>'I think that ignores the fact that the forms and such are there in the first place precisely to contain the tide of applicants.'
This thought did cross my mind, but I've done lots of work in the public sector - local, federal, education and health.
As a rule, these agencies just aren't that clever, not even close.
In my experience, bad forms and the like are generally a matter of "That's how we've always done it."
That's not to say the concern isn't real. Surely it wouldn't serve to simplify an intake form without altering other parts of the process. To fail to do that would just be moving the bottleneck.
Ideally, sticking with the mountain analogy, you'd end up with a steady stream of healthy, willing and ultimately productive hands coming into the valley via a long, winding, but relatively safe pass.
It doesn't have to literally take the form of "hey, we can scare people off by making the forms longer! And my mustache is twirlier today!"
Rather, it's more like: with a reasonable flow of applicants, they can be lax in checking them, and maybe call the applicant if they need to get more information or something doesn't look right.
But as the influx gets too large, they have to adopt an attitude of "give us everything we might possibly need to validate you, the first time around, or we can't afford to process it". They may not be deliberately trying to scare people off, but the massive influx does lead, somehow, to ever longer forms.
Heck, I see "that's the way we've always done it" and awful mountains of paperwork inside the enterprise. You'd think Fortune 100 businesses would be interested in internal efficiency, but they're not.
Comments
>'I think that ignores the fact that the forms and such are there in the first place precisely to contain the tide of applicants.'
This thought did cross my mind, but I've done lots of work in the public sector - local, federal, education and health.
As a rule, these agencies just aren't that clever, not even close.
In my experience, bad forms and the like are generally a matter of "That's how we've always done it."
That's not to say the concern isn't real. Surely it wouldn't serve to simplify an intake form without altering other parts of the process. To fail to do that would just be moving the bottleneck.
Ideally, sticking with the mountain analogy, you'd end up with a steady stream of healthy, willing and ultimately productive hands coming into the valley via a long, winding, but relatively safe pass.
It doesn't have to literally take the form of "hey, we can scare people off by making the forms longer! And my mustache is twirlier today!"
Rather, it's more like: with a reasonable flow of applicants, they can be lax in checking them, and maybe call the applicant if they need to get more information or something doesn't look right.
But as the influx gets too large, they have to adopt an attitude of "give us everything we might possibly need to validate you, the first time around, or we can't afford to process it". They may not be deliberately trying to scare people off, but the massive influx does lead, somehow, to ever longer forms.
Heck, I see "that's the way we've always done it" and awful mountains of paperwork inside the enterprise. You'd think Fortune 100 businesses would be interested in internal efficiency, but they're not.