Tech Companies Face a Fresh Crisis: Hiring

I'd court someone for the right position. Most of the recruiters are useless to candidates though. They don't really care about fit. In my experience, they often lie, or have no idea about important details.

'“Unfortunately the recommendation you made to drop one or two of our requirements,” the client wrote, “was frankly completely inappropriate.”'

It's the company's decision at the end of the day. But it's stupid to not listen to the talent you have contracted with to find you employees. They have knowledge of the market. Otherwise, what recruiter want to work for a place they know will have low fill rates due to uncompetitive offers?

Well that doesn't help. Too many lazy recruiters just sending messages using keyword searches.

The guides I've read say I should expect to repeat that funnel 5-10 times to get a few offers to compare, but I'm thinking about saying "fuck it" and starting my own thing.

> The job she posted listed its selling points — the business had 400 percent growth a year, the backing of a legendary venture capitalist, no limit to personal vacation days, full coverage of employee health-care premiums and the option to work remote or locally.

> Dyba estimates that she sent the listing to about 75 prospective hires and received back maybe five responses, three of which were either a brief “no thanks” or the simple declination of her InMail message. A declination — that’s LinkedIn language for “Please, stop throwing all these jobs at me with employer-paid health-insurance premiums and unlimited vacation time.”

Sorry, what? As an in-demand tech work, I feel incredibly fortunate to be compensated far above many others who work harder at in my view more significant work (e.g. teachers, or nurses). I would certainly not defend tech compensation relative to many other sectors of our economy.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in value creation and wealth in technology over the past few years (from an already high baseline). I think part of what we’re seeing is a larger percentage of that value flow to software engineers and other technology workers. And still that percentage of the overall value created pales in comparison to the value that’s accruing to tech executives and venture capitalists.

When I read passages like the one quoted above (which by the way is written by the reporter! not even quoting someone), it’s as if the article is written by a tech exec or VC who’s outraged that they have to spend an additional 1% of their market cap paying engineers.