Human Resources is a lovely discipline occupied by thousands of wonderfully insightful intelligent people. Formally, the field is referred to as Industrial/Organizational Psychology (or the name on your degree). The science behind Human Resources aims to make organizations more productive while ensuring productive and healthy lives for its workers. Translation: workers happy, company thrives. They even used to call it PERSONnel!
r />But then the HR folks wanted a part of the technological revolution and they upgraded themselves in a big way. A marriage formed between HR + IT and it formed a whole new world (HRIS). But somehow the technology tornado swept through and sucked the Human out of Human Resources.

The HR departments are no longer filled with “people people.” Instead, the pressure to keep up with the Technology Jonses has forced traditional HR folks into bits and bytes decoders.

Back in the day … and by back in the day, I mean back in the day when I first graduated college (1996), I was still thinking about the quality of paper upon which I printed my resume. I wore a navy suit with pantyhose and pumps. I carried a leather portfolio and sent a handwritten thank you note.

Today our job hunt begins and ends with the computer; it is our porthole into the market. We log on to let the world know that we’re looking. We have to be our own email marketers and drive our own viral campaigns. We network online, we apply online, we click to send our saved resumes and the upload yet another cover letter. We always email to follow up. We summarize decades of experience with a maximum number of characters and we send it out into the online abyss.

I worked at a recruitment advertising agency for 7 years so you figure I’d be able to navigate some sort of back end armed with the inside scoop. Wrong. Turns out I don’t have the formula any more than anyone else does.

Most large companies have applicant tracking systems (ATS), which are databases designed to hold and process the millions of resumes. When you are applying to a job online or via email, your resume is automatically going into this database. Often you may be applying to a position that isn’t even available; the company just wants to build a “pipeline” of candidates.

When the company is ready to hire someone, the first order of business is to have the HR folks search through this ATS. The hiring manager provides the HR person with cryptic keywords and then they go into the massive database, laden with millions of our career histories and conducts a keyword search. Code given, code entered, resumes served.

If you know the correct code that will yield your resume, hurray for you. The rest of us better figure out the code. The current economy means companies can get the best bang for their buck; employees come cheap. It’s the simple principle of supply and demand.

When I worked for the recruitment advertising agency, my clients often wanted me to advertise hard-to-fill jobs on very obscure Websites. One client was seeking a highly specialized nurse. The position was so distinct – there was only 18 known practitioners in the country. I thought a better approach would be to call the 18 nurses and give them a personal pitch. The client preferred to psychologically guess which Websites they might be visiting. In this instance, technology brainwashed (and trumped) the human.

The online job-hunting marketplace has gotten so overwhelming, they created a search engine to further simplify the process. Or so you think. These one-stop shops (like Indeed and Simply Hired) let you enter a title and a location and voila – jobs at a click. But how many of these jobs are legit?

It’s often the same job on different sites. The job boards have gotten very nepotistic and have created relationships and partnerships all over the place. When a company advertises on one site, they get a dozen others as a bonus. What this means for a job hunter is same job, different www.

Oh the online forms! Some of the big sites like Monster and CareerBuilder let you store your resume and apply to jobs with a click. Many of the large companies mandate you fill out their own profiles on their company’s career page. Fun!

You cruise around the Fortune 500 Online world filling out forms ad nauseam. Hours of virtual paperwork to earn some space on a database. You spend countless clicks inputting your life into online boxes. You indicate your gender, your nationality, if you’re a veteran. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have you ever worked here before? Sometimes the experience will lend itself to a little “pre-screen” interaction where they give you a series of questions and you click off some buttons answering what they want to see. You customize a cover letter with their words.

I feel ahead of the game. The older generation is at a disadvantage in this technologically dominated new job-hunting universe. It is not enough to maintain expertise in your profession of choice; you also have to be proficient in navigating the Web 2.0 and Social Media world. Without it, you might not stand a fighting chance.

But for the thousands of those currently unemployed, they should use the technology rather than compete with the technology. Candidates have to be louder than the technology. They have to integrate a little human back into the mix.

If you find yourself enthralled in a slightly older school of job hunting, you may find yourself busting out the suit, pumps and folios and doing the headhunter dance. That scenario usually plays itself out like so:

You find a job online and apply for it, often unknowing that you’re really applying to a headhunter. Said headhunter will call you and ask you a series of questions and then hopefully deem you worthy of an in-person interview. When you come in for your in-person, you use your tiniest handwriting to fill out a 10-page archaic paper application. This is the exact same content you filled in when you sent in the “application” online. You wait to be called and then get escorted into a cubicle conference room. There you make small talk and answer the same questions the headhunter asked you over the phone. This time they write it down. They put it in a file with your name on it. They tell you all about their unparalleled opportunities. They direct you to complete the online application at home. The say they’ll be in touch. Sometimes they are.

… And that’s what happens when you add the human element.

Watch the video related to Human Computer Interaction

This video describes the HCI program and includes interviews with professors and descriptions of projects.

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http://www.heartseverywhere.com/1974/08/about-me.html

The World of Facebook…

……..and other social not-working sites leave many of us more socially retarded than we were in high school…

Returning to Canada and running into “Facebook friends” of mine has really puzzled, humored–and in some cases annoyed me–enough that I think writing this article is worth my time.

Does anyone else have the following contacts on Facebook?

• The brother or sister who is apparently too afraid to talk to you in person, but is chatty on your wall and private messages as if you’ve been through hell and high water together?
• Or what about Joe “I went to high school/elementary school with you, but don’t answer anything you write me-even though I’m the one who sent you the friend request in the first place?”
• Or the friend you know “from somewhere”, and have not been in touch with for years and years, and you have an initial “entry level communication” with? What I mean by that is, say that you found this person, and added them, and once they accepted your invite, you wrote on their wall or sent them a private message that showed up in their inbox, they responded, and had a follow up question of their own about your life and what is new with them. You respond to this and ask them one or two more details about their life, and the communication ends there with a total of three interactions–entry-level communication, but you remain “Facebook friends”, and no doubt keep spying on each other’s sites to know the latest news and developments, but otherwise have no real communication whatsoever.

Now, I’m not popular, and never have been–don’t get me wrong. I have never been known to have lots of friends in social settings, but this Facebook thing, well everybody seems to be on it! I have almost 700 contacts on it, and yes, I am at the very minimum at least acquainted with all of them–but still accept ones I don’t recognize hoping THEY will indicate how we know each other. And I have a handful of fictional characters from TV shows like The Simpsons. I accept any and every invitation I get, even if I don’t recognize the person sending me the invite. Unless of course you’re some hoochie mama and in your picture you’re wearing almost clothes or I recognize your name from my seedy past of internet porn addiction, or I otherwise just simply know your name and pic is bad news and no real fruitful communication will come of it.

I’ve been on this thing for almost two years now, and I’ve noticed some peculiar things about human and social interaction from this website, that I realized telling my computer illiterate grandmother about it has helped me see just how ridiculously stupid the world of Facebook is (and of course, MySpace) if you really think about it and try describing to someone on the outside or who didn’t grow up with the Internet.

One of those ridiculous observations is in fact the very reason I joined it-how easy it is to stay moderately informed about the latest goings-on in the lives of people in my social network with very little effort involved on my part-or theirs. When I first joined Facebook, the privacy settings were such that everything people did on their page showed up in my mini-feed. This is the part of your page, where once you sign in, there’s a list of the latest activity that has taken place on your friends’ pages. I LOVED this feature, and have taken full use of it by constantly putting pictures and newsletters, and now audio mp3s of our podcast, onto this social network, to constantly make people reminded of me. That’s simply it. I still don’t know the balance of how often is too often and becomes annoying, but this website is one of the most brilliant things people have invented for the internet and gotten me “in touch” with way more individuals than I could have on my own effort.

However, many people who joined the site were up in arms that they had so “little privacy” by having all the latest developments show up in their friends’ mini-feeds (basically the home page after signing into the site). This is the part that has puzzled me completely: why did people join such a site if they felt that what happens on it is an invasion of privacy? And if they don’t want certain people to know their latest updates, then why did they add them as friends on their network? If you don’t want someone to see your page, there’s boxes you check in your account information.

Myself, I have almost everything checked, and the more people on my account the merrier. I have forged for myself a career path that is public, and my life–generally speaking–is an open book, so the more I can put myself on peoples’ minds for prayer and knowledge of my missionary life, the better it is for my interests of keeping people informed–especially those who WANT to be. Most or at least many churches in North America give little time and interest to the Great Commission as it is (other than outreach to the local community-which many churches excel at, in my opinion–but the sending out of missionaries…..?), so missionaries like myself have to keep making sure they come to your attention as much as the local “change the color of the sanctuary carpet” fund. Pictures can say a thousand words, so I put almost all of them on Facebook and you can SEE what I’m doing.

Needless to say, I love Facebook! But probably for different reasons than most who use it.

But allow me to put my emphasis on the word touch in the “keeping in touch” that Facebook allows. You barely have any real interaction with each other on this site. I’ve known about peoples’ marriage and dating developments from their “relationship status” changing and showing up in my mini feed. I’ve known other people who’ve found out their girlfriends were dumping them by changing their relationship status on Facebook!

Probably none of you reading this will go out of the way to leave a comment about what you agree or disagree with, since on Facebook most people just lurk and ‘face stalk’, but you will have read this anyway. This is typical of the online community our generation is becoming–don’t you think?

Watch the video related to Human Computer Interaction

I’m using a laser pointer to move the mouse cursor on a computer. The software works by finding the brightest pixel in its field of view using a webcam. The webcam is also used for turning the projected area of a projector into an interactive screen. For more information, visit msdn.microsoft.com or ashishrd.blogspot.com

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About Author

Steve has been a missionary to Europe for over 2 years, and currently lives in Canada while preparing to move to Peru in early 2009. He is a contributing author on the Fire On Your Head Blog, which can be viewed at www.fireonyourhead.org and also co-hosts a bi-weekly podcast with another missionary, Fire On Your Head- The Podcast, at www.fireonyourhead.com Both sites dwell richly in Pentecostal/Charismatic themes within Christianity.