Most people don’t finish online job applications
shrm.org
shrm.org
2. Some companies even / still requires you bring your University Certificate or whatever as proof. For Pete sake. That was decades ago. Can I pay $5 to LinkedIn or whatever so once and for all they can verify it from there.
3. The other 8% of the application that I have not included details in my CV/ Resume or LinkedIn could have been reused across all applications. Why do I have rewrite it again.
4. You are not fucking suppose to verify or reference check on me before I even had my interview or offer. So now my boss / management knows I am job hunting?
5. By the time I get to the end of the application I am already exhausted depending how bad the day I had. And some form of PTSD from previous interview where i had to contain my thermonuclear anger or else going absolute animal against the HR / agent / interviewer. Because I have to be professional.
6. My thought on why all these are so bad is because job application, listing site, social network ( LinkedIn ) all work for hiring companies, they are the ones who pay them. And not job seekers. Someone needs to figure out a way where we can turn this around and empower ( I hate this word, but I dont have anything better in my vocab ) employees.
It is even worse: They work for HR departments in those companies, whose primary goal is 1) to produce automated reports and statistics about their “pipeline” so they seem important 2) have an auditable paper trail for legal risk, and a distant 3) hire people.
Ultimately, there are only 2 kinds of companies: owner/majority shareholder operated or manager/minority shareholder operated. Owner operated companies have far quicker and more painless procedures- so you can prioritize those. For manager-run companies, you need to find an inside human recruiter first, before applying.
This is more legwork, but it will ensure that 1) your application is not in vain, a human will take a look 2) none of the pre-calling references 3) might even let you talk to some teams informally.
Many years ago, I posted my resume on a job site to see what my options were. An enterprising recruiter called my current (at the time) workplace asking if they'd need help filling the position I might be leaving.
To make his pitch, he asked to speak to the "hiring manager", which happened to be me. He quickly hung up.
Once he fired a guy for not working on his house...that employee was hired as help desk. Thankfully I passed all my interviews and they called him right after I was almost guaranteed to get the position. Took a few insults from the guy, but haven't heard anything from him since I left thankfully.
Every time someone has a casual "Well, you can just sue them" answer to being wronged, they forget that the court system (at least in the US) is inaccessible unless you're rich and richer than your opponent. If my employer does something wrong to me, like wage theft, fraud, harassment, discrimination, it doesn't matter that I can sue them in theory. In practice, it's me and my $5,000 in life savings vs. 100 corporate attorneys working at a $N billion company who will inundate you with paperwork and motions and procedural tricks. Not to mention, if you sue them, they will fire you in retaliation (which is also probably illegal) and may even go so far as informally blacklisting you in your industry. So you're giving up your time, your life savings, likely going into debt, and giving up your future employability, just to pit your one already over-worked attorney vs. their army. Good luck.
That doesn't mean that suing is easy or cheap, but only that things are way more balanced than your comment makes it look like.
One attorney may be all you need if the evidence is grossly in your favor. No point denying yourself the opportunity, especially if you can afford the consultation fees.
If its a difficult case, then a good lawyer will tell you ahead of time that they don't think they can win and that you probably shouldn't pursue the case. If its borderline, they'll probably accept the case but you gotta pay them.
If its ridiculously easy, they'll take the case for free on their dime / contingency (because they're so confident they're gonna win).
Vis a vi the original question,
"I never said that. Do you have a recording?"
Especially when you get the follow up questions, and find out HR left contemporaneous notes in their HRIS tool, which corroborate the story.
Remember that the standard for a civil suit is not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but “more likely than not”. I really don’t think you’d need a recording to win that case.
Employees with grievances sue companies all the time, because it works for them.
Companies may have lots of money, but that doesn't mean they want to burn it. They'll often settle even frivolous lawsuits because it is cheaper than litigating.
On "slam dunk" cases, some lawyers will work for small retainer and large cut of settlement. You no longer have to spend time chasing. You just supply lawyer with info when requested.
In a case like this, your lawyer would send their lawyer a letter, their lawyer would tell them they’re going to lose, and you’d negotiate a settlement.
Consider that is exactly what bigCorp wants to you to feel. With that in mind, your feeling of daunt is doing exactly what the bigCorp? So do something for yourself and not in bigCorp's favor, and get over it and do what's right.
Trust me I do what I can where I can!
Small claims, yes. District court and above, not always. Winning the case? Even harder. Trying to a get any lawyer on contingency against deeper pockets is not practical 99% of the time.
Suing a major corp with cause though? They’re going to spend $10,000 just to respond. If you have any basis for your suit whatsoever, they’re going to settle. See: almost every patent lawsuit. A corporation’s in-house counsel is there to avoid getting sued. Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly. It’s just not worth it.
I would talk to a lawyer before assuming this kind of thing. In my experience (having tried), I do not.
> Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly.
The retainers are already paid for or insurance covers that. The sentiments (eg inefficacy of David vs Goliath) are built up over common experiences, not simple misunderstandings of how a case is likely to proceed.
Reputation is important! It can be the difference between one company having complete control over your future, and being able to choose to do what you want.
"Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.
The actual answer HR will give you, the magic words are ‘are they eligible for rehire’.
"Trick managers into exposing the company to lawsuits with this one sentence! In-house counsel HATES it!"
In seriousness, answering this question with "no" would quite likely still constitute tortious interference.
Another said "all our records are in a storage shed in another state, so we have no records of anybody". This stopped the background check dead. Until I called that employer "but I still have money in the 401k system!" HR_drone says "why yes you certainly do, have them call me back". The results of which also appeared typed into the background check results.
Heck I don't even update my LinkedIn until a year or more after I move companies. I do update it way before I might want to jump ship again, just like the "Looking for work" flag. My current employer's HR department will get no direct signal that I'm actually looking if I can avoid it. I'd go as far as not using LinkedIn functionality to apply to something. For all I know LinkedIn provides a paid for service to my current employer that notifies them, that I'm interviewing.
Apart from this reference nonsense asked right in the first form - refused of course leading to exclusion by some automation immediately - I met with ability test of rapid finance related calculations - not enought time to complete all and only tests how good I am in finance tests having a non-relaistic idealistic scenario as a context - for an engineering position - which then "will be the baseline for promotion decisions" later. Refused to take the test, then I was refused too. All this after successful engineering interviews and conceptual agreement on particulars (salary, location of work, start date).
Not remembering I got refused and calling me with the same kind of position in couple of weeks, greeting me with "you have experience that fits perfectly" just to offer me something require experience I don't have so obviously not reading the long forms they mandate to fill in down do the last dot, and similar clue and careless aproaches are what I experienced.
There are dozen or (famous in their field) organizations I could discourage people from applying to due to the dumb procedures even on the most elementary level. Frightening what could go on there concerning organization and administrative tasks.
All have very cutting edge approaches to forming a perfect work environment that they consider the utmost importance if you look at their career pages with explosively happy all young and dynamic and diverse and smart and pretty people. They are full of bulls..t and they know that (or hopelessly clueless which is equally frightening).
The only benefit is If they sign I can use customer names instead of generic descriptions (e.g. "large bank" or "telcom provider") and I can show product interfaces.
Personally I thought an optional NDA strikes a good balance, but I've been surprised at how many candidates just sign NDAs automatically. We communicate that it otherwise has no bearing on their application but I suspect some believe that it'll increase their odds.
Enforcing an NDA is more difficult then a lot of people think. If you have a legal department you can threaten to sue an individual for anything including breach of an NDA and in that sense it can be effective. But the only times an NDA has been enforced in my working experience is when there is real theft of intellectual property and you don't need an NDA to prevail in that situation.
https://www.acc.com/resource-library/issues-enforcing-nondis...
</devils-advocate>
Eventually I got a call about my friend, and I discussed my friend and my experience working with him. But at some point the caller asked me about myself, and if I was interested in other positions.
This turned out to be a recruiter (who was placing my friend), but he was not interested in my friend - he recruiting from the reference list.
ugh.
I understand that finding people who do what I do is hard, but that scenario made me sick to my stomach.
Not only that, but the terrible Taleo software consistently fails to import a CV without completely failing to parse it and leaving you to manual update what was imported.
There's got to be a smarter way.
https://jsonresume.org/schema/
But nobody uses them, because nobody uses them. LinkedIn and other proprietary recruitment services like TeamTailor want to keep all the details locked in - there's no advantage to them to allow you to mass import/export candidate details.
That said, why doesn't LinkedIn throw its weight behind this? In that context, it would make sense to have and maintain my CV there. With some sort of authorization confirmation that would let a 3rd party import it into their system?
As fun as it is to rip on recipe blog it's really nice how standardized they've gotten so your plugins can yoink them easily.
why should you have to pay? They're the ones that want it.
I've (literally) employed people who were working 3 jobs without any of the other employers knowing about one another. We were being scammed. This happened not just once, but with 2 people (1 full stack engineer who is a HN regular, and another was an account manager).
This was at a 15 person company, and 2 out of the 15 were working multiple full-time W-2 jobs all with full time benefits. At the end they were both let go once we discovered the deception (their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)
After this, we heavily beefed up our pre-employment screening, which is all of what this person is complaining about.
Unfortunately there are people in the job market who scam companies. To find and weed these people out before they make it in the door, we need to do things like verify your degree (even if it was 20 years ago) not because we care whether you have a degree, but as a test to see if you were truthful on your resume.
Edit: Also, if anyone requests reference checks from your current employer, you should say no. It's not standard practice to check current employer, only prior employers (at least in the US).
If they are not delivering, other jobs are irrelevant, they aren’t meeting the bar.
Look up the overemployed subreddit.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
One thing that is REALLY helpful when supervising highly complex operations like a large corporation is knowledge of how similar operations are run at a large number of other companies
It makes it easier to identify things like pointless ‘not invented here’ syndrome, or where a company is being very inefficient in an area because they don’t know of any alternatives.
It’s common for companies to hire in outside consulting firms or independent contractors who also work for a great many companies in an industry for the exact same reason. It’s a way of keeping on top of what the industry norms are so the company doesn’t fall behind and lose competitiveness.
Plenty of pros and cons there, but that is a big part of why.
The other reason is the board of directors works for the shareholders, and represents their interests.
Institutional shareholders hold shares in a lot of different companies, and if they have someone they know , trust, and are happy with performance wise, most would prefer to have them on the boards of as many companies as they think they have the expertise to oversee.
That’s pretty much never what happens though if someone does it when applying for a full time salary position, and line managers know it, which is why you see people get worked up about it. People doing it try to convince themselves it’s not a scam, but it almost always is.
The folks doing this on boards, despite any hate and derision they are getting here, are often exceptionally talented, educated, and have a long list of references where they have been doing it before successfully. They were voted in with full visibility to their other board memberships, and while being open about it and any potential conflicts of interest. They’re just not software engineers. I have yet to meet one that didn’t work their asses off either, just not in the way you might recognize.
There can be (and is, of course) nepotism, cronyism, etc. that happens, same as anywhere, and the shareholders who vote that in get what they deserve as well in my experience. Sometimes it’s also as simple as ‘x owns this company, and wants y to takeover when they’re gone, so y sits on the board.’. Rare in public or widely held companies though.
Ownership has it’s privileges, and it’s costs after all.
Just because something is the status quo and it is happening without mass protests, doesn’t mean people are agreeing to it.
Too fucking bad they don't "like it". I don't give one bit of care to the centimillionaire and up club.
Oddly, that's the second time I've used that word today: talking about Rishi Sunak earlier.
If that's not "stealing" but regular people actually working multiple jobs with actual deliverables in a way you couldn't even tell is,
then "stealing" is good and I will help as many to do it as possible, especially from the HN poster companies coming out and countersignaling it so hard.
I've worked a full time w/ benefits job and freelanced on the side. The only aspect of that I would feel that would be unethical is if I were to mix IP from the firms that should remain private.
Otherwise, who the hell cares. If I'm doing task work and meeting expectations then I'm holding up my end of the bargain. I'm not a slave and my work does not own me. Standing around the proverbial water cooler wasting company time is acceptable, but doing something productive during my downtime is not?
If the people are actually delivering equivalently to other employees then there's no need to worry if they're working one or two extra jobs.
It's my job to balance the workload such that they have enough work to make it worth it for me to employ them, and increase that workload where bearable so I can make more profit from their employment. If they are not underperforming and still doing two jobs, then I have failed my task because I have not effectively exploited their abilities for profit.
Ever had a medical claim by your over employed staff? Which insurance pays?
Do you pay for training?
In case of intellectual property theft from you or the other company, do you know what are your obligations? (Receiving company is can held liable.)
What amount of taxes do you withhold? What are the penalties for withholding significantly wrong taxes in your jurisdiction?
Of course you pay for training, why wouldn't you?
Working for competing companies is even more stupid than being overinsured, and could potentially be illegal (for the employee). And rightfully so.
Company withholdings don't change so this is not your concern.
1. The employee's insurance pays; in the US, they pay at least part of their insurance costs so it is unlikely for them to be covered by two services. If so, they can choose. If they were injured on the job, or in some capacity based on your work, then how is it different? Actually, how is this situation different from them purchasing outside insurance or being covered by their spouse? It's unlikely to be a problem and if it is it's not unique.
2. Sure, why not?
3. What does this have to do with them having multiple jobs? If they steal your intellectual property, that's a problem whether or not they are employed elsewhere. How does double employment compound this? If you hired someone from another job and they brought stolen property with them, is that different?
4. They are responsible for letting you know how much to deduct. You can do standard mandatory deductions based on expected salary and as long as you pay the required employment taxes based on the salary you pay them there isn't a difference in withholding on your end, only on theirs. If they owe more in tax, what do you care?
It's not like that. Since work is a market, you exchange a previously agreed amount of money for a previously agreed amount of work and knowledge.
Otherwise, the employees can also say they failed at their task if they wouldn't determine you to part with a large sum while putting in the minimum possible amount of work and working two jobs minimum.
That coin has two sides.
I have no idea why they would want to work two jobs minimum as a part of their task at my job specifically, but yes, part of being an employee is understanding how much money you can get paid in a negotiation with your employer and getting that amount is a success.
How does have more than 1 job change this logic?
If you can get the job done then I don't see why it matters, and if you can't I don't see why it matters if you can't and you only have 1 job or you can't and you have 2?
Especially since rescinded offers have suddenly become acceptable, I think most people going forward should at least have the two jobs overlap by 2 weeks.
Meeting productivity targets is an important aspect of your job, but so is being available during business hours, meetings/collaborations, etc.
Moonlighting is working another job outside of business hours - which I agree, employers have less of a right to object to.
This paternalistic bullshit will be the downfall of companies who care more about micromanaging and controlling their underpaid employees than they do about actually delivering something to the market. If someone isn't producing, fire them. If someone is only being given 10 hours a week of work, and they have enough free time to get another W2 job and earn another full-time salary, that's 100% a company/management problem.
If you want to get paid by the hour or unit rate, be a consultant.
To a certain point I agree with you, but how much an employee actually outputs is a constant negotiation between the business and the employee - this is where expectation comes into play.
If you are performing beyond the baseline, you can negotiate to be compensated for exceeding it, or you can take a break.
There is no expectation that an employee should perform more work "for free" just because they can.
I believe in fairness between both sides - there is no free lunch in either direction.
This position collapses the first time someone's boss asks about workload and the employee has to lie or admit they have tons of free time.
Im sure there are unicorn cases where employees are never asked how long a task will take, or about their bandwidth for new tasks. However, in reality, the vast majority of situations require constant deception.
Most of the time the lying starts at the beginning with false employment history.
Most employment contracts, even for salaried workers, list things such as "37.5hrs per week".
If this is the understanding, and you aren't working diligently for those hours, you're a thief and fraudster, a scam artist, and should be fired.
If you get done a task early, ask for more work!
The attitude of people in this thread is laughable. People in this field are some of the most privileged, well paid members of our society.
To hear such persons moan and bleet over their lot is laughable. Grow up people. Just disgusting.
I don't know if anyone was advocating for going as far as you're suggesting (break doesn't mean paid vacation) - merely pointing out that an employee is granted the right to negotiate their labor at any point. If they get declined, that's fine. But the idea that you are a literal slave for 37.5 hours regardless of your capability is very flawed and you'll never convince the person that actually creates value of that.
The funny part for me is that I have grown up - I used to share your position but time and time again I was proved wrong, so I changed my mind.
There is zero defense for this. None.
There is no way to work 22.5 hrs per day, 5 days a week, and not be a thief, a crook, scum.
This is who you have aligned yourself with. This is the behaviour you have defended.
Into this conversation walked the spoiled, the entitled, the scam artist. People advocated working multiple full time jobs, and equated doing normal work as "slavery".
Above, you do so again. You liken working diligently, to slavery. Good grief.
Working beyond explicitly assigned tasks is not "performing more work for free". It's doing your job.
That's funny because if I hire a company to do some work on my house, they do strictly the tasks assigned and even try to charge me more than agreed. They don't try to make my house better.
The right analogy is you hire a full-time handyman (whatever go with it), and you come home to find them on your couch in the middle of the day, their excuse is I fixed the dishwasher, and your response is likely to be “I’m not paying you to sit on the couch, go change the ac filters, fix the garage door, and re-seal the deck”
If you want people to work beyond the bounds of their contract, then renegotiate the contract.
Without it being in the terms, it's not a duty you have to fulfill. It's not deceptive not to do favors for your supervisor.
Most people won't lie about it when they turn it in on Friday, they'll just turn it in when it is due and not explain. Why turn it in early if there is no reward for doing so other than more work?
As I've said elsewhere, this is a management problem, not an employee problem. As a manager I made sure people knew that there was a path to promotion, to advance within the corporation. I checked and tracked their progress and their work, and worked myself to make an environment where contributions were noted and rewarded. If a company or manager doesn't do that, they won't have people outperforming the base expectations for long, and they don't deserve to.
In a hypothetical case where someone only has 10 hours of stuff to do a week, I'm sympathetic, I'd be pretty bored by that too. But when I see a SWE describe a scenario like that, most of the time they end up meaning that they have 10 hours of coding tasks a week, because they don't consider anything else to be a real part of their job.
On the other hand, speaking of "delivering," companies like Amazon and UPS have figured it out. Amazon wouldn't care if you were working a second job, because they know your output down to the nearest Joule at any given moment.
Wow. That's...astounding. If you're such a poor manager that....managing...is too hard. Perhaps you should go back to IC work.
Employees don't have to be continuously monitored to see if they're doing work, that's how you wind up with spyware and butts in seats mentality. Are they checking in their work? Are they completing their stories on time? Are they getting near the average number of story points done in a sprint? If so, leave them the fuck alone.
Story points are supposed to be a proxy for amount of work required, seems reasonable to track that. It's not like I'm saying you should be measured by the lines of code you add or something arbitrary.
So yes the kind of process that plans everything in two week sprints and tracks tasks lasting maybe just a few hours each via daily meetings is micromanagement. That's what it's called when managers are so incapable of setting a clear direction and then trusting their people to get the job done that they have to check up on progress several times every day and constantly meddle with the real work.
It's mostly for planning, though.
What the hell else are you even doing that you don’t have time to ensure your employees are doing their job? You’re really not that busy.
You won't be able to do that for knowledge work, and you'll end up using proxies like butt-in-chair time or jira-tickets-closed which are easy to game and push away the actually competent workers that have outside options.
Just do your job as a manager.
As for reference checks: If a reference is on a resume that I've been handed by a candidate or that candidate's agent I check it. Glowing references really highly correlate with job enthusiasm and honestly most developers don't list them anyway, so even having one that's positive without being glowing is a good signal.
Anecdotally, there is slight correlation between university prestige and interview performance. But not enough to toss lower tier university graduates - if their resume is otherwise strong, they're worth interviewing regardless of school.
The strongest signal I have as a hiring manager is a successful internship/co-op. If the candidate worked on interesting projects and can discuss the tech stack and business problem being solved, they're likely to be a good hire.
The few collegiate athletes I've hired have also been top-notch. But not enough of them to claim correlation. Would be interesting to see if there's a real correlation there.
The main complaints I've heard about the prestigious institution hires are:
1) They tend to excel well when given a problem that can be solved with a rather templated approach, but tend to struggle more with poorly defined problems
2) They tend to have higher turnover, with the speculation that they jump ship as soon as a perceived higher status opportunity arises. Meaning, they start a lot of projects but don't see them to completion
I don't know if I've had enough experience with the differing groups to draw strong conclusions one way or another.
OP is okay with employment verification, but it should wait until after the offer is signed. Any offer will be pulled back if the job seeker lied about their job history
If you move a judgement call of that kind to after the offer stage, then the offer letter becomes a lot less meaningful.
That may be true, but if a potential employer gets current employer references before any offer is made, the candidate is at serious risk of unemployment (let go and no offer to replace it), or an uncomfortable change in relationships at the old job. The risk to the candidate is high.
Besides, many offers are lowball without much room for negotiation. Why would a candidate take the risk, not even knowing if there's a good enough offer contingent on the reference?
If a potential employer asked for a current-employer reference from me before making any offer, I would terminate the process even if I expect a great reference, because it shows the employer doesn't care about (or doesn't think about) the fundamentals from an employee's perspective, and that is a big clue that it's likely to be an awful place to work in other ways.
A good employer doesn't act as if employer and employee are in equal positions with the same to lose. I've been jerked around by too many employers and potential ones who don't care about effect on their employees, sometimes at large financial cost to myself, so these days I'd just drop the company if they seem oblivious to how things affect the candidate. There are plenty of good ones who also pay well, and those are also the ones I'd rather help succeed.
If it's just about the amount of the offer or level of the position, they always have the option to revise it up after they get a reference they like.
At least in the US such reference checks are impossible these days. To avoid litigation any serious company is going to:
a.) have the call directed to an HR rep rather than the manager or any other employees
b.) the HR rep will only verify title and dates of employment.
I haven't heard of anyone doing the type of reference check you're describing since the very early 2000s.
OP mentioned having to bring a diploma, and to me that does indeed seem ridiculous.
In the USA, the National Student Clearinghouse [1] provides degree verification that is the standard. It is much more reliable than someone showing a piece of paper.
How do I know this? The hire who lied about graduating also produced a falsified diploma, which blew me away. I confirmed it was false because when I checked with the university in question, they pointed out some things that confirmed although it was similar, they never would have issued one like this. (And the registrar confirmed this person did indeed never graduate)
It’s rarely prosecuted outside of high profile cases though.
So employers beware and all.
Were there any problems with their performance? I mean, why do you care about their diploma if they were able to pass interview and then perform on the job afterwards?
I do agree that outright fabricating credentials is a worse lie, but the job market and interview process is morally corrosive by nature.
The honest and most common answer "I want more money" makes you look greedy and you had to come up with a more acceptable excuse, Like "Your product is very interesting", "I'm "Looking for new challenges".
kind of like the initial steps of dating where you kind of know what the other is up to but you don't talk about it until you had evaluated each other and decided that "yeah I want to be your girlfriend" or "yeah I want to hire you" and then you finally can take your mask off and talk with honesty.
Monkey brain fault, I guess
These are just normal human things. Like for e.g. How to give negative feedback to a direct report, while not discouraging them to keep trying harder and motivating them. You need to have tact and be strategic in how you approach that conversation.
The common retort "Well I just want it straight without sugar coating, corporate speak sucks!" doesn't address that not everyone is the same, and you need to apply a layer of human sensitivity to certain types of conversations. The more you know someone the more you will be familiar with their mental state, and the more freely you can say things without this 'emotional handshake'.
I'd argue this is about story telling capability. Telling a story well, is an art. Chances are you've seen a number of stand up comics tell an otherwise factually boring story - but somehow made it hilarious. This is why there is the "they were so funny when they said 'foobar'....guess you had to be there."
The problem here though is now your interview process is evaluating stroytelling skills rather than job skills per se - well unless you're looking to hire a good storyteller. On the other hand, interpersonal communication is important...
What kind of opportunity are we talking?
I think it highly depends on the circumstances. Job performance and lying to gain entry don't necessarily correlate. The "dishonest for personal gain" argument goes out the window in this profit-driven world. If anything, it's encouraged with the precedence already being set by the employer market itself. Employers will cheat candidates out of whatever they can get away with; that's the norm not the exception.
If a candidate has more work experience than their would-be college educated peers, you've effectively shut out a valuable asset for no good reason. Maybe they've assessed the position and determined it's an arbitrary barrier for getting hired, but honesty would be far too risky. If they passed your interview, then either your education requirement is unnecessary or your interview process sucks and you're allowing bad candidates in regardless. Maybe this trait of fabricating education credentials means they're actually resourceful and understand risk assessment?
FWIW I'm a high school drop out, no degree. I work in FAANG and I'm going on 17+ years of work experience in tech. Lack of degree has never been an issue for me. If I see the requirement there, I still apply and each time the employer has waived it. I'm just playing devils advocate here.
The opt-out process for the site is detailed here: https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/privacy-policy/
Crtl+F for 'opt-out" and you can find the email address there and other information.
> Most college registrars will confirm dates of attendance and graduation, as well as degrees awarded and majors, upon request
And for the National Student Clearinghouse, you do need a person's name, school, and date of birth. Although date of birth might not be wildly difficult to get, it is an extra piece of info that won't surface if finding someone's name randomly on the internet or in a phone book.
The report is very plain - it confirms basically what the FTC quote mentions.
Given that registrars give out that info, are you still concerned? If so, I'm interested in what you would propose as a solution if you are applying to a job and they want to confirm that what you have stated on your resume is true. Perhaps a system like credit scores use where you can lock your credit against being checked, and then unlock it for a short time window?
I'm sure HN can think of all kinds of clever approaches to allowing this, and perhaps the clearinghouse website will indeed change significantly sometime.
I consider the clearinghouse's approach as similar to the insecurity of checking account numbers. Basically, if someone has your name, checking account, and routing number, they can ask a bank for money from your account. As an account holder, I've asked my bank, "Can I tell you to not give money to certain parties from my account?" And their answer was a flat no. I am much more concerned with that, and nothing is changing on that front anytime soon. At least I can move my money somewhere without a checking account, but it's still fairly hard to live without a checking account somewhere.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/avoid-fake-d...
Yes, absolutely. It should not be legal for registrars to be doing that either IMO. I don't generally think that it should be legal to build businesses on the exchange of third party information without the direct consent of the third party in each specific instance.
In times past, perhaps a reasonable approach would have been to fax a photocopy of the alleged degree to the registrar or clearinghouse for pass/fail verification.
These days the individual ought to be able to initiate the registrar or clearinghouse to send a digitally signed document to the company.
The relevance here is many managers have experience with employees who seemed fine in interviews and barely met performance bars (or just flat out didn’t) despite working just one job.
It’s well within their legal rights (and a useful heuristic!) to not hire someone because they’re not comfortable rolling the dice on a candidate being able to meet performance criteria because they’re working multiple jobs. Because working multiple jobs is a lot harder than working one job on pretty much any metric one can think of, and is not a protected class or status.
They’ll also reap any blowback or rewards from doing so, including difficulty finding candidates, or not.
A manager considering it for something like a software dev position would just be hurting themselves, though likely only a little as I doubt ‘candidate wears plaid’ comes up often.
If it was someone hiring for a fashion designer position, or a public facing spokesperson position, plaid could be a huge plus or a huge minus (I’m guessing huge minus as of right now for most), and what the candidate wears and how the they present themselves relative to current fashions and norms is a huge and important element that the hiring manager would be incompetent to not consider.
That said, there are plenty of managers who are pretty incompetent.
You don't. But you never know that for sure. The whole interview process is just gathering data to make an estimate about whether or not the person will successfully perform in the role. Them having another job would be almost the strongest indicator I could imagine that they will not be successful.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many people successfully work multiple jobs.
Or, you can try to guesstimate that by checking with previous employers. Which was the OP's point I guess, or alternatively the OP's point was "I give my employees a 40 hours/week contract, so they can't really have another job (and still perform adequately, or simply they can't depending on the law of the country)"
> Most benefits plans will detail the eligibility requirements to participate in the plan, including employee classification (full-time, part-time, regular, temporary, etc.) and/or numbers of hours worked per week or month. Once these classifications change for a covered employee, his or her eligibility will need to be reassessed.
> Short-term, temporary changes usually will not change an employee classification. For example, if a full-time employee goes on vacation for three weeks, most employers would not change the employee's full-time status. However, if an employee reduces his or her hours during the school year to accommodate his or her class schedule, employers may want to reclassify the employee to part time due to the length of the arrangement. It boils down to how the employer defines the classifications and how they are used in the eligibility requirements of each plan.
---
Without getting to an attempt to measure productivity...
The nightmare scenario for HR in this situation is to have someone who is a full time worker and getting full time benefits is found to be splitting their time between two or more companies in a way practically means that they couldn't be working the necessary number of hours to be eligible for benefits at the company.
Having an insurance company or similar decides that your employee isn't eligible for the benefits that you claim they are and ask for an audit of employee time now and going forward, this gets into the "this is gonna suck" category.
There are also issues of IP assignment where one (or both) companies make claims to the inventions that were produced "during work hours" at the other company.
An employee lying on their W-4 about having multiple jobs can create a lot of legal and bureaucratic overhead.
That employee also likely assigned all IP they created during work hours to two companies.
That's not to say that some employers wouldn't be OK with it, just that it tends to be thrown in by the lawyers because why not.
Non-competes are illegal or unenforceable in the following US states: California, North Dakota, the District of Columbia, Oklahoma, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Also, if a company asks you to sign one, you can say no. I always do.
For example, in California, you can't ban someone from working for a competitor after leaving.
You absolutely can ban them from working for a competitor at the same time.
How?
California offers protection for "lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises."
Note that it specifies "nonworking hours". There is also an exemption for working for a competitor.
https://www.mossbollinger.com/blog/2020/december/my-employer...
My employer can also ban me from stealing money or tools. If they discover it, they can legally fire me.
You stated that non-competes are illegal. This is incorrect in the context of moonlighting with competitors or concurrent employment (with anyone during working hours). Those types of non-competes are completely legal.
I expect we will see a rise in the number of contracts that explicitly state no other employment during business hours.
Non-compete in this context means post-facto (forward-looking) non-competes.
That is the letter of the law, but that has not been the interpretation (re: a 2020 appellate ruling mentions this)
https://calawyers.org/business-law/california-appellate-cour...
I also happen to know that ND non-competes are enforceable in a limited fashion.
1 - you are a manager.
2 - you are selling a company.
If you are a coder or regular employee, then no, the non-competes are not worth the paper they are printed on.
> The Jimmy John’s agreement prohibited employees during their employment and for two years afterward from working at any other business that sells “submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita, and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches” within 2 miles of any Jimmy John’s shop in the United States, according to Madigan’s lawsuit. An agreement in effect from 2007 to 2012 extended that to 3 miles.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jimmyjohns-settlement/jim...
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet...
They were being sued in IL & NY by the states' attorneys general over the issue.
I fail to see how verifying decades-old degrees would have prevented this.
Or did you get pissy because you didn't have a person's livelihood to hold over them to make dance to your song?
You know, we could get people recruited on a double/triple and take an ongoing %, to monetize his crying.
If that employee does all of their work for you, why does it matter if they work another job? Are they underperforming? I'm sorry, but I don't see how that is a scam. In retail, people work multiple jobs all the time. Why is it suddenly unethical the moment it turns into an office job?
>(their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)
It's only unethical if you're not in the ruling class. If you're an executive, it's perfectly fine to sit on the board of multiple companies simultaneously (each one paying you $50,000+ per year).
Unless you are somehow working them in totally offset hours, or you have _literally_ zero meetings and work in a completely asynchronous environment, then you need to disclose.
But that's not true for an overwhelmingly large number of people. You aren't just being paid for output, you are also being paid for time.
Ethically though, I don't feel this way at all. They're paying for my output not my time. I don't get paid overtime when I work extra nor do I get credit for working on the weekend.
I don't think I'll convince you but I guess I would say you don't owe your employer your life. They'll cut you off when it's to their benefit and it's best you do what's best for you.
Even just a tiny bit of effort in the application process does miracles to filter out people who do not really want to work for your company. Because sending hundreds or even thousands job applications requires you to optimise your efforts and reject possible employers who would require you to spend total of one day in the process.
On the other hand if found the company you would like to work for, you researched the position, you have realistic demands, spending that time is just an investment in getting the job you really want. For example, when I interview I take a day off so that I am rested, fresh and with my head reasonably empty of the projects I am currently running so that I can present my best on the interview.
If a company has that little respect for my time to make me jump through all of these bureaucratic hoops, seemingly to prove I can tolerate mindless nonsense, I don't want to work for them.
Yup, all my data is on linkedin, then I click apply, and I get taken to a whole other website? And no way to fill in from linkedin?
Clearly corp x cares little about my time.
And for what? Why? Is 'Apply with linkedin" that bad?!
Here's the truth, top talent? Corps need to do the work. Not us.
I am sorry this is the way you see it.
Have you ever tried figuring out where you would like to work, researching the company, be excellently prepared for the interview and working them to get the best terms?
Trust me, it is easier than ever and I have been a long time on the job market. Right now, trying to put ANY effort will immediately put you in front of other candidates because 99% of candidates, frankly, are too lazy for barest effort on their part. Which this entire comment section is an excellent example of.
'candidates, frankly, are too lazy for the barest effort'.
If you join the company, there will be a lot of things that will not work perfectly and yet you will be asked to do things anyway. Everything is in constant flux at any startup because of growth and at large companies things are broken because of entrenched mistakes.
If everything works perfectly it means the company obsesses over its internal processes to the point of ignoring everything else. Which is also a problem.
There exists no company that is in a state of change where everything works perfectly. And every non trivial company is always in a state of change.
If you can't get over one broken form you simply aren't cut for the job.
Unless you do something truly groundbreaking or contributing to a cause I deeply care, which makes me to want to really work there, I will just go to the next company where will be a lot of things that also not work perfectly, but I don't have to jump through these hoops.
I guess the good people will just have to go work for one of the 20 other companies who will hire them based on a personal introduction and a couple of reasonable interviews instead then.
Two of the most reliable indicators I have ever found for places I wouldn't want to work are employers who think they're special and only want to hire true believers who agree and employers whose HR and/or legal teams manage to create so much unnecessary friction in the recruitment process alone that it's actively difficult to work with them even if the people doing the useful work there would want to make the hire. These behaviours seem to be quite accurate predictors of poor working environments for those who do get hired in the end.
One of the reasons I got fed up of being someone else's employee and shifted towards B2B and entrepreneurialism was exactly that the above strategy wasn't really working even back then. If it's a direct approach without a personal introduction there's too much randomness to justify jumping through a lot of hoops in a recruitment process even if in fact there would be a great fit and everyone would be happy if they ended up working together.
With the kind of market we've had in the tech industry for at least a decade now it doesn't make sense for good candidates to spend too much time on potential employers who make it too difficult to work with them. Maybe that will change again if the growing economic problems persist for more than a year or two but I'm a long way from placing that bet right now.
Setting up a spam magnet just attracts spam, not the “candidates with the most opportunities.”
I think this may be more a consequence of blasting out numerous applications, than the cause of having to do so.
Every job I've gotten in the past 20 years has been a) the company I was targeting to work for, and b) the result of a targeted, careful, and studious effort to get in there.
I just wanted to add to anyone: make sure you actually understand who was the employer and give an opportunity to address the potential lie.
Sometimes people (in a rush to read the cv) assume that a contract position, for instance, was a permanent role and similar mistakes (even when clearly specified in the cv) and these checks might make people drop out of the process unfairly, without recourse.
Question for you: One of the previous companies I worked for changed their name after I left. The company is still searchable under the old name. Should I list the new name, or old name on the resume? I feel like it's not really my problem, but also is my problem, you know? It's a weird thing. I'm not sure how common of a problem this is.
Vice President of Red Lectroids
For example: EMC (now Dell)
> After this, we heavily beefed up our pre-employment screening, which is all of what this person is complaining about.
So practices were already in place to detect and correct this.
That makes it quite foolish to distrust all applicants across the board, and make their experience worse, when performance tracking and correction was already a solved problem.
That said, making the process worse for your good candidates is a horrible solution.
I feel for that employer, but making the application process more onerous would be a red flag for me, as a candidate.
They are going to potentially hurt themselves if not careful.
We've had several instances of foreign contracting companies forging identities and using paid actors (who sound and act American) in order to get into our company. Not only do these scams seem somewhat common they are also a massive security risk. We usually find out quickly because there is almost always an inconsistency in their employment history.
Your process is like everybody elses:
1. automated resume screen hunting for keywords 2. HR human review 3. HR call 4. 3-4 other calls 5. detailed screening 6. offer
If you are doing detailed screening BEFORE interviews, stop right now. It is wasted effort. Nobody else does it that way.
"We just met...You know very little about us...Now give us the personal details of 3 people that you know but we do not. Just trust us..."
WTF? Really?? What kind of fool would go for that?
This is another perfect example of my 1st Law of Hiring:
How you hire is whom you hire.
Full stop
If you can't fill out a 5 minute form to get a job, that's a problem.
I mean, they were so confident in their initial email to me. Were they not actually as amazed as they stated?
So really, as OP put, it's 20-50 5-minute forms that are all exactly the same, so that you might get a single interview. Or you just know someone who works there and skip the whole thing because woo nepotism.
If I pay a man to move boxes from here to there, should I fault him for asking where the pallet jack is? Certainly not! When he was done with that, I had other things which he could be doing for me instead. I'd rather pay one man handsomely, than two adequately. A man who doesn't have a disdain for the inefficiency of the thing is the one I aim to replace.
Hopefully you were joking, but it does seem like over and over you're required to go to the trouble of running little experiments on claims for which there already exist ample evidence in well-documented parts of my life.
Why isn’t LinkedIn providing this info as a glob of structured JSON for pay to the ATS sellers?
Or just offering their own ATS for that matter? They could own the whole process from search (most recruiters just use LinkedIn anyway) to hire, as a springboard for expanding beyond there?
They could go the other way too: fill out the application and it generates a LinkedIn profile for you. When my gf worked there there was a push to expand LinkedIn beyond “professionals” to trades.
I've changed jobs 3 times in about ~10 years and this has happened to me both times. I want to leave my current position but the anxiety of dealing with this again is one of the primary reasons why I haven't started looking yet.
What? I'm in my mid-late 40s and have NEVER been asked for a diploma (in the US). Is this a regional thing? What country are you in?
My friend and I are trying to do this with a matching tool we've been working on lately. You describe what you're looking for (pay, schedule, etc.) and then you only hear about jobs that match your criteria:
If you like the job, you can accept the match, and then you and the employer are introduced.
It's early days still and we have plenty to iron out, but we've started making matches, so please check it out and let Ryan or I know what you think (at team at polyfill dot work).
I get that there's problems these things are trying to solve, but it doesn't seem like it's doing anything to solve them and it's frustrating all the people who aren't the ones you're trying to run off.
Applied online for a role - nothing. Got referred for the same later - instantly hired.
It would be ideal if universities could agree on an ISO standard for an XML document that could be used to emit digitally signed certificates. Also, on another one for transcripts. Then you could simply upload that to your LinkedIn profile and get a verified mark along your credential, you would see something similar like when you click to view an HTTP certificate (e.g. document verified by someuniversity.edu).
One complication would be that university degrees need to be revocable. Digitally-signed documents, I believe, are all irrevocable. So perhaps just a standard XML format (no need for it to be signed). Then a graduate could just share a link like https://certificates.someuniversity.edu/<certificate-id>.xml or something more sophisticated that supports some way of sharing expirable pre-signed URLs (you may not want to share it indefinitely).
https://simplify.jobs/autofill
Our thesis was the same: we want to make the job application process easier for everyone, and to prevent repetitive processes. We're looking to build a common application for jobs, and that starts with making your data work nicely with all ATS!
Its considered the "good jobs" in my area, as in well paid enough to own a house, but every time im tempted to apply and see the logos, and the memories come back, i abort these applications.
Some companies are cesspools and its good to remember that and stay away from them. I also warn others to stay away from them. Some people hack these companies and get the easy life there, which is nice, but for people who actually want to work and not interact with such a culture.. not even as customers, if it can be avoided.
Toxic work culture is a very serious thing. It's both a cause and symptom of a dysfunctional economy and we need to fix it with the same urgency as problems of transport, environment and health (and it relates to all).
Every small company starts out "like a family", full of good intentions, and then ends up in a psychological race to the bottom of naked exploitation, greed and systemetised ignorance.
Modern HR selects primarily for desperation and compliance. Management is essentially an activity of self-preservation. Qualities like duty, loyalty, initiative and industriousness are deemed weaknesses.
There is no way we can build globally competitive and innovative business in this milieu. How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?
This is true for the white collar world - the entire point of which is to put restraints on the actual skilled workers, so they don't start changing the world quicker than psychopaths can adapt. Otherwise the idiots will just drop off the gene pool, and then who's gonna start our wars for us, eh?
>How do you do full hard-reset and reboot on an entire culture?
You ask this rhetorically, as if it's some sort of intractable question, but the 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states, and it sure ain't pretty. Takes about a generation of chaotic violent struggle, give or take. Then, a new local optimum emerges as power inevitably consolidates into the same externality-blind primate hierarchy, "but different".
Sorry if it came over that way. I certainly didn't mean it to sound rhetorical. I'm all about actually changing things.
> 20th century is full of examples of the West "rebooting" the cultures and economies of non-aligned states
And Britain long, long before that. All have been failures, since all were looting presented as benvolent reform and aid. People help themselves, which can generally happen only once the boot is romoved from their faces. So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :)
Maybe de-booting is what we're after?
One cannot impose a culture. But there's no reason it need take "a generation of chaotic violent struggle". That seems a little pessimistic. Historically, "blind primate hierarchies" [1] have civilised themselves rapidly under the right conditions. It would be nice to think we could reason our way into a better place before it comes to the point W. James's "Moral Equivalent of War", as climate change, inevitably brings us to our senses.
[1] Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy? Is not that very perspective part of the problem?
Me too.
Where I am from there is a lot of bullying. All the way.. from small kids and up to the political representatives.
What I am doing (and I do not recommend this btw) is to exit every norm, so I do everything superficial poorly. I never edit anything I write, I just post the first draft, I don't cut my hair, I don't wear shoes, my clothes I've just found, I can't remember when I last bought clothes, I don't own a phone, I don't use any social media. Basically I set myself up for being bullied.
However! I also work on the most important problem; the idea being that the absurdity may wake people up to the idea that maybe it's better to help me (by editing things or contributing things) than it is to bully me when what they are doing is nonsense and what I am doing is necessary... The point is that if you cannot use violence then you've got to use humor and poke fun at the holes in the opponents argument.
The rest is trapping(s).
I thought our individualistic culture was based on the shared understanding that, the more value you provide to others' lives, the more your nonconformities are accepted.
Aint much you can do for your fellows when your hands are in handcuffs though, golden or otherwise, so we better keep up with 'em Joneses and don't dare imagine freedom, or else.
In another recent comment thread, the refusal to use the conveniences of Big Tech was compared to "self-flagellation" - another quaint association with the atrocities of Western religion - while the fact remains that entrusting contemporary connected technology with stewardship over one's social life is the actual self-harmful approach.
However the more nuanced point, something maybe deeper, about society, reminds me of Weil's 'Great Beast'. In a way I'm offering a redemptive hermitdom, and that's why I thought your response was hard to parse (blame me, because my question could either be seen as childishly naive or a handshake from one acolyte to another).
My conception of hermitdom isn't cursed or evil or self-destructive necessarily, and I was poking at the parent commentor a little to see if they might think the same way. Weil is probably hitting at the core of the issue with more resolution that I could ever hope to achieve:
> Relationship breaks its way out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave. The way out is solitude. ... To relate belongs to the solitary spirit. No crowd can conceive relationship: "This is good or bad in relation to..." "in so far as ..." That escapes the crowd. A crowd cannot add things together. One who is above social life returns to it when he wishes; not so one who is below. It is the same with everything.
Honestly? I used to think of it as an edifice of enlightened human thought... HAHAHAHAHA.
>Is not that very perspective part of the problem?
Don't think so. I'm not even sure there is a problem.
>I'm all about actually changing things
Oh, I wish things were different, too. But IMHO all I can possibly ever change are my local circumstances, and even that is not always particularly tractable. Intentionally "changing the world for the better" kinda sounds like a single cell of your body arbitrarily changing the laws of physics under which it operates. (Stretch that metaphor a bit and you get cancerous ideologies. We saw how well that worked...)
The world can evolve, though. Over feedback loops that take generations.
>So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :) Maybe de-booting is what we're after?
Now that's some pretty cool wordplay - the world needs more of that, so you made a positive change right there :) The Butlerian debooting :D
Wherever you look, loyalty is for suckers. Be it as employee, car insurance or cell phone plans. Only the new guy gets respect.
Acquiring competitive market rates and competing in market rates isn't always easy or even reasonable. Sometimes it takes significant effort due to barriers and some of these barriers were erected by companies. Take the modern interview process. Weeks of evening prep time, lots of applications/artificial networking/cold calling/recruiter responding, the time/emotional/ mental energy to step through several hoops, etc. and all this for a chance to compete at a position that probably isn't all that great anyways beyond TC.
I know from personal experience that is is possible for a friendship to survive adverse shocks involving money. But it is difficult, it does change things permanently, and it seems rare that it survives at all.
This is only true if you both dont either have eachother as a priority or act hypocritically in light of that stated value.
Losing $100 to a false friend is a great way to pay your enemies to get lost.
It is easy to make grand declarations. But when ethical considerations are not very clear-cut and you're talking real pain, you really figure out what a friendship is worth.
There is no system-wide hard-reset, not in our lifetimes. There is retreat & regroup, away from the eye of sauron, while the parasite devours the host.
Now it’s looking more and more likely every day.
Especially when the CEO publicly brags about being called the Eye of Sauron by employees, as Mark Zuckerberg did.
This is a great way to put it.
Leave and build lifestyle businesses. Not every business has to be globally competitive. Create more opportunities for freelancers. Basically, there need to be attractive options for employees outside of working at globally competitive companies in order to force the change. After all, from the already existing global businesses' point of view, the current methods are working fine.
So do nothing and ignore it, especially if the person is poor.
easy, hire management consultants
When you have so many mergers/aq. that build de facto monopolies there's no incentive for companies to care about their employees and the emphasis becomes on the image of caring vs actual caring.
As the employee has a small selection of companies to work for and jobs become about bureaucracy and politics instead of actual `work` and there's not much you as employee can do about it.
The companies not caring about customers but pretending to is another story tangential to this one.
One way would be for people to team up and form cooperatives. A cooperative is owned by all the workers and all the workers share the profits and have a saying.
There are good companies out there though. Finding them is difficult though.
IMHO large, corporate-style companies all appear to have read the same manuals on how to organize a company, so, minor variations aside, you know what you're going to get.
Small companies don't hire from the same sources or don't reach critical mass in any departments to start down the track of the larger companies, so your experience there may vary a lot, for good and bad.
I've spent approx. 12 years at large multinational engineering companies and 8 at small/medium size companies. I am now at a good, medium-size one (~150 employees, all told), and unless things change dramatically, this is where I'll have to clean out my office when I retire.
Edit: To elaborate a little, I think the sweet spot where you are quite likely to find a decent experience is in a company which employs at least several tens of people, but no more than a couple hundred.
Why? Because by the time it has reached that size, you will have dedicated people (that is, people allowed to spend time to become good at their niche, rather than being generalists) for most functions.
Still, the company is small enough that most people in the organization at least are familiar to each other, making most interaction more flexible (IMHO) than if you're at a huge corporation where anybody is viewed as an easily replaceable resource.
All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)
Some places I've been have been 'good' by department. People in dept X really ... tolerated things. Pay was decent, but periodic pushes for more 'work' burned out quite a few. But people in dept Y loved their setup. Each dept rated 'the company' relatively differently (not surprising).
Another place was... nice. Good... Pleasant. I was on the tech side - around ~20 people in the tech dept (a little bit of networking, some software dev, some testing, some support, etc). We had around a year of everything just humming. Then a new day to day CEO comes in and 8 people left in 8 months. Out of 20... that's a lot. The new CEO was quite damaging (and, I think he knew that he was having a negative effect, and wanted that for reasons that would only benefit him). Suddenly, that company that was 'good' for years got bad real quick.
Perhaps the 'good' companies are the ones where some larger culture can endure top leadership/personnel changes? Does that ever happen, or is it an inevitability?
Actually, small companies can be even more toxic, because the chance of this toxicity blowing something up is much less, and there may be powerful individuals, who have little to checks and balances.
It seems like at most big companies no one person can really do anything major, it takes 2-5 powerful people; plus there's oversight above them that could theoretically act if the whole team starts going rogue.
I've heard horror stories. Some of my colleagues have had to admit that while everyone may resent HR, you do NOT want to work for a company that does it badly.
"Give an example of how you used Amazon's Leadership Principle, Customer Obsession, in your current position."
"I just did that in the last interview."
"Oh, I just wanted to see if you could extrapolate or give another example."
"But... I just... told you..."
My god that gives me nightmare flashbacks to that horrible process.
Then further down the form they require you to record a video introducing yourself and telling them why they should hire you.
Ended up closing the form right there.
Do these people not realize how annoying their process is and how talented people don’t have to put up with crap like this?
I believe the thinking is: "This is a great filter to ensure we only get great and passionate people!" when the reality is: "This is a great filter to ensure that only desperate or unimaginative people will apply!"
This keeps getting repeated. But honestly these days I can't tell the god damn difference. What is malice, other than incompetent people struggling to survive like anyone else, and paradoxically sticking up for each other through the same repetitive cycle of abuse that prevents them from aspiring to competence?
Functionally, though, your experiences may be very similar on the receiving end of incompetence vs malice.
edit: I want to append this to say: The purpose of the original phrase in my opinion was to encourage cooperation and communication as the solution. In a sufficiently structured corporate environment this solution may be impossible for reasons other than malicious behavior, in which case the statement is without practical value.
I agree that this might have been the original intention, yet the phrase has become a way of virtue signaling and looking down on those who assume malice. IMHO, difference is minuscule, because in many cases consequences are the same.
Malice is a legal, quasi-religious concept. A tiger can also quite actively exploit weaknesses and imbalances for the harm of its prey, yet we don't judge the animal as malicious - because we don't attribute concsiousness to it in the same way we attribute it to humans.
To have "malice", you need "intent", for which you need need "consciousness", in the classical folk understanding of the term: taking "selfhood", "free will", and "adequate theory of mind" as axioms. Whatever the scientific consensus on those, they seem to have little explanatory power in the domain of business. They're also a pretty high bar, so to speak - certainly higher than we give 'em credit for.
If those words really meant what they purported to mean, we'd be functioning in a much more humane economy; but for whatever reason these concepts just don't "stick" to what's really going on in the day-to-day. They're just the wishful thinking of Western humanist authors who were trying to set an example, i.e. mold the world in their own image a little bit.
> Functionally, though, your experiences may be very similar on the receiving end of incompetence vs malice.
Precisely. And since we're just people who just have objectives to accomplish, and our understanding of the consciousness of others takes at best a pragmatic role in pursuing those, our response to others failing us ends up being essentially the same: looking for ways to enforce compliance so that the counterparty delivers.
At the end of the day, "attributing malice" vs. "attributing incompetence" is about saving face - for the counterparty as well as for ourselves. Either way, dedicating effort to saving face detracts from the effort of understanding the problem at hand, which like you said is fundamentally structural.
> A tiger can also quite actively exploit weaknesses and imbalances for the harm of its prey, yet we don't judge the animal as malicious
A tiger is not malicious when it harms prey, because the intent is survival, and it cannot have that without harm. The survival of abusive CEOs and managers does not require harm to be done to anyone, yet they do it (sometimes for no tangible benefit).
> To have "malice", you need "intent"
You need not intend for your actions to be malicious, for them to be. If you are willfully ignorant of malicious consequences of your actions, your actions are still malicious. This is why "I didn't know what I was doing was harming people" defense doesn't fly, not in the legal sense and not in the moral. At some point it is your duty to determine the consequences of your actions, and something being your job is definitely over that threshold.
I think this is almost the same point as parent, albeit slightly askew from that one.
The hint is in your use of the word “willfully” — that is, you know what you are doing will result in harm, and you choose to do it anyway.
A difference is that “intending to harm” may be a differently intractable behavior because it is effectively sadism. That is a tighter reward loop than “pretending it doesn’t harm” which can just be avoidance.
Of course whether or not you can ever learn which of those (if it isn’t both) you’re dealing with is an entirely different matter.
We agree on the tiger, though I do wonder what she would say if she could explain her actions.
No, you _don't know_ the consequences and you don't bother finding out before doing it.
Actually this thought process has been problematic for me. Seeing that everyone is actually incompetent is more dangerous than there being a reason (good, bad or otherwise) for their actions.
While this is true — I would be very surprised if anyone was actively malicious towards their hiring pool — it's not an important distinction when trying to decide which employer to apply for.
Oh I completely agree.
The funny thing is I actively enjoy writing - but I look at the long questionnaire for some otherwise quite attractive companies and sigh, and assume that everything internally is just as clueless and so just pass them by for a company who won't waste my time.
I no longer subscribe to this line of thought after seeing several borderline sociopaths use this very same mental model in order to try and manipulate people into doing their bidding.
As I see it, "intentional failure" is just a euphemism for sabotage.
https://www.theskimm.com/wellness/weaponized-incompetence
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/weaponized-incompeten...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/weaponized-incompetence-women...
Assume this were true. Even if this were the case, this might backfire: "passionate" easily works against a company.
This means that if you filter for passionate people, but reject such passionate candidates, these candidates might passionately work against your company (e.g. tell every friend what a shithole of a company this is etc.).
So, filtering for passionate people in the hiring process (even if it worked) is in my opinion dangerous idea.
I work for John Deere, one of those companies that (where I live) has a lot of loyal customers who teach their children we are the best. Even still the majority of great people I work with just want to work their job and go home. (to avoid burn out we don't allow the passionate to work more than 8 hours very often, so the difference between great; and great and passionate isn't significant)
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Please stop saying this, especially if you have no actual evidence of incompetence. It's the equivalent of clicking your heels together three times because you really, really don't want to live in a world full of casual malice. Wishing doesn't make it so.
Easy. They select for compliance, not skill.
It's considerate of an applicants time by saving them the hassle about price conversation up front. That's for your benefit, not theirs (they lose the "grip" they might otherwise have at price negotiation time due to your sunk cost, which is totally to their benefit). Some applicants know to ask about wage this early, but many don't, so it's equalizing to let anyone opt out pre-pipeline, not just the confident men who've done a billion interviews and know to ask asap.
As for video, that feels like a company trying to supplement a prior process that used to lean a lot on in-person networking and associated soft skills assessment, which is lost in online apply processes. Not everyone feels at ease in networking settings, and so many ppl don't show up to those "meet first" spaces. This is giving the introverts and non-urban ppl a way to enter their pipeline while still requiring those applicants to put some of their personality on the table early on in the filter.
I dunno, I don't get the criticisms in this sub-thread, but I assume commenters have a neurotype that this specifically rubs the wrong way?
Regarding price conversation, salary is always negotiable after an offer is made even when an employer says that it isn't, the applicant just needs to be willing to say no.
He was genuinely confused as to why I wasn't excited by this "opportunity".
Is this true outside of tech? The only application I ever did in finance/accounting that wasn't one of these annoying forms was an IB interview I got through nepotistic networking, nothing to do with my talent.
Jobs that pay well can treat their people worse - though worse treatment is weird. There are places that treat their people well, but because the job is considered unethical by many they have to pay more.
Technically they can.
But on practice, jobs that treat people badly also tend to pay badly.
Despite their (supposedly) knowing that, they put me through all their HR hoops anyway, all the way to a final interview, when the manager I'd have worked for looked across the table at me and said, "So what sort of salary would you have in mind?"
I looked him in the eye, didn't blink, didn't blush. Repeated the figure I'd given up front. The interview was over.
Why the fuck did they bother with all the palaver when they knew they were never going to pay that much. Did they think I'd blink?
Last laugh: I ended up doing a short consulting stint there several years later and took more off them in a couple of weeks than the annual salary they'd failed to meet.
This is still a dream of mine. I'd like to pull this off somehow. The answer is apparently not "Fiverr" or "Upwork".
1. having a network of trusted people you've worked with in the past
2. building some sort of public reputation where people seek you out.
They're not mutually exclusive, but #1 is probably easiest for people already in a job. Go to networking events (covid has muted a lot of this, I know, but it's coming back). Tell people you're looking for consulting work or open to new jobs. Be nice.
Yes, the answer for most people is not fiverr or upwork. I've known a few folks who've done good there, but they're outliers in my network. And even then, the few businesses I've known that have used platforms like that use it as a test ground, and then go direct with someone they click with.
That said, I've never taken a full year salary in 2 weeks. I have taken my own full year salary matching my early earning days from 30 years ago in 2-3 months now.
My favorite one was an employer who low-balled me for a job in NYC. Then he says "I know people who live in Pennsylvania and commute in [read: the wage doesnt have to be sustenance wage in NYC/suburbs, you can just commute to somewhere far away]." suggesting that one can make budgets work if one tries hard enough.
that kind of sums it up - talented people won't apply there as they won't be compensated and they will leave - waste of time.
That's pretty much the point that I stop. As a professional in demand, I'm not going to do data entry for a mere job application. (But, if I see an apply button on some other job board that lets me upload a resume, I'll let the company's HR see my resume and do their own data entry.)
The problem is that hiring companies are treating applicants like a captive audience; and have little empathy for how frustrating their expectations are.
Interviewing for a job, especially a professional job, is always a two-way street. When I apply, it's because I want to know more. Extensive data entry for a job that I'm not sure I want, or that I'll be hired for, is a waste of my precious time.
So even in situations where tailoring is needed, it's still a completely unnecessary step to solicit details that are typically found on a resume.
Prior to becoming a software engineer, I had to tailor my applications just as you pointed out. BUT I ALSO HAD MULTIPLE RESUMES READY for each situation, since writing a new one from scratch--each and every time--would've been a completely pointless use of my precious job-seeking time.
Usually when an employer thinks I could be a fit, they call and we chat and see if it makes sense to continue talking. The resume and job application is just meant to be a signal of "hey I might be interested & qualified in what you're doing" if they can't be bothered to put in any effort, it's probably a sign they won't put any effort into making an enjoyable workplace either.
> You can list the same skills for every job application and eventually find what you want
Not really, actually. Every hiring manager is different, and if you take the time to tailor your application and resume to the hiring manager you do have a higher chance of success.
> and there's about 10 different ways I can spin my experience based on what's being asked in the job listing
Same thing in tech, too.
> I don't WANT to copy & paste my LinkedIn because that's not going to get me the job
Some techies do the same. The reason why it's less common is the critical difference between tech and your space. (At least what I think the critical difference is.) Many people in tech SPAM their resumes, and thus tech hiring managers have to wade through many applications from people who shouldn't even bother applying. The techies who tailor their application end up having to fight the odds that someone just won't look closely enough at the application to call back.
I suspect that the non-profit space has a narrower applicant pool that self-selects better; thus allowing a hiring manager to pay closer attention to each application.
Of course, for the target company itself that is looking for hires the employee in question may well be great but the incentives are not always aligned with that of the hiring company
I've seen forms where they want you to enter your work history including descriptions of all your roles... And then they also ask you to upload your resume.
Recruiters, HR people, etc. mean well but they kind of just put up a lot of hurdles for the best candidates to even get far enough into the process that there's a meaningful interaction. The profile of the best candidate is that 1) they are probably not bored or unemployed 2) they have many options if they want to change their current situations 3) they are unlikely to engage with cold outreach via email or phone. 4) in the rare case they show any interest in your company at all, you should be ready to go and talk business.
They're absolutely trying to filter out the overqualified.
Overqualified candidates will resign the second they see the terrible projects the company contains.
They're looking for the sweet spot of desperation.
You've seen through the fog my friend...
I have seen over qualified people take an entry level job - but it was only offered because they explained they had personal reasons to want to move to the area we were hiring (a non-remote job, though this was pre-covid), and were willing to take a pay cut. As soon as review time came they go a promotion. (At the time we only had entry level positions open, as we had "too many" senior people on the team)
I recently started a new job and interviewed with multiple companies in the process. At the end, I was still interviewing with two companies. One of them put me in a room with two devs who went slightly hard ball on me and seemed to want to try and catch me on not being good enough. The other put me in a room with a member of leadership who wanted to discuss a role he thought would be a good fit for my profile and then have a casual chat about the organization and the challenges.
Both wanted to give me an offer. Guess where I ended up working.
Best candidates will require best money.
Most positions don't need best candidates. For many, even mediocre candidates will do.
But these last two years I did try to look for one, every now and then. All in all, I sent my one-sentence-per-job resume to about 10 companies, which I researched somewhat thoroughly and concluded that can put my skills into use. I know it's not the usual shotgun approach of mailing zillions of companies in hope that one will turn out to be The One, but that's how I work. Friends and family tell me that I should put more into the resume, but I'd rather explain stuff face-to-face. Of course, I don't get there. I'm also very picky (my ethics filter out so many companies, you know, tracking people, advertising, etc..). Anyway, out of those ~10 companies, only 3 got back to me. One of them rejected via email in a matter of hours. The other two had HR call me. One of the two invited me to a face-to-face nontechnical interview with a young manager... not the position I've applied for, but anyway. It was friendly though kinda stuck at why I decided quit some company 7 years ago. She might have also found me clueless, since I didn't have a formulaic conception of software development that she seemed to inquire about. The next day I got an email rejection.
Now, I'm a very technical person, and I'd probably have more success going via a different route, maybe meetups. I'm an introvert, but don't have difficulty opening up to other technical persons. So I'll try that. (No LinkedIn or "networking"... a privacy-conscious introvert).
But anyway, my point is that I projected a high probability of providing good value to these companies after nontrivial amount of research into them and their positions, but it seems they're all drowning in noise so manage to miss my signal. Industry situation is poor.
Luckily I'm keeping to my own projects as well. Some day they may bear financial fruit.
So if we assume that we are going to get a more or less random sample of quality then what you can we screen for? As far as I can tell there's basically only two positive signals we can look for: motivation and agreeableness. So I think that explains why interview processes end up the way they do.
Maybe that's an overly cynical take, but I really just don't think that it's possible to find the "best candidates," so you end up just filtering for what you can control.
"It" is a story of how they won't pay over $x but can't find workers who will show up.
There's likely a historic bias that many people have where historically, a 6%+ unemployment rate made gave people with open positions power; as we've stayed close to full employment for so long, we're due an awakening.
Mix this with the generational retirement of baby boomers, <2 child population control concepts, high costs of childcare /healthcare, and a lack of immigration limit increases in 30 years.
- job descriptions that don’t tell me anything about what the company actually does to make money
- repeating the same question in your application form, sometimes in sequence
- “submit application” buttons that resulted in a server error or 404 (and when pressing back to try again, all your previous info is gone)
- requiring me to generate an account (with an overwrought password complexity requirement), validate my email, log in, and then I can finally upload my resume
- "we don't discriminate" promises followed by way too many questions about gender preferences and vaccination status and diversity pledges
- absurd captchas asking you to identify the “smiling dog” or "plant on a table" or "picture of a living room" through multiple pages
- asinine questions like "tell us why you want to work at (Acme Corp or Bunyon Doctors of America or Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company or whatever)"
It’s all out there and extremely common. If you manage to get to complete the application and get to the interview process, things don't get much better:
- 5 stages of interviews with 11 people over 4 weeks before the committee meets to decide if we want you to pitch us on whether to offer you
- "as a policy we don’t provide feedback" but here’s multiple nagging emails requesting your feedback to help us improve our process (looking at you, Amazon)
- 3-4 weeks between submitting an application and receiving a request for a phone screen
- an endless barrage of “tell me about a time when…” questions
Companies often remark they are desperate for good talent but then invest seemingly nothing in making the process efficient, enjoyable, and succinct.
I get it that they want to automate stuff but how much would an extra employee or two cost to analyse the resumes? The scraping software is also not that cheap.
I guess it also says a lot about the companies itself if the first experience you have with them is using some shitty tool that nobody really wants to use.
just send them to the hiring manager. It is very obvious who doesn't have the skills at all so it takes seconds to reject them.
I suppose you could fake someone with the right skills, but I don't understand how such a scam could make you money so I don't see why anyone would.
Yes, please do. Spotting odd patterns in CVs is a good skill. Even with lots of garbage being funneled my way. The clearly hopeless or flat-out misplaced applications indeed do get rejected in seconds.
For one role I was hiring earlier this year, I noted how a few [recruiter fed] CVs had a striking similarity. Same set of skills in the exact same order. Same wording in the skill descriptions. All coming from the same geographic region. After the third I wrote a remark about the CVs looking either plagiarised or coming off of a weird template. Mentioned the similarity explicitly on the fourth one, with a slightly acidic comment about clearly being a wrong fit for the role.
Never saw a fifth one.
That made me laugh :D
It's funny as a non-american dealing with those kind of things. Onetime I amused myself by checking their definitions: a person from Spain, which speaks Spanish and has a non-white skin is neither Latino or Hispanic; a diabetic is a disabled person.
Since most those questions are optional, I just do not answer them to any of them.
Being in a wheelchair, being blind or having just one arm you're always facing limitations in your life, a diabetic usually just takes medication and is more careful with their diet. So they don't seem comparable to me.
Some diabetics probably have a worse life but overall I don't think it's a disability.
"Tell us why you're passionate about middle-of-the-road paper-pushing" is a favourite. Come on people, I don't think "passionate" means what you think it does.
You're missing out on the perfect opportunity to tell them about your severe head injury and/or paper-pushing fetish...
Tempting, but no.
As an interviewee, I like to ask something like "One of my favorite things at work is when I have a win. Like, something I've been working on launches successfully, or I notice people are using my work months or years later. It makes my day! Can you talk to me about the last time you had something like that at work?" I've had people freeze up for 30+ seconds with this question, which is usually not a good sign.
As an interviewer, I've gotten "why do you like working at {company}?" or "why are you in the data management/marketplace space?" from interviewees. and boy do I love talking about that one. Work isn't my whole life, but I am actually passionate about the stuff I do, so it works out.
I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read this! "Dunder-Mifflin" -- Me thinks: But, do they know it is a Python term (__xyz__)?
I guess this is why websites reinventing recruitment and recruiters exist, although I suspect 'back in the day' when you would circle ads in the newspaper things were better, much better ...
[1] Annecdata collected 2018-2022*
Maybe to have a separate "get more info" is worse for business. At least for me, the opposite it is true. It makes me hesitate to click in the "buy" button just to find more about the product.
When you advertise traditionally you don't get a lot of information back from consumers other than those who start or make a purchase. The more actions you put between discovery and purchase, the more you can refine parts of the process.
There are probably other psychological elements at play as well about gradually introducing information so you can strategically present the better aspects of something before you talk about say an ugly cost.
I used to think that too, until I clicked a similar button on Amazon...
(Yes it expired was contested etc.)
Also, the article is spot on about the tediousness of the online applications. I applied to a position at my kids’ school last year. School websites are awful enough but then they bounce you into a separate portal for the application. And the flow is built around the most complicated job that they might need to hire for. So, to get a job as, say, a p/t middle school soccer coach or night custodian, you have to go through all these steps that really don’t apply. And of course then they moan about how hard it is to fill positions.
Moral of the story (maybe?): Just fill the thing as needed to get through the automatic gate-keeper, then wow them in your cover letter and real uploaded resume. Maybe some - maybe even most - will be pissed off, but you only need one job!
Unless Taleo blocks you centrally and now you cant apply to half the companies in the world.
is anyone ever hired through dumping a resume into those big systems? doesn't seem like a loss.
But nope. In many cases it's a lengthy multi part form with dozens of things to fill in, usually asking for way more information than you'd ever want to give. Like a ton of personal demographic info that has zero relation to the job in question, and feels invasive as all heck. Or instances where you've manually got to fill in your past jobs in some of multi part field that has to be slowly filled in piecemeal rather than being imported from your CV or what not.
And let's not even get into stuff like "please make a video explaining why you want this role" or some of the other ridiculous things I've seen in these applications. Unless you're working as a TV presenter, actor or other showbiz related role, you shouldn't need to do a literal audition.
So usually I'll click an apply link, find a huge form waiting the other side (or some other 'trendy' bullshit), and immediately go back to find something else. I'm not wasting my time on providing some fifty pages of documentation before even getting an interview.
I recently applied to a (completely technical) position which asked me to state my sexual orientation. Who thinks that is not going to be off putting to many people? Even as a boring straight white man, I felt so uncomfortable I closed the application.
What the article seems to be missing is that if an applicant doesn't want to be there enough to spend five minutes and 52 clicks filling out their form, the company knows full well that if that applicant becomes an employee, they're going to stop showing up at the slightest inconvenience and inconvenience their team, leaving them short-staffed again.
This process at this job level is a glorified captcha. Instead of proving you aren't a robot, prove you have at least a tiny interest in getting this job.
The people who can complete it in five minutes are those that have all the information at their fingertips, because they already applied to tens or hundreds of other jobs. The person who has worked for your competitor for 15 years, and is considering making one single application to you will have to do more work.
I think you're gonna have to support that assumption a bit more - job apps (especially ones that can be done in 5 minutes) don't ask for a bunch of data that isn't generally at your fingertips, and your example would make the process even easier - 1 job in 15 years is easy to remember and faster to type than 8 jobs in the same timeframe.
And anybody’s could work for anybody. So if we want to get more than 8% through the filter we’ll have to reduce friction.
I don't mean to be obnoxious, but I genuinely cannot figure out what this sentence means, and without it I can't understand your reply.
They're right to screen out people who don't even care enough to complete an application.
Ours is a very different type of business than Home Depot, but we intentionally put a minor roadblock (a fizzbuzz-level coding problem) in our job application, specifically to filter out those applicants unwilling or unable to put in the slightest effort to apply. (And we see a very similar percentage who don't bother to complete it - at least 90%.) The question is intentionally easy, as we don't want to waste people's time, and it's not fair to ask for much before reciprocating. But it is a fantastic way to eliminate the applicants who are just using the shotgun approach, and get down to those who actually have a clue and a real interest in the position. (Much fairer and more useful than keyword filtering imo too, and can be a good way to start a dialogue.)
So I guess what I'm saying is, maybe this is a feature, not a bug.
For one, when I'm applying for jobs, I'm in a totally different headspace to when I'm programming. It's uncomfortable and takes me out of the zone.
And two, sometimes I apply for jobs on my phone. With a saved resume and autofill from Google it works out really well - but not if there's a coding question.
That said, I do think I'm going to try and simplify the question even further, since I think having anything at all will accomplish the goal, so there's no point making people do any more work than absolutely necessary.
You mentioned a better way in your original comment:
>>> we intentionally put a minor roadblock (a fizzbuzz-level coding problem) in our job application, specifically to filter out those applicants unwilling or unable to put in the slightest effort to apply. (And we see a very similar percentage who don't bother to complete it - at least 90%.) The question is intentionally easy
Use a difficult question, and you'll get a smaller pool of higher-quality applicants.
Why would you need one filter for "qualifications > 1" and a second one for "qualifications > 4" when you could just apply "qualifications > 4"?
If you put a hard programming question as a requirement just to APPLY for a job, I don't think you would get any good candidates at all. It's just not worth the time. When you're applying for a job you have no idea if the company is going to be interested at all, and that's fine, because there are just so many variables involved.
They could have just found someone and not yet taken the ad down. They could be about to receive an application from someone even better than you. They (or their system) might have some inherent bias against you, maybe even accidentally (degree > bootcamp, US college vs Canadian college, etc.).
When you're applying for a job it's just not feasible to go around doing HARD programming questions every time, because for so many reasons out of your control the company might just ignore you. And that's fine, that's for them to decide. But it means doing what you're saying would be a terrible, terrible idea, and actually most likely get the worst candidates who don't have any other options but can find a solution to your problem online.
> They could have just found someone and not yet taken the ad down.
> They could be about to receive an application from someone even better than you.
> They (or their system) might have some inherent bias against you
> When you're applying for a job it's just not feasible to go around doing HARD programming questions every time, because for so many reasons out of your control the company might just ignore you.
> you have no idea if the company is going to be interested at all
Most of those responses are going to candidates the company would never even consider hiring, because the initial filter is so worthless.
I know you're saying it is a minor roadblock, but how do I know that you're not going to ghost my application like most of other companies do? That's why most people will not bother to do your test, not something about you, but the broken system.
To me, they should do at least one solid hour on the phone/vid/in-person technical interview. If OK, then proceed to take-home test.
Of course if I were unemployed and didn’t have other options I’d do it for free…
Offering $100/hour for a take-home problem would signal that they respected my time, which goes a long way.
Specifically, a company can blast out a bajillion take home tests to a bajillion candidates for one position without a care in the world, but for live coding interviews it requires their own employee's time, so they're incentivized to only do it with candidates they're serious about.
Plus, there's the fact that I don't do well in live coding interviews. I get a version of "stage fright" where my mind goes blank and thinking becomes impossible for a bit. I don't experience it anytime on the job, either. Just in interviews.
You don't care whether you have almost no effective chance to actually get a job? Yeah, something tells me you're not being entirely truthful here.
> You don't care whether you have almost no effective chance to actually get a job?
Grug care. Grug can't pass live coding interview. Grug freeze. Grug ask for take home test instead. Grug not care about "perverse incentive." Grug want job.
Perhaps the form should say "do not spend more than 5 minutes on this question", so that people who get stuck don't end waste a long time. It's really just a captcha to filter out people who can't program at all and also don't know to Google for an answer to paste in.
From there we make a shortlist based on those discussions and résumés (and cover letters if present), and move on to a few more involved programming tests, which try to replicate the actual kind of work that would be done here. (Each was taken from actual development or bug fixes we did in the past, then simplified and encapsulated to make a reasonable assignment.) We start with one of these and ask that the applicant pull the assignment repository, create a branch, make some commits as appropriate to solve the problem, and then start a pull request, which we review much like we would an internal code review. We also encourage them to ask questions and share thoughts throughout the process, as they would as a member of the team.
Through all of this the goal is to show both sides what it would be like to actually work together. (As well as to demonstrate to the applicant that we are as invested in this process as they are.)
I'm sure we do lose some good applicants with the initial quick question on the application, but it does serve to filter out essentially all of the really bad applicants, which gives me the freedom to give real attention to those who remain.
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing in regards to the open position at Google. I believe that I would be the perfect candidate for this job and I would like to explain why.
First and foremost, I have a passion for technology and Google is at the forefront of technological innovation. I would love to be a part of a team that is constantly pushing the boundaries and developing new, groundbreaking products.
In addition to my passion for technology, I have a strong educational background. I hold a degree in computer science from a top university and I have consistently achieved excellent grades. My skills and knowledge would make me a valuable asset to the Google team.
Finally, I have a proven track record of success. I have previous experience working in the tech industry and I have a history of meeting or exceeding expectations. I am confident that I would be a high-performing employee at Google.
I believe that I have the skills, knowledge, and experience that would make me a perfect fit for the job at Google. I would love to have the opportunity to discuss my qualifications further and I thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
[My Name]
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing in regards to the job opening at Google. I believe that I have the perfect qualifications for the position and would be an excellent addition to your team.
I have always been extremely intelligent and have a natural knack for computers and technology. I have also always been very good at working with people and have always been able to get along with everyone I meet. I believe that these qualities would make me the perfect candidate for the job.
I am a highly motivated individual and I am sure that I would excel in this position. I am eager to put my skills to use and I am confident that I would be a valuable asset to your company.
Thank you for your time and consideration and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
[Your Name]
Being in a position to be picky it felt great to send him a list of pieces of information I expected from him before I'd consider filling in their form.
So much for worldwide hiring and all-remote.
I don't mind being rejected at all, but it's clear they have absolutely no concept of how much time it takes applicants to submit. The thought of ever going through that again means I'm unlikely to ever re-submit in the future.
I think one of the ten "automated" companies sent an automated email after a year that I might want to check the site for new ads. Lol yeah sure I will, great success last time. They were the one where I had worked for before but in another country (and had multiple good references), and they couldn't be arsed to respond at all (just like all the others with online application forms). Rot in hell.
Got a call the next day, interviews the same week, contract signed the following week.
More often than not, they’d ask for my LinkedIn, which I’d assume would pull in my resume. But no no no, I then had to manually enter all of my past experience. When you have over a decade of relevant experience, this is quite cumbersome.
By the end of each application, I was so irritated that I declined to submit a cover letter to any of them. No one has time for that.
Out of 12 applications, I got 7 flat out rejections and 5 no-responses. I chalk it up to the cover letter, but I’m sticking to my guns on this. Cover letters aren’t useful these days, especially when platforms such as GitHub exists.
Their stance: ain't no one got time for that – unless it's a tiny company. Each of the 5 said they never ever read cover letters, but allowed that truly small startups, who are thus extremely selective, may put some weight into them.
Fresh our of college (or even looking for an internship), or other non-traditional path to a technical job, where you don't have experience and need to convince me you are technical enough to interview. (this also covers people who have large gaps trying to get back into something technical)
Candidates who know they are over qualified and need to explain why they would accept the position anyway, and thus it isn't a waste of our time to interview you for a position that can't pay something reasonable.
Otherwise I read them, but they don't tell me anything. I want to see evidence you have done technical things like the type of things we need someone to do. Your resume should give me a better indication of what you can do because it is what you are doing.
When you get more experience, your experience speaks for itself. (not always a good thing - if you want to change from embedded development to front end for example you will be overlooked even though there is no reason someone cannot make that change quickly)
Depending on the person, the time spent writing a cover letter may be better put to just more applications.
Plus, it’s just kind of dishonest to have a requirement and list it as optional. No offense but that sounds toxic.
Cover letters are a waste of my time.
So how do you filter for that? You cannot make the cover letter required, because as you said yourself, that doesn't signal anything then. Anyone can write a decent cover letter if forced to. So the best way is to make it optional. If you don't get enough people writing cover letters with that strategy, you can still change it and look at applications without cover letter. Or you just use the cover letter as one of many signals in addition to the resume.
I have experience. I am willing to work in exchange for fiat. I look forward to joining the team.
Seriously though, read the fucking resume. I am not here to stroke an hiring manager's corpo boner on how gratified I am for the opportunity to apply to wagery nor will I be conflating my world view on being part of a TEAM. I give you a service, you give me money. We are not friends, we are not family, this is business.
Other issue is companies with a broken captcha. Can't apply without proving you're human, can't prove you're human because their captcha just spins. Wanna refresh? Sure, but you'll have to enter your details again.
In saying that, I find the process better than a couple of years ago. Many companies are able to prefill details like education and employment from LinkedIn. At least it's better than them trying and failing to read your resume automatically.
1. Salary range
2. A short list of “must have” with most items being in the “nice to have”
3. No bullshit form questions, maybe a quick text-only “cover letter” which is ultimately just a Captcha.
And this makes sense, why would I waste my time filing out some asinine personality test or resume re-entry when the pay makes this a non-starter? Being too greedy with your requirements prevents people who would otherwise be qualified for the role from applying in the first place.
A lot of these larger companies have had the luxury of having a high false negative rate but it’s one they are finding they cannot afford any longer.
Unfortunately the high entry bar coupled with the “sink or swim” once your in a company just makes people inflate their résumés and job hop once they get a better offer. We’ve seen it in tech for years and now we’re starting to see it in other industries as well.
I'm currently looking for employment and find this frustrating.
In return for me spending 10-15 mins filling out their personality test, i get nothing? At least give me the results or something for my time?
is there a legal restriction? i'd pay $5 to a company when applying to an actually interesting position if they promised i'd get a non-form letter from a human back about my application, good or bad.
> It makes new grad applications slightly better than a random lottery
Your second assertion indicates that your first may not be true...
Even new college grads know people, have been through internships, and have the ability to research jobs and companies to find a better way in. Do that.
Ever been to a trade show? In a tight job market it's not uncommon for a good chunk of the attendees to be carrying CVs and asking about jobs. I used to roll my eyes at that, but now I see it as a go-getter getting-their-go-on, and if I were hiring for what they're looking for, I'd shepherd their app though the process and ensure they made it to the post-screen interview stage.
That's just one example of how to do it - there are tons of others. The point is that straight out of college, your job is getting a job. Spend 40 hours/week on it. Work hard. Try new things. Learn what works and what doesn't (pro-tip - every time you make it past the first stage, ask someone how you got there!). The people that do this are going to go farther than the people who shotgun 500 job applications then give up.
1st time: "after the initial HR screening and meeting with Dept head, you will have 4 interviews with 4 of our engineers" (expressvpn)
2nd time: "please tick to confirm your data being shared for the purpose of automated application processing" (crossover)
F!#k this job market.
Jumping through hoops during the process has also left a sour taste in my mouth.Even after spending hours on an application, cover letter, customizing my CV, often no response comes. Even a form letter would be better than nothing! It feels like I'm sending a part of myself into the void.
Would you rather they use your data without your consent?
4 interviews sounds reasonable, and also useful for you to meet the team
1) Quick phone chat 2) Technical interview - Either review or carry out technical test. 3) Team interview
Even then the team and technical interviews can be doubled up and the phone chat can easily be cut out entirely.
I'm not saying the in-person experience was superior or inferior to how it is now, but it was considerate of everybody's time.
Add in a couple of convos with the internal recruiter and the negotiation session, and I was still under 3 hours over the course of a week or 2. Completely not unreasonable..
the wording was different, it was meant as we will filter your application automatically based on the data you provide, are you ok with that y/n
1. Some application processes ask me to upload my resume and then want me to manually enter it again in a series of web forms. I'm not interested in spending 30+ minutes manually copying and pasting the resume I just uploaded. I figure that lack of common sense is systemic in the company, so I don't want to work there.
2. Some companies use third-party services, like icimi.com. If I submit two or three resumes through these third-party services and fail to receive a response, I never apply for other companies that use these same services.
They probably want you to fill that so they can query that data easier
Meanwhile still have access to original CV
Workday! If the "Apply Here" button takes me to a Workday link, that's my off-ramp.
I have no idea how Workday is so ubiquitous when its user experience and aesthetic is so terrible.
Every job i have applied for requires i create a new account on [abc].myworkday.com. this just seems incredibly STUPID?
Employers, out of laziness and entitlement, have pushed away all responsibility and effort in hiring, which fell on to lazy, entitled and incompetent "human resource" specialists, who then outsource to applicant tracking systems that have not changed much since the 90s.
Predictably, employers complain that the candidates are lazy entitled when they have difficulty hiring.
On the other hand the initial step in software development job application (my current profession) typically seems a lot smoother, though of course then they are followed up by more technical steps (which generally makes sense).
I do see start ups here in London who try to make the process smoother. I do not know how successful they are.
To limit the number of applicants; like you said, menial and low paid, so having people go through hurdles to apply makes them more motivated than shotgun applicants - and reduces the amount of applications HR has to sift through.
One suspicion I have is perhaps the people in hiring whether consciously or not believe making the process more difficult improves the signal to noise ratio of applicants. Makes sense when there are 10+ applicants for each open position I think. They don't care about the people they are turning away.
One should generally prefer criminal gangs elected according to social contract, since they are basically "our* criminal gang.
As for moral relativism - not so much. There's enough consensus for judiciaries and criminologists to define objective criminal behaviours. I think you mean that we exercise more or less tolerance of the criminal behaviour of certain groups.
> What I have noticed is that the more menial, low paid and generally low desirable a job is, the higher that initial barrier is. I suspect it is to at least some extend intentional, though I struggle to understand why that is.
It's down to scale. Low paid work has historically had more applicants than positions. Poor conditions resulting in lots of turnover aid in that also.
It's fairly simple to find work in a small restaurant by walking in or knowing someone already there. Even if the owner/manager treats you poorly there's still a social connection.
Large companies have no social connection with their workers. They adopt language intended to dehumanise. Take "person/worker/employee" being replaced by "resource" as an example. Resources don't have feelings or families. That's then reflected in their recruitment process.
Software companies partially avoid this by have a smaller pool of candidates to draw from and lower turnover. They're - generally - incentivised to improve those processes because they don't want the right candidate to go somewhere else. Yet even then we see a lot of software companies with awful hiring processes.
> I do see start ups here in London who try to make the process smoother. I do not know how successful they are.
I don't think it's a problem that can be solved with automation. The solution is bottom up management. You need to trust the people you hire directly to hire wisely themselves. If you can't do that then maybe your company is too big.
Also for a KFC job.
My fave interview was when I was still in college I think the recruiter messed up and put me up for a sr role or maybe the company was a true unicorn: very few generic HR hoops, and heavy on the interesting problem solving with engineers.
Aside from that particular company I had weeks of HR screens, re-fill out your race/gender please(?) emails, and lots of time wasting that was a very very stark contrast for sure.
A long time back, I would take the effort to expunge information from staffing services masquerading as company contacts (some places have data retention laws). As experience taught this was the number one warning sign for internal toxic business cultures, low ball compensation packages, and position instability.
If the first thing a company does is discriminate, manipulate, and or deceive... you likely won't want to work there... Again, please consider becoming a plumber , as it is the reductionist logical dream of all techs =)
Same with filling their forms for the first time (proceeds to write your name 13 times, your date of birth 23 times, your full address 8 times etc etc).
I'd love to know if they are aware how bad it really is. You're sick and want to just stay in bed, but need to see them to check up on you. And then you lie there and call them 25 times on repeat until finally, maybe, someone picks up.
My dentist requires i cancel an appointment by calling in with 2 working days notice. Failure to do so can result in a charge.
She has also called to reschedule my appointments with under one day notice???
Last time she did this, i told her there will be a short-notice cancellation fee. She refused to pay, and refused to recognize the irony in what she was doing.
She also texts you to confirm your appointments, but the only option you get is to "accept" - you cant respond to cancel/reschedule.. this must be done via the phone only???
Though it should be not more than once per two-sided sheet of paper
When you have surgeons making sure to mark the leg they're going to amputate with sharpie so they don't remove the wrong one it's not that out there to try and make sure each document has a complete set of basic information on it for anyone looking at it.
Me: I want to make an appointment
Receptionist: you can only make an appointment on the same day as you call, and you have to call between 0830 and 0900
Me: Really? Er...
(Next day around 0845) Ring ring ring ring ring...
(0900) Me: No-one answered between 0830 and 0900
Receptionist: you can only make an appointment on the same day as you call, and you have to call between 0830 and 0900
Me: ???
But yeah, if there isn't an "easy apply" button on a LinkedIn job ad it takes a lot before I'll click through and even more before I'll consider filling in yet another form.
And then they don't let me fill-in things the way I want to. For example, as a one-man operation I have worked with multiple clients at the same time and mediated and implemented projects that were a collaboration between several clients. Their web UI won't accept that sort of thing.
Just let me upload a damn PDF, or even just let me type-in free-form text.
Kudos to companies that have adopted simple platforms like Greenhouse.io. Upload the resume, answer a few supplemental questions about the job, self-identification questionnaire, and submit. Easy.
If you're not, and your numbers of abandoned applications are high, then throw the forms in the trash can and see what happens for a month. Contact details, attach resume done.
I highly suspect that a lot of these 'applications' are ad/click fraud (companies spend a lot of money to drive traffic to their job postings), other bots, recruiters testing the waters to play middleman, or people who were never going to apply no matter how easy the process is.
Find a job postsing on linkedin, click apply and you are redirected to [abc].myworkday.com.
Need an account first, so you create your 20th one on *.myworkday.com
Upload your resume for the 20th time, need to fix the exact same data mistakes myworkday makes every time you upload your resume. Repeat.
What value does myworkday offer? why cant i just create one account on myworkday and use it for any job i apply for?
Why is myworkday so prevalent when the experience is terrible from a job applicants perspective?
Flip side, I'd LOVE to know why companies use it. Like what does it do for them? Why does every company require its own login, and its own resume?
wouldn't it make more sense to have a large pool of resume's in a single location?
The downside is that you can’t customize your resume for each job, but that’s easily fixed by hosting multiple resumes.
I've yet to have any success from any online application, while my hit rate when contacted by recruiters is relatively high - nothing to do with particular recruiters being good at gaging my wants or skills, simply they have the incentive to get this done, because only then they get paid.
My guess is either the official postings are a company policy requirement to give someone a promotion (get some external CVs in, do some biased comparison to justify why the person deserves a promotion - at least my experience from working in a bank) or the company can't be bothered to spend their own time recruiting & just outsources it to a recruiting company, forgetting they have their own listing open. Also, most if not all of those external platforms are quite bad.
It's the most bizarro thing I've ever seen, a single line text field.
Feeling kinda leet at the time I decided to take the plunge and cut and paste cover letter, CV, LinkedIn profile etc into this small field and let it burn.
Unsurprisingly I never got contact or received any confirmation or anything....
Why the hell would they even have that as an option?
(I am the %8 !!)
Example: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-au/careers/jobs/4526889
Scroll down to 'Apply for this job' and click to activate JavaScript expanding form....bleaugh
One of the "questions" on their apply for job form is
TL;DR
Optional field is REQUIRED and only option is "Yes"
"At Thoughtworks, we are intentional about making technology a better place for all. We know that the more diverse our backgrounds are, the more impactful solutions we build for our clients. We foster an inclusive community and focus on creating a balanced workforce reflective of the society we live in.To help us achieve this balance, we encourage you to answer these demographic questions. We collect this data to understand who we are reaching (and who we’re not) so we can do better at connecting with a truly diverse group of potential Thoughtworkers. Our recruiting teams will only see the data collected here on an aggregated level, consistent with our Data Privacy Policy. Responding to the questions is completely voluntary and anonymous. Declining to respond will not impact your standing in the recruiting process."
The field is REQUIRED and the only option is "Yes"
You may want to contact a lawyer about suing them for asking, but I'm not sure how that works.
The above applies to the US. If you are in a different country then you need to check your local laws.
There's also the vaguely insulting patterns like only putting MIT/CMU/Stanford/Harvard/etc. on your college list, punctuated by "Other".
I have a love/hate relationship with applications that are just an email. On one hand it doesn't box me into the requirements of the job and lets me make my own case. On the other hand I know that the company is missing out on so many excellent candidates simply because writing an email is a lot more work than filling out a form (at least for most people).
To select where candidate went to school, and they only listed options of big-name schools and then "Other"?
Maybe they were trying to make a joke, and it was inappropriate. Or maybe they were being surprisingly transparent about the brand-seeking prejudice that some employers have.
This article isn't really focused on applying for software engineering roles, but for menial roles. When that happened to me decades ago it was rare, and Best Buy was one of the first companies to do it, now I see my teenage daughter applying to entry level roles and it seems nearly every company is doing these sorts of psych evals, and worse your profile is tracked across multiple employers because the company offering the service is the same.
No wonder people are noping out. Nobody should have to undergo a psych eval done by a computer program, and not even a qualified person, just to be able to flip burgers or stock shelves. It's demeaning, dehumanizing, and it frankly should be illegal.
In theory the diploma should be enough, but the govt doesn’t take care of sustaining the diploma levels, because it’s unfair for some protected groups. So I just fired my first person who I had assumed having a Masters degree in communication implied they could use Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Turns out in communication they don’t type much in Word.
Now it’s gonna be on my hiring test.
This seems way to fast for me.
I usually take much more longer to known what to write in those damns forms "Why you want to work here?" usually takes me at least 20 minutes to write.
A lot of people will write that once and then just copy paste everything over and over again. Some people believe that job searching is purely a numbers game and that 100 crappy applications is more likely to lead to a job than 5 well thought out ones. And for all I know they might even be right.
I think this is only worth doing for companies you REALLY want to work at. for the other 95% just write a mostly generic two paragraph response and swap out the company name and your passion for the specific problem they are solving
But I guess it's working for them: folks treating race-based decision making process as racism would not waste Wikimedia's HR staff's time.
https://www.eeoc.gov/pre-employment-inquiries-and-race
From an applicant perspective, while physical tear-off sheets for mail-in applocations (one can imagine hand-delivery setups that solve this) are clearly imperfect, web forms are even worse.
Those don’t (oddly enough, given that the voluntary self-identification section for US applicants to support government reporting has a “race/ethnic definitions” expansion block) have a question about race, just gender identity and whether or not one identifies as Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.
So its kind of odd to complain about a race question with those as the example.
1. Difficult/lengthy application processes can filter for intent
2. Structured data (obtained during sign-up) is useful for recruitment platforms
3. Some ATS's are just bad
Point 1. might be difficult for SWEs to understand, but in lower leverage roles (e.g. non-grad) you sometimes have a 100+ applicants for a single role, so any filter helps a lot with the recruitment process.
Only if the filter is good. What's a good filter?
One that improves the quality of candidates at a given market price.
I don't think filtering out people who realize the system is bullshit/broken is a wise filter. Such a filter means you'll be capturing the portion of the populace that is unable to think beyond what they're told and inefficiently bash their heads against brick walls.
I know the cynical will say "Exactly! thats exactly what these employers want!" But truthfully, it's not, it's just what they think they want... This is part of what is breaking America down, people getting what they "want" instead of what's actually "good for them".
I understand these are just concepts and really messy in reality, and there's a dystopian take of false benevolence. But America I believe that America used to work because people used to be optimistic, which meant they could work with honest benevolence towards many/most.
I was telling a friend yesterday that one difference between the Canada I remember and the America I live in now is that Canadians used to not chase every last personal profit (dollar). As an example, if a company could buy a piece of software that helped them perfectly price their product giving an average increase of $101 dollars, but at a cost of $100... most would say "yeah, the company should do that! they make an extra dollar..." but what is missed is the customer ends up paying $101 dollars for the increase of $1 profit. I think in Canada people let some of those marginal dollars lie, thinking it was just too much effort to chase it, and not good for everyone involved. Not good for the customer, the software developer could do something virtuous with their life instead of predatory, the entrepreneur can both feel good for how they act in the marketplace and also sell something else for $100 that the customer now still has....
So what does this all have to with hiring software and forms? I don't entirely know, but I think this form stuff is a symptom of a real problem to be fixed, not just bandage over.
Name, phone, email address, upload CV.
No account needed and you can push-update me via email.
Where I next cut off things is if I invest in their forms, but then they don't seem serious or savvy on their end.
The most common problem here is that they say they want a Staff, Principal, or technical cofounder person-- but the interview process hoops seem to be for zero-experience new college grad filtering, or for hazing.
IMHO, the biggest thing many tech companies -- from startups to FAANGs -- need to hear about hiring top talent is that they aren't Google, and they can't just copy Google's rituals, without having Google's reputation and value proposition.
A large part of the problem in the us is the required "Voluntary Self-Identification" information. It is voluntary, but it still needs to be filled out, even if the response is Decline to Answer. Should be optional. Companies are now taking an extra step and asking about pronouns and other identifiers, beyond what is required by law. I just want to complete this application and move on.
This is one of the reasons I don't fill out job applications anymore. If there is a company I would like to work for I find their recruiters on linkedin and reach out to them. Though my past few jobs have come from either a recruiter messaging me with a position and me messaging them with any open positions they are trying to fill. The last time I filled out a job application I was in college applying to my first tech job.
People don't complete online job applications because they have all the user hostility of modern nudge driven tech but implemented with the subtlety of a brick in a burlap sack.
I would add metrics, and a global leader board to see who can jilt the largest number of the most valuable companies!
It would be a fun hobby, that many many people could enjoy together! Lets make hiring just /impossible/ for companies, so long as they want to have difficult yet exploitable job application processes!
Trovinto doesn't ask for CVs or your life story, it just validates candidates competencies with less than 10 job specific questions, before they ever reach an application tracking system.
It helps HR and hiring managers generate a relevant interview guide and then it automatically evaluates and ranks the submissions.
I am looking for feedback so please try it at https://use.trovinto.com
Let me know if you are interested in partnering.
In general application form questions have accumulated over the years. When you dig into why there are 95 questions, you’ll find that no one actually knows who added most of them. Or if they do know, that person is no longer with the company.
But “I’m sure each question is there for a good reason.” And no one wants to risk removing any of them.
Unless you're feeding those responses into an ATS system that's doing some data correlation/massaging on the backend, in which case can you identify why the system things the question is important - if not, refer to first line.
I was recently helping my father in law apply for entry level jobs. He isn't that old but is not a very computer literate person, and he was getting extremely frustrated when he would walk into a grocery store / thrift shop / hotel with a printed resume but they wouldn't accept it and were always telling him he needed to go through their online application portals... which he struggled to fill out on his own.
I helped him fill out a few and honestly I can't even blame him for struggling on some of the application portals; one in particular for a Hilton hotel was absolutely awful online applications that constantly hit errors or timed out for no good reason. Some were hard to find online, and of course the classic re-entering all the same info in different ways for online forms quickly gets annoying.
I'd imagine a lot of people do; I know I have in the past.
Perhaps the main difference with a digital application, is that we are able to track some of the behavioural artifacts that are created on the lead up to applying .. which aren't available (or visible) via the traditional alterative.
Are they identifying if somebody does this, or counting the first visit as a person who left without returning?
It's probably closer to 100%. As soon as I see the application form wants me to re-enter my entire job history, my educational background, and my contact info, I immediately exit it.
Also I don't want to give access to my LinkedIn and Xing accounts for data import, which is anyway, again, messed up.
Our goal is to modernize the job application process and make it as seamless as possible. We're building a common application that helps you both discover and apply to highly relevant jobs.
One of the tools that is powered by our common application is our Job Application Autofiller: https://simplify.jobs/autofill
With the autofiller, you are able to breeze through some of the most annoying job applications (think Workday, iCIMS, Taleo, SuccessFactors and more). Our goal is to make this process as simple as one click.
I understand recruiters have the incentive to lowball you and play hardball when you're trying to find, at the bare least, the salary range. Still, sometimes you're literally overqualified and willing to take a bit less, but that entitled attitude deters a perfectly fitting candidate from applying.
Then you start to post high-quality stuff on LinkedIn, HN or elsewhere, and when they don't find another candidate to lowball, they seem to regret it.
The approach recruiters apparently take is about thinking that candidates are cattle, numbers on their HR system.
Many require you to apply on their site, ask for LinkedIn profile, ask to upload your resume but also ask to hand fill the same data in their forms.
There is also some stupid web site used by many for the application process that requires you to create another account and refill the forms for every application even if you already uploaded you resume, input LinkedIn profile and completed the same forms on the same website for another position you've applied to before.
HR/recruiting and the managers actually with open roles dont always have the same goals.
Referrals as 5% of applicants, and 50% of hires. Make friends with coworkers, and then as they move on you have a massive network that allows you to bypass all of this bullshit.
Also, I've consistently found that any company that uses this shit software is addicted to complexity and unnecessary processes, and was worth later quitting.
Let's not get into OCR in these, it's abysmal, throwing information all over the form and usually, it's simpler to just fill it in yourself, if you're that desperate.
The answer of course is not to use the ATS apply process. It's almost universally a bad experience for candidates. Home Depot should take a look at our products, they would have different outcomes if they did.
Then again, I've gotten all of my positions through responding to the constant recruiter spam beyond the age of... idk 22 or something. A mostly out of date LinkedIn profile is almost exclusively my career search tool of choice.
Most of the companies who contacted me back for an interview are the ones who got their data straight from LinkedIn.
At this point I’m not even sure if big companies read cover letters at all.
I have 15 years of work experience.
I hear all the time, looking for a job is like a job in of itself. Then why are you leaving so much work unfinished?
I just deleted them all and let the browser re-memorize them.
Somehow all the same and yet not same form fields just messed up the browsers I used.
One job I am considering applying for right now is a bit light on the details, and there is no contact information. The full application form is the only way to interact with them. I’ve filled out and closed the form three times.
"No."
the best way is to work your network for a connection. Steve Dalton has the best literature on this concept.
It's a complete waste of time. Easily gamed or "crammed" for and provides little to no measure of actual problem solving or capability in the context of actual work.
On the other hand it's a strong signal that the company adheres to many "best practices" that aren't grouned in reality. So I say thanks for the red flag interviewer, goodbye!
First impressions and all that.