Why it's hard to get hired despite glowing jobs reports
wsj.com
wsj.com
I am sure a lot - maybe most! - of this "ghosting" really is just rudeness and/or abusing power. But in my anecdotal experience I was always way too busy to do my normal duties along with handling a hiring process, and I ended up stringing candidates along without intending to - in fact I felt terrible about it! Some managers accommodate the work of hiring by taking other stuff off your plate. Other managers dump too much of the hiring process onto you, even if you're already coding for 60 hours a week (my last job really sucked).
That said, note the extremely important caveat tucked at the very end:
> More than three-quarters of the reported job gains in the last month were concentrated in four sectors: government, healthcare, construction, and leisure and hospitality. Jobs in tech, finance, law, and accounting were essentially flat or slightly down.
I will note that salaried positions often are arbitrary on the time commitment.
Regardless, in practice, if you're asked to do something by your management, that is literally the definition of "your regular duties." Working a couple hours overtime isn't anything worth complaining about (nothing will change and you'll get flagged as a complainer), but working an entire extra workday is. See my previous comment for reasons.
If you want a to know the true state of the software engineering job market, I think sites like hnhiringtrends [1] illustrate the situation nicely.
One time, when I was applying to work for a newspaper [1] as a software engineer. The recruiter was pretty sure I'd get an interview so he actually fast tracked me to do some stupid personality quiz and compliance crap, which took about three hours. The next day, I get a call from the recruiter and he tells me that I was passed over because my resume "looked too much like a manager's resume, no hands on coding experience".
Now, that is very bizarre, because I've never really been a manager. I was an adjunct professor for two semesters, but for the last 13 years I've been a pretty vanilla software engineer, and my resume pretty much exclusively tried to highlight my work with .NET and Java and Node.js and Kafka. In fact, people have told me that my resume was "too technical" and that I need to speak at higher levels and get out of the weeds.
The recruiter was confused too for the same reason, and then I realized something: the hiring manager probably never actually read the resume. I believe that they already knew who they wanted to hire for the position, but for bureaucratic or legal reasons, they had to make it look like they were trying to find the "best person for the job", and put out feelers for people, and they were just kind of ambivalent about wasting my time. It really bothered me, but there's not much I can do about it.
2023 was probably the worst year of my life. I got laid off twice, and spent about six months applying to jobs. I never really got used to waking up to twenty rejections every morning so every day I would feel kind of depressed until I went to sleep. I hated the faux politeness that I display during Zoom interviews. I hated logging into LinkedIn every day, applying to 100 jobs. I hated messaging all my contacts to ask if they know anyone hiring. I hated feeling desperate. It was tough, and I don't wish it on anyone.
I have a really decent job now and I consider myself very grateful and lucky to have it. It's a really tough market right now, and anyone who's stuck competing in it has my sympathies.
[1] Not going to say the name but it's definitely one you've heard of and probably have read.
My gut feeling is this happens all the time, more often than we can possibly imagine. They're just "seems" to be so much nepotism and hire-my-buddyism. But of course we can't prove it. When you get rejected for a reason there is no legal requirement that the reason makes sense, is true, or that they even tell you the reason. It just cannot be one of a few very specific enumerated reasons (which usually can't be proven anyway, so a pointless rule), and that's it.
It wouldn't have bothered me as much if I hadn't wasted my time with the idiotic personality test they made me take that took way too much time. If they weren't going to hire me, that's fine, I'm not entitled to a job from this company, but I think they should just be courteous and minimize how much time is wasted. When recruiters call me for a job I don't want, I try as soon as possible to say something like "I'm not interested, I don't really want to waste your time, so I'm going to hang up now". It might come off as rude, but at least I cannot be accused of leading anyone on.
[1] I guess outside of maybe religion since I'm an atheist? That never really comes up during interview though, and I very much doubt that's ever been the reason I'm rejected.
I don't think you understand how "protected classes" work in employment law.
I guess what I was trying to say is that I'm not in a demographic that's historically been a victim of prejudice; I'm a 33 year old straight tall white dude born in the US that comes from a relatively affluent family without any kids who has never been a veteran.
Obviously if someone explicitly didn't hire me because I'm white, that would be an obvious violation, but I don't really think that's ever happened to me. I think when I've been declined for jobs, it's for more direct reasons like "he's kind of an asshole" or "he doesn't seem smart enough".
On very rare occasions they will know if I am actually a good fit for a job because they’ll take the time to actually learn a bit about CS. Those recruiters I generally like.
To be clear, I don't love recruiters. I even asked on HN awhile ago what recruiters actually do [1], because it doesn't appear like a lot, at least from an outside observer.
Nowadays, there are 4 to 6 rounds plus 2 technical challenges... Do they think they are Google? But they don't pay like Google.
If someone asks me to “design twitter” or about a time I disagreed with my coworker one more time…
Seriously considering the woodworking route.
The number of adults with completely dysfunctional conflict-resolution skills is actually mind boggling.
I was recently asked this question, and while I've had some disagreements with coworkers over minor things, I've never had a major disagreement that was noteworthy, so I (to my inevitable detriment) said: "Nothing really comes to mind at the moment but if something like that were to happen, I'd do X, Y, and Z". Given the reaction from the interviewer I doubt I passed. I still have 2 more interviews with this company.
If you don't disagree with your coworkers on some part their technical decisions on a regular basis, then you probably don't review their code
> some disagreements with coworkers over minor things
Handling minor everyday disagreements gracefully is a valuable soft skill
Ah the classic "it's not wrong if everyone's doing it" argument. But to me the op wasn't complaining about the content of the question, just the banality of answering it over and over.
Yes, mediocre people like to select the same.
> Handling minor everyday disagreements
is a skill that does not need to be "prepared for" in an interview. And naturally the mediocrities that think asking the standard question and getting the standard answer back are also in for a surprise.
It's surprising how many candidates will say batshit crazy things not realizing they're bat shit crazy.
It's like fizzbuzz at this point, just cuts out a surprisingly large chunk of the cruft out.
I agree you'd think this is the dumbest question, and most people will make up something minor, but it does weed people out.
When it comes to disagreements not being noteworthy, it could also be that you've internalized "disagree and commit." That's not a failing; that's just moving the fuck on and not dwelling on past decisions, unless they actually bear revisiting.
They don't want to hear actual stories - in real life some people are just unreasonable assholes, and the conflict you have cannot be resolved in some MBA style procedure.
What these questions do is push you into being somewhat sociopathic and twisting the truth to tell them what they want to hear.
You'll end up hiring people that are excellent liars that can "navigate social situations".
I had three coding interviews, and they all involved very practical, challenging problems that I hadn't ever seen before. The system design ones was a good back and forth, it didn't feel confrontational or textobok.
I highly recommend people looking for a job to at least give it a shot there.
That's the biggest thing. Companies want you to lie prostrate in front of them for comparatively mediocre pay.
The people doing the interviews at most companies are often terrible too... so what is all of this ceremony for?
I'm lucky to have a job at the moment, but I have looked around. I can honestly say I was not impressed by any of the big companies I talked too. The startups were in cash holding mode at the time, so I didn't really look in that direction.
And then for tests, you’d want a FizzBuzz (doable in one minute or less) before the phone screen and then something more substantive before the final interview.
2 interviews/2 tests seems to be the minimum.
And, again, it should be something doable in under a minute. The best I've seen is a bonus screen on Indeed that has one of a dozen sample 20-line programs and you just have to point out which line is incorrect in the program.
It's also incredibly difficult to fire poor performers in most modern companies, so managers are very touchy about who they hire.
I've interviewed people who claimed to be practicing engineers for 5+ years, and had big name companies on their resume, but became lost when asked to write a simple (no trick question) program in a language of their choice.
One time, I interviewed while on burnout (general startup stress + workplace bullying). The position was a perfect match, but I was so exhausted that I couldn't write a simple loop. I was rejected.
After a forced health break, I applied at Mozilla, got hired, shipped code and specs that are currently used on most devices on this planet and at least one in orbit.
So, yeah, I'm not a big fan of judging people from their performance in an interview.
Even if we did, hiring someone that burnt out just doesn't seem like a great idea. You were a fundamentally different candidate after your forced health break. What do you think the odds are that, had you actually been hired while burnt out, that you could have succeeded at the job at Mozilla? Without the time off, I'm guessing those odds are low.
I realize people have to make a living. Believe me, I do. And I don't think people ought to be as heavily penalized for needing to take extended amounts of time off work as they are. But, I also don't see what a company in a capitalist economy can do about it while still remaining competitive.
> I've interviewed people who claimed to be practicing engineers for 5+ years, and had big name companies on their resume, but became lost when asked to write a simple (no trick question) program in a language of their choice.
I've failed these tests, sometimes for code I literally exactly have on my GitHub and that I've written from scratch (effort-free).
Live coding with three random strangers staring at you just isn't the same.
Kind of like an English Literature degree shows that you know a great deal about the language and have read many works but tells me nothing about whether you can write a compelling novel.
I always ask people to stand back and consider if this is actually possible.
Someone who has been at a big name company writing code for 5+ years clearly has been writing code. (You can confirm this with the company as HR will issue a statement saying J.Doe worked there from date to date and what job title they had.)
So there's two possibilities. Either they've been writing code at a known company for 5+ years and can't write an if statement. Or, they can but are too stressed by the interview setup they don't even remember their own name.
The latter is about 1000x more likely than the former. If they truly can't write an if statement, they would've been PIP'd out of that large company before 5+ years.
It is true, however, that people don't generally seem to give enough benefit of the doubt in interviews. This could be an illusion sometimes. If interviewers give you the benefit of the doubt and someone else does way better than you or has a better resume (or cheaper pay rate), you won't get the job.
Background checks do, and a company shouldn't (and don't) do that before being ready to extend an offer (actually it's usually done after extending the offer, just a contingency).
However, a simple employment check is easy and quick. (Perhaps even automated by HRIS systems these days, haven't kept track so not sure.)
Why waste ~6 hours of expensive senior engineer and hiring manager time doing rounds of interviews before doing a simple check on whether the resume is correct about employment place/title/duration?
Also, I've seen records from my most recent background check, and one of the companies I worked at simply didn't answer questions, and hardly ever picked up the phone. Almost nobody at any company I worked at had a phone, so it all had to go through HR. And again, if each unemployed worker gets like a dozen interviews, this kind of frivolous checking will generate hundreds of pointless phone calls.
>Why waste ~6 hours of expensive senior engineer and hiring manager time doing rounds of interviews before doing a simple check on whether the resume is correct about employment place/title/duration?
I think it is rare for a faker to make it through to an interview, much less even pass the first 1 hour session. Failing the background check is rare. I think it's safe enough to start with the assumption that a resume is correct and work from there. You should be able to detect most fakes because they will be screwed up in obvious ways.
Most bachelors degrees in CS from accredited schools are exactly this, regardless of all the smack people talk about new grads. It is rare to see a school teaching CS without a significant programming curriculum. Schools take advice from industry to improve outcomes.
If you can't take the word of a long-standing institution that tested an individual for 4 or more years, what kind of certification are you expecting people to get?
>I've interviewed people who claimed to be practicing engineers for 5+ years, and had big name companies on their resume, but became lost when asked to write a simple (no trick question) program in a language of their choice.
People get nervous, can have a bad day, or be intoxicated. And a significant number of people you're talking to might be overtly lying on their resumes. Your "no trick question" might also just be a bad question: too hard or ambiguous, or very different from what the candidate has seen. Some interviewers are overly confident in their ability to ask relevant and comprehensible questions, or else too particular about what they will accept.
And yes, there are many people with CS degrees who can not, even with much help and prompting, FizzBuzz.
I'm not really complaining, I'm in a fairly good spot myself, but for others out there in this situation, you're not alone.
It's been over a month. I can believe that family friend would be forced to say something positive about my CV, but not that he'd give me false hope.
My interpretation: companies aren't hiring, they're covertly laying off staff whilst projecting growth to the market. Or, they are hiring, but the current teams are worried about the security of their own jobs as AI is now making everyone worried.
But he left with the promise of a reply. It just seems heartless, especially since I will see him again soon at another family function.
So what happens if you send in your resume when we're already evaluating a bunch of people? Well, we may not have the bandwidth to interview you while we see if our current batch of candidates pan out. But also if your resume is good we probably won't reject you, either, while we wait to see if we can actually close a candidate.
It's entirely possible that we DO reach out to you after 2 months if we fail to make a hire on the current batch of candidates, or if our offers are rejected. Believe it or not, your resume is still right there in the tracker, and if there's no response yet, it could just be because it takes a really long time to go through this hiring process for everyone involved and there's no reason to reject you outright.
I saw a tweet that showed we had a net job loss when revised reports are accounted for. I see thousands of videos on TikTok saying people are struggling.
Many job gains are in low-wage category.
I don't know what is going on. We have a business but people have stopped buying for the most part in last 6 months.
Anyone else see your business or startup struggling to close deals in last 6 months?
Hope it doesn't last longer. Slow bleeding is worse than hard recession.
This is false [1].
> Anyone else see your business or startup struggling to close deals in last 6 months?
VCs are raising record-breaking funds again [2].
[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
[2] https://www.altassets.net/private-equity-news/by-pe-sector/v...
VC raising funds have nothing to do with ecomony. It is rich people moving money among each other. If you believe in trickle down, then perhaps part of these record breaking funds will flow to rich and connected founders.
For everyone else, there is a big struggle.
The claim absolutely is [1]. Revisions for 2022 were on average up. Revisions for 2023 were on average down, but only about 10% of the original increase.
> VC raising funds have nothing to do with ecomony. It is rich people moving money among each other
It has a hell of a lot to do with fundraising!
BLS is government resource. Same with job reports, data gets revised often.
Regular people aren't seeing their "business or startup struggling to close deals in last 6 months." You made two false claims. They're being refuted individually.
> a software engineer who lost his/her job and now struggling for months is real signal
FTFA (and top comment): "Jobs in tech, finance, law, and accounting were essentially flat or slightly down." That's nationally; it's worse if you're in e.g. the Bay Area.
Also, statistically speaking, software engineers aren't "regular people" given their median wage is double the population's.
> BLS is government resource. Same with job reports, data gets revised often
Yes. You can see the revisions. They publish them. They're linked to above. If you know how to read these data, you know first estimates can be 10 to 40% off. That's why they're published as estimates.
Also, there are dozens of employment metrics. Here is a private one [1]. They all paint the same picture.
There isn't a large tech industry in my area so it's difficult to network or leverage my local connections. I was fortunate to land my current role simply because the CEO found me on LinkedIn and offered me the position. However, I now realize now that he likely had no one apply for this position at all given the pay and benefits.
But I'm still glad I found this role as it is my first official software development job after years of freelancing. I'm hoping to use this role to help me transition into a better compensated job with a more legit company.
As a software engineer with a CPA, it’s been brutal. I was laid off in January and have received zero interviews in 100 applications. I’ve received 3 responses, which led to an initial conversation and then being ghosted. I’ve received about 10 rejections. The rest have had no response.
Over those 4 months I applied for a total of 87 roles for data scientist / analytics engineer. Outcome:
- Ghosted: 49.4% - Rejected: 34.5% - Role cancelled: 3.4% - Interview: 12.6%
That breakdown was consistent across all my former workmates (between 50 to 100 applications before signing a contract), which is largely due to mass layoffs / high competition in the tech sector
Being ghosted is the norm (more on that later)
Avoid recruitment agencies at all cost. Here, they will ghost you for the jobs you apply for, and will then start contacting you for roles you're overqualified for (internships, etc..)
What we realised after a while, from chatting with folks who work in the recruitment field is that if you start getting loads of templated rejection email a few days / weeks after applying for roles, this means that nobody ever read your resume.
Each role we apply for usually receive 100+ applications, and that the recruiter who posted the role is also hiring for a network engineer, a janitor, two junior data analysts, a marketing consultant, a senior project manager, etc..
In other words, they're going to receive several hundreds of resumes, and they won't be able to read all of them. Actually, they'll only read 10 resumes for each role, as is the norm in modern HR.
It seems that most recruiters these days use ATS software to do all of the work for them. Here in Ireland the top ones are "Lever ATS" or "Recruiterbox ATS". Depending on the keywords that the recruiter enters, each resume gets a score. The recruiter then proceeds to open the top 10 applications only, and clicks on a button that sends a templated rejection email to all the unfortunate candidates that didn't make the cut.
Though recruiters usually try and become experts in a specific area ("I'm a tech recruiter", "I'm a recruiter that specialises in finance"), they actually know very little about the jobs that they hire for.
The truth is, 99% of the time, the reason why we get rejected isn't because we're not a good fit for the role. It's because we failed to pass the ATS software filtering process.
In 1998, I was hired after one interview where we talked for about 10 minutes, then I was asked to sit down at a computer and demonstrate that I could use vi and knew how to get a query string from environment variables in C.
I stayed there for 24 years, hit major burnout when I was forced into more social roles, took some time off, and now I have no idea how to effectively navigate this Kafkaesque hiring process.
Which is weird because recruiters reached out for both Meta and Google in 2021 and I passed their interview then. I took a job at a startup instead. Not sure if good or bad decision since both Meta and Google had mass layoffs.
So even if you cleared 2021 bar, 2023 results in being ghosted.
It’s a pretty absurd market. Unless you’re one of the few ML/AI scientists, it’s pretty rough out there.
In other words, I didn't experience anything as bad as what is described, but still, a far cry from the situation 3, 5 or 10 years ago.
.. perhaps because jobs numbers are now partisan and politicized, and no longer reflect reality.
Tell us how many 40-somethings you rec’d when they were on the other side of the desk.
the govt bean counters do not care about job quality...to them, a job is a job and if you took it you must be happy with it
- Company lists position - Company interviews citizens. - Company claims it can’t find any qualified citizens - Company hires immigrants, paying them less
Meikeisha Scott-Parker, out of work as a project manager since January, recently cleared a second-round interview and believed an offer was imminent. But she didn't get the job because she was overqualified and too expensive, a recruiter told her.
A few days later, she saw the same position reposted with an advertised wage that was $10 an hour less than originally listed. She figures the company either trimmed its budget or concluded that it could find adequate help at a bargain price.
"The truth is, had they asked me, I might have taken $10 less because of the situation that I'm in," Scott-Parker says. "The market is so slow right now."I'm not a project manager and I can't stop recruiters contacting me. Project management is not the whole IT market. It's a small niche to say the least.