Ask HN: Recruiters, how bad is the hiring market for candidates? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recruiters, how bad is the hiring market for candidates?

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With so many layoffs happening simultaneously right now, and so many companies with hiring freezes, layoffs planned, or other prohibitive measures taken, I can imagine that the amount of candidates applying for any one role must be a lot.

Tech Recruiters: Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?

Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?

How intense is the competition presently for roles?

Without going into too much detail, I’m about to enter the job market, and I’m terrified

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I’m not a recruiter but figured I’d comment to help you relax a bit if I’m understanding your question correctly.

HN is very in touch with a segment of the tech sector that has seen a huge downturn. If you’re asking about positions where you’ll be making 300k in 5 years as a software engineer, I would say you’ve come to the right place and you’re probably right that those positions are even harder to come by than they were before the downturn. (I don’t really know, though. I’m just a code monkey at a normal company.)

Regarding putting food on the table and living an extremely comfortable life as a software engineer, don’t worry lol. I’d imagine the average hired competent programmer is starting at the same thing as they were before the downturn (that is to say Amazon, Meta, Twitter, etc. haven’t had a statistically significant effect on the job market). Anecdotally, my fintech company is ramping up hiring tech right now. Take a deep breath and relax, you’re in a very safe industry. (Unless you’ll only be satisfied by 300k and up, in which case I have no idea what’s going on and can’t really relate anyway.) Most if not every company has software to build; you might not be the core value generation, but the pay is still way above what new hires are making outside of software.

Where?

The dozens of places on Indeed or LinkedIn that I still get emailed about multiple times a day because I’m too lazy to log in and unsubscribe from the alerts?

Look at education, non-profits and government.

This person is correct. Outside the tech sector there are companies still hiring at a rapid rate. Is the tech sector an early indicator of the overall economy? I don’t know. it could be. But if you need a job look at other sector. Lower paying sector like education, government, and non profits are pretty desperate for people still and these are often great places to work with good benefits even if the pay is not so great.

To echo this: in Australia, people with even mediocre tech or data skills can walk into a federal government job as they're desperate for IT and data expertise. You'll get a combined yearly salary and retirement benefits of "only" about $150k AUD (~$100k USD) for a mid-level role. Certainly not big tech money but the hours are good and job security is rock solid. Tech people have it so good - I certainly regret my career choices.

oh wait, so that's why there are so few tech founders in Sydney? Really hard to find any engineers hungry to start their own thing

Nevermind, I’m stupid.

I believe that they mean "300k per year with 5 years experience"

… positions where, within 5 years, you'll be making 300k as a software engineer.

>I’m about to enter the job market, and I’m terrified

You're getting a highly biased view of what is really going on in the job market because some high profile Tech companies laid off people. Their leaders are not liked so everybody has an opinion about it.

I've been at companies in the past that had huge layoffs, but they were boring companies that nobody cares to talk about on HN or Social Media. If Cisco, Oracle, Siemens, Coca-Cola and a bunch of boring companies laid off 50K+ people over the course of a year the news would not care and nobody would realize a ton of people just landed in the job market.

Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.

How did you determine that the market is fine if layoffs at smaller/boring companies wouldn't be visible anyway?

>How did you determine that the market is fine

I didn't say the market is fine. I said it's not as bad as one might think based on social media.

I lived through the .com crises and the mortgage bubble. People in my neighborhood were getting laid off across industries and jobs. People in my family and extended network were getting laid off. If you didn't get laid off, you'd know people who got laid off. Most of my career has been large boring companies and a lot of people I know work for large boring companies. My org in my company has slowed hiring, but still has openings for "critical" jobs.

That's absolutely not my experience at all right now. I know people who are jumping jobs and getting large pay bumps. Granted, some of that is slowing, but it's not like 2000 when the only response you'd get on a job site was somebody from an insurance company asking you to be an "entrepreneur" by becoming an insurance agent.

> Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.

That's subjective.

What if you want to work for a large unicorn or FAANG? Yea, the job market is pretty bad right now then.

so work somewhere else. My company is interviewing people (some have jobs and only look at us as a fallback in case their job dies, no panic), other companies are trying to hire me. I got 4 pings on linked in this week. I still get random "companies looking for senior or principal java developers" emails. I got one today.

I could imagine it's harder on early in stage career people, because that first job can be harder to get. My resume helps I'm sure.

Only some are doing layoffs, but the vast majority are doing some kind of hiring freeze.

I'm an engineer. The fortune 100 tech company I work for is ramping up hiring, even evaluating new ways to find junior engineers. We struggle to fill all available roles.

There's a lot of panic in the job market because everyone follows what happens FAANG + Twitter, and a disproportionate amount of engineers want to work in the top 10 tech companies. You will always find work in the top 500 companies in my opinion.

Why don't you name your company so that OP and others can try to fill those roles?

Are the struggles related to candidates that only want remote work?

Somewhat. But it's probably not a big factor.

I believe a more important factor is that the sw engineering job market is still a seller's market. Many large and well-known tech companies still struggle to compete with the tech giants. Even if several of them have frozen hiring.

It is difficult for me to agree with the very popular notion these days that the epoch of employee's choice is now over. Perhaps for FAANG and a few more exceptions. But I have been referring tens of very skilled engineers to my company and I often heard they have accepted other offers. From my perspective, employers must still compete for good talent. Maybe even entry-level talent, although maybe not so much.

What is your company?

disproportionate amount of engineers want to work in the top 10 tech companies

Could it be because the top 10 tech companies pay well?

I know I could easily find jobs which pay 150k. But why should I do that if I can put in some effort and get a 250k job?

HN is laser focused on TAMANG and anything happening in those few gets magnified out of proportions. For the rest of the boring industry, it is just business as usual.

Here in EU, my employer is struggling since early this year to recruit enough talents, as no one will accept an offer without full-remote or at least 95% remote contract, even if the pay is pretty good(adjusted recently with inflation) and they just live next door to office. Times like these are probably safe in non-sexy non-unicorn corporations and ancient businesses which are not into hip online businesses. :]

Why doesn’t your company allow remote?

Because they're out of touch

as most of the companies in EU

If they’re unwilling to make changes then perhaps they are not really struggling?

The Dutch companies I'm familiar with have one office day per week. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

Not really because you still have to live near the office.

> TAMANG

These company acronyms are getting out of control, is this twitter|tesla, apple|amazon, meta|microsoft, alphabet|adobe, netflix, google?

Not a recruiter, but have had experience on both sides of the table in good and bad economies.

First things first, take a deep breath and realize it will all work out one way or another. The worst thing you can do right now is lock up, so put together a plan and just put one foot in front of the other.

Right now, start talking to everyone you can, leverage your personal network and hit up everyone you can to see if they have open gigs. That guy that you worked with 10 years back, hit them up. Ask them if they know anyone who is hiring and if they can intro you to them. The person you met at a conference last year, hit them up too.

If you are getting laid off, just think of your new job as finding something new, gaining new skills to be more marketable and connecting with as many people as you can.

As someone who is looking at the moment, straight up, it isn’t a great time to be looking for something new, but you will find something eventually, even if it’s just a placeholder until the market comes back around.

I'm currently in an engineering leadership position hiring for a startup not impacted by this downturn. I see the numbers and do interviews, but not a Recruiter per se.

> Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?

Seeing a slight increase in qualified candidates, not much of a change in unqualified candidates. By unqualified, I mean, as an example, a fresh bootcamp grad applying to a Staff level position.

> Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?

Have the same amount. Had a hiring plan, still have it, still working on finishing it up for the year.

> How intense is the competition presently for roles?

Not very. We're on a glide path to meet our hiring plan for the year without the pipeline being dry or being over-full. We're able to consider candidates individually without needing to hire anyone just to make the numbers, or reject people simply because we have too many applicants. If you're a good fit we make an offer.

I'm not a recruiter, but my company is currently hiring, and it's _tough_. The top talent goes to FAANG (that's still hiring) and the talent after that goes to interesting startups. We're a boring but successful company. Of the 70 applicants in our initial wave, we found 3 who mostly met the qualifications, two of whom cancelled their interviews thirty minutes prior.

I have a few inferences here. There's a lot of talent in the pool right now, but A. They're being scooped up by more attractive companies B. They're not feeling desperate enough to work at a boring company. Both of those would indicate that people are still hiring, and they're hiring for desirable roles.

There's a lot of gloom and doom at the big tech companies right now, but it doesn't appear to reflect the state of the entire industry.

which industry do you work in? I love boring but successful

We're a web development shop. We're not flashy but we do work with a lot of large companies. We're having trouble getting applicants with a solid 1. Skill level 2. Grasp of English.

The unemployment numbers are phenomenal. It was around 3.5%. That means anyone filling a seat is coming from another position.

I graduated into the Great Recession. This is nothing like that. You’ll probably be able to get in at the entry level for whatever you’re going into professionally (or better).

It’s been a bit so I’ll reply to myself.

I do know the fear of entering the market. Heck, also the fear of graduating into the workaday world in my early twenties with not really anything other than a degree. So I’d say be on the lookout for an entry point into whatever. If you’re going into tech then Help Desk/Service Desk work is a standard starting point. Programming, making sure you have a portfolio on GitHub and do your leetcode prep. I don’t know your exact point. But that first job can last as little as 6 months, even less, or even more. But once you’re hired you’re “off the ground” and that’s the key.

I work in tech now but started in the regular industry out of college. Something to keep in mind is that tech is a very small percentage of the US engineering workforce. Tech is great because of the projects, culture, pay, and benefits. But the reality is, there is a ton of engineering jobs in the US outside of tech. The US alone has about 2M engineers nationwide [1].

[1] https://ira.asee.org/national-benchmark-reports/workforce201...

Part of the hiring freeze and layoffs happening right now are from companies which have been negatively by the current situation abroad and want to send a message before publishing their worse than usual Q4 numbers.

If you look at the larger trend, unemployment is really low and current trend of bringing back manufacturing from abroad guaranty that there will be jobs to fill in the near future. Things should also get better next year. Results will have been published and the energy market should get back to normal. Don’t worry too much.

If you want to work as a developer for places like Verizon or Home Depot, you'll find a job fairly easily.

I'm not a recruiter but just to give you hope: Yes, the market looks difficult if you want to work at any of the FAANG companies. The media is giving them lots of screen time and it looks like we're doomed. Yes, it'll be difficult to land +200K and above since these salaries are usually being offered at Fb, etc... Now, there are mid-tier salaries too (75~100k) and there are a steady amount of jobs in that bracket. If you absolutely need something since you can't afford to be without a job, you can look low-tier positions (50~74.9k) and you'll find steadily job positions there too.

In summary, +200k jobs are scarce (FAANG companies), 75~100k and 50~74.9k have steadily job supply.

Your numbers are way off.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...

Interesting. It's hard to get a +200k right from the get go but achievable if you get to work at Google, etc...

Thanks for sharing that page.

I’m trying to hire a senior engineer (with a lot of Rust experience). We just hired a new junior last week. It’s not all bad.

Are you still looking to hire a senior engineer?

Yes! Email James.martin@zelis.com with your resume and GitHub link if you’re interested.

Is it worldwide position?

A side question: Have these periods of large layoffs and restructuring been followed by periods of large hiring? It feels pretty natural that companies would use this environment to clean house with the idea of rebuilding some stagnant parts in the future.

Boom and Bust in everything, including hiring. It's just that nobody knows how long the boom and bust last, but when you're in the boom take advantage of it.

Probably worse for recruiters since they are the first ones to go in markets like this.

It isn’t that they go, but the frothiness does. I built teams through the 2008+ downturn and plenty of teams froze hiring, but many were still hiring through it. What this poster doesn’t get at is the fact that it changes what types of opportunities rise to the top—you get more scratch and dent or problematic roles vs. straight up the middle quality roles.

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