I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated requirements if necessary.
To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.
No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.
I totally get your point – checks and balances are important. However, I don't think anyone is helped by unstated or invisible requirements. It speaks to a high level of mistrust of employees and candidates.
Now, if HR were to explicitly add those requirements and be open about it, I'd wager it'd still keep fraud down while also actually improving the hiring process for both HR and the hiring manager.
Fraud is a difficult problem to deal with -- the more open you are about what you're doing to prevent it, the more you speed up the "evolution" of better (aka. worse) fraud.
Whether that effect is large enough to justify the lack of transparency in this case, I don't know; but I'm sure there are some cases where it is appropriate.
(Marginally related: This is why I have some sympathy for Paypal when they say "this payment is suspect" and refuse to provide any more information -- they can't tell me why a particular payment set off alarms without also telling the bad guys how to evade their alarms.)
No, it's really not when you constrain who the possible perpetrators are and consider that they must be long-term, more senior employees. Fraud by higher ranking employees – particularly managers involved in the creation of job descriptions and doing hiring is just not going to be that common.
It certainly isn't going to be common enough that it's worth destroying internal trust and credibility when open (within company) reviews and sufficient internal control mechanisms that didn't include hidden manipulation of candidate hiring could do an equivalent job without reducing the organization's ability to hire stellar candidates (not that I'm biased, given my case, of course =)
I mean, it may well happen, but all sorts of unlikely events may happen and yet would similarly be problematic to keep constant protection for. It's all about the risk/reward analysis and, in this case, I believe you've calculated that incorrectly.
Comments
(warning: anecdote ahead)
I once had a job at a large institution created, for me, with requirements based solely on my resume.
The automated HR system decided I wasn't a match for the job. It took a month or two for them to be able to hire me after that fiasco.
I don't know anything about your specific case (obviously) but what you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. In some organizations, one of the rules of HR is to add a level of corporate sanity-checking to a process which is otherwise driven by individual managers -- by creating additional unstated requirements if necessary.
To take an extreme case, if Bob the VP of Sales decides he wants to create a "Senior Engineer III" position with a salary of $300k/year based on requirements drawn from his 13 year old nephew's resume, it's entirely appropriate for HR to add an unpublished "should have education or work experience suitable for a $300k/year job" requirement and not accept Bob's 13 year old nephew as a match for the job.
No system is perfect, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong to have such systems in place.
I totally get your point – checks and balances are important. However, I don't think anyone is helped by unstated or invisible requirements. It speaks to a high level of mistrust of employees and candidates.
Now, if HR were to explicitly add those requirements and be open about it, I'd wager it'd still keep fraud down while also actually improving the hiring process for both HR and the hiring manager.
Fraud is a difficult problem to deal with -- the more open you are about what you're doing to prevent it, the more you speed up the "evolution" of better (aka. worse) fraud.
Whether that effect is large enough to justify the lack of transparency in this case, I don't know; but I'm sure there are some cases where it is appropriate.
(Marginally related: This is why I have some sympathy for Paypal when they say "this payment is suspect" and refuse to provide any more information -- they can't tell me why a particular payment set off alarms without also telling the bad guys how to evade their alarms.)
No, it's really not when you constrain who the possible perpetrators are and consider that they must be long-term, more senior employees. Fraud by higher ranking employees – particularly managers involved in the creation of job descriptions and doing hiring is just not going to be that common.
It certainly isn't going to be common enough that it's worth destroying internal trust and credibility when open (within company) reviews and sufficient internal control mechanisms that didn't include hidden manipulation of candidate hiring could do an equivalent job without reducing the organization's ability to hire stellar candidates (not that I'm biased, given my case, of course =)
I mean, it may well happen, but all sorts of unlikely events may happen and yet would similarly be problematic to keep constant protection for. It's all about the risk/reward analysis and, in this case, I believe you've calculated that incorrectly.
I hope that they replaced or repaired the automated system. How did it turn out?
Admittedly, this was a few years back, so I'd expect it's been replaced, improved, etc.
But it all worked out for me in the end – I had a number of years of good employment, working for an awesome boss.