Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer obviously feels as though her HR department can’t make the correct hiring decisions on their own, but her involvement may actually cause the demise of things she wants to avoid and in the end, place the blame on her
According to Wikipedia, “Micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes or controls the work of subordinates or employees”. They also rightly claim that Micromanagers usually get agitated when people under them decide on things without their approval, “even if the decisions are within the subordinate’s level of authority.” What if the micromanager was not a manger though, but a level above the manager as in a Directors position? Even better yet, what if the micromanager was above the Directors and was actually the CEO of the company? Well, if you work for Yahoo’s HR department, Marissa Meyer may very well meet such a description.
It turns out that Marissa is not just actually overseeing Human Resources, she’s acting as part of the department and it’s not sitting well with some people there.
Reuters claims that “Mayer insists on personally reviewing every new recruit, a practice that supporters say brings needed discipline to the company. Critics, however, say her high standards are hampering Yahoo’s already challenged ability to fill vacancies.”
One of the critics (an anonymous Yahoo source) cited by BI seems to feel as though Marissa’s micromanagement hiring practices are atrocious. The source simply broke down the hiring process by saying that Marissa has four people interview a candidate . The candidates information and review then goes to Marissa’s office where it then gets stuck for at least 6 weeks while it awaits her approval. After that, well, there’s more waiting. In addition to that, there’s a rumor that Marissa’s even turning down good candidates just because they didn’t go to renown universities. Surely though top notch candidates (if that’s what Marissa is looking for) are going to be snatched up within a 6 week window.
One talent recruiter, Rick Girard at Stride Professional Search, even went as far to say that the engineers that come to him seeking employment opportunities only see Yahoo as a “back-up” option to other employment opportunities. Well, I know one thing for certain, telling all your current employees that they can no longer work remotely but must now come into the office (regardless of how diligent some may have worked remotely) probably doesn’t inspire many new comers to the company (see Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer Cuts Homework & Old Yahoo Projects for a bit more info on that).
Truly, we don’t know what Marissa is doing if these are relfective of some of her ways to procure the IT world’s top talent and bring them into her IT ranks, but Rick Girard also said that not only do his clients see Yahoo as merely an employment alternative, but he “only had one person who ended up taking the job at Yahoo. [He] thinks it was because she wanted to be at a larger company”.