Employer’s Online Applications for Hourly Workers

Colleagues, 

I invite you to review the new study on Essential Work: Analyzing the Hiring Technologies of Large Hourly Employers from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The focus is large employers' online application processes for hourly workers. Questions for discussion include: 

  • What does this mean for our students who lack technology access? 
  • What does this mean for our students who have limited technology skills? 
  • What are the equity issues with the broad scope of personality questions included in these online applications? 
  • What could happen at the Adult Education program level to address these questions and concerns?  

I looke forward to your thoughts about the report. 

Kathy Tracey

 

Comments

Hello Kathy, and others

This is an important study with online job application information that may be very useful to job seekers as it was gained by researchers who applied for these hourly worker jobs by completing these online applications (although the researchers were not interested in following through with interviews and other parts of the hiring process.) As the authors readily admit, however, they could not learn exactly how the information they provided was used by the employer to make hiring decisions. Still, knowing what kinds of questions an online applicant might be asked at these large corporations, would be very useful to adult learners who wanted to apply for these jobs.

The actual corporate hourly worker application questions that teachers will find in this study might be a good stimulus to include in lesson plans for adult reading and writing students or for adult English language learners.

I wonder if an in-person or online learning circle that included a focus on these applications and how to respond to their questions might be useful to the job-seeking participants. Any thoughts about that?

My main takeaways are that while from an employer point of view this information could be very useful, from an applicant point of view many of the questions seem unnecessarily intrusive, especially for low-wage jobs; from a public policy point of view, I wonder why some of these online applications aren't better regulated by the federal or state governments. Could this be an issue for the new U.S. Secretary of Labor, Martin Walsh, to be concerned about? I also wonder, given that in at least in some states many people who left these jobs during the pandemic are not returning to them, if one of the reasons in addition to the jobs' low wages, is the obstacles of the application process, especially for those who do not have the digital literacy skills to complete the applications.  That's a question for adult basic skills programs to consider if their objectives include helping their students find jobs.

David J. Rosen