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Comment by johan_larson | Hacker News Reader

From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements.

I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.

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Also, in some jurisdictions, you are required to hire whoever has the best qualifications for the job (makes sense), but maybe you as an employer already have your sights on someone particular and wants to ensure the chosen candidate is the winner in the end.

Fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a lab rat/hardware designer at another university. The list of qualifications mostly made sense - electronics engineering, PCB design, SMT soldering skills, some assembly and C skills, swahili...

Swahili?

When coming to the interview, I walked past the door to a postgrad office liberally decorated with photos from East Africa. Bingo. They had already decided on who to hire; they just needed to make sure the hiring was legit, too.

It did make for an entertaining interview, though - at first they were more than a little embarrassed that their sham hiring process was outed, but once they realised I was OK with it, the mood lightened considerably and I was given a grand tour of their research facilities.

(I already had two other interviews for more relevant positions lined up, so I could appreciate the humour in failing a HW design interview due to deficient Swahili skills...)

That's funny! But mostly because you already had other interviews lined up. I'm curious -- did they actually ask you anything in/about Swahili?

-Nope, they didn't - and I don't think they would have (could have?) anyway.

(In fairness, they never got the chance - I did break the ice by observing that after walking past that office door down the hall, I realised why Swahili had been on the list of qualifications - so were they interested in looking at the work samples I'd brought along, or should I rather fail the Swahili test first?)

Sadly they wouldn't have to, because he (presumably) didn't put Swahili on his CV.

Or explain why Swahili was "required"

Oh, if I were them I'd just say something along the lines of 'We've been working with an East African university (I believe their preferred candidate had spent some time in Dar es Salaam), and have found a working knowledge of Swahili to improve cooperation greatly' or something to that effect.

A similar thing happened to my uncle. He applied for a university position for which he was qualified (military history/strategy)- but there were a few odd requirements like needing to speak Italian (luckily he had gone to high school in Italy and spoke fluently). He also did his post-grad at MIT so it would be very unlikely someone would be more qualified than him. Yet, he was rejected and they informed him that they were closing the position and not hiring anyone for it after all because they didn't have the budget. Later he saw it up again with even more obscure and stringent requirements... they were obviously just going through the motions in order to justify hiring someone they already had in mind and he had thrown a wrench in their plans.

> in some jurisdictions, you are required to hire whoever has the best qualifications for the job

Curious, what jurisdictions would these be? Nice idea I guess but I don't see how it could possibly be enforceable.

-In this case, Norway. The public sector are required to publish all available positions and adhere quite strictly to the listed qualification requirements when determining who to hire.

It is a nice idea, but in practice it basically means the system will be gamed like I experienced in the cases where they already have a candidate lined up.

It is especially obvious for research assistants and phd positions. And it makes complete sense, as you are not looking for someone to do a specific job, but quite the opposite, for funds to prolong someones position. It is especially obvious, if the person in question was the one writing the proposal for the grant money.

A similar thing happens in countries where you must justify visa applications by proving that nobody in the existing hiring pool fits the criteria.

This is true in the UK. At least, we are trained that we must have a paper trail to show we picked the best candidate, so you have to think carefully about which requirements are essential vs optional. I'm not sure what the law says, but the aim is more to avoid lawsuits than to find out I guess.

Closely tailored requirements to pick the candidate already in mind are definitely a thing that still happens, though. It annoys me as it wastes the time of everyone from the hiring manager through to the unsuccessful candidates, but alas we're all slaves to HR :( Lol at the Swahili thing, I've not seen it so blatant before!

Thinking about it, this is discrimination law: you have to be able to prove you selected the candidates based on their merits as outlined in the job requirements, rather than a protected characteristic such as race, gender, sexuality etc. Proving a negative is difficult so you need a watertight case for the positive.

Definitely France, and quite possibly this is a law ratified into EU law. For example, if a French company wants to hire a specific American (or any non EU citizen) person, they need to prove that the position is unfillable in France, and then unfillable in Europe. The leads to incredibly obscure job adverts as explained in this thread ..

When companies list many seemingly silly requirements (example, why do I need experience with database x, when I can pick it up in less than a week?), at least two types of candidates will be likely to apply: those that know all of it and possibly more, and those that don't check off all boxes but had the guts to attempt to convince them to pick them anyway.

The one type is going to fit right in and be ready to contribute quickly. The other has the drive to get up to speed and further. Both are much desired people.

There are way too many of the latter for the signal to be important.

I can tell you right now that I do not want to hire the people that show up to my interview without checking at least some of the boxes, guts or no.

It’s a (senior) programming job, why are you here if you have barely 2 months of experience...?

For sure you need them to for sure meet certain requirements.

My current job was listed as full time (Entry/mid level) but I'm a student and in my phone interview told them that - guess they wanted me anyway. My biggest value IMO is that I've dabbled with a lot of stuff. Okay I haven't worked on a personal project in Django, but I'm at the point where the exact language/framework is semi-irrelavant. I was confident I could, and was able to be semi-fluent with Django for example in a few weeks (only 25 hours a week).

My point is that what GP is trying to say is more about "Oh we listed postgres but they've only used mysql" if the person is motivated they should have no issues picking up postgres

They shouldn’t have listed a database if they don’t require a specific vendor of DB for operation.

Jusging by what you are saying you’d probably have a problem telling the two apart, while they will have many differences when run at scale.

Maybe an unfulfillable set of requirements is the point? That way they've got a bulletproof reason to reject you, and if you do get hired it's negotiating leverage

why do I need experience with database x, when I can pick it up in less than a week

You can use a serious database like Postgres or SQL Server or Oracle for 5 years or more and still not see more than a fraction of it or its surrounding ecosystem. MongoDB sure, you can know everything you need to know in a day.

By “use” you mean is when that database size fits in a single page of memory, right?

Having only an interview and resume to go on is really a nightmare scenario as hiring goes. When a team already knows who they want to hire, they shouldn’t have to sneak it by the institution - the institution should celebrate! Positive professional reputation / recommendation by another skilled practitioner makes for a much higher quality hire than strong interview performance.

That is the ideal. But it can be abused as well,which is why I think the regulation exists. So the best person is hired, and not the guy who happened to be a good friend of your boss.

The tricks applied still allow that, but they produce a clearer paper trail.

Reputation networks deal with that just fine. If someone’s recommendations/referrals turn out to be incompetent, it reflects back in the person making them.

The friend has to be significantly less competent than required for this to work, but they only need to be less competent than other candidates to have a negative impact on hiring.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine when applying for a PhD position, except that due to a strange set of circumstances she actually had every single qualification they where asking for, even the obscure/irrelevant ones. She went in to the interview thinking she basically had it in the bag (I mean how many other people could tick all those obscure boxes) and then it turned really weird once she realized that the reasons the qualification where so specific was that they'd already decided on someone else and where now desperately trying to come up with a reason to turn her down.

Had a similar experience with a university where they already decided who was going to get the grant money (an internal candidate) but had to do the hiring dance for probity's sake. I must have impressed them somewhat since they hired me to take over his old job.

> I'm not sure why companies over-list.

My theory falls apart outside of the tech industry, but I'll list it here anyway:

Manager: We want to hire a good programmer

HR: Sure - What decides that

Manager: uh....

HR: Do they need to know a particular language or framework?

Manager: Well, that's nice, but actually any good programmer can pick this up, knowing it in advance doesn't mean much, particularly if they pre-know a style that is different than ours.

HR: How about length of experience?

Manager: No, that doesn't really map to how good that experience is. [ Editor: I'm lying here. They always want Senior devs that can hit the ground running. And more often than not get no one for a long time. ] .

HR: I have 5 million hits on Linked In for Resumes that cover "programmer"...I need something to narrow this down.

Cycle a few times on those criteria and you end up with the unnecessary requirements. The fact of the matter is that experience and skill ( or talent and promise) are important, but we have no way to quantify them. So they over require and they can pick someone that meets some of their criteria that makes them happy. That they reject good matches is regrettable, but they represent (they assume) only a small portion of the total filtered out applicants.

Those that have more rigorous requirements ( govt or govt contractors, for example) just shift the over-requirements from "required" to "preferred".

Companies do want all the requirements listed. They're just well aware they're probably not ever going to get them.

Unfortunately not everyone knows this, I've had many conversations with people looking for jobs who decline to apply because they don't feel they meet all the requirements. My advice to them is: "No one meets all the requirements, if you meet even 50% of them and want to learn the other ones, you should be applying. You don't have to be the perfect applicant, just the best person who happened to apply in the time-frame of the hiring pool."

-- having read the article now: I help write our job reqs, and I agree and use the author's "nice to have" section for non-critical "requirements".

Bonus: companies are then puzzled at their poor diversity scores. Men, broadly, overestimate their qualifications and women underestimate them.

https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...

But also, honest people.

What I've learned is, apply if it sounds cool. Worst case, you hear nothing. A relatively close second, you get an interview, and that's the meat.

One aspect is that at least in one company where I have wroked the job descriptions, skills and qualities were quite official and used everywhere (and actually reflected reality quite well) - so for hiring purposes, you get a list of what that person needs to [be able to] do, but that list is mainly written for the existing employees doing that exact job, or switching between roles within the company (external hires were a bit <50% IIRC).

Sure, you may not know X when you're hired, and it's not a hard requirement as you may learn it as you go, but it's on the list for a reason - you will need to know and use X on the job, you'll be evaluated on X during your semi-annual review, so X matters for the hiring ad / job description as if you don't fancy the idea of learning X and doing it for half of your working day, then I'd rather prefer if you know about the need for X before you choose to apply or not.

Usually that requirements list comes directly from the hiring manager telling the recruiter "here are all the attributes of an ideal candidate", who in turn posts it in the job description verbatim. Not much thought goes into it beyond that.

In order to qualify as an equal opportunity employer an open position must be posted to the public. If you wish to convert a contractor to an employee the position already filled by that person must be posted to the public in compliance with EEO law. You can put whatever you want in the job requirements for that position, as the candidate is chosen before the position is posted.

Sometimes companies over list job requirements because they don't understand the position's actual requirements and other times they want a purple unicorn.

>I'm not sure why companies over-list.

It's not companies, it's the individuals.

Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:

  - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
  - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires

The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away.

The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.

Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.

It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".

Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring for a long while, with repeatably good results.

It's a filter.

We want good so we will ask for great. If we ask for good we will get lots of mediocre.

I think you're overestimating the thought put into job listings. In the US human resources/recruiters like to find folks to refer that vaguely meet the requirements. Job hunting is still highly subjective.

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