randomness of interviews / getting a job
A comment that was made in another thread about the job selection process got me thinking, along side an article I read somewhere (sorry I cannot remember where) but literally over a thousand people applied for one job.
My thoughts are this: let's say I advertise a job, I give a job description and a list of essential and desirable qualities and qualifications. Now let's say the company I have is well sought after one, in a sector that attracts a lot of applicants. I receive 800 applications. Now the easiest way to whittle the pile is set aside all the CVs that are messy, hard to read and don't have the exact requirements but let's say that 100 candidates have the exact experience and they meet the desired requirements. So I whittle the pile of people who have outstanding CVs and letters, along with extra experience but now here is the crunch, I now have fifty candidates in my pile.
How does a recruiter whittle down the pile after this? (Unless they are willing to interview 50 people, which I doubt it). Does it come down to location, schools attended, or other unknown factors.
Remember at this point most employers don't know age (although they can guess by the school dates and work experience) or gender (unless they can tell by the name or if there is a mention of children). So assuming they stay within the equality laws, how else can they select say 20-30 candidates (which is still pretty high) out of a pile of 50 outstanding candidates?
I raise this issue because with so many people out of work, so many going for the one job and so many people worrying about their interview performance, CV performance, cover letter performance, there is a huge amount of anxiety and sense of failure. I often wonder is the whole job seeking thing more random than we give credit for (during a time of extreme recession of course).
