Oiling the machinery of public health recruitment: actions for employers
Data-driven lessons learned from the job search process: Part II
In the previous installment, I began to derive lessons learned from my data-driven quantitative and qualitative insights into experiences of applying for public health jobs, with a focus on job seekers. In today’s installment, I now turn my attention to public health employers and seek to derive some constructive suggestions for actions that employers could take to lubricate the wheels of this rusted machinery.
Photo courtesy of Secta.AI: They’ve put me in the middle of the road again but at least I feel a bit more visible to oncoming traffic. Still wondering whey they cut off so much of my face though.
Bring the equity lens
Particularly in our field of public health, where we talk the big talk about prioritizing and operationalizing the value of equity and the promotion of mental health in our work, it is nothing short of hypocrisy for public health employers and their systems for hiring to ignore the humanity of job applicants and treat the over-supply of human beings as though our search for meaningful employment can be so readily overlooked without consequence. We job seekers desire and deserve respect and dignity too. Courtesy and common sense are the foundations by which our job market ought to be operating, but any job seeker will tell you that they appear to be painfully absent from hiring systems right now.
Calling BS on the ATS
When I talk about hiring systems, I mean the internal recruitment processes and the websites that employers use to manage them online. The ATS (applicant tracking systems) software that I have seen most commonly used in our field of public health (including governmental health departments, national nonprofit organizations, as well as the private sector) include BambooHR, Workday, Taleo, ADP, BrassRing, and Silkroad. For academic positions, I’ve most often seen Interfolio used. For federal positions, all applications are routed through USAJOBS, the official employment website of the United States government. For health department positions in State and local government, applications may be managed through an ATS or through a custom-built web portal.
Each of these systems has advantages and disadvantages. The most user-friendly ones from a job seeker’s perspective are those that are stable and functional for the input of biographical data, but sadly this is not guaranteed. (Really, we don’t ask for much, do we? Man, the bar is LOW.) All of these systems require job seekers to painstakingly manually enter their contact information, education history, employment experience, skills, etc - often multiple times, in addition to uploading a resume that already contains all of this information. Many systems claim to be able to scan a pdf resume for automatic completion of these fields, but I haven’t yet met one that actually works: always check the scan and correct for the inevitable errors. Sometimes the edits are more tedious work than manual entry from scratch.
After 20+ years of work experience in our characteristically choppy field, simply entering my employment history in the first step of a job application can be a complicated and time-consuming process, during which the website can be guaranteed to crash (always save your work!). Plus it’s already in my resume. Why does it need to be re-entered? In a world where a gas station can award me discount points based on the contents of my supermarket shopping cart and AI can provide mental health counselling services, there must be a better way. There just haven’t been the financial incentives.
Judgy judgy
Employers: remember that the job seekers are judging you too. I judge you for embarrassing spelling mistakes in key terms of job advertisements that reveal a lack of quality control; I judge you for sprawling job descriptions that show you don’t know what you are looking for; I judge you when your screening questions aimed at streamlining applicants are duplicative or contain logical inconsistencies. These aspects might not seem important now, but eventually, when the current surfeit turns into a shortage of applicants, it will benefit you to have a functional, efficient, and technologically sound hiring system that makes a good impression on the best applicants. Remember that we job seekers are making multiple applications simultaneously and we are comparing you to your competitors in real time.
The hiring process can highlight the essential characteristics of the employer to the job seeker. For example, two of my recent job applications distinguished themselves from the pack: one with excessive administrative tasks required even before the first interview (including printing and scanning paper forms, plus in-person witnessing requirements), and the other with a lecture about the organization’s bureaucracy that took up more than half of our scheduled interview time. Since I am neither a fan of bureaucracy nor excessive form-filling, I am already inclined to make a negative judgment about these employers’ priorities based on what has been revealed to me through their hiring practices, compared to what I have already learnt from their competitors. (And for the record, surely you won’t be surprised to learn that after multiple interview rounds, both of these employers ghosted me.)
Equity, schmequity
It has not gone unnoticed that hiring systems in both the public and private sectors continue to perpetuate inequities. Even if we apply the benefit of the doubt and assume that these systems were originally designed to allow the employer to equitably pick the best candidate for the job based upon information presented in a common format, we can see that they have now become so sluggish that they are promoting the opposite goals, unfairly favoring internal candidates and those with independent income sources and health insurance coverage.
The obstacles and burdens of the arcane application processes we job seekers experience every day are inevitably resulting in the exclusion of well-qualified candidates. For example, what kind of candidate can afford to remain patient and bear with the excruciatingly slow and disturbingly opaque hiring processes I have described? Candidates who urgently need a job to pay their bills and cover their health insurance can’t afford to wait around for an unspecified number of interview rounds over an indeterminate number of months. There’s a special kind of irony here for the ways in which hiring patterns for public health jobs result in a shortage of health insurance coverage for public health professionals. Our wellness-oriented profession can’t effectively impact population-level health when the workforce itself is unwell or uninsured. Relying on health insurance coverage from a parent or a spouse should not be a prerequisite for a career in public health. (Thanks to Dr Marta Induni, Dr April Moreno Arellano, and Dr Jennifer Todd for important conversations influencing my thinking here.)
I call upon HR professionals - especially within governmental agencies - to question whether existing hiring systems are truly meeting the needs of their workforce. A hiring system that requires candidates to spend time and effort learning how to navigate through a uniquely idiosyncratic process, master the quirks of the system, and create individually tailored documents is no longer furthering a goal of equity. A hiring system that requires a webinar, online career fair, instructional video, advice gleaned from insider contacts, or paying a specialist consultant just to understand how to submit an application is no longer serving to level any playing field.
Jack be nimble
At the start of the public health emergency due to COVID-19, it quickly became apparent that many of the existing governmental hiring practices were too clunky to pivot to meet rapidly changing needs and recruit the specialist staff needed in the emergency pandemic response. The CDC Foundation, an independent nonprofit associated with the CDC, quickly and ably sidestepped governmental hiring restrictions to nimbly hire a workforce of much-needed and highly skilled public health professionals into State and local health departments through their COVID-19 Surge Staffing initiative based on grant funding for fixed term contracts. This mechanism provided an important boost to the public health workforce during a time of emergency and successfully recruited thousands of public health professionals into the emergency response, matching specialist skills availability to needs gaps through State and local health departments, and deftly promoting remote working practices which opened up public health hiring nationally. What lessons are now being learned to translate these experiences into sustainable practices for the ongoing development of the public health workforce?
It is worth noting that this 4,000-strong workforce, of which I was proud to be a member, is now largely unemployed again. The lack of public funding prevented most of these short-term contracts from transitioning into long-term opportunities to use the skilled expertise of this temporary workforce to continue to contribute to the development of the public health workforce within our communities and throughout our country. Furthermore, many health departments no longer permit remote working or hiring from outside their jurisdictions, leading to geographical mismatch between the labor force and the need for skilled workers. Despite continuing public health challenges relating to respiratory health, reproductive health, infectious diseases and more, I am one of a large cohort of skilled public health professionals who have been treated as disposable. These mechanisms were agile during the emergency, but ultimately unsustainable.
What you gonna do about it?
To all the employers, interviewers, hiring managers, and recruiters with whom I have ever interacted: I doubt that you will recognise yourself from the descriptions I have offered here and in my previous columns. If you do, I welcome conversation - please reach out. I expect that your point of view is different to mine, and that you think you’ve always done the right thing under the circumstances. Or perhaps you think that you are just an individual cog in a much bigger (and quite rusty) machine? But the next time that you are hiring, please put yourself in the shoes of a candidate and imagine how it feels to be a human being on the receiving end of these brutal interactions: not just once, but repeatedly over and over again during an extended period. Please take some time to consider whether - even if you are just a small component of a much larger mechanism - there are any steps you can take that address the perspective of the jobseeker.
The ghosting and lack of responsiveness shown to applications submitted within an ATS environment is inexcusable and I shall not dignify it by convincing you to take action. Update your settings to automatically notify all candidates when hiring is completed or the position is closed. ‘Nuff said.
While the ideal goal is to work towards reducing the hoops that you are requiring job seekers to jump through, it’s not too late to start supporting your former employees who are still painstakingly jumping. I hear increasingly about public health employers unable or unwilling to provide references, verify employment dates, or provide proof of previous salary, making it even harder for candidates to satisfy the requests of a new potential employer, and facilitating imposters who are able to claim a false employment history. I’ve also heard of employees in our field whose current employers refuse to cooperate with requests to verify salary, as required by a mortgage lender. Employers and hiring managers: be a good human! Help your current and former employees to jump through the required administrative hoops, even as we work towards eliminating them.
Moving forward
I know that some day in the future, when I am employed again and I am hiring for a position, I will remember that the applicants painstakingly trying to make their way through the machinery of public health job applications are human beings deserving of respectful and transparent communication, and I will treat them accordingly.
Questions (join me for discussion in Notes or Chat or Comments or Threads…? I’m still learning by doing.)
Do you have any tips and tricks for job seekers painstakingly submitting their applications through those bloody awful ATS websites?
If you could truly communicate honestly and anonymously with your current, former, or potential future employer without consequence, what would you like to say to them about the recruitment process?