that I try my hand again at software testing as a contractor.
This worked moderately well, though I could never manage to walk from one contract straight into another. But I worked for a number of different companies and organisations, from a professional, semi-regulatory legal organisation to a travel agency, a third party services provider and a company producing embedded software for medical devices. (In the meantime, I still had a side hustle, this time as an estate agent’s photographer.)
Eventually, though, I was able to move back into full-time salaried employment as a software tester with a facilities management company. But the day came when the company’s owners decided that they were spending too much on in-house IT provision and (first) bought in proprietary apps to replace the tools we’d built in-house, and then (second) they liked what they saw so much that they bought the company, making all their IT staff redundant.
But they said that they would look to re-deploy surplus staff elsewhere in the organisation, if there were suitable posts. It was at this point that I thought “But they’ve only ever seen the CV I did for the testing role. They have no idea what else I can do.” So I drafted a supplementary CV, detailing all the roles and experience that wasn’t on the other CV, on the grounds that I probably had experience that no-one else in the company did. It didn’t stop me being made redundant, but it did two important things: it made the Board member in charge of the redundancies avoid me because the additional CV showed that I had worked directly to people ten times more important than him; and (perhaps more importantly), it made me feel that I was taking some measure of control of my own fate.
I incorporated some of this into my main CV, which started with ten “career highlights” on the first page to grab attention, only some of which were related to testing. In the six months that followed, I found that this CV attracted enough attention for me to get to speak to recruiters who contacted me at a rate of two or three per week, and I was getting invited to interviews at least once a fortnight. (Just so you know, I was then of an age where candidates normally get passed over, for some unknowable reason.) Eventually, I landed my current role as a tester with another specialist software house, with a single product that sells to a particular niche market. The final selection was between me, with little technical IT knowledge but a lot of varied business experience that they could not match, and another candidate with a fairly ordinary set of IT tech skills – but they already had five other testers with that sort of skill set.
I have now been with this company for five years and I’ve learnt a lot from the guys I work with: but I think I’ve also taught them a lot about how software products get used in the real world, as well as a lot of stuff about business situations generally. Perhaps what I draw from all this, in the context of your post, is that there are no unemployable candidates; just candidates who haven’t found the right employer – yet.