Last month I was ruled out at screening stage because I "focused too much on money" (that was the recruiter's feedback to me from the company's HR). They wanted to pay £35k for a developer who also can build statistical models. In London.
I also don't think good boy points help that much either, I'm subscribed to the idea we tend to hire people similar to us, effectively turning hiring into a numbers game without much influence over over that bias.
Indeed, once a technically challenged HR included a whole spreadsheet of applicants in her reply, which basically confirmed her company rejects applicants for arbitrarily stupid reasons, so one might as well focus on the money.
Is this an imaginary situation, or did it actually happen? If the latter, link?
Rejecting for too high expected salary was a non factor basically (also they strictly did not try to negotiate that), lacking technical skills were rarely mentioned too.
It may well be that they can't afford someone who can build statistical models, but they can probably get someone more junior who's willing to learn. The new hire gets paid and gets experience, the company gets the job done. There are plenty of (experienced) people for whom money is not the prime motivator.
I would look at it a different way: if a company offers you a below-market rate, would you get paid a lot more if you can add significant value to the company in a year or two? Is the gamble of being underpaid in a small company worth it for you?
How is the response "you're too focused on money" when trying to get a job to make money a reasonable one?
> There are plenty of (experienced) people for whom money is not the prime motivator.
There really aren't. This is a myth of the highest order. There might be some, but certainly not many. If they have families or debt, that number basically goes down to zero. And for the record, £35k in London for a software engineer is a laugh-out-loud joke; a bus driver's starting salary is £25k.
The company have stated what they're willing to pay, if that doesn't meet your expectation then look elsewhere. It's not a personal slight. On the flip side there are plenty of jobs which will pay more, and plenty (no doubt) which pay less. You can laugh at the job adverts and get angry when they won't pay you what you think your market rate is, but does it really matter? If you're that good, then you'll find a job which pays you what aspire to.
Note that the OP indicates they were rejected at a screening stage, which implies that there was no wasted time on interviews. I have no idea what the job is/was beyond that it involved statistics. The OP provided no details, although a followup post suggests it's not a small company. I used that as an example of a situation where you might see this sort of salary, and some logical justification for it (the morals are debateable). If it's a big corp then obviously you might expect different standards of pay.
I would give you academia as the obvious counter-example to your second argument. There are thousands of talented people, globally, earning peanuts compared to what they could in industry because they enjoy the work they do. I'll admit some compared to the hundreds of thousands of hungry developers, but it's not insignificant. Starting postdoc salary in London is around £35k for instance, with annual progression up the national spine point scale.
Academia is one field which has historically had excellent benefits for staff including regular travel, very flexible working hours and freedom to work as independently as you want. You also tend to get more holiday than industry e.g. 30 days is standard. That's a pretty good tradeoff to some folks.
Is it a laugh out loud joke? Public sector employees don't earn much more than that initially. To take a fanciful example, SIS/MI6 are currently advertising a software engineering role with a range starting at £32k.
Offer anything else and I'm going to be thinking about how I can pay my bills by doing work on your projects to the detriment of my own.