Performance Appraisals

Hello Bill,

That sounds a bit unfair. The HR folks I have worked with let me take over whatever I wanted in the hiring process. Resume scanning, phone calls, whatever. They did the jobs I didn't want or could not do such as background checks etc. And yeah, they even let me hire numerous outsiders in an industry where that is frowned upon. Because I really wanted to.

Where HR is a huge help is in most crisis situations. I mean, what are you going to do when someone has a miscarriage right there at the company? Or what do you do when someone has a hardcore alcohol problem? Or when there is an alleged harrassment case? Luckily I had a smooth sail most of the time but it sure felt good they were there when the need arose.

Not in my life.

Sure they didn't understand. How could they? That's why HR brought the whole stack to my office, less the ones with gross typos in there which they knew I wouldn't consider anyway.

Like anything else, when you have idiots, lay them off.

That said, I've found HR when done right to be the most useful dept in the org as a hiring manager. The second startup I did, we went from 5 people tap dancing a business plan, to 900 shipping workstations

I when we made a mistake hiring a black single mom with a 4.0 from Stanford that had zero work ethic, guided us right thru the layoff process without a law suit.

It was certainly true for the sections of British and Australian industry where I've worked.

It isn't true of Haffmans BV, which the only company I've worked for in the Netherlands, but that was a very interesting company in a lot of ways, and didn't have anything that looked remotely like a personnel department. I've certainly had some very strange interactions with the Philips and ASML personnel/sub-human relations departments.

Sounds like paradise.

Once you've got onto somebody good they usually can't stop you - though some idiot in personnel in Philips decided that I was too old to learn a slightly new trick (TV bandwidth optical receiver development) when all the engineers understood that I''d done closely related stuff for other applications, and managed to block me from being hired, back in

In the U.K. they just threw away CV's that they didn't like - at Cambridge Instruments this included the CV of brilliant Chineses engineer, whom we only found out about because his wife played badminton with the wife of one of our engineers, which got his CV into the hands of the engineering manager, who hired him immediately. The Chinese guy did great things for Cambridge Instruments for some three years before he got head-hunted away to California.

In the U.K. their reaction to crisis situations was to minimise their employer's exposure to any possible claim. The thought that an experieince employee had value for the company didn't seem to enter their heads.

You've been lucky.

And how do you know that?

Actually, they give the most glowing reviews to the duff emplyees in the hope that a competing department will snatch them away thus solving both the performance problem and making the competing project fail ;-)

Was certainly the case for the black single mom 4.0 standford grad with zero work ethic. All references were glowing.

Hello Bill,

Know what? What really bad typos indicate? Pretty clear, if someone affords his or her resume that little attention to detail I assume it'll be the same for a design. Can't use that.

As a general rule, the more complicated the HR form is, the less useful it is for evaluating technical people.

Or the person is dyslexic with a foriegn native tounge, language impaired, but with experience and genuis in design that can easily be offset by using good clerical assistant to help the designer with writing, editing, and other written language issues.

By that rule, a blank page of paper is best .... I think we have a scaling problem.

Well, I guess they should leave the boxes for "Name" "Job grade" and "Employee number" :-)

Steve

In message , dated Thu, 31 Aug 2006, fpga snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com writes

Yes, it's a log law; a blank sheet is minus infinity help.

That would seriously hinder the personal expression in providing that information, as well as being overtly demanding. :)

In the UK you have to learn not to judge any potential employer by their personnel department. If you don't, you'll never accept a job offer.

I think UK personnel departments are a major factor in Britain's industrial decline.

Steve

Presumably they'd mention that -- or anything else that would make them "unusual" -- on their resume? In general, if you know you're going to be needing "clerical" assistance in your job, presumably you'd also obtain such assistance on your resume?

Joerg seems like a nice guy, I'm sure he'd give people the benefit of the doubt.

...

ROTFL!

Eric Jacobsen Minister of Algorithms, Intel Corp. My opinions may not be Intel's opinions.

And make the box by "sex" big enough to contain "Occasionally".

Jerry

Wouldn't you then expect that genius to be smart enough to have a friend critique and correct their resume? Or at least click Tools -> Spell Check? That ain't rocket science...

Hello Joel,

Yep. I wouldn't expect disclosure of a disability but anyone in that situation who wants to be an engineer should be smart enough to seek help writing a resume. Or at least figure out how to use the spell checker.

Thanks. Yes, I would. Never had a problem hiring older folks who had health issues or disabilities. Language or anything else didn't matter either. The funniest experience: One of the guys had such a thick Vietnamese accent that sometimes folks would call on me to discuss a highly technical matter with him (and I grew up speaking German...). He was BTW an excellent technician.

hehe, I walked into the local language school, here in spain, having problems translating my CV. The average tranlator cannot comprehend technical terms like "Video Post Production facility engineer"

martin