Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Applicants do not self-filter. If you've ever read resumes for a job listing that haven't been prescreened, you'll be blown away by how many people refuse to self-filter even for basic fitness for the job. Put out a job listing asking for a college degree, and you'll get applicants who are still in school with their graduation date two years in the future looking for an internship. That's an extreme, but people will apply for jobs they are very much not fit for. Frustrated job seekers will often submit things under the assumption that "the worst they can do is tell me no" (they're not wrong). If someone is receiving unemployment benefits, they may have to apply to X number of jobs every week/month in order to qualify. The incentive of the applicant is to apply to as many jobs as possible and get one.

View on HN

As an applicant, I don't self-filter from positions I think are interesting, because I've gotten several offers from companies after to applying to jobs I wasn't technically qualified for.

Some companies are pretty strict about their qualifications. For some, the qualifications are more like guidelines. But if the position is interesting, I'll take that chance.

and for some, they're just nonsensical. Like when you see 5 years min. experience with Swift

Applicants don't self filter because they are conditioned by job postings that bear little relation, if any, to the actual job.

Applicants don't self-filter because they need a job. They like to eat, they like to wear clothes, they like to sleep indoors. They often have other people in their lives that also like to do those things and rely on the income of the applicant to do so. They also aren't very able to pool risk. Most people have between one and two wageearners paying towards "household" expenses. There's not a lot of redundancy here. Contrast that with the average amount of employees at an employer. When you're hiring, having a position vacant for weeks or months is something you can work around much, much easier than you can work around being unemployed for weeks or months.

Most people are told to apply anyway, because most employers are setting the requirements ridiculously too high.

That's why job descriptions should not be authored by hiring managers alone. Most of the time, it's not the employer, it's the hiring manager who has unreal expectations. This is driven in my opinion by multiple factors including but not limited to:

Unreasonable expectations created by hyperspecialization and role blending as part of corporate restructuring, or as pushed by the investors/stakeholders that follows economic recessions.

The expansionary period that follows provide people opportunity to leave, providing more liquidity in the labor market.

So talent leaves for greener pastures and now you have a hiring manager who's direct report has left them with a gaping hole and finance dictates that you have 1:1 for this spot.

So you type of the list of roles and responsibilities and send your requisition to HR to help find candidates. Meanwhile you assign out duties to remaining team members because work must get done.

The search lingers because the hiring manager looking for the proverbial purple squirrel, meanwhile the team seems to be handling the workload with no measurable impact on quality.

This then just repeats itself over and over, at companies large and small.

This is only one use case, there are many, but I think one that plays a big part in the problem of job search and matching talent with opportunity.

You're not wrong. Hiring has just become a numbers game and I think this is part of the problem. Recruiters blast a thousand engineers with the same dry email. Engineers apply to a hundred different companies. A lot of companies don't consider applications without a personalized note or cover letter, and for good reason. They too want a personalized message.

Let's compare it to dating. A lot of people like dating apps where you can rifle through hundreds of options within minutes. But most people would agree that a matching process that is more personal and human leads to longer lasting relationships.

Despite how many people play the numbers game, there are tons of people who don't, myself included. (And I happen to mean that for both my personal and professional relationships.)

recruiters even suggest apply to even things that are close to a fit. To me that's the difference between required and preferred skills.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com