In the less than twenty four hours since accepting my new job, I have been offered two other jobs. Some of my friends and family think I should consider these offers, but I'm not. There's something wrong with an economy in which it's easiest to find new jobs when you least want or need them. I have no idea what that something is. I'm just saying it's odd. Kathy Sierra may be on to something when she says:
I would hope that all hiring managers everywhere will read this book and perhaps get a new (counterintuitive) insight into why they might actually get a better result by, um, lowering their standards. Although I don't think of it as lowering, since candidate A who has this different perspective but isn't, say, as young, high-IQ, or classically-trained as candidate B, might bring something even more valuable. In other words, what you lose in IQ points might be more than made up for by other things...
There seems to be a lot of group-think in hiring practices, probably because it's easier. Rather than actually research so many job candidates specifically, it's much simpler to just filter out a large chunk by assuming there's a good reason inexperienced or unemployed people are so. To see this in action, currently one out of every six job ads on disemployed contains the word "experience." Unfortunately, the end result of that practice is homogeneity, not only internally in a given company, but across the whole economy with each company doing the same thing.
Speaking of everyone at work being the same, today I discovered the blogs of my two new primary coworkers, Ian Leckie and Ryan Colley, both of whom have interests very similar to my own. But, in a bit of delicious irony I could not have scripted if I'd tried, one of us has a beard.
Though I would guess unemployed people more often have beards than the general population, beard quotas isn't really the trend I'm trying to suggest here. What I'm getting at is that everyone out there with jobs openings should stop offering so many to people like me who neither need nor want them, and start actively seeking candidates who are unemployed. It may even do more good for your company than the beard quota has apparently done for Apple or my new employer, Integer.