Employer prejudices - skilled people not wanted

Employer prejudices and preferences are an obstacle to employment.

When firms advertise vacancies, many have a long list of requirements, most of it repetitive. An accountant or engineer can summarise his core duties in a few lines. Why would it need two pages to describe?

This overkill is because employers are casting a broad, generic job requirement list hoping to catch that “perfect employee”. Or equally, they don’t know what they want. They also pepper the advert with MBA-speak like “strategic” and “governance”.

My former employer, who fired - they called it "retrenchment", though - me in 2012 allegedly for having been "over-qualified" and earning too much (that wasn't the reason but because I had resisted their wasteful and possibly irregular accounting practices), had a job description for my successor “bookkeeper” that exceeded the duties of a finance officer (me), and included duties unknown and irrelevant to the organisation. They couldn’t explain why.

To them the “perfect” employment candidate is 25 years old with a professional degree, MBA an advantage, five to ten years experience and preferably black and female. Job advertisements state: “Applicants who do not meet all the requirements will not be considered”.

I saw a ridiculous job advert placed by an unnamed Cape Town investment house. They wanted an economist "who has never failed" - school, university, jobs - and achieved perfect scores. Wow, what pressure, who can achieve this impossible burden? Do such paragons actually exist? It is said even Albert Einstein failed maths. If this is the standard the majority of South African employers demand, no wonder there is a skills shortage.

Applicants who comply with the above impossible job descriptions do not exist. Even if they met objective requirements, e.g, education, the subjective requirements – day-to-day systems and procedures – is unique to each organisation and can only be learnt on the job, irrespective of how experienced the employee is.

South African employers fixate on small things. For example, does the applicant have experience in specific software, without realising an experienced person probably is familiar with similar software because all of them function in similar ways. The important question they don’t ask is he able to perform the core functions of the job? Employers ignore transferability of experience and demand the incoming employee be an exact replica of their existing or outgoing ones.

As an accountant (and previously, engineer) I have experience of going into a new environment, or client, without prior knowledge of the client or industry and being able, after a few hours of job review and familiarisation, to be productive. This is typical across the professions.

However, South African employers insist there are no experienced, skilled people and new graduates are unable to function. They expect experienced and skilled people to miraculously materialise, and have forgotten their own responsibility to train.

Are these impossible requirements why South Africa’s young, bright people are leaving to find their fortunes overseas, like the young, newly qualified chartered accountant I knew who was snapped up by the sixth largest audit firm in the US, working in New York in a sector he had no previous experience of on multi-billion dollar audits?

How does anyone in South Africa get hired?

Last year a national non-profit organisation for the disabled in Cape Town invited me to an interview for the finance manager post. However, at the appointed time the director was not there to interview me. There was no apology and despite a promise of a call-back, it did not happen.

In response to my e-mail about my reception, the chairman replied in barely literate English, complete with texting abbreviations. No explanation was given for what happened, though. The organisation had used the familiar catchwords in their advert - integrity, professional, good governance – yet their conduct displayed the absence of either. This behaviour is common, even typical, but employers expect extraordinary standards from employees.

The best and brightest of America’s top universities – Harvard, MIT, Stanford etc – flock to work at Google. Google has different recruitment practices. While placing value on college degrees and good grades, they are not the most important qualities. Applicants need not be experts, but more importantly, must display an ability to learn. They believe that with training even a non-expert can become as capable as an expert.

Google prefers people who have failed and can learn from their failures. People who have always succeeded never learn this lesson. Teamwork and lateral thinking are traits they value.

However, Google’s progressive way is not how people are hired in South Africa – remember those exhaustive job requirements lists and “applicants who do not meet all the requirements will not be considered”.

South African employers pigeon-hole job seekers, placing them in rigid racial, gender, educational and experiential blocks. Some require applicants to complete questionnaires and tick boxes in addition to providing comprehensive CVs – why not simply ask them at the interview? How can they get a sense of a person from a questionnaire? I scratched those organisations when I was asked to complete one.

I don’t know if hiring was always like this. But labour legislation has made it harder, not easier, to find the diamonds in the rough, and perhaps may be the reason why employers are so fussy.

In conclusion, consider this: according to US job site CareerBuilder, 47% of all graduates surveyed work in fields unrelated to their academic field of studies. By South African terms, these people are consider "unqualified" or "unskilled" and would never find work. I wonder how the US became the largest economic power? By South Africa's standards, which is struggling economically, they would never be.

Updated 30 April 2016.