Hiring Policy – What’s New and What Could Be Next?

Something not getting much attention, except recently with artificial intelligence making inroads and causing controversy, is how employers hire.  These articles are spread over ten months, but it takes a while to get news on this subject, about which companies can be secretive.

Finally, “Globalization has come for US tech jobs” (Aki Ito, Business Insider, September 28^th).  What took it so long?  I predicted in 2012’s Work’s New Age that that would happen quickly, given that most such positions need little or no in-person presence, and Russia and India, to name only two, had many skilled candidates not expecting American pay scales.  But now we can read about “the payroll startup Deel,” which “wants to prioritize hiring the best candidates regardless of location,” and is looking on at least three continents.  Per this piece, companies learned how people can collaborate remotely from the pandemic, so some are taking that further.  Dare I say that we should expect much more?

After that is “5 jobs U.S. employers plan to outsource,” by Lee Hafner on November 17^th in Benefit News.  Really fields instead of positions, they are human resources, information technology, marketing, sales, and software development and testing.  That’s two in computers, a departure from IT’s frequent appearances, as late as last year, in listings of best careers.  The others are somewhat surprising, as some sales, HR, and marketing research must indeed be done in person.  It is possible that this list, after the remote-work backlash, would be different now.

Something worth considering is Brock Dumas’s December 23^rd Fox Business “Trouble filling a job?  Look at hiring someone with a criminal record, HR pro says.”  This article and the next address re-examining hiring restrictions, appropriate when potential employees are scarce.  The author cited studies showing that employees with such history were not only as reliable and effective as those without it, but often more, as they have “fewer options.”  As well, “former offenders” can be “less expensive to hire.”  People can be given positions less pertinent to their previous crimes, and their status may not be relevant at all.

Another approach, taking place in other areas, is to evaluate credential requirements, many of which were installed when hirers wanted to thin jobseekers’ ranks.  The largest is the subject of “See Workers as Workers, Not as a College Credential” (Editorial Board, The New York Times, January 28^th).  Points made here were to follow the example of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who, ten days before this piece’s press time, “eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the vast majority of jobs in the state government.”  It is easy to use graduation as a proxy for various general skills and attributes, but interviews, among other tools, can serve that function also.  We may not go back to the age, during some of our lifetimes, when people wanting business careers usually did not attend college, but we can loosen general education’s grip.

We may forget that, just before the big artificial intelligence news, 100,000 people in information technology lost their jobs.  Per Tyler Le in Business Insider on February 14^th, “Big Tech’s massive layoffs will come back to haunt it.”  The author maintained that the bloodletting has badly hurt the field’s reputation, especially for a generation valuing stability, so IT may no longer be “the destination of choice for the smartest kids at the best schools.”  But what goes down often goes back up.

I finish with a newer hiring-related issue, as “Affirmative Action Ruling May Upend Hiring Policies, Too” (Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, June 30^th).  “The Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions in higher education” has been rippling outward, with potential for new attitudes even in legally unrelated areas.  With the lawfulness of hiring policies favoring certain groups already in doubt, we can look for many changes as new practices take hold.  As with the other issues raised here, that may take a while.