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HR gatekeepers keeping the skilled locked out

I spent an afternoon last week with some unemployed job hunters.

They were about a dozen high-level professionals — out of work for longer than you’d think possible for men of their education and experience.

I wanted to meet with them because I’ve been flooded lately with publicity about the “brain drain” expected as the baby boomer generation leaves the work force.

So, I wondered, if employers fear this loss of talent, why are these capable people not being grabbed up in a heartbeat? The room was full of expertise, ripe for the picking.

But most of them had worked in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d been let go in corporate downsizings or mergers that made their positions redundant.

Unfortunately, they agreed, recruiters treat the unemployed, for whatever reason, as damaged goods.

“If you’re out of work, there’s a prejudice against you,” one said. “Recruiters say the employers are more interested in candidates who are employed.”

Thus, the unemployed professionals — in project management, engineering, sales, purchasing, information technology, marketing, finance, and so on — created their own referral network.

“Here. I know so and so. They’re going to have a position opening up.”

They were generous with contact names and tips. They were upbeat in their accounts of what’s working and what’s not on the job hunt.

But, when prodded, they let the optimistic facade crack. Here’s what they agreed:

Good candidates aren’t getting through corporate front-line resume screening systems.

Or, if their resumes are reaching the eyes of actual hiring managers, they’re getting no feedback as to why they’re not getting interviews.

“We can’t get past the HR gatekeeper,” one said. “If we’re blown off, we don’t know why.”

Three of the men in the room came to the job-transition support group out of camaraderie. They recently had landed jobs.

Two of the three emphasized that their jobs came through networking with other people, not by sending resumes into unresponsive cyberspace.

At a different job hunters’ event this week, an outplacement company brought together some job candidates and recruiters from one of the hottest companies in the Kansas City market.

One of the job hunters presented his resume to the corporate recruiter and heard this: “Oh, yes, I recognize your name. You’ve applied several times before.”

It wasn’t a put down. He’s a good job candidate. But why was he only hearing this when the face-to-face meeting forced interaction?

The answer, as last week’s groups of job hunters agreed, is that the hiring system is broken in many companies.

Blame the flood of Internet applications.

Blame downsized human resource departments that can’t handle the application volume.

Blame front-line screeners who don’t understand what they’re looking for or at.

“It’s a loss of etiquette,” one of the participants complained.

More precisely, it’s a loss of human contact.

Buzzwords on a resume don’t make the worker. It takes contact with humans to “sell” a job candidate.

When companies get so big that the contact is lost, the resume filter system keeps them from seeing some of that talent they say they need.