There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth.
Blow up your pipeline, tell your HR department to buzz off with their navel gazing requirements that aren't job related, and most of all, tell your hiring managers to get over their fears and their laziness. The Earth won't spiral into the Sun if you have to train someone on your department's specific needs and should you hire someone who just never adapts, the universe won't snuff out of existence because they have to be let go and you have to look again. Companies have been hiring tech resources for longer than most of us have been alive (yes, even if you're from the mainframe era) and it's only recently that this madness has taken hold to a level that everyone is self paralyzing. Get over yourself, you and your company just aren't as important as your hiring process implies. Billions won't die from a famine if you hire someone who only understand half your stack and some of what they do understand is a dated version. They'll learn and if you treat them well (you do treat them well, right?) and don't do headcount reductions each time Wall Street feels a slight breeze, you can build up a competent team. Or you can continue the madness and profess endless confusion as to why you're unable to find anyone as smart as you to do the work you need done.
Sometimes comments are so good on Hacker News I wish I could click a button and tip them. Companies that don’t deserve to have way too high of standards/requirements now.
After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover.
So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why.
I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.
But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.
I find the concept of cover letter completely disassociated of a candidate competency to do their job.
I can spend 1h to write a cover letter with perfect structure, good intention and really speaking my vision of me in the company, this won't show that I can do a leetcode medium or that my clipper code is well structured.
The resume/CV tells you the "what", the cover letter tells you the "why". Basically, the cover letter is the sales pitch.
If you don't provide one, that certainly doesn't eliminate you from consideration, but providing one can give an important edge.
Even with the AI helping, it's more work than I usually want to do for something that is probably going to be ignored.
Jk but why not ask for a five minute coding challenge instead of a cover letter. Eg decode this string and include it in the subject line.
Sure, being fluent at the level of fizz-buzz in a relevant programming language is useful too - but honestly, that bar is lower.
I realize that people that can't code their way out of a wet paper bag (mysteriously) apply for programming jobs, and there's a low-pass filter needed for that as well - but a coding challenge isn't a substitute to check for (written) communication skills and basic reasoning.
There's "can't" and there's "won't." Programmers in demand won't spend the time, which leaves you with programmers who are desperate enough for work to jump through your hoops (unless you're FAANG or a unicorn). You're effectively filtering your candidate pool down to people you don't want to hire. Round and round we go.
At some point the candidate needs to invest some time on communication with the specific employer - why waste everyone's time synchronously in first first interview, when it's better for both to waste that time asynchronously?
So, who applies to your open position? Programmers who don't have any other options and are desperate for a job. They probably won't pass your interview. You now have a sales funnel that is filtering out the candidates you want and only giving you the ones you don't want. Then you get to be yet another company that complains about how hard it is to find competent programmers.
The exception to all of the above is if you're one of the companies everybody wants to work at. Then you can require whatever you want and people will still apply.
I'm not sure if I understand - there are candidates that want the position, but won't write a couple of (relevant) paragraphs? Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense.
It sounds like you want to filter only for candidates who may or may not be particularly competent, but who are somewhat obsequious, at least during the hiring process. Maybe that works for your business.
> The programmers a company wants to hire have options that don't require a cover letter.
Ok. That sounds like they expect to be recuited - not needing to apply for a job?
Is there a small group of candidates that will read a job ad, be qualified, want the job enough to apply - but only willing to customize the email address they send their resume to?
Or are we talking about completely separate candidate pools here? Ones that read and respond to ads, and those that expect to be recruited?
> If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense
But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
Or does "cover letter" strongly imply "fawning, vapid, nonsense" to you?
What is the alternative? Having the first interview as first contact certainly seems like a waste of time?
(Not to mention writing skills being essential for remote work - which I hope is an option for most software positions these days)
I think basically yes.
You raise a good point, though, about people who are really good just always getting recruited. Based on my small sample size, such people do still apply to jobs at startups they find interesting. So their pipeline is thus a mix of cold apps and recruiter activity and referrals.
> But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
No, it's nonsense. A "cover letter" is a terrible prompt to elicit any meaningful information about a candidate, and implies negative things about the company asking for one. Among them: that the company is perfectly willing to have the candidate waste their own time writing one, so this symmetry of investment and time-saving rationale doesn't seem too convincing, IMO.
I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
You will still filter out good candidates who do not want or do not have time to answer any such questions, but I think those questions are far more fair and probative of the kinds of qualitative skills you are looking for than "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
On the contrary, a cover letter is a powerful tool to elicit meaningful information about a candidate’s soft skills, in particular empathy (for the hiring manager) and communication, and refusal to provide one implies negative things about a candidate.
> I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
A good candidate does not need those prompts. Having read the job description, he has an idea of what the hiring manager wants, and he writes about it.
> "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
That’s not a cover letter. I don’t care how much a candidate wants a job. To be honest, neediness is a turn off. I care how effective the candidate will be at the job, both technically and socially.
I feel that perhaps you and others think all a cover letter is, is ‘Company X is such a great place! I want to work at Company X so much! Please pick me!’ If so, then yeah, I 100% agree with you. That’s useless input to the hiring process. But that’s not what a cover letter is IMHO.
As mentioned elsewhere, I assert that a cover letter is the soft skills equivalent to the resumé. The resumé lists relevant skills, education/training and experience. Those are all good things, but they are in the nature of checking boxes. The cover letter is a soft-skills demonstration. It’s also an opportunity for a candidate who is borderline in one area to draw attention to the fact that he more than makes up for it in another.
Not anymore. Not with ChatGPT. In any case, you have completely missed my point, right along with e12e.
> Not anymore. Not with ChatGPT.
I don’t think so. I don’t care if a writer uses spell check, grammar check or ChatGPT: good cover letter is a good cover letter, regardless of what tools the writer used to help.
> In any case, you have completely missed my point, right along with e12e.
What was it, then? That the best candidates consider cover letters nonsense? I disagree: I am asserting that a candidate who considers cover letters nonsense is ipso facto not among the best.
Maybe this is related to a misunderstanding about cover letters? They’re not about ‘I love your company!’ or ‘please please hire me!’; they are about ‘here’s why I believe that my skills, education and prior experience suit me for this opportunity.’ The resumé is what; the cover letter is why. The resumé is facts; the cover letter is judgement.
It's not about can or cannot, it is about need and need not; you are by and large getting applications only from people who really need to apply to jobs even when there are these kinds of hurdles.
Because if it's not asking for a cover letter, you as an applicant are one of 160 low-effort resumes we've gotten this week. Do we build a ML to try to parse all these and then ask it to score everything? Because I hear a lot of people in this thread saying that's exactly what they hate about hiring.
That’s not an argument, it’s an ageist ad hominem.
> why not ask for a five minute coding challenge instead of a cover letter
Why not both? There are two aspects to any hire: hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills are the things a resumé can relate and a coding challenge can demonstrate. But we do not hire automata (if we did, we might as well just use ChatGPT or Copilot); we hire human beings who will be working in teams with others, who will need to take input from other human beings and interpret it, try to figure out what is being unsaid but which should be said & so forth. Those soft skills are the hardest part of the job to hire for, and in many ways the hardest to develop.
The cover letter is a the equivalent of a five minute coding challenge for soft skills. ‘Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. What would he like to read which make you stand out from the other candidates?’
Why is this important beyond making the company feel loved?
As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
Theres hundreds of companies out there employing who want your time but give nothing back.
I know next thing you'll ask for is a coding test and I’m not doing it. You can blame all the previous companies who wanted a coding test and it turned out to be just burning my time.
No cover letters, no coding tests, no 5 stage interview processes, no “you passed 4 interviews and failed the 5th cause everyone has veto”.
For all other scenarios, cover letters seem pointless and redundant at best, and “i wanna see how much you are willing to suck up to the company” at worst.
I’m not going to write a cover letter about how good of a fit I am for your job if you don’t give me enough information to understand what your job is. Most job descriptions are 90% useless. What I need to know is, what is the problem you need me to solve, and what resources will I have to solve it. If you as a recruiter do not know that, you’re not the right person to write a job description.
If you received a notice that your resume had been read, they liked it, and they wanted a cover letter before an interview, would you submit one?
No, because that would mean they didn’t specify that the cover letter would be required ahead of time, and I am not trying to waste my time.
How am I so certain that they didn’t specify it ahead of time? Because I wouldn’t apply in the first place if a cover letter was listed as a requirement on the initial application.
If I am feeling particularly petty or upset about that surprise ask for a cover letter later in the process, I will just ask ChatGPT to write the most generic and useless cover letter for me, and then send it over.
The result is a quickly scannable, pretty direct and memorable cover letter.
So we aren't looking for a love letter, ideally it'll at least demonstrate that you've read our job listing.
Because at this point I'm pretty sure that 90%+ of the applications we are getting haven't even looked at the job ad, they are just spamming their resume to everything.
I was rejected because it did not pass a case I was not given and could not test against.
I hate the interview process for software engineering
No, and that is exactly the wrong sort of cover letter. A cover letter is a letter from the human applicant to the human hiring manager explaining why he feels that he is a good fit for the position. ‘But that’s the resumé!’ you might say. No, a resume is a list of relevant training, skills and previous employment. Although not traditionally machine-readable, a resumé is basically input into a process machine (we want someone who has been programming in Java for twenty years; this candidate has done it for 24; awesome). The cover letter is input to humans.
Humans whom you will potentially be working with, potentially for years. It seems reasonable for them to get an idea of your communication skills and empathy. Exercise that empathy: put your self in their shoes, and imagine what it is like to receive hundreds of resumés. What would you want to receive from a candidate? What would make your hiring decision easier or harder? Having figured that out, communicate it.
> As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
It’s a free world. You don’t owe hiring companies anything. Of course, they don’t owe you anything, either. In a booming hiring market, you may find that you can easily find positions without investing in leads; in a softer market, you may find less success.
Or a human could just read the resume.
In our case, we have 3 out of 10 people at the company reviewing these resumes (CTO, senior sysadmin, full-stack dev). We are committing significant resources to reviewing applications.
If you are going to optimize for submitting to a machine that scores your application, don't be surprised that a human isn't reading your application.
Here's the thing: If you're willing to accept that your resume will be passed over in preference for people who wrote a cover letter, that's fine, but a curious position to be in if you are looking for a job...
You're self selecting for people who happen to be as privileged as you are. Maybe that's what you want, but I'm not surprised it's been more difficult than you were expecting.
Please note, I'm not disputing your comment at all. It's just that what used to be considered the norm (cover letter, etc) is just way too time-intensive by the wayside as applicants now have to mostly optimize for quantity of apps submitted.
If you don't NEED a new job ASAP then, yeah, you can do that, but for someone who's been laid off or unemployed for longer stretches, it's really just a numbers game most of the time.
It’s absolute bullshit. What precisely do you mean?
Many smart people choose the right path even when they are broke and hopeless, it makes no sense to shift responsibility and call it privilege.
Doing this is a good way to get people good enough to have options to avoid applying to your job posting.
Yea, sure, cover letter for some JoeSoft writing crud apps may be weird
but for fancier jobs I don't really see problem with cover letters where candidate can share something more human than CV's "i've did blabla" like passion, motivation, etc, etc.
And highly motivated employee may be way more valuable than more skilled employee
Is there any evidence that writing a cover letter means they will be a motivated employee? What motivates me is the problem that I am solving on the job. I am extremely motivated to solve that specific task. If you ask me to write a cover letter about myself, I have zero motivation to do that because the evaluation criteria are unclear and half the companies don’t read them to begin with.
When I’m evaluating candidates, the only useful thing about a cover letter is as a disqualifying factor. If I see they’re bad at writing, I’ll likely reject their resume as well. Being well-spoken isn’t a positive, though.
They're at least motivated enough to spend time writing a cover letter.
FWIW, I haven't written a cover letter since 1997, but if it was a company I was interested in, I would write one if I thought they would read it.
Also, consider some smart people haven't acquired the ability of talking on their feet yet, but might be able to show some desirability when given the chance to write. Thomas Jefferson was that way; he wrote beautifully but speeches, not so much.
I meant evaluating this by reading the content.
Why would anybody want to do that? This is actually a serious question. Why would you expect Java developers to want to write frontend JavaScript code? I have seen a lot of positions come up like this and the employer is always left cluelessly scratching their heads as to why hiring is so hard. Is this a problem of expectation management or poor empathy?
This could be why that employer is not happy with the quality of candidates. They are forcefully imposing Java with an iron fist and wondering why people aren’t thrilled to work fullstack like that, when most people are not thrilled to work fullstack like that.
That is because there are smart people in the world that can self educate and jump into new technology with minimal friction, but those people are rare. Most employers want employees as early as the position opens and they don’t want to invest in training. Java is super desirable to employers because many developers are taught Java in school, it’s single paradigm, and it’s terse OOP conventions force the vague shape of a uniform architectural style. Most developers only know enough to be hired and not enough to write original software, of any style, so employers have to account for these things as though everyone is a junior developer, least common denominator.
That line of thinking suggests lower expenses, ease of candidate selection, and a wider candidate pool. In reality it tends to result in a less qualified larger labor pool with greater insecurity. This is why everything on the JavaScript side is about giant frameworks and the software is super bloated, because putting text to screen is all that matters but nobody knows how the technology works without a framework.
It seems like that they are having trouble finding people because what they want is less than optimal.
Why not get people who’ve worked with Java and other frontend frameworks, or Vue and other object oriented languages? In my first coding role I knew absolutely no C#, just some JS but I was contributing to the codebase within a week. Most of the particulars of your codebase will be particular to your codebase. Find people who’ve shown they can learn and give them a few weeks rather than take months to hire a person who has last worked with your particular stack.
Is a cover letter or a resume going to allow a manager the best chance at making a good hiring decision, WRT to finding a good fit for the project and team?
Clearly, you'll need more than just one or both of those, but as a first step, I'll take a cover letter that shows you give a damn over a fire and forget resume . If your only interaction with hiring is: "I'm willing to put in nothing more than the bare minimum", that's telling me something.
Generally, I'm seeing hourly rates 40%-60% lower than a year ago (for senior roles). It's pretty crappy.
Even when I apply to them (with those rates), 95% of the time, I don't get a response. (This has been talked about a few times in other threads, mainly to do with cover letters).
Are all these layoff I keep hearing about, really screwing things up to this extent? I'm confused on wtf is going on.
These services, like most others, sell something that cannot be bought. Namely, high quality candidates delivered to the hiring managers door. But in reality the incentives are more similar to Tinder than they are to a matchamker. Get everyone on both sides in a pay-to-play whirlpool and provide just enough value to seem useful.
In many industries hiring is still done primarily in-person through real-world network referrals. Maybe you tell yourself that these jobs are more fungible so the extra steps aren’t as necessary, but I think that as developers we underestimate our own fungibility.
1. The CEO/Board/Leaders ignore clear signals from candidates on what they want in a job (hybrid/remote being most common issue)
2. Hiring managers refused to learn the basics on how to attract & vet quality candidates. They are unreliable, capricious, and generally run hot/cold during the process
3. Recruiters have given up on addressing points #1 & #2, so they shovel candidates and jobs back and forth without expecting to be heard
Most intermediaries are in this position, they are trying to apply expertise on a business function to those who don’t share it. It’s very difficult to overcome, even when internal owners (like HR team members) know the gap and are advocating for an effective approach
Pay isn't the issue. I think there's three reasons why this is the case: we need genuine senior-level people, web/internet stack technology experience isn't relevant, and there's a requirement to work in the office. I mention that second one because the vast majority of applicants we get are Java/C#/etc. programmers and we need C/C++ ones.
Hopefully, the company will at least give a bit on the office requirement. I think if they did, we'd have filled these months ago.
I previously had no Python experience, but know how to code well in C# and JavaScript. Using a LLM, I was able to quickly get up to speed writing DevOps Python scripts because I understood basic programming concepts and terms.
But we absolutely interview the ones who seem like they'd be able to come up to speed. The pickings seem a bit slim, though.
We also aren't in SV, Seattle, or any of the other hot places people want to be. That's why I think the problem is more the office requirement than anything else.
The positions also aren't ML positions (we do use ML, but those positions are already well-covered.)
Another aspect: we aren't a pure computer tech company. We manufacture industrial equipment that uses a lot of tech. So I know that it wouldn't even occur to a lot of devs to apply.
That's why one of the pieces of advice I give to devs looking for work is to not restrict yourself to the obvious software houses. All sorts of types of businesses hire devs, and lots of them are doing cutting-edge, very interesting work.
While I've actively worked in many languages, C++ has been the bulk of my experience. And I am the same way. I can certainly work with C++17+, but I have learned that I dislike it strongly enough that I don't consider such jobs at all.
Bit manipulation? proficiency in hex notation? firmware frameworks (e.g UEFI)?
It's an indie conference for systems programmers (lots of assembly and C/C++ experts) and we have success stories of employers hiring people at Handmade. You'll notice some of last year's companies are even coming back this year.
Full disclosure: I'm the organizer.
As long as there are any people out there who meet your other requirements (seeking work or not), if you pay enough you can poach them from where they are.
Once the talk of possible recession started (earlier this year), postings fell off. Also salary range seemed to have dipped. As in the hiring company was looking for more for less. It appear many were fishing for better talent, recently downsized and desperate of steady income. Sure, such people exist. But when you sense it from a job ad, it's not a good look.
Since the beginning of Sept (read: end of Summer) it feels like things have picked up, and there's less bottom feeding. I've been getting interviews steady enough but in nearly all cases in the first five to ten minutes I find myself thinking, "Why am I here?" The point is, I often feel companies post ads but the ad doesn't actually refect their needs, or they are for some reason confused about their wants and needs. It's very annoying.
Cut-the-bullshit attracts talent.
I personally referred two excellent colleagues from past gigs, and had HR waste 3 hours of their time before DQing them because they mismatched on a cultural index quiz of some sort. I was not notified. When I finally found out, I was super embarrassed, and it damaged my relationship with one of the two friends. Guess how many colleagues I will be referring to this company in the future?
Our best applicants seemed to take weeks to schedule first interviews with. By the time we got to them, they had secured other gigs.
Strangely, many of the mediocre and "you're kidding, right?" candidates were actually promoted to us by our HR crew, wasting our time. I assume because their calendar times were widely open and available to us.
We ended up hiring some decent people, but.. I like to think if there was some sort of Quality Score we could apply, our HR team's involvement cost us 30% on the quality of people we ultimately brought on.
I wish I understood why companies did this. Our CTO apparently did not want to "ruffle feathers" to push back on HR's process. My continued howls of frustration about the process and its ineptitude actually got ME reprimanded. Which sent me back to the "fine, they're good enough" mindset in my screenings. Which completes the cycle of mediocrity.
Sigh. It should be better than this.
I had an SF-based startup to which I applied administer an IQ test as part of their interview process
It was really dumb--we're talking literally like 20 questions of "which shape comes next in the sequence", the kind of test administered to children to determine whether they qualify for advanced placement
Just taking job descriptions as an example, the state of tech job descriptions is an absolute, unbelievable, dumpster fire of an embarrassment.
If you have blatant typos, incorrect/missing information, botched formatting (copy+pasted bullets from Word to Outlook to LinkedIn to the point the formatting is mush), etc, you are going to get candidates of similar quality. I'm sure these job descriptions are written by recruiters/managers who would reject outright a candidate with a similar quality resume.
There is a parody idea along the lines of: if candidates wrote resumes like recruiters/managers write job descriptions.
Or candidates who have just started working with ML/AI are going to have to accept lower pay as their cost of changing specialisation. Or, likely, both.
My team started taking a different approach: We started hiring people at the lowest level we could ("associate", below even entry-level engineer), with minimal tech skills, but with active clearance and some adjacent skills. STEM background, or tech writing, or just someone who was a hobbyist. I started interviewing people on troubleshooting -- someone told me a fantastic story about troubleshooting a comms issue while deployed in the middle east. The fix involved copious amounts of superglue on a ground-based satellite. Switch out the words, and you could easily have a story of a grizzled old sysadmin patching in production.
We actually ended up being pretty successful. Sure, a substantial portion of our hires were still misses -- but that was already true. Meanwhile, we hired some really talented people from this route, who I ended up trying to poach years after leaving AWS, and leaving the cleared space entirely, because they were just genuinely great engineers who needed to be given that chance.
tl;dr, I agree, and it's nearly always a good idea to look at expanding the talent base in some way or another if you're struggling. In many cases, it means hiring people who have potential, as long as you have sufficient numbers of senior staff to help get them up to speed.
Job seekers exaggerate their experience and skills.
Hiring managers exaggerate how great job is.
It is a problem with no technical solution.
Well you have leetcode to check tech proficiency but is leetcode grinding hire best hire for the company?
There is also bunch of problems like, company itself doesn’t know what they want. Job seekers on the other hand not knowing what position they exactly want.
In the end, that risk can never be reduced to zero, so you have to accept a certain amount of bad hires/employers. There must be a level of risk where, in the big picture, the maximum benefit lies, and that's what should be aimed for rather than trying to accomplish the impossible at any cost.
I would say my personal cutoff is about 25, whether these statistics are trustworthy or not.
I would not be surprised if jobs were getting 1000+ applicants.
The last person I hired was at the start of this year, and at the time our salary offer was around market average. For this role we (well the execs... I'm pro WFH but not my call) were asking people to be in the office four days a week and work non-standard office hours. Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city.
One person we interviewed seemed like the only thing they were interested in was growing their Twitch subscriber count. Then we interviewed the person we ended up hiring, who I'm sad to say we only hired because they seemed the least bad - and by that point we were desperate for someone, and worried execs may cut our budget.
Oh and for anyone wondering, the role in question just needed standard frontend React skills. Nothing special.
The reason this might happen so often is that a job is incorrectly categorized on the job boards. I've last track of the number of jobs I've seen that are listed on a job board as Remote with that word prominently displayed on the post, but buried in the job description is some clarification that says something like "Candidates must be able to work 4 days a week in the office."
Finding talented people is harder than before.
It was talented people who were not laid off (mostly, generalizing ofc).
So now we have a huge surplus of untalented, average developers applying for all the jobs en mass.
Signal to noise ratio is worst I’ve ever witnessed.
I don’t know any experienced people with solid skills who also have degrees who have been having difficulty.
I know one good one, but without a relevant degree who is struggling. I also know lots of boot camp/recent grads in iffy masters programs who aren’t getting anywhere.
I am aware of a few hiring processes that are just inundated with people who don’t have a relevant degree that keep restarting as a result.
So it may simply be that standards rose more than actual availability in the market did.
I've done so many interviews in which a 4.0 CS grad can't sort a list that a degree from even 'elite' institutions doesn't mean much.
But for experienced hires, nobody gets algorithms questions. Instead, you get practical questions -- depending on the role, things like writing an ID allocator, finding duplicate files across a filesystem, demonstrating understanding of concurrency, etc. No "implement this well-understood algorithm that you'll never implement again" questions.
A lot of recruiters are just throwing out anything they receive after I dunno, after 400 applicants. It's too much trouble to go through.
Navigating the current job market hardly seems worth the risk, considering I've already got a stable, fairly well-paying job.
For seniors the bar is much higher because they will be expected to provide leadership and strategic guidance.
Current "seniors" are much worse than 2016's "middles". I'd not mind hiring a "middle", but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn. It's more about the attitude than skills.
Also funny stats: For 15 candidates interviewed we even got "scammed" thrice (fake CVs, one was basically copy-paste from other people, stolen code presented as their own). We hired one person so far.
What’s “a nice price” in 2023?
(Nothing personal, but it had to be said.)
Hmm.. not been my experience and not for me specifically. My attitude to interviewing (when I was on that side of the fence), was to hire for (I hate to say it as it's subjective), by perceived IQ and their drive to learn/get stuff done. It usually worked out quite well for my hires.
ATM, I'm getting rejected for the most stupid f.things of not knowing some obscure dated framework/library. Not sure if interviewers realize this, but in a lot of cases, it's an evening hacking on a project to learn it. These things are not rocket science.
My thoughts is that there's so many candidates (or maybe posting bots?), that if all checkboxes are not ticked, they can discard them.
About 25 years ago, friend used to have a bullshit detector skill in the job spec requirements. "Experience with: [real things], RFC 1149, [at least one more real thing]." Anyone who claimed experience in that one was automatically rejected. And yes, that was well before a Norwegian user group actually pulled "IP Over Avian Carriers" off in real life.
I’ve made a point to try to be as open and as fair as possible in our hiring process. We list the salaries up-front in the job description. We create per-hire ”join our team” pages that share a lot more about the role, including the exact hiring process, links to docs with interview prompts, timelines, and who you’ll interview with. We don’t require any formal studies; we hire globally through an EOR; we don’t change salary based on where in the world. We’re also a non-profit with a compelling mission and interesting technical challenges. We want to hire people who bring different viewpoints and add stuff to our team, and where we can give them a good professional experience too.
A few observations on folks who are applying:
- About a third are just outright unqualified. For example, one of the roles needs folks with experience in Postgres at a medium level (triggers, plpgsql, replication, PostGIS, etc) and we’ll get applicants who’ve only used an ORM to work with Postgres). We have a few screening questions that literally confirm the required skills listed in the job posting and use these to auto-reject applicants. (Again, nothing unfair or tricky; just literally “have you used features like triggers or replication in Postgres?”)
- About half seem like good candidates from application but are obvious-no’s after either several-minute examination of application materials or a 20-30 minute call. (Generally failing a screening call because they’ve exaggerated on their resumes; haven’t read our “join our team” page that we ask them to read before our call; have red-flags in our call; etc.)
- The remaining ~15% are reasonable folks for us to do technical interviews, and it comes down to how much their experience lines up with the areas we need and how well we can asses their skills in interviews. (Two-way street, of course… lots of chances for them to ask us Qs!)
Where it’s been tough is filtering through the top of the funnel. In part: ChatGPT has really made a difference, in that many candidates are now using it along with much more sophisticated tools to track all their potential jobs. I think it’s _good_ in some ways, but previously we could use the ability to write well (resume, answering Qs like “why do you want to work at our company?”, communication in email) as a good proxy signal of overall effectiveness of communication. (For a fully distributed remote team that does its work via slack and GitHub, this is a relevant skill.) So we’re now having to do a _lot_ of extra work to try to be fair to everyone and keep bias as much as possible down. (I had to hire a contract recruiter to work with us - it used to be resume screening and initial calls were an average of 45 minutes a day; it went to 3 1/2 hours this year; as a CTO there’s no way I can spend that kind of time).
I don’t know what the solution is — it feels like a bit of an arms race. For every company that’s trying to run a good process, the extra application load is a real cost; for companies that aren’t particularly thoughtful, it makes it worse for the candidates.
I’d love to hear what others think about anything I’ve shared. What can we as hiring managers do to make it easier for you? And: what can we do to make it easier on us?
I've never used postgres. I've worked with umpteen technologies over the years, including lots of gis, just never needed to use postgres yet. But I know it's out there and I'm confident if I needed to, it wouldn't take more than a few days to catch up.
Not a dig at you specifically but a lot of companies seem to look for specific tech experience rather than a track record of just learning whatever tech is needed.
I remember a friend describing interviewing as a search problem. How long and how much resource is one willing to spend on a search? And then, adjust the hiring process (for employer) or job search process (for candidate) accordingly.
The link: https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-boss-laid-off-staff-p...
The deeper story: Business Insider does not write these stories themselves. They just take articles basically "pre-written" by corporate PR/press flaks and reprint them... Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ they might reach out for a "pushback/response" quote and add "x,y,z refused to comment for this story" if they don't get a response within a couple hours. Or they might spend 5 minutes fact-checking something - but probably not: if it's a source they "trust" who gives them articles that make their life easier by feeding them stories people click on, why bite the hand that feeds?
So what? Well, this story was written by _AirBnB_, most likely at the behest of Chesky either directly or indirectly. And the narrative essentially reduces to "Brian Chesky cares about the people he laid off". Why would he pay people to create that narrative? I won't lead you all the way there, but suffice to say it's good sign.
It's hard to find people with the desired skills at their offered price point. Simple as.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tech-layoff-draft/ (“Tech layoffs see former workers in high demand elsewhere”)
Source? My impression is the exact opposite.