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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for asking this! I was thinking about what's the best way to ask something like this - I was too negative about the $subject to ask anything without offending people.

I have been watching these for months now - for a long time just out of curiosity and recently because I'm starting to look for a new job.

My own experience is that a single digit percentage of these jobs actually sound like there might be people who can interview for those if one had to check all tick marks on the skills and experience requirements faithfully!

This to me is baffling and discouraging as I typically don't want to bother with jobs I can't check all boxes for even though I am fairly confident I could easily do those jobs!

Anyone who was hired - can you comment on the delta between what the job posting asked for and what you actually had along with how closely what you actually did matched with what was asked for?

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At GitLab, we have this line at the bottom of our job postings:

  Avoid the confidence gap; you do not have to match all the listed requirements exactly to apply.

We believe that while it would be nice to have someone that exactly checks all the boxes, we are willing to look at candidates that might not feel they are all the way there.

Yes, the occurrence of these was so slim that I do distinctly remember seeing that on the GitLab jobs page! Thank you for taking a realistic approach to hiring - I will see if I can find anything that excites me @GitLab!

I'm impressed. This shows a lot of self-awareness. Makes me think that there's a big disconnect in hiring at companies where they're actually looking for people who check all the boxes and then complain about not filling positions.

The way I approach the postings is I look for companies and positions I would be really interested in. Even if I don't meet the requirements, e.g. they want a senior engineer (I'll be a new grad), I'll apply anyways. The worst that could happen is I don't get a reply or a no, but sometimes they do reach back. Recently this led to some great conversations with senior engineers (good career advice and insights into the company) and them referring me internally to HR for when the company starts looking for new grads. There were a lot of no's and that can be attributed to me not being qualified for their positions due to lack of experience in certain fields/tech.

For the ones I did get interviews with recently, I generally met about 80% of their requirements and maybe one or two of their reach requirements.

> positions I would be really interested in

Sounds like a good thing to try out - I suspect I didn't try that out until now because I avoid going out of the way to convince people in person - One more thing to work on! :)

> a single digit percentage of these jobs actually sound like there might be people who can interview for those if one had to check all tick marks on the skills and experience requirements faithfully

This has been my experience as well. It seems every job is for a Senior with 5 years of experience in 10 specific technologies.

What happened to the days of on-the-job training? Or was that ever a thing in the IT realm?

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