Relaxing Job Requirements May Be A Short-Sighted And High-Risk Response To Employment Stats

The headline and subheading from this article in the July 27 Wall Street Journal at first seem to make a strange kind of sense in light of current lower unemployment statistics:

Employers Eager to Hire Try a New Policy: “No Experience Necessary”

Inexperienced job applicants face better odds in the labor market as more companies drop work-history and degree requirements

And this quote in that article from a person representing a search firm makes it seem even more like a job-hunter’s free-for-all out there:

“…estimates one in four of the agency’s employer clients have made drastic changes to their recruiting process since the start of the year, such as skipping drug tests or criminal background checks, or removing preferences for a higher degree or high-school diploma.”

It would be easy to attribute this loosening of requirements simply to the “tight labor market” as the Daily Mail does in its headline of its July 30 article piggy-backing the WSJ piece.

But other factors that have been building for some time may also be at work, pushing it along:

Employers have lost sight of the more subtle dimensions of the jobs they’re offering. They may suffer from a myopic and narrow view of the true requirements, overemphasizing the “task” nature of the work and undervaluing the more nuanced, but perhaps even more critical, aspects such as good judgment and discretion in decision-making that require more intellectual maturity that often comes with higher education and experience. (Remember the story of Edward Snowden?)*

Colleges and universities are losing a P.R. fight they should never have let themselves get drawn into. They’ve been pressured into trying to justify their very existence on the basis of tuition cost recovery analyses using dollars-and-cents comparisons of salaries of grads vs. those of non-grads. Instead of being proud of their role in broadening students’ world view and giving them important tools like decision-making and problem-solving they’ll need for the higher-level aspects of most jobs, they’ve been trumpeting their effectiveness as “trade schools” that prepare students for specific job tasks.

This was a battle they couldn’t win, since community colleges and in-house training programs run by employers are naturally better suited to impart purely technical task skills in less time and at lower cost.

This spectacle has led some job seekers and employers alike to an often short-sighted conclusion: Why get (or require) a college degree if someone with certificate training can perform the task just as well?

This has profound implications for action by all parties to the equation.

For employers: Look beyond the technical tasks of the job when drafting your job description. Think through the kinds of challenges, problems and decisions facing the incumbent. What education and experience is really likely to be needed to get that right? Selling the job short will lead to bad hiring decisions that are very hard to unwind later.

For job seekers: Set yourself up for success. When applying, in addition to comparing your technical skill set with the mechanical parts of the job, find out about the kinds of problems and decisions you might face in the position. Don’t be satisfied with meeting the written job description. It’s in your interest to show up well-prepared to excel in all aspects of the role, where you can “surprise and delight” your employer with your contributions to the company and its customers, especially in tough and unexpected situations, and build skills for the future.

For colleges and universities: Get off the bandwagon of numerical cost-justifications of your degree programs. Return your focus to the original purpose of a college education. Make your case based on real-life examples of how college-honed maturity, problem-solving and wisdom actually paid off in the real world, and where mere technical competence turns out to be insufficient to get the job done right. Swap out those important-looking, CFO-style charts and graphs for some good stories.

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*The unfortunate saga of Edward Snowden may have started with this type of naive job posting. By all accounts, he was fully qualified for the technical aspects of creating and managing systems to collect and store data. But as someone who ended his formal education short of finishing high school, he may not have been prepared for the ethical dilemmas he faced or the intense pressures from the journalists, film makers and foreign operatives who came his way with their own agendas.

We haven’t seen his job description, so we can only speculate that a lot of trouble for a lot of people might have been avoided if his employer had recognized the value of — and the need for — the maturity and wisdom that might come from a college experience — or even a high school diploma, given the extreme sensitivity of the data he was to handle and the controversial real-world purposes for which it was being collected.