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How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.

> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?

I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.

Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.

I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA.

A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.

This doesn't really match my experience for my own career or as a manager. Plenty of great engineers don't have a plan beyond "learn and get better," including those that have traditionally-successful careers (e.g. director+ at top tech company).

I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).

There’s also a difference between not having a plan and not being able to articulate your plan. Articulation is a skill that needs training and people who rarely need it are rarely good at it. I can take people who have strong plans and train them to articulate it in a few weekend sessions but someone who doesn’t have a plan requires multiple years of work to develop a plan.

"Learn and get better" is absolutely a plan and a great basis to build on, though it's nice to know if there's something in particular they'd like to learn. I've never encountered a candidate who will say they want to learn but not have an idea of what they want to learn...just candidates who have an idea what they want to learn but are afraid of saying the wrong thing in the interview.

setting career goals seems pretty silly

though im nearly 20 years into my career i barely can predict where i'll be in one year, let alone five

for the first 10 years my only goal was to make more money and not hate work

not a great goal from a hiring manager perspective

as a hiring manager, i ask what folks like to do and see if that aligns with what we need them to do

Ok, you've said what you did in the beginning of your career and what you now do when it comes to career goals. Did this work? Do you consider yourself successful? If so, do you consider yourself successful in spite of or because of your lack of career goals?

I don't know you, so it's hard to draw much from what you're saying.

> "I work for the highest bidder"

Uhm, I find people like these are actually the easiest to keep. They know their price and define it. You know what to expect.

There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not).

We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.

This is well said and sums up my experience

> As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s

By that same logic most managers also fall into B just like ICs. So that statement is incorrect - Bs are perfect material for empire building and As are usually not

You can’t have all A’s. I’d rather have B’s than a hypothetical C who is just trying to hold down a job and not get fired, or a D who DGAF but isn’t middle of the pack and takes your lower-paying job because it’s the best they could do (sure, the B is basically the same, but at least there is some theoretically higher quality on average).

You simply won’t get (A) in some industries. People love making things like games, not boring CRUD apps driven by people outside of development who also resemble (B).

These views are always short-sighted like that.

I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers…

You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.

Can you disclose which company you work for / what your company does?

Not much, I’d like to remain anonymous, sorry. We’re doing apps for Jira and Confluence Cloud.

Most companies forget how expensive hiring, onboarding and training is. And how rare finding an amazing employee is.

Great on you for rewarding him generously for his performance!

For what role did you hire that person?

Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates.

> Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.

Strongly agree with this point.

Maybe this is part of why I got my first job - told my interviewer my plan was to become the CEO