A sergeant candidate may have to meet minimum qualifications, take a written exam, sit through a structured interview, complete an assessment, compete against other candidates, and live with a scoring system somebody can point to afterward. Then the chief’s job opens, and sometimes the process gets looser. A city may review resumes, conduct a few…
If I were helping a city hire its next police chief, I wouldn’t be comfortable making a recommendation based on a résumé, a good interview, and three references the candidate picked himself. I’d want to know quite a bit more about the person who was about to take charge of the department. A police chief…
When I’m looking at hiring a police officer, the salary is only part of what the department will spend on that person. By the time you add benefits, uniforms, equipment, academy expenses, field training, supervision, and the time other officers spend helping someone learn the job, you’ve made a considerable investment before that new officer…
I’ve sat on both sides of the interview table enough times that I don’t really think of one person as the interviewer anymore. If I’m hiring, I’m trying to decide whether somebody can do the job and handle the responsibility I’m about to give them. If I’m applying, I’m trying to figure out what I’m…
When I first became a police officer in 1997, the people around me who wanted the job actually wanted to be police officers. Maybe they had wanted it since they were kids, or maybe they came to it later, but they were working toward putting on the badge and serving the public. Nowadays, I see…
I’ve heard employers complain about employees for most of my working life. They can’t find anybody dependable. Nobody wants to work. The new employee has a bad attitude, can’t handle the pressure, won’t take direction, or isn’t what the company thought they were getting. Sometimes they’re absolutely right. There are bad employees, and I’m not…
Software can do a lot more than organize job applications. It can decide which applications anybody bothers looking at, and that’s the part of Mobley v. Workday I find more interesting than the AI label. Derek Mobley and other applicants allege that Workday’s hiring technology scored, sorted, ranked or screened applicants in ways that discriminated…