Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

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In my opinion, it is pretty easy to hire if you pay fairly and treat people with respect.

But I do get a lot of job offer emails that go straight to Trash:

- recruiters with an exciting opportunity but they don't mention the technologies or the compensation

- companies that want 10+ years of experience at $36k annually

- job board spam that just wants me to create an account inside their system

- mandatory "play coding game XY" to apply

Every company who makes one of those mistakes will feel like hiring is difficult, but it's mainly because they are doing it wrongly. When it's about firing employees, everyone is happy to use the free market as an excuse. But when it's about hiring employees, nobody seems to get the hint that the free market is telling them to stop being cheapskates ^_^

Having a conversation with people isn't even that cheap, an email / phone call starting with "I'm looking for an engineer who can build XYZ stuff and I can start your salary at 123 plus ABC benefits, please get in touch with Joe Schmoe at 555-555-5555 if interested to discuss details". The reason people don't communicate this way is pride, they want to sound like hot shit so they feel better about the fact that nobody's applying. Self-induced failure flywheel mechanism.

I’ve spent the last year/year and a half hiring developers. We pay well, company is relaxed, no overtime, and established.

I will post for a senior level position and get 200 resumes with zero experience. Just a undergrad or grad degree, but never in a relevant technology/skill set. Maybe two will fit the bill. By the time I get ahold of them they already have another job.

If I post a junior level position, for someone just out of college or a code school…crickets. No one applies.

Since you can become "senior" on paper with a few weekend courses, I'm not surprised. Maybe require actual years of working experience instead and ask applicants to name the company where they gained that experience.

That said, when I got my first team lead position, I had no experience actually working, but only a lot of hobby projects. So make sure not to discard the "senior" overmotivated hobbyists.

If you pay well and post a junior level position on LinkedIn with the salary range included, there is approximately 0% chance “no one applies”

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