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Why is it important that someone was never homeless?

Or why does it matter that they’re “not financially hungry enough”? Or that they have poor job seeking skills?

If anything, wouldn’t those last two mean the candidate would be unlikely to ask for raises or leave your company for another offer when you least expect it? The latter in particular has seemingly zero impact on someone’s dedication or skills (same with homelessness). Why would you prefer someone that’s good at finding work? That’s like looking to date someone who is good at starting new relationships, wouldn’t you rather someone who is good at maintaining them?

I worked at a company that at one point was actually open minded and cared more about the work than a lot of trivialities (till it grew up, got acquired by private equity, and became an empire of bullshit), and there was an employee who was famously homeless until she worked there. She was intelligent and incredibly dedicated and really well liked throughout, but I was also told she needed to be told to shower regularly (no idea whether that's true; she never seemed too unkempt to me). She could certainly also be called a bit weird.

I suppose people just don't like misfits (speaking as one who could also be described in such a way for a few reasons) and don't want to be made uncomfortable by their presence.

It’s just a possible signal. When you have 30 equally qualified candidates, you will take any signal you can get.

Homelessness could indicate drug addiction, mental health issues, poor history of financial decisions, lack of social support network (below average social skills). In a 200 resume pile, SOME of those people will have bad personal lives that could negatively affect their work performance, maybe not always, but perhaps episodically.

And there’s a Goldilocks zone of financial need. If you are too rich, then we might as well be paying you Monopoly money. Those people can act in unexpected ways since they live in a different incentive world than their team members. If someone is in dire financial straits, they might suddenly have their car repossessed or begin stealing from you. It’s standard to do a credit check for certain financial roles to make sure the candidate isn’t a theft risk.

> If you are too rich, then we might as well be paying you Monopoly money

I’ve wondered if this is a significant factor in the industry’s ageism. For the past maybe 15+ years, software engineers who would have had a really solid resume at age 25 often have significant financial flexibility by the time they are in their 40s. Some of them check out of the industry, some of them focus on more cause-like efforts, and the remaining ones might be less dependable for the company in terms of overworking than they used to be back when they were still more financially motivated.

Yes, this is absolutely interrelated. Cognitive decline is not a real issue before typical retirement age. I suspect the following : Younger, less experienced managers being uncomfortable managing older more experienced workers. Life experience means older workers are less likely to put up with abuse, can recognize toxic situations, and have the personal skills to make proactive changes. Busier, fuller lives, and having already been burned out a few times means they won’t overwork themselves. And financial independence means they can stand up to bad situations and that getting fired is a speed bump, not an earthquake.

Managerial class needs to strip away any responsibility so they are perfectionist. If we sill lived in an entrepreneurial society this whole thing would not be a big issue

Not hiring tech workers because they're not financially desperate enough sure would explain why "tech hiring is hard". Jesus Christ. Thanks for the reminder that I should have no loyalty to an employer whatsoever and treat them as an adversary.

You should not be loyal to an employer unless they are extremely special (and probably privately controlled).

And yes, the right amount of financial dependence keeps the average employee in the seat and taking the work seriously.

Good to know the industry does its best to discriminate against the disadvantaged while maintaining plausible deniability :)

Yup, and age discrimination is rampant as well. I’d say 50 is where it starts being a serious drag on an IC candidate. People use terms like “fit” and “team dynamics.”

"culture fit" is what I've heard, but "fit" is good to watch out for too, so good to know, as is "team dynamics" which I had not come across before (in this context).

Gracias :)

"team spirit" and ”teamwork" are other terms to watch out for, when used in the wrong contexts, as expressions of factors that might be beyond your control.

#parsing_pun

you should hire people who are worse candidates because.... they're disadvantaged!

Not saying that, but some of those reasons for passing on a candidate are straight-up illegal.

Illegal if you do it explicitly. Legal if you do it by proxy criteria and plausible deniability.

Eh I wouldn't call that legal but rather a good coverup.

Schrödinger’s cat. It’s not illegal till the court looks at your situation and says it is. Companies do plausibly illegal things all day long.

I've never been a hiring manager but I've interviewed maybe a couple dozen engineers over the years, of all experience levels. I've never once considered an employment gap in and of itself a deal breaker. Sometimes I've never even asked about it. And the times it did come up, there was never a concerning explanation.

But many people are not like me and they think any stumble in the rat race is an insurmountable red flag.

Were you interviewing applicants directly, or was there an upstream selection process before their names landed on your desk? It makes sense that everyone you see with a resume gap has a good reason behind it if recruiters were filtering out the people who don't.

I'm not usually the one that first sees resumes. It is true I have the luxury of seeing pre-screened candidates. I don't know what the filter criteria are but I've seen candidates with worse things than employment gaps. I mostly put that down to the recruiter or whoever is screening the resumes not totally understanding the position that we're trying to fill.

I get filtering candidates with just a resume is not any easy thing to do and no matter how you decided to do it, some tough calls have to be made. But now I'm wondering who we may have missed out on considering because of some health issue, family issue or just decided to do something else for a year.

Did you filter through the giant pile of raw resumes? If they were pre-filtered then you already were talking to qualified candidates and a determination was made that the gap was not indicative of bigger issues with that candidate.

If you are interviewing less than a dozen candidates a year then that probably means someone else in the organisation has already gone through a big pile of CVs to narrow it down to the 10-15 best candidates for you to interview. Having, briefly, sat at the start of that pipeline and seen 150+ reasonably relevant looking CVs (someone had already thrown out the very worst ones) roll in in a week for a fairly entry level programming position and having only a few hours spend to go from 150 to 10-15 candidates, you start making up some pretty arbitrary rules for throwing out CVs.

That's what unvarnished truth sounds like.

I have a gap on my resume, I went thru-hiking, sure that is a good enough and maybe positive explanation, but if brought up on an interview I'm going to pass on any offer unless I'm desperate.

I don't want to work for someone that judgemental. I enjoy my work, and making good things, but also work is work. If an employer is going to judge me beyond just the skills I bring to the table, that is a major red flag.

maybe I am not the ideal candidate then, but if you are looking for someone perfect on paper, your going to get someone who _was_ perfect on paper

It’s most likely to be brought up by a recruiter during a 10 minute phone screen, and since a tru-hike takes maybe 6 months max, I wouldn’t expect you to get asked. If you went hiking for over a year, I think the recruiter might ask, but that it doesn’t really reflect on the company’s values, it’s just a standard kind of question any recruiter might ask if they get a sense there could be a problem there.

If the hiring manager asked about a short gap, that would be a bit wtf to me.

I think you're over thinking this.

I mean to say if a recruiter asks me about a gap in my resume, I would see this as a red flag. The length of the gap is almost arbitrary. If I sat at home for 2 years straight playing Quake3, but have provable skills (e.g. technical assessment) for the job, the employer should not care what I do on my time. It is MY time.

As a former recruiter, I very much disagree:)

Even if a candidate passed a strong technical assessment, there are many other factors and skills that make a person a successful team member. A gap is just one of many possible signals that a person might not be a perfect employee. It’s a common sense question to ask for recruiters. They do not need to be explicitly told by their bosses to ask the question and it does not have much to say about the organization. All it takes is to talk to hundreds of candidates for various roles and see how inconsistent the candidates quality is and tie it back to employment history.

The ideal resume is a series of 2 to 5 year stints or promotions within the same company where each role is of increasing responsibility and level. 80th percentile candidates who want to work do not spent long periods of time unemployed. It’s always a matter of someone having major priorities beyond work or an inability to work.

And I say all this as a person who took a year break because I had priorities outside of work, then with awareness of that impact, aggressively jumped back into the workforce at month 12.

>All it takes is to talk to hundreds of candidates for various roles and see how inconsistent the candidates quality is and tie it back to employment history.

Oh good idea. I'll make sure to never hire "former recruiters" now.

> As a former recruiter, I very much disagree:)

Then agree to disagree. I find it offensive that an employer would care what I do in my free time.

I wouldn't want to work for you. :D sorry

You will of course find someone, but its not me.

And for some reason it's a mystery why people are having few or no kids these days.

I had a baby, but in reviewing its resume realized it had a 9 month gap of doing nothing. I asked that recruiter what policy was, realized my mistake for bringing him onto the team, and fired jr the next day. Strangely morale plummeted.

It's amazing the baby even came to term. Without results by the end of the quarter, I'd have expected Mom to have been taken out back and shot. Weird how the company is struggling to make progress, despite the high bar for performance.

Just make sure and get him into a competitive preschool since I'm sure recruiters will be looking at that by the time he's applying for a job.

Wow... do you mind sharing which company(ies) this is commonplace?

Almost all of them and in every industry. It is as standard in HR as having a PTO policy.