Why ex-Googlers make the worst hires?

• Lots of arrogance but very little to justify it in performance
• Mostly come with sexist, racist, and misogynistic attitude
• Lots of biases for minority hires so your diversity initiatives will suffer
• Lots of biases for pay, work, and benefits
• They significantly effect the team culture through negative attitudes
• Questionable skills and experience
• They will question everything with unconstructive ways of working and the solutions they come up with are usually bookish, unproductive, inefficient, and uncreative
• They lack pragmatism and common sense
• They want to interview people in convoluted ways which have no context nor relevancy to the role just like how they did at Google
• They want to make your organization function like Google like a mirror to their past
• They drive a toxic culture, whatever was bad at Google they bring to every other organization or team
• They like to harass other employees
• They look at others in a team as lesser individuals and make the collective team feel miserable
• Why did they leave Google to come to work at your organization if Google was so great?
• They demand higher compensation packages just for working at Google, while their pay at Google was at best mediocre
• If they are part of the team that has to screen candidate applications they seem to be stuck on where the candidate got their degree and their racial backgrounds then end up interviewing them with racist stereotypes and biases
• They lack job relevant experience and skills because they didn't exactly do much at Google
• They don't want to be interviewed the same way as other candidates, treated like special candidates for some reason (maybe special candidates with disabilities?!)
• You have to flex your entire organizational handbook to meet their ridiculous expectations
• They lack basic work ethics, integrity, and fundamental sense of professionalism in the workplace
• Pretty much every ex-Googler talks and acts like they are still in school or university with emotional immaturity
• They act like spoiled and pampered brats in the workplace
• They lack basic skills of being able to think outside the box
• They tend to be unwilling to learn new things or new ways of doing things
• They tend to frustrate easily on tasks and require a lot of micromanagement
• They tend to be resistant and unwilling to listen to constructive feedback, at times repeat the same mistakes without learning from them by overcompensating with a false sense of overconfidence and lack of experience
• They tend to waste people's time by pontificating and procrastinating
• Habitually putting people down to artificially inflate their egos and prop themselves up
• They tend to be the biggest cynics of other employees in workplace especially if they are not ex-Googlers
• Sometimes they can act as saboteurs or moles out of pure jealousy and resentment

Why Indians make the worst hires?

• Once you hire an Indian, they will try to get you to hire more Indians, work with more Indians, and try to push for Indian outsourcing
• An Indian manager will have a preference for Indians, lots of biases
• Over time your diversity efforts will get a massive setback
• They generally tend to follow a caste system mindset so brewing ground for racism, prejudice, and discrimination and this will become an issue within teams but also in recruitment/human resources practice. Also, that BJP mentality seems to be spreading across organizations. Likely will be looked over for promotions, increments, recruitment in place of an Indian. 
• Indians don't mingle, assimilate, or interact much with other groups of people
• Interviews become very bookish, like sitting in a classroom
• They can't think outside the box
• They have a tendency of replicating what others have done
• Poor sense of creativity
• Lower salaries in most cases here equates to poor quality of work
• They will be quick to dismiss "no, that cannot be done" if they have not seen someone else do it before
• They need a lot of hand-holding, mentoring, training, and micromanagement
• Ordinarily, implementations will be buggy and not meet requirements
• Indian managers drive a lot of politics, nepotism, low salaries, tend to be rude, and provide for a bad work life balance
• Lots of unnecessary "yes, sir", "no, sir"
• Their judgement of correctness is measured in terms of how other people and organizations are doing things
• That weird smell in the office
• Lots of bad practices
• Nothing ever gets done properly
• They say they can do everything, but nothing is done correctly
• They will want everything for free
• They are not pragmatic, they will follow trends and come with a crowd follower mentality
• They are generally unwilling to challenge the status quo so bad things stay the same
• They are unwilling to take the initiative, be proactive
• They also tend to take credit for other people's work
• Lots of cultural favortism in workplace
• Indian managers and employees drive a toxic work culture
• Many tend to be incompetent, do not deliver on what is on their resume, nor a reflection of their experience
• They have degrees but practically struggle with inexperience
• Communication skills tend to be poor and at times difficult
• Lots of lies and deception to cover things up
• Questionable sense of work ethics
• Overtime your customer service and product quality will degrade

This is not to say you should stop hiring Indians. Some obviously are good but those tend to be few and far between. However, recruitment should always be fair and give everyone an equal opportunity.

Recruitment Processes

Making job applications can be frustrating. No one has the time to tailor their resume to each role. And, what is worse is that the recruiter is likely to only be hunting for keywords. If they use an application tracking system it will likely have its own approach to matching. The hiring manager will have their own needs. Most companies have a failed recruitment process where many able candidates are rejected through inadequate recruiters and systems. Automation does not help candidates. However, everyone needs to be given a fair chance of review. Unprofessionalism is typical in most recruitment processes. What is worse is when a candidate goes through multiple stages and towards the end the employer is unable to get funding approval for new hires. Not only is it unfair and frustrating for candidates but it also wastes time on both sides. Streamlining recruitment processes is important for every responsible organization as it is the first point of contact for individuals. Bad recruitment processes is a negative reflection of an organizational practices and the way they treat customers. If the individual has a bad experience as a candidate, they will likely be less inclined to join the company as an employee. All in all, bad recruitment processes can affect the reputation of an organization. 

Application Tracking Systems

Application Tracking Systems are the bane of organizational recruitment. They reject 75% of applications while accepting only 25%. And, majority of this is down to formatting. Even if you are lucky enough to get past to the recruiter, they are also likely to be interested in counting keywords. In most organizations recruitment processes are antiquated and handled by people that don't even understand the hiring needs. Furthermore, machine learning models compound the issue by automating the process of counting word distributions which is what was done manually by the recruiter. In essence, not really solving the issue of understanding semantics and context towards looking beyond the surface of a document and into discourse processing. The following things are typical with ATS:

• Submit an application and receive a standard rejection email response within minutes. There is no way that a recruiter could have reviewed the application that quickly.
• Because the automated systems are also looking at word distributions they miss out on the context and content of work.
• It is very common to get rejected by an ATS but get approached by a talent partner for the very same role.
• Since it is looking at word distributions, having two many keywords confuses the automated system
• It seems to also look at job titles, what if the job title did not exist in the market for the length of experience required.
• What if the technical skill required did not exist for the length of experience required, asking for ten years of experience in LLM will get a lot of CVs rejected because they are very unlikely to have so many years of experience. Or, the fact that you mention tons of experience with embedding models but no mention of LLMs. 
• Acronyms and abbreviations are tricky.
• Skills are not properly evaluated in context.
• Formating of CV seems to be the end game. But, if that is the case then it defeats the purpose because after passing the ATS it will be screened by the recruiter and then the manager who likely has their own requirements.
• If the system rejects 75% of CVs then it's proof that the system is not working.
• If the talent partner then later also approaches after the ATS rejection then it is further proof that the system does not work.
• If the ATS + the recruiter rejects you for the role that you are a close match compared to the candidates that have very little experience in the area, then is very likely that there is serious bias in the recruitment process.
• At times, the entire recruitment process is done to legally filter out minorities and further hides the curtain of institutional racism within an organization.
• It may even ask for information about protected characteristics hiding under the covers of initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion to transform them into discriminatory filters.
  
• Hiring for keywords and job titles is a useless way to match jobs to candidate profiles, or better yet to build a candidate profile in first place.
• No one has time to customize their CV to every job to game the ATS.
• ATS resume parsing is useless, if it is based on keywords, job titles, file type, formating, and special characters.
• ATS ignores aspects of discourse processing which is the essence of resume parsing.
• If you apply to more than one role the ATS might consider that as spam.
• It also proves that human resources is the weakest link when an organization states that there is a skills shortage in the market when there really isn't. The issue is with rejecting 75% of applications at the expense of using an ATS process, some of which are perfectly good candidate profiles to the job requirements.
• Rejecting a CV just because it doesn't meet a particular formatting criteria is not really a reason to decline a candidate application for a job.
• This is a case for where AI Automation is bad, likely unethical, untrustworthy, lacks assurance, and irresponsible.
• Recruiters are terrible at reading and understanding CVs, and ATS makes it even worse
  

Human Resources is Pointless Department

• Doesn't take an entire HR department to process pay and benefits for employees
• HR dept are usually there to play politics, lie, and support the company not the employees
• Head of people means absolutely nothing
• All in all the role of HR contributes little to the organizational goals
• Most of the tasks of HR can be outsourced or automated
• They have no clue about the positions they hire and recruit
• They hold no real skills working in HR
• Having HR means you relinquish a degree of control over recruitment and personnel relations
• Additionally, it is an unnecessary time and expense
• Executives and Employees don't care about HR
• HR has no clue about data and metrics analysis
• HR is stuck in a time warp of rules and policies but not logical initiatives that look to the future
• HR likes pointless and unproductive conferences
• They provide little value for money or justification for an entire separate dept
• It is a team of lazy and uncreative people that don't provide any real business strategy or return on investment
• It is a graveyard of buzzwords and pointless cultural fit goals
• HR dept drives constant inefficiencies year on year for an organization
• They don't know how to read CV/Resumes
• They are a roadblock of hiring talent for an organization
• HR people tend to be immature and hold grudges against candidates and employees especially with petty things
• HR tend to be pedantic on pointless things like spelling and grammar over content of work
• Going around and bypassing HR almost always opens more doors into an organization
• In some places HR only come into contact with an employee after they have left the organization
• They don't know the first thing about health & safety in the workplace nor do they really care
• They use third-party systems that almost always leads to personal data leaks and breaches for an organization
• They generally tend to lack basic commonsense
• HR is generally made up of the most insecure people in an organization
• One of the few dept of an organization populated mostly by women

How To Identify A Racist Company

• They will reject your CV even if you are appropriate for the job
• They will keep talking about skills shortage even though they keep rejecting good candidate CVs for the job
• They seem to want to give you an interview invite if the name is not disclosed but not when the name is disclosed
• They don't want to shake your hand after an interview
• They isolate you from communications so it prevents you from doing your job
• They block your bonus or pay increments
• You have to work harder than everyone else to prove your worth
• They incessantly talk about your background like you don't belong
• They try to talk to you like you have entered civilization for the first time
• They avoid going to lunch with you
• They look at you differently
• You get stared at work
• When you raise issues of racism with the company HR they deflect the topic or brush it aside
• They block you from contributing to any technical project work
• They try to put you on the spot as a scapegoat for all their politics
• They will try to blame you for all their wrongs and mistakes
• You will likely be the first person they will consider to make redundant
• They will racially profile you in the workplace
• They will talk to you like you don't understand their language
• They will talk to you like you are beneath them
• They will even talk about how they feel about 'your kind' in the workplace and you may have to put up with it as the HR don't want to do anything about it
• They will try to harass and bully you in the workplace so you end up leaving the organization
• They may expect you to put up with their verbal abuse and hostile intimidations
• They may even overly criticise you for your lack of abilities
• You might have to put up with microaggressions
• You might have to put up with your complaints being dismissed
• You might see it in the hiring and interview process
• You might see it in the lack of diversity in both the management as well as in the general workplace
• You might hear the term 'cultural fit' being used a lot by people that are mostly similar to each other
• Your ideas for change and opinions will get dismissed without much thought
• They may even try to take credit for your work
• They will avoid having a desk next to you
• They will constantly complain about you behind your back and keep tabs of your work
• You will be expected to work harder for the same level of work and put in more hours
• They will treat you like someone that doesn't have a voice in the organization
• They will avoid giving you access to things to be able to do your job
• They will overlook you from attending organizational events
• They will not be willing to pay you the same level of compensation but expect to pay you less
• They will put you in the hiring process for diversity but will not consider you for the interview or have any intention of hiring you
• They will go out of their way to keep tabs of your whereabouts and have a heightened sense of distrust for you than is normal - what time you go to lunch, what time you leave office, how much time you spend at the desk, how long you spend time in the restroom, what you are doing on the computer, what time you get into work, checks and balances for everything that you produce
• They will scrutinize your background alot more than is typical for their candidates in an interview process and likely will give you more tests to do
• They will likely consider you an outsider and not part of the team
• During the breakout periods in an organizational induction you will typically see the first signs of racist employees where they openly talk about how they hate a particular group of people, religion, etc
• Their organizational culture, marketing, and advertising campaigns are not considerate towards the protected characteristics
• The managers, co-workers, and colleagues are generally rude, unapproachable, and hostile towards you
• Many times the security will block you from entering the building and likely also do more random searches on you
• The receptionists will generally have a rude and hostile demeanor with which they greet you and how they interact with you 
• They will excessively question and scrutinize your right to work in the country even though you might have been born there, are a citizen of that country, or have already shown proof of id
• The contract will at times display signs of it in the wording and particular sections
• They make bigoted and inappropriate jokes and comments about race, color, nationality, ethnicity and other cultures
• They show favorable preference for people of a specific nationality, race, color, ethnicity, or culture
• They refuse to do business with companies that are run by minorities 
• They play down acts like slavery, human rights, affirmative action, and equality
• They use offensive terms to describe people of certain race, color, nationality, ethnicity, or culture 

What makes a sucky Employer

Increasingly, in a competitive world, many organizations are becoming the worst places to work for employees and the worst places to apply for candidates. The below sheds some light on questionable employer practices.

• Employers that stress diversity, equity, and inclusion but have very little reflecting that in their management team or recruitment practices
• Employers that hide behind the facade of cultural fit to discriminate on candidates and employees
• Employers that want people from top schools but have very low compensation packages
• Employers that want everything but don't want to offer anything in return
• Employers that expect their employees to lie and cheat to customers
• Employers that have disgruntled customers and bad customer service practices
• Employers that have cheap and terrible products to sell to customers or can't be bothered to understand the frustrations of the customer, identify the gaps in market, and take the necessary steps to improve their business model
• Employers that have terrible work life balance for employees
• Employers that treat their employees like disposable goods
• Employers that care more about where you went to school rather than what you did with your degree
• Employers that are pretentious and procrastinate with employees
• Employers that can't be bothered about candidates during the hiring process and display unprofessional practices
• Employers that have terrible record of dealing with abuse, harassment and discrimination in the workplace
• Employers that are unethical and lack the sense of social responsibility
• Employers during tough times will always look to job cuts as a point of cutting costs rather than reducing red tape between managers
• Employers that have poor incentives for training and career growth
• Employers that don't appreciate good employees and overcompensate bad employees
• Employers that have high turnover as a result of bad recruitment and cultural practices
• Employers that don't realize that it is a two way street between them and customers, employees, and candidates
• Employers that don't realize their brand value can drop in a second through bad social media reviews
• Employers that don't value customers, employees, and candidates will lose business in long run
• Employers that don't make themselves accessible to the public
• Employers that are out of touch with reality and the internal issues in the organization
• Employers that don't listen to customers, employees, and candidate feedback and put it into action to improve both the product, service, and the workplace
• Employers that display a total lack of empathy towards customers, employees, or candidates
• Employers that don't take the time to quality check their products before selling to customers
• Employers that don't care about the privacy rights of customers, employees, and candidates nor take the necessary steps of care to protect their personal data
• Employers that don't have an effective health and safety induction process
• Employers that are disorganized, badly managed, and hire clueless individuals
• Employers that have core values that includes teamwork, valuing people, and integrity while not practicing any of it in the workplace, especially if valuing people involves making them redundant at the drop of a hat or not valuing customer service
• Employers that mostly have bad reviews from their customers, candidates, and employees
• Employers that have biased and discriminatory processes for employee performance reviews for bonuses, increments and promotions
• Employers that don't provide support for maternity and paternity leave
• Employers that have dodgy benefits packages
• Employers that expect employees to work during holiday leave
• Employers that provide bonuses to their mgmt for mass layoffs
• Employers that pay huge pay packages to mgmt but are stingy when it comes to paying their employees
• Employers that don't have sustainability in their business model nor take initiatives to protect the environment
• Employers that don't provide days off for volunteering to employees 

Phd Incompetence

Academia is very different from the practical world. In academia, foundational skills are measured through exams and rudimentary coursework. While in practical world, organizations want people that can do the job under uncertainty, huge amounts of complexity, efficiently process noisy data, adaptability to change, and a requirement for following best practices. At some point in a person's career, work experience far surpasses academics both educationally and in problem solving. The below points highlight the typical patterns of behavior that Phd individuals display in the work place and academia:

• Will want to command authority simply because they hold a Phd which may not even be in a technical field and totally unrelated to the job
• Will measure someone's skills by the amount of degrees they hold and where they got them from
• Will expect others to help them with 80% of their job
• Will struggle to convert theory into practice 
• Will take years to do something that could be done in months by an engineer
• Will reject perfectly good candidates simply because they don't hold a Phd like they do or went to a certain university like they did
• Will advertise for roles where job titles are miss-aligned to job descriptions to miss-lead candidates
• Will be enamored by the amount of papers they have published even though many of them are either plagiarized, summary synthesis of other papers, lack technical depth, incorrect in plausible theory, or are simply too unimportant to hold any real value to an organization
• Will ask really dumb questions to engineers and then expect them to sound deep like asking what is unit testing
• Will reject the very same people with experience in academic admissions to universities while lacking the same skills themselves
• Will try to take credit for other people's work 
• Will have questionable basic foundational skills for the job, but will call themselves as experts anyway
• Will have multiple published papers that have different topical headings but basically the same content
• Will spend majority of their time hacking through things but will expect others to think they are following a scientific method or process
• Will usually have no clue themselves as to what they are doing
• Will introduce biases into their data just because they can and no one will question them for it, they will then produce such flawed and biased results and expect everyone to call them experts
• Will have no real accountability for their work output in organizations
• Will likely make terrible leaders or managers of people
• Will struggle to teach others the very same concepts that they call themselves experts in because they don't fully understand the concepts either
• Will make silly reasons as to why they need to hire more people on the team, even when it is really part of their own job to know how to do
• Will expect anyone that doesn't hold a Phd does not know what they are talking about
• Will likely patronize and discriminate on non-Phd people in the workplace
• Will reject people if they hold a difference of opinion to themselves
• Will likely be very insecure and take offense if their skills or work is criticized or is taken into question purely because they assume they are experts because they have a Phd, eventhough that Phd could be in cartoonism
• Will likely add more cost to organization for all the help they will need to be able to do their job, and the job that they do amounts to very little in quantifiable value
• Will likely leave a forgettable mark in organization especially as most of their work would already be done by others 
• Will tend to hire people that will not be a threat to them or highlight their deficiencies in the workplace 
• Will likely not know how to read a CV/resume
• Will reject approaches that are outside of their own discipline, knowledge, or comfort zone
• Will not be adaptable to change outside of what they already know
• Will likely hamper organizational productivity and efficiencies in work output and provide incorrect recommendations to management
• Will produce incorrect models which then influences flawed strategic decisions within organizations
• Will likely only have questionable academic skills with jupyter notebooks, matlab, or tools that will require huge amount of effort to refactor and productionize
• Will likely be expected to teach what they can't put into a practical implementation
• Will likely not have basic skills in data structures and software engineering or the background of things that they will look for in admissions applications to universities
• Will focus on theory all day long but be clueless about how to apply any of it in practice
• Will likely lack fundamental work experience to put them in a position of seniority to call them experts in organizations
• Will likely struggle to take such things as uncertainty, noisy data, biases, complexity, and context into account within their work output and likely expect someone else to sort out for them
• Will likely for all the things they call themselves an expert in, they will expect someone else to do for them
• Will likely be the weakest link in organizations expected to be an expert in an area, but a master of none when it comes to practical implementations
• Will likely be unprofessional when interacting with non-Phd individuals and not value their time
• Will get easy access to funding for their research projects but the work output will not be sufficient to justify the cost, and at times a lot of that funding may be deceptively used to fund other projects in other research teams or faculties
• Will require an awful lot of mentoring to be able to do even simple tasks, making you wonder how in the world they could be called experts or have achieved a Phd
• Will act like a grasshopper with the absence of legs in the workplace
• Will use overly complicated methods rather than approach it first with the simplest solution
• Will use academic approaches to solve non-academic problems in most cases the approach they use will be inefficient and unworkable for prime time production

How To Read A CV 101 For Recruiters

Recruiters and HR representatives are one of the most clueless people in any organization. When it comes to hiring processes they don't appear to know the most fundamental aspect of reviewing applications: knowing how to read a CV. This is a big issue as perfectly good candidates get rejected. And, the ones that do come through the filters are normally not a good match for the role. The primary reasons for this are highlighted below:

• Recruiters sift through CVs without understanding the context, they only read through job titles or whatever was the last job title of the candidate.
• Many don't even have the time to read through hundreds of CVs so they only scan their way picking out keywords or even how many times they are mentioned.
• From the hundreds of CVs they have they might review the first five to ten CVs on the pile, put another five to ten on hold, and reject the rest without even reading through them.
• Sometimes they already have their preferred candidate pool who they go to first rather than bothering to sift through the entire pile of new candidates.
• Sometimes they might reject the candidate because they don't answer their call on first instance so they assume that the candidate is only passively looking.
• They may even favor candidates that are already in a role and looking for a change, compared to the ones that are actively looking and not in a current role.
• On other occasions they just can't make sense of the CV so they reject it.
• On other occasions if the CV does not contain certain keywords they reject it, ignoring the fact that the same keyword could have been used in alternative synonym forms.
• Sometimes they will reject the candidate simply because they are racist and make the assumption that they want a typical white person for the job as a safe bet or the fact they stereotypically assume that a non-white won't have the skills to do the job. In fact, in many cases they might even label it as a cultural fit issue.
• In many cases, it also boils down to the fact they don't have the necessary understanding and skills of the domain that is being recruited for to be able to review the applications.
• Sometimes, it is the case that the role was only advertised to meet compliance but that direct applicants are automatically rejected in favor of agency supplied candidates.
• On other occasions, it could be the fact that they might have had a bad experience in past with the candidate and decided to blacklist them for future roles.
• Or, it could simply be that the role never really existed and was merely a marketing gimmick to showcase that the organization has alot of work on the go.
• Sometimes they might like the look of the CV but just not like the candidate personality, the way they come across in-person or on the phone.
• In some organizations, a CV is not even looked at and a separate scoring grid matrix may be used just as in public sector jobs and if this has been filled out by a recruiter then there is likely to be some discrepancies.
• Sometimes the recruiter may ask the candidate to custom tailor the CV for the job, which usually means they either don't think it is a match based on missing keywords or don't have a clue of what they are even looking for in their application screening process. 

The way to get around this hurdle is for organizations to use smarter more intelligent tools that can provide better context-specific matching of candidates, measure of their associated risk selections, and to resolve for biases in such screening processes. And, fundamentally to remove the human-in-the-loop biases as much as possible. However, this process should not stop here but also be extended to review of interview processes as on many cases the interviewer can also bring their own sense of biases. There also needs to be a way of picking out fake job ads especially ones that don't quite make sense where the job titles don't match the job description or they simply don't exist. There is an endless process of improvements that could be achieved through AI in the human resources and recruitment sectors. However, in many cases this starts out with identifying the right places were AI can make the greatest impact. Perhaps, sending HR and recruiters on a 101 course in how to read a CV could be the first point of training. It is understandable that a recruiter may not have the technical background to know about all the domain skills in every specific type of job that they recruit for an organization. However, there are various tips in reading that can be used to make the job effective such as: 5W1H question/answering, SQ3R, using a tool that uses probabilistic NLP models and knowledge graph to bring context and aspects of match/filter functions to light.

Bad Processes for Applications And Interviews

Interview and application processes at many organizations generally requires a massive overhaul across the board, but for IT related jobs in particular. Some of the below, highlight the glaring truths about such recruitment practices:

• Providing puzzles to solve that no one in their right mind will ever need to do on the job
• Providing codility or hackerank tests that anyone can cheat their way through them
• Asking bookish questions to test memorization skills or to impress upon the candidate
• Asking questions that are totally irrelevant to the role function
• Asking one to do a test, like why? Do you ask a builder to build you a sample wall before you hire them to build you a wall?
• Coming into an interview with certain assumptions about the candidate even before interviewing them
• Asking them badly worded questions like "what gives you energy?"
• Asking someone to do pair programming. Do people naturally talk out loud in any job function, ever heard of anyone pairing in other job functions like finance, admin, marketing, operations?
• Having excessive amount of interview stages
• Having bad attitude or being unprofessional while interviewing a candidate
• Hypocritical behavior, like making a candidate wait for a long time for an interview, but having an issue when the candidate is running late
• Having silly tests that have no basis
• Applying for one role but trying to interview the candidate for another role without candidate consent
• Messing around with candidates and wasting their time during application and interview stages
• Not providing application and interview feedback. Providing feedback is a requirement if want to be in compliance with GDPR as part of processing and storage of candidate information.
• Changing the job role part way through an interview process
• Interviewing candidates before securing funding for the work
• Not being honest about the job role
• Over selling and underdelivering on the job function
• Using terms like cultural fit to justify their biases
• Expecting certain educational backgrounds that are unnecessary for the job function
• Showing interest in a candidate purely on basis of where they got their degree or which company they had previously worked for
• Not focusing on candidates practical skills
• Giving candidates silly tests to do through out the interview stage
• Making candidates feel uncomfortable during interview stage
• Not providing water or asking for refreshments before a face-to-face interview
• Not listening to what the candidate has to say or not letting them speak
• Evaluating candidates purely on basis of likability and subconscious and unconscious biases
• Rejecting candidates for roles just because they are women or part of a minority group
• Rejecting candidates for roles on basis of religion or other such prejudices
• Not being considerate and respectful with candidates
• Being overly distrustful and pessimistic of candidates through the entire process
• Not answering basic questions of candidates that would help them evaluate the job function
• Being difficult, unapproachable, and not being forthcoming with candidates
• Taking too long to provide feedback or not providing any at all
• Not realizing that job interviews are a two way process
• Rejecting candidates for using american english rather than british english for spelling words
• Rejecting candidates for grammatical mistakes and being too pedantic
• Rejecting candidates based on their looks and appearances
• Rejecting candidates based on disability and not being sufficiently accommodating
• Changing interview times or cancelations at the last minute
• Purging the entire job application database so the candidate who might have spent time on the application has no chance to be reviewed, and likely has to apply again
• Advertising for jobs that do not exist
• Advertising for jobs but having a preferred source of candidates
• Advertising for job where the job title does not match the job description
• Advertising for job when the job has already been filled
• Using job ads as a marketing gimmick
• Asking for age, date of birth, and race on the job application
• Not focusing the application and interview to what the job actually requires and entails
• Not interviewing candidates on their relevant merits
• Using silly benchmarks and psychometric tests
• Not reviewing every job application and candidate
• Using non-technical people to pre-screen candidates who have no background for the skills required for the job function 
• Using job titles rather than the context and content of work when evaluating job applications
• Screening candidates by keywords and not context and content of work
• Making it difficult for candidates to approach organizational recruitment teams for enquires or feedback
• Not acknowledging job applications nor the deletion of job applications
• Refusing to shake the candidate's hand after an interview
• Using cognitive and prejudicial biases to screen a candidate
• Having badly designed job application forms
• Having poor communication skills as interviewer but expecting amazing communication skills from interviewee
• Going off on a tangent and losing focus
• Rejecting candidates because they didn't feel comfortable or like your pet dog or cat in the office
• Being rude and offensive to candidates
• Talking about diversity awareness, but not having much of a diverse workforce in the office, nor displaying an open-mind about diversity of cultures
• Using excessive stereotypes and generalizations in communication with candidates
• Not being careful with using gender pronouns
• Using innuendos whether sexual or otherwise to invade privacy or personal space of candidates
• Don't ask silly questions like "how are you" during a lockdown period or when there is a pandemic as you could likely expect a diplomatic answer, in many cases the candidate could find the question on the whole quite inappropriate, given the circumstances of the situation
• Don't expect a candidate to have video on during a virtual interview session, in fact you should not even care what the person looks like in first instance

People That Memorize Things

There appear to exist people in IT industry that memorize literally everything from APIs, Libraries, functions and the whole lot. In some job interviews they will even ask questions that purely test one's memorization skills. Such efforts at memorization are futile. In many cases, it is unnecessary and a pointless exercise in wasted time. One should never have to memorize something that they can lookup or do an autocompletion on, especially if it is being used as a tool to complete work. Technology moves at such a fast pace that new versions are released, APIs are changed, new ways of doing things are introduced, and in time previous methods may be deprecated. In many cases, people that memorize such tools are likely doing it to pass a certification exam. Perhaps, also something to question, is the need for such a pointlessly designed certification. Invariably, memorization is tested by people that are academically inclined, that use it as a yardstick for others, and have very poor practical skills at applying any of it themselves. Phd people tend to fall in such an academically inclined group with poor practical skills. All in all, memorization in most context from academics to practical life adds little value. 

Useless Managers

In many organizations, managers are clueless. They don't appear to be managing anything let alone their own work. One will often find them in meetings, running around doing their personal chores outside of work, talking on the phone about things that are unrelated to work, and unapproachable to their employees. They will often act as a series of buffer placeholders in a role function to formulate red tape from the interaction of employees. When the organization performs poorly they will look to make a selection of employees redundant while maintaining their own jobs, even earning a bonus or a promotion for such an action. Invariably, most of their actions are counterproductive for teams as they almost always have a selfish personal game plan and are often seen instigating politics. They will interact with employees with an air of authority while having little to no practical skills in effective management. Even their personal performance reviews are purposefully planned to garner as much end of year bonus as possible away from employees. Currently, in organizations there is little to no accountability for managers. In some organizations, there are more managers allocated to teams compared to the actual employees doing the work making it highly inefficient and not very cost-effective. Considering the fact, that an organization is non-functional without its employees, perhaps the role of the manager needs to change or removed entirely towards a more flat structure of working practices. In most cases, a manager's role can be replaced by artificial intelligence. On other hand, perhaps the manager needs to be treated as a sub-ordinate to employees so as to enforce better management practices for teams that is more nurturing and approachable. And, rather than making hundreds and thousands of employees redundant over failure to meet business strategic goals, the responsibility should rest on the shoulders of the managers who are then sub-ordinates and accountable to those employees and the primary ownership team. In fact, such approaches might increase productivity, reduce turnover, higher job satisfaction, drive more creativity,  more effective ownership of work, and provide options towards a better performing organization in its success factors. Managers in many organizations lack emotional intelligence, use politics to build self-centered relationships, lack the necessary self-management skills, lack basic self-awareness skills, lack basic common sense, are usually neither company fit, nor are they team fit, generally come with very poor technical skills, lack the necessary experience, and lack the necessary maturity to drive cohesive management in organizations.

Incompetent Graduates

Graduates on the whole can be a nightmare to work with especially if they have come straight out of university with zero practical work experience. It is when they start talking out-of-depth and undermining the experienced people in the team with their lack of experience is when it gets really annoying. Another aspect of questionable hiring is when graduates need mentors in the workplace to teach them everything that they should have been taught at university. Another aspect of annoyance is when they insist on using anti-patterns, while questioning the use of best practices and correct use of patterns. In fact, they have probably never even heard of the best practices and patterns before. Nor do they have the necessary skills to think through practical solutions for business. When things go wrong they are quick to blame others rather than take ownership of their mistakes and learn from experienced people on the team. As a result, they will drag the experienced people on the team to make the same mistakes. Furthermore, one will have to deal with questionable understanding of even the most basic things. On other cases, it is their bizarre comments like "there is no such thing as reverse discrimination", "statistics is not math", "decision trees is not machine learning" that makes them sound utterly clueless. How can you have statistics without the elements of math. Even more annoying is that they will assume they know more than the experienced member on the team and start teaching them basics making themselves sound like a beginner with little to no practical skills. Some of them even need help with google search. They basically are so used to courseworks where someone literally hands everything to them on a silver platter that they assume working on a business product case would work the same way. In fact, they have a tendency of approaching business solutions like they working on a school assignment. On the whole, most degrees should enable a graduate to think and to be resourceful in learning on their own (towards a holistic attitude to self-learning, self-exploration, with the added sense of creativity to extend it in some way). However, it seems universities are not teaching students on how to deal with the complexities and uncertainties. When they come into the real-world they are ill-equipped with the practical skills nor the mindset to think on their own apart from turning up with a shed load of arrogance and a total lack of creativity. Like they think passing a degree means they have conquered the world. The worse things a team can do during a project is to trust graduates especially if they have no practical experience. In fact, they will find themselves quite insecure working around experienced individuals to the point of being disruptive and undermine their work. Employers need to end hiring graduates that have no work experience and giving preference for individuals that have at least some applied skills to share as examples in practical application cases. Education is rarely ever a substitute for experience in any practical field. Just passing an exam will not provide a graduate the necessary skills needed to do the job. All university courses should really be providing at least a year of practical training in a controlled environment either via internships, bootcamps, gap-year programs, or an element of project work as an application accelerator of applied theory in their courses outside of assignments and exams that replicates the practicalities of solving problems in the real-world. So, when they take on full-time position they can be productive and have the correct mindset for business application. Many universities are also failing to teach graduates the basics of morality and ethics as part of the course in order to maintain their professionalism when they embark on their careers where they will be interacting with all sorts of people and dealing with workplace issues. If employers have hired graduates correctly, there should never be a need to provide them with formal mentors in the workplace and excessive expectations for handholding should not be the norm. On the other hand, employers that listen to inexperienced graduates and allow them to cluelessly dictate project work often lose out considerably with missed deliverable targets, badly executed products, and extended time spent in training graduates for even the most mundane things that leads to a source of frustration for teams. Not to mention a contradiction, on one hand they require mentoring for their lack of experience, and on other they try to dictate project work in teams which is bound to lead to catastrophic failure.

Recruitment Agencies

There are some glaring practices in recruitment industry. Some agencies actively practice reverse discrimination by only hiring women for roles such as nurse, personal assistant, receptionist, secretary, catwalk model, and others. However, if the tables were turned and if an agency were to only hire men there would likely be an uproar. This could equally be construed as sexism on part of the organizations that these recruitment agencies are working with to fill such roles. In a society where there is now apparently 100+ genders, how does one even know that the person is a man or a woman anymore? Would a transwoman/transsexual be rejected from such agency for employment? And, should one even care what gender they are? Institutional racism is also a major issue where the recruiter tends to pick candidates based on their inherent bias. Often under the covers the practice continues in some companies in form of cultural fit as an umbrella term. In fact, it doesn't just stop at gender and race. In many cases, it emerges there are all forms of hypocrisy that makes recruitment a very humanly flawed discipline. Also, how can a recruiter profile a candidate purely on basis of a phone and email conversation? And, it is practically impossible for a recruiter to be fully aware of all the skills listed on a person's resume. Such practices have a very dampening effect on the economic demand and supply for jobs and candidates in the market. AI certainly is the way to go to avoid such recruitment risks by retargeting on the things that really matter in employment which is more around the fairness for qualifications, practical experience, and skills to conduct one's job rather than to pass a judgement on their likability factor. However, an important aspect here is that AI should not only be approached via probabilistic methods. Just imagine what would happen if one were to probabilistically cluster bias based on someone's name in order to identify their ethnicity. Can you really tell someone's background based on their name alone? What if they are of mixed background? Won't they be an outlier? AI combines both logical reasoning as well as probabilistic methods.

Employment Checks

When an employer uses third-party kyc checks for compliance why do they make mistakes in data entry? Isn't validation and verification part of compliance? It is even more shocking when potential candidates are checked against federal databases with incorrectly spelt derivatives of names especially when the candidate has provided correct information. In most circumstances such lack of due diligence on part of the third-party should be legally liable for penalty and held responsible inclusive of the employer that is using them to conduct such compliance checks. Intelligent Agents are necessary in all aspects of data entry to protect the personal information of individuals as well as to avoid potential data discrepancies where they could potentially get linked incorrectly through human error. Why must we be forced to trust another human to process our personal information especially someone we have no information of and have not done our own background checks on to assure ourselves of integrity. Sharing personal information is a risky affair especially when a candidate has no idea of the third-parties that are utilized for such processing to develop any level of assurances on trust and even such trust is questionable at best.

Intelligent Recruitment

Recruitment processes at companies need to change. It is a given fact that human resources have no clue about how to recruit candidates when they are not even qualified to know the technical skills required for any given role. Also, recruitment agencies are even worse charging fees for unqualified services where they have literally know clue about employer requirements or the candidate CVs. In fact, it is not even possible that a recruiter would have an understanding of almost all the role types and the skills required for them. The most they can do is count keywords without having a clue as to the context of the skills applied. A candidate has to furnish a CV that looks readable to an unknowledgeable recruiter while also keeping it substantially technical for the interviewer. Scratching at the surface it seems most companies need to do away with the recruiter altogether and use better and more intelligent means at recruiting staff. Secondly, human resources are there to protect the employer not the employee. And, most recruiters only sift through CVs at a glance and possibly not even bothering to check all of the candidate applications. The entire recruitment and human resources function can be automated through a service-oriented or microservices style architecture with an intelligent agent playing the pivotal roles of recruiter and human resource advisor/assistant/manager by using modularized backend functionality. Such measures will not only mean all candidates get an equal chance at employment but it also means a meaningful and seamless recruitment process. Similarly, it also means a seamless human resources experience for employees at an organization. It also means a better experience, a more secure way, and an effective way of finding jobs for candidates with higher chances of them getting their ideal role. In end, employers will not end up reporting on skills shortage where there aren't any especially as there are so many able candidates available in market that can be tapped. If only they used more efficient, intelligent, and responsible means in which they provided a balanced process for all candidates and employees in the mix.

The connected services for an intelligent agent could incorporate:

• CV creation and publishing service
• feedback/survey/complaints service
• compliance and screening service
• candidate/employee/employer review service like glassdoor
• separate application for contingency worker management
• CV database with stringent access controls
• job search functionality that can be queried via SPARQL/Linked Data
• filtering service
• freelance bidding service
• semantic weighted graph matching service that brings candidates/recruiters/employers together
• identity/social/influence profile management for ranking candidates
• microtasking service
• ranking/commentary/news service
• recommendations service
• internal corporate search enablement
• social search enablement
• semantic CV extraction and parsing service
• tracking service like jobvites and workable
• internal human resource management for permanent employees payroll and other services
• additional recruitment and human resources workflow services
• social platform like linkedin or meetups that incorporates aspects of stackoverflow and events
• an ontology for human resources and recruitment to formulate commonsense reasoning
• SKOS thesaurus that can be utilized for term extraction, linking, and annotation
• blockchain for the entire recruitment process
• an ontological understanding of people, cvs, roles, sectors, and skills
• w3c standards compliant process using schema.org and other formats
• an insights and metrics service to understand the distributions in the market and the effectiveness of the hiring process

Outsourcing Development

Many companies look to outsourcing as a means of cost efficiencies and for rapid turnaround of work. On other occasions it is about lack of in house skills for which they need to outsource for support. Although, outsourcing may appear to increase development efficiencies in short-term, it more than reduces it in the long-term. Outsourcing is also detrimental to agile processes within a team environment. It also ordinarily reduces the scope of development work for existing permanent staff which inevitably leads to loss of morale and productivity. Although, management might see outsourcing as the way to go, for many developers it is often an unpleasant experience. Not only does outsourcing incorporate frustration with third-party communication but it also involves lower quality as well as increases risk for unexpected delays in project deliveries. Invariably, with outsourcing one is also limited to the skills and experiences of the third-party for development. On many occasions once a project is delivered, third-parties also play tricks to continue on the contracted work with continued maintenance or for more project deliveries as a form of business opportunity. While the product owner values quality assurance, the third-party outsourcing agency more than values delivery of work for which they are paid. At times, delaying work also means more income from the product owner. On other occasions delivering on buggy projects means more continued work for maintenance later down the line. All this stretches the budget constraints on an outsourced project and for the product owner. The best approach for most corporate environments looking to deliver on project is to bring in permanent developers for the entirety of the full life cycle of work. This will mean a clean execution of development work with clear deliverable as well as a chance to form an agile culture that grows internally as the project evolves over time. It also avoids wasted time for the product owner as well as for development staff. Most hands-on developers that enjoy development work will never be in favor of outsourcing or contracting work out because it reduces the scope of their work and increases risk of uncertainty. Cloud computing has also allowed for more efficiencies in development with performance and scale to meet business demands for growth. Organizations that utilize outsourcing as their core means of development budgets really need to start re-evaluating their strategy for the long-term as having internal development teams will far surpass in quality of work as well as provide for continued cost efficiencies. In the long-term, this is almost a necessity especially with the changing trends in technology and the demands of the business environment for maintaining a competitive advantage.

Pedantic Interviewers

These days there are an increasing amount of applications, time constraints, and limited employable spaces at companies. This creates a huge spiral of competitive dilemma for candidates trying to get an employment. It is even harder for ones just starting out as their first job. Technical interviews usually require some level of programming test. However, the more hands on a test is the more pedantic the interviewer will get in process. Even mistakes that an interviewer makes in their own daily lives can seem like an issue to mark against a candidate. For a lot of candidates that get rejected these days their solutions are pretty much perfect in terms of deliverable. What this means is that interviewers look for every corner case possible to mark a candidate off as there are no other ways about filtering them. Interviewers are setting a very unfair target for themselves and screening out perfectly good candidates in process. This can be very frustrating for candidates too. Not to mention if the interviewer does not even bother to check their test and ends up messing them around which means a wasted exercises. Most interviewers can't be bothered for the time and effort that a candidate puts into their application and interview tests. And, in turn, they provide for an aimless feedback that has no real meaning to candidate other than the fact that code was not produced in a similar way as to how the interviewer likes it even though the candidate approach is perfectly logical. With pedantic interviewers, a candidate also has an opportunity to work out how the team is going to be like on a typical work day. Would you really want to work with such a person in your team who just has an issue with everything right down to what you name your variable, spelling, to the approach you followed. There have even been cases in UK where an interviewer has marked a candidate off because they used American English spelling of words in their code. Some senior developers are so strung out on process that they really forget to deliver on quality. Would you rather see a piece of code that was optimized and correct with no issues, compared to a solution that worked in sub-optimal time, had a whole lot of unnecessary tests, and still created issues in production. Tests are essentially there to provide a confidence level to assure the code does what it needs to do, has been properly refractored, and can be applied to a continuous integration for repeatable build tests. Overbearing tests that have little sense are just driving time wasted solutions. After all tests are self-engineered. However, an experienced productive developer can build tests that are minimal, logical, and yet have a better coverage. Again, over engineering on solutions is driving away creativity and innovation and instilling a very rigid and illogical approach to quality assured development practices.  

Clueless Recruiters

Most recruiters have little to no clue about technology or the relevance of it to a role. When they conduct CV screening they are usually just looking for keywords. They have usually no idea what the manager really wants and what the candidate is stating in their technical CV. In respect of that, it means the candidate not only has to tailor the CV for the recruiter but also the technical manager. Possibly, a very difficult task in meeting a balance. The recruiter would like to see a word document and yet a technical manager most likely prefers the PDF document version. Not to mention in process of CV screening the very good candidates will get screened out of the process for having either too many or too little of any given keyword on their CV. Perhaps, most technology related companies should really do away with third-party recruiters and let technical managers and developers deal directly with CV screening themselves. It is understandable that people are bound by time constraints and most only spend about 10 seconds to review a CV before making a decision. However, reviewing the context of a CV is paramount in recruiting the right candidate for the job. These days a recruiter will decline a CV on all sorts of reasons which may have no relevance to what the technical manager has asked for. Also, it is understandable that minority groups in any society are always at a disadvantage as part of institutional discrimination. It may be assumed that it does not exist, but it is something that ordinarily does happen at a subjective level and as part of human judgement. A non-white is generally less likely to get a salary at par to a white individual and at same time less likely to be offered an interview in certain places. There is even a correlation these days that plays into having a specific religious affiliation which draw even more stereotypes on the CV screening and review process. A fair and equitable process of recruitment is key in finding the right people and knowing your candidate in an objective way also makes for a more approachable process for both parties. Making assumptions about a profile only leads to good candidates that will not be accepted and in process business will struggle to find the right skills. There is generally a technology skills shortage in world and will continue as newer approaches from open source community are developed. This would mean a demand for people who are well versed in their use and implementation. Elucidation of technical concepts and how they are used need to be approached methodically from a balanced view point of communicating to both non-technical as well as technical individuals on  CV. Conducting aptitude and personality tests are also a complete waste of time. Even at certain interviews the interviewer wants to ask as many technical questions as possible without realizing that a lot of it has no relevance for the role, which means a complete waste of time. At most companies recruitment processes are a foregone conclusion with much to be desired in terms of improvements and any consideration for candidates. One thing is for sure, the future of recruiters is in a sure demise as job search engines turn into smart matching engines and people are more able to rely on intelligent approaches rather than requiring people to do the job. Even human resources personnel will be reduced at most technology companies, in future, as most processes are pushed to the cloud or are automated to provide for a more contextual efficiency.