HR / Recruiters whose job it was to locate the best candidates have largely disappeared

Corporate training has largely disappeared, along with the recruiters whose job it was to locate the best candidates for those programs, argues Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (click on the link to get a free e-book copy this week).

Cappelli tells me that while corporate CEO’s might say they favor applicants with a broad education at the foundation, those leaders are largely removed from the hiring process. The people on the front lines of hiring these days are lower-level managers who want jobs filled by people who can do the work immediately.

“This plays on the prejudices of the hiring manager,” he says. “If they think they need someone with a master’s degree, they’ll ask for that. If they think it will take too long to train a liberal-arts graduate, they will toss those applications aside. All without evidence of what’s really needed to do the job.”

Those who hire also receive their initial pool of candidates through a screening process that has largely been taken out of human hands with automated software that scans applications and résumés for certain keywords. “They can’t imagine the job skills or experiences you don’t program into them,” including nontechnical degrees, Cappelli says.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Skills Gap? Employers and Colleges Point Fingers at Each Other – Next – The Chronicle of Higher Education.