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Comment by carlmr | Hacker News Reader

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that.

They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate for this position.

The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers.

EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.

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They wanted a 100% candidate.

You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...

That's definitely an understandable thing the employer might do, but if they're still not getting a "good enough" candidate after a year, they're probably too demanding one way or another.

Of course, it's also plausible that they just never took the posting down.

Great point. Having been on both sides of the hiring table, I can tell you that the candidate has no idea what we use to make decisions, because the candidate has no visibility into our internal issues.

Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.

Some examples to give you an idea:

- we like you, you did well at the interview. But we have one position open right now, and Joe, who is the star engineer at our competitor, is making signs that he'd be willing to finally join us. We have been courting him for two years. So we put your application on hold, until Joe makes a move. Nothing you can do, and we sure won't tell you, in case Joe doesn't jump ship, and then we call you back as if nothing had happened.

- we like you, but we are about to close a new contract in the middle of Texas. If that contract closes, we'll need to hire someone ASAP there, instead of here. So while technically the position we have is here, we are waiting just a bit to see if the contract closes and if we need to shift our hiring. We should know this week, so no point in telling you anything. One week later, it turns out the contract is not signed yet, but it looks really close. Let's wait another week, we should know for sure by then... A month goes by...

etc.

I made an account just to say as a frustrated person on a job search right now with pretty good qualifications what you are doing is silly.

BOTH of your examples are things that in no way whatsoever make you liable legally and you have no reason not to tell the candidate in either situation. You could literally tell the candidate even vaguely that there might be issues that will take awhile to clear up before the company can make a hiring decision. You can vaguely say that these are based on internal business processes that you aren't at liberty to explain.

Please TELL the candidate that they did well and you would hire them and might be interested in hiring them in the future if not for 'vague thing that lets the candidate know it is the company and not you'. This is incredibly frustrating and there is no reason for lying about it.

Saying "I'm sorry, there's nothing you can do to make these problems go away" would cause me to give up on the interview process and look else where. I can't see a benefit for the company to let the interviewee know what is going on behind closed doors.

There's a talent shortage and employers hesitate giving information that would potentially close doors.

My recommendation: If they delay or have excuses then don't bother. How they treat you before is how they treat you after. My rule for professional communications is 24-72 hours.

Those are the most frustrating reasons. You wonder why people hate finding a job, its because of people like you doing this type of nonsense. Figure out what you want and need before wasting people's time.

Don’t assume parent is making this decision on their own, or even at all (inspite of using the proverbial “we”). Most of us are just caught up in the system with little recourse to go against it.

Of course, if you are using a proverbial “you”, my comment doesn’t apply.

Get used to it.

From the perspective of running several consulting/job-shop types of business, this happens all the time from clients/customers/prospects (who are effectively employers, and are in very analogous positions here).

We'll be going along through the process of sales, project definition, quoting, etc, and then all of a sudden they just go silent. No reason, no explanation, just ghosted. For days, weeks or months.

Then, suddenly, with no warning or explanation, they call/email again, and the process picks up as if not a day has passed -- the only difference is often they are in a bigger rush and want the project more. (seen similar with VCs too)

So what happened? Almost anything. Other business have their own priorities, and their own fires to put out, and can often quickly get distracted from a project.

The difference is one of perspective. For us the employee or service provider, this job is a critical priority. For them, it's one of many, even for top priority projects.

It's just not the same sense of urgency from different sides of the table. I've learned (after way too much anxiety) to just accept and ignore it -- mostly.

And the times I couldn't just ignore it and felt that I had to do something, and only barely managed to hold myself back? Almost always glad I played it cool (even if I wasn't cool inside my head).

YMMV

If they treat you with disrespect initially then they will continue to do so as is their status quo.

Actually, I haven't found that to be the case with this phenomena -- as soon as they return, they are eager, engaged, respectful, and often write large checks, and there's no diff in their attitude on projects that have a sales process gap and those that don't.

I just don't put this int the category of disrespect, but of "they've probably got their own problems, so I ought to have a bit of compassion".

(If I put any unannounced hiatus in the sales process in the disrespect category, I'd have very few clients left, as I generally fire clients that treat us with any significant disrespect.)

It'd certainly be nicer if they were more forthcoming, but I've seen it in two industries, software & manufacturing, and it just seems that

1) they're writing the checks and determining the schedule, and 2) their schedule is often determined by THEIR clients, and when that has a hiccough, the entire downstream supply chain gets a cold.

I've just found it better for everyone to be sanguine.

Sounds like the typical big company with 10 managers above that position and none of them can't be arsed to make a real decision.

> Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.

I've applied to jobs that required a long and tedious hiring process and in the end unfortunatley I didn't get hired, but I also had nice HR drones contacting me to provide a thorough review of my application.

Regardless of your decision process, if you don't give any feedback to those job seekers you turned down then you are the problem. The reason why candidates overanalyze stuff is because you left a wide gaping hole by providing no feedback.

> The reason why candidates overanalyze stuff is because you left a wide gaping hole by providing no feedback.

Moving the goalpost to more specific information, weakens the employer position. Now they are no longer interviewing potentially qualified people, but interviewing people trying to intentionally pass themselves off as specializing in a few skills. Weak hiring practices are the norm, so the strategy of hiding information (the most valuable skills) benefits the employers. People are very good at faking skills at a cursory (or specific depth, like side projects), which is part of the reason Headhunters are derided, prepping both sides to fail for their own commission.

Frankly, I don't want the interviewer's feedback. There's a lot of superstition in hiring people because of how much luck is involved, meaning that there's a good chance that the reason they decided not to hire you is completely meaningless.

> Frankly, I don't want the interviewer's feedback.

That's great, but others do want it and also find any feedback to be very helpful.

I’ve never has to do either of those things in my hiring. It sounds like your company is incapable of proper planning.

Well, it’s still poor hiring if that is the excuse: rude and unhelpful.

Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no.

Either way -- in tech (and for some reason more so than in other industries) -- when it comes to hiring, it's head games all up and down. And generally to an extent far more than can really be called "necessary".

It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies. They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate, especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps (well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit).

Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filtering candidates. These people have no idea what any of these technologies are, so for them it's a liability on their ass if they let people through that don't satisfy the "requirements". Managers, when you write up "requirements" and that is being sent to an HR department, keep in mind you might want to move some of those to a "nice to have" category.

That being said, there ARE competent, non-technical HR departments that do understand technical hiring.

Edit: Ohh... I wanted to add too, it's nice being in a startup where you really don't just "leave it up for a year". In a startup each and every candidate is literally needed when it's posted. It's kinda crazy and shows just how much larger companies hire just to hire if they can just sit on positions for a long time. Are they really "needed" if the position can go unfilled for an entire year?

If HR has no idea what the job means, they also shouldn't be the one selecting candidates and conducting interviews.

HR doesn’t really conduct interviews beyond maybe a quick high level screen. They select candidates, but also only as a high level screen, it’s up to the engineering team to screen more deeply and do interviews.

Of all places, Facebook had a pretty clearly non-technical person screen me over the phone.

Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?")

So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.

I talked to a person in a similar situation... ironically some of the questions could have multiple answers. Pre ES5 and Post ES5 JS has changed a lot of the "rules". Specifically to scope/closures.

But yeah, for the most part, those kinds of questions help. It does depend on what your needs are.

I’ve been screened by a Facebook recruiter without that experience. Sounds absolutely dreadful.

I had a very similar experience with LinkedIn a couple years ago.

This is different. The engineering team provided those questions so that the recruiters stop wasting their time on people who have no chance at all. They're just implementing the filter. HR themselves did not come up with any of them, and don't make the decisions. Also, recruiting and HR are not quite the same function.

At my company if a candidate doesn't check all the reqs but comes close, HR shows the resume to the relevant department and asks them how important the missing boxes are. We're willing to train employees, so we usually at least give the candidate an interview.

I disagree about startups not leaving it up for a year. I have seen plenty that do exactly that. I don't know what the motivation is but I'm guessing they just want to fish for their pipeline. And they don't need someone next week.

"keep in mind you might want to move some of those to a "nice to have" category"

I would add be more general if possible. Someone with 5 years of postgres sql will pick up sql server pretty quickly. So maybe just: Relational Database experience. Somebody who has used 5 different ui frameworks will pick up the whichever you use pretty quickly. So perhaps: Web UI development. Etc.

I've never worked for a startup, but when my company leaves a long-standing position open, it usually means that there's some work sitting on the back burner that isn't important enough to make it on to an existing employee's task list. Even in my small group, there's plenty of work that would be "nice to have", but isn't mission critical. If we find the right person to do some of that work, we will hire them on a short-term contract to do the work. If we don't find the right person, one of us will get to it eventually.

I have a feeling this isn't any different at a startup.

No, startups just never get to the "nice to have".

If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they don't want to pay the market rate.

Most of the job positions all of FAANG have posted have been open for months, some for over a year. They are really hiring and have no problem paying market rate. That's a counterexample.

If a company is really hiring and paying market rate, what's the situation leading to positions open for over a year? Unicorn-hunting?

I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither of which would apply to FAANG.

They are just being picky, and can afford to be picky. I’ve heard FAANG interview pass rates are pretty low, frustrating their recruiters to no end :).

Maybe they're willing to hire in depth for those particular positions?

The company I work at has an ad for "Senior Full-Stack Developer" and if 5 amazing candidates show up they'll probably hire all of them (or if just 1 shows up and gets hired the ad will remain online).

HR just leaves the same position open because it's not really a position, it's a category and they are too lazy to remove and add the same ad over and over.

Just because there is a job posting doesn't mean there is position open.

That isn't right. We did hire, several times. More please!

I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038

We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff.

This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.

Your ad is a “looking for people” type ad. The ads I skip are the ones with fairly specific skills that haven’t been filled after a month.

Looks like you do some interesting work! If I was a US citizen you'd be hearing from me.

My experience has been that HR just passes the resumes to all the hiring managers who make the call to proceed. There are some more competent HR recruiters that could also prioritize candidates that are a better fit to the top of the pile.

Sometimes in a startup the posting stays up for a year because you can't identify and successfully hire a good candidate. I'm thinking of more niche roles, sure, but I've seen it happen multiple times.

Looks to me like a Green Card job. They wanted the job for an internal candidate and so they crafted in a way that only that candidate would meet it. The law requires them to advertise in a public newspaper of record or some such thing.

They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal candidates they needed it for.

This is 100% it unless the GP commenter had some red flags. This also happens for visa reasons outside of the US.

I know of at least one person at a fairly well known UK company that had to undergo the same waiting process.

Generally if the position is ultra-specific compared to their other postings, it's for someone they have in mind.

Seems to me that this was a job put together with a specific person in mind and somehow that didn't work out and they just didn't know what to do after that. Seen this same scenario play out before at multiple companies.

This is most likely the reason. One of the requirements for an H2B visa is that an in-country hire isn't possible. And you make that impossible by asking for impossible requirements. You may have seen these as experience requirements in 5+ years technology that has only existed for 2-3 years.

I think h1b doesn’t have such requirement - only that the wage is in prevailing range...

applying to employer sponsors green card though does require proof of lack of local hires, and job reqs that are created to prove this often go to this crazy level and have to be met 100%.

Or it could be that that was the one criterion that was non-negotiable. Often there are one or two that are "must haves" and the rest are just wants. If you meet the must-haves, you only have to hit a couple of the wants in order to get an interview; but if you miss them, forget it.

Well, there were quite a few of must haves (just by the nature of the position), I already filtered out the ones that were optional before.

The ones that were listed as optional? Because often even if they're listed as required they're not (which is the point of the article). For instance, wanting someone to start right away, even though the listing has been open for a year... probably flexible.

>The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason.

Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?

Or more likely fake postings to show investors they are a successful company that is hiring.

There are plenty of hires. I think it was one very picky department head.

Internal hire doesn't show investors much, also there was an interview which is pointless for fake postings.

Do they still require you look locally and "not find" someone before you go H1B?

Your numbers don't match your %. 20% is 1/5 and 30% is around 1/3.

Also I think you can drop the English requirement as most people willing to go to China will speak English (it is certainly not independent).

With this corrected, we get around 0.5 which still means it is unlikely they find someone.

What? 1/20 == 5%

Yes?

Yeah, good catch, removed that. Doesn't really matter anyway for the point.

As a nerd I still enjoyed reading the calculations !

> I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would find a better candidate

So I get where you are coming from, but not having the 1/20 requirement is a much easier excuse than explaining why they don't want someone who thinks it's ok to do this.

I only showed them after they already told me it's a no. I didn't really have a reason to be polite after that. I was just a bit incredulous. The job posting is still open now 1 year later, although they refreshed the date.

You should always be polite, you might meet them again in a different time and place. It sounds like this rejection bothers you a lot. You are in danger of not seeing the bigger picture because you are hung up on not meeting that single requirement.

It doesn't bother me that I didn't get the job that much. Just the headline of this thread reminded me of it. I already had a comfortable position and I have a new position now in a great team. I think it worked out for the best.

The only way in which this bothers me is that these (I assume) fake, unfilled jobs are used for political reasons. But that's a global problem.

There's a company in my town that have been advertising for a C++/C# dev since I moved here (around 4 years). What are they thinking? 'Give it another 4 years and we might get lucky'?! Also they post this job on job boards, which must be costing them hundreds a month. Something doesn't add up.

Maybe matching 95% made you too confident salary-wise. Maybe they just want a 50% who they can haggle down to working for peanuts as a junior because of those missing 50%.

Your information here is really asymmetric, so while I agree with you that there was probably a reason, it's really difficult for you to accurately assess what it was.

Maybe, they are waiting for a superstar, who knows?

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