Anecdotally, I've never seen so many folks laid off on LinkedIn since I've been on the platform. Some are going on 3+ months. Recruiter spam is at all time lows. Are these companies getting by with less?
I’ve had recruiters contact me talking about these roles they had that look like a perfect fit, nearly all of them ghosted me before any interview could happen.
It’s totally an employers market now. Out of the few interviews I’ve managed to scrap together most have been shockingly hostile, feeling more like an interrogation than an interview. And I’m not just talking about tech companies, even the non tech companies seem to be doing this now.
They’re going to win. They have a much bigger war chest than me.
Union participation in the US is a rounding error.
Which is to say: you're right, but times may be changing.
There is a UPS strike right around the corner. More than 340,000 workers are set to go on strike on August 1 & they have hundreds of millions saved in strike funds.
Every actor and writer in Hollywood is also on strike against the big studios.
Unionizing is happening at its fastest clip in decades right now.
Don’t lose hope. Things can seem hopeless until one day, they aren’t.
The people I see struggling on LinkedIn that I know are all people I wouldn’t hire. Maybe its just the toxic people that are vocal enough for me to notice? Just my anecdote and doubt it reflects the wider market.
On the hiring side, it seems to be harder than ever to get qualified candidates. We’ve given up even trying to tech screen and hire based on “attitude”. I feel stuck in a lose lose situation where I either OK a subpar candidate and hand hold them or continue to do all of the work. I suspect this has to do with the boring unsexy nature of the company, but it was never this bad in the past.
I had one particular role where our team had the same issue and eventually really ticked off higher management when we kept open vacancies on the team for too long. They effectively said fill the spot soon or they'd move the headcount elsewhere, making for a really dumb choice between filling a seat or committing to be under resourced indefinitely.
This is actually quite rational. Does the team actually need the help? If yes, just hire someone already who is adequately qualified and has a good attitude. These people are super easy to find.
But lots of teams like to have a req open forever while they keep looking for that absolutely perfect candidate on a hundred arbitrary scales who has spent a lifetime working the exact tech stack they have, is totally willing to spend a year crunching leetcode and doesn't ask for much pay. So it's more of a game, like a cat toying with a mouse instead of actually needing to eat.
In that case it is the best decision to close that req and reallocate the funding to some other team who actually needs help right now.
Oh this is one that would definitely get me in trouble. I'd rather just not hire someone than make a bad hire, and I expect I'd be pretty ticked off myself if management was telling my team to dumb down our interview process and make it easy for most anyone to fill the seat
I’m curious what your interview process is like.
The excuse is always that the company has particular expertise (they really don’t)
Edit: Thought I would add my current experience with this. My company is replacing contracted staff with permanent staff but out of South / Central America. The salaries are pretty much 1/4 of the US salaries. The people I am given to thumbs up / thumbs down (and that's very much what it is) are just ok. A couple are good but the rest are meh. I am allowed to thumbs down maybe 1 out of every 4 before I get push back. So this is very much a real thing where the US engineers are stuck filling in the gaps when the company onboards very cheap but not very good engineers.
I am curious to see how this plays out in the long term