If it takes me more than 2 minutes to apply for your position, I’m going to skip the whole thing
If you make me retype everything that’s on my resume, I’m going to pass
My ideal application is attach resume, put basic info like Email and name if not automatically scraped and submit
I know that applying to jobs is a pain in the ass, and that there are far too many bad actors on the hiring side (ie not giving a clear no and just ghosting applicants). But if you enter the application process making it clear you have done your research, you know what the company does, what the specific role is, and even better if you know something about the people on my side, who you want to work with and why, etc. then you are guaranteed an interview and you're starting a mile ahead of anyone just shotgunning in a resume. Yes, that takes a LOT longer than 2 minutes. But with that approach maybe you won't need to send in hundreds of applications.
If I'm right, you are trying to find people who have the rights skills and the ones who match the culture of the company, right ? Then not doing any research doesn't mean anything
I do the same, if the application process is longer than 2 minutes, I skip, if the cover letter is mandatory, I skip. But when I get an interview I prepare a lot.
So it's about showing that you can take the viewpoint of someone other than yourself (in this case the person doing the hiring) and figure out how to be effective. Refusing to even write a paragraph explaining why you're the right person for a particular job is simply not an effective way to try to get a job. It shows naivete and a lack of understanding of the system involved, which makes me assume that you'll approach similar non-technical roadblocks, of which there will be millions, in the same ineffective way.
Don't be surprised if the people you recruit lack the real skills needed by your company
It's not an ego-driven "only consider the candidates who put in effort specifically to satisfy me" thing. It's more "there's a 50% chance that this applicant who did zero research wouldn't actually be happy in this line of work, whereas any applicant who spends ten minutes of research and then still applies has already decided that this line of work is probably a good fit for them."
Does this justify it for you? Or do you still feel that asking candidates to know generally what your company makes beforehand is unreasonable?
I think "knowing what the company does in general" is reasonable. Anything beyond that is on the unjustifiable-impractical plain. First quarter.
I write unique cover letters for each with a copy and pasted section about my skill set
I don’t think a poorly made application process has a lot to do with doing research on a company
That is, my issue is with bad software not necessarily shotgunning resumes
Unlikely. There's a reason so many people take the shotgun approach. The response rate from cold online applications is very, very low. The 'hiring funnel' is also very discouraging. Every additional step in the hiring process is a step in which you may never hear from a single company again for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with you. Are you going to spend a lot of time up front to send an application into the void and never hear anything back again?
"Bad actors on the hiring side" include companies posting job openings they have no intention of filling. There's an information asymmetry here and spamming resumes and stock cover letters is how I resolve that. I know the company is serious about hiring somebody if I make it past the first HR/recruiter phone screen to talk to an actual engineer. Then I invest some time, do my research, contact some of the company's engineers through twitter and linkedin, etc. The company gets bonus points if first contact is made by the actual hiring manager or someone even higher up the food chain.
I wish I could tell right away who's serious about hiring somebody and who isn't. I haven't found a way to tell from the job ad alone.
This is such a pain, it’s 2017 and I have job sites who want a Word document resume, plain text resume, then in the middle of filling out a web form with my work history I just closed the browser window because I don’t think I really wanted to work at a place like that anyway.
Granted that was the end of my attempts to work there.
And I skip when they ask for a cover letter (or send a blank pdf page)
Job hunting works both ways. If the company has put in the time to write up a decent enough job listing to make you interested, then you damn well do your side and don't waste their time (yes, this may be a shock to you, but sending a crappy email without a cover letter wastes someones elses time).
And yes if I don't spend 10 minutes writing a cover letter for your company I'm not able to do my job properly, you probably find the easiest way to find if someone is going to do his job properly. Well done !
Yes, it does indeed work both ways. Just because you don't understand this doesn't make you in any way correct.
I'm not really sure what your second paragraph means. Are you saying you job hunt while at work? That's not a professional thing to be doing. In any case, writing a cover letter is very easy, so being unable to do that probably means you need to work on your communication skills. Heck, with the amount of posts you've stuck onto HN today alone, you could have knocked up a short cover letter that would suit 90% of technical job applications, so this can't be a time problem for you.