What Your Job Ad Says About You
talentstuff.com
talentstuff.com
If you're responsible for writing job ads in 2024, the best advice I can give you is to disregard as many of the traditional job ad tropes as possible and write your job ad as if you're writing it for the actual human you want to hire in mind.
It's just individual company not being incentivized to pull down job listings when they no longer have capacity to hire.
The roles suddenly become "opportunistic hire" rather than actual open headcount. Open roles exist in a continuum of "urgent backfill" / "open budget headcount this quarter" / "could negotiate headcount for the right candidate" / "just passively interviewing to see who is out there" / "no chance we are hiring anyone this decade".
Not a clear case of fraud to be made really. Better to have no job listing to send resumes to? Not clear thats true either.
Though I suppose it's impossible to prove.
How would you define a fraudulent job listing versus simply keeping a listing up in case the right candidate shows up / budget comes back next quarter?
Wouldn't this create incentives for companies to be more hesitant to post job openings and more aggressive in taking them down?
I've worked at places where we had job listing X, talked to some people and ended up filling job Y and Z instead (which didn't exist as listings) because we found some really interesting people.
Would that possibly create unwanted side effects like more jobs filled without being ever listed via backchannels/personal networks? Or more process/HR?
Anyway, assuming that the core of a given job posting's problem wasn't simply inherited by people who can't do much about it, I must think, at the very least, that being more truthful will be likely to help and unlikely to hurt.
Edit: Saw another comment from someone else about how the companies in general are succeeding as things are. So in that sense I guess I can see wrt why would they change what's working. For some reason I got the sense of the focus shifting unaccountably from abstract to particular but without any actual particulars happening.
At the end of the day, as well as most of the rest of it, I guess I don't really know. I'm definitely not the guy who's going to miraculously fix this problem. I do wonder, though, if companies aren't merely succeeding despite everything -- or maybe a constantly churning majority with a crust of established players plus a bit of sawdust and super glue just manages to give the impression that the practices generally seen are the same ones that generally work.
this is the 'tock' after the "prompt engineer" 'tick'
If your hiring process can't perform that well, it's broken.
If you have a lot of candidates for example, you may not be able to physically interview them all on the same day (both for your own capacity reasons but also for candidates' own availability reasons for example).
You may think that this does not fit your hiring process. If so, I think you're not really getting what you expect out of it anyway.
From an interviewee perspective, I appreciate what you are saying, but typically the interview process for a position could last weeks, depending on the availability of the candidates. Unfortunately, resume embellishment has increased quite a bit over the last decade or two, so candidates who look good on paper aren't great "in the field." This results in an even longer process because you have to manually (via phone call/interview) weed out the embellishers who you thought would be a good fit but weren't quite up to the ability stated in the resume.
Hiring is a slog and it sucks.
As a candidate, I’ve had situations where I got two offers at the same time. BOTH offers were acceptable, both good companies, and I’m confident I would have been happy and successful in either place. With all that being equal, I chose the company that was in my timezone and I had prior connections with. The other company could have done nothing except go waaay above market rate on the role for me.
Some candidates interview just for practice, some are keeping options open, some were solicited to interview and weren’t really looking and the want to get to the offer before they really even begin making a decision.
Likewise, as a hiring manager, I’ve had cases where more than one candidate meets the bar for a single role and I would have been happy to hire either, so “falling back” to the next person isn’t a reduction in standards.
There’s so many reasons that you don’t always hire the first candidate you make an offer too.
If they don't need to fix it, what makes it broken?
I've been critical of hiring in tech for years and years and years, but hiring has only gotten worse (from my point of view) and the companies seem to be fine.
So not actually broken, but someone idealistic or naive or clueless as to the working of a business may think it’s broken.
This seems idyllic and by your measure every company has a broken process.
Perhaps they are all broken, but which are useful.
As a hiring manager, I’m balancing lots of priorities and hiring is rarely my true #1. When with early startups it’s hard to just logically review all applications within 5 days because rolling reviews are hard.
That is completely unworkable and you will end up with bad candidates or you will have to fire candidates very quickly with a process like that.
So, yeah, a can of worms. They are rare, but they sure are pungent.
if political location is required for regs/visa/tax/whatever don't tie that to applicants' geographic location
We send rejections. I haven't heard of any complaints or arguments ever
I also once offered someone to privately help them make the career switch they were trying to make but were clearly not ready for (I didn't word it like that to them). The applicant reminded me of someone in school who wasn't the technical best performer but always kept high spirits while working hard (within reason, nothing extreme, but it set a good example for... you know how most kids in group work usually perform) and they just needed a little bit of help to be a great teammate. Never heard back from that applicant :(
This is all for an IT position in Germany (though remote work in adjacent timezones is fine and more than half our employees aren't German currently; we basically hire anyone qualified who applies), perhaps it's different if you hire for different types of jobs or in other cultures
I've also had places keep it ambiguous and send an offer nearly a year after interviewing. Game theory applies, as always.
On the other hand, the rude option of not answering harms the company's HR brand.
Moreover, candidates might prefer bland non-responses that demonstrate more savoir faire than explaining, honestly but stupidly, the reasons of a rejection.
The talent pool is not infinite, and a rejection means "we don't have a vacancy for which you are the right candidate right now", not necessarily "No way will you ever work for this company". So the core benefit of treating rejected applicants fairly, and perhaps providing them conditions under which they can re-apply ("We won't accept further applications from you in the next year, but we'd encourage you to re-apply for a suitable role after then"), and some things to work on before they could be successful in the company, then they might be an asset for the company in the future.
Likewise, companies which have a reputation for providing feedback and a polite thanks but no thanks are more likely to get applications than companies that have a reputation for ghosting.
> You can start arguing
Just have a rule that all communications with the candidate go through HR (or the person responsible for coordinating hiring overall in a smaller company), and then if they reply at all to candidates arguing, just have them be firm that under policy, the decision has been made, and can't be reviewed. It's okay to ignore further correspondence if they argue.
> these emails can go public with harm to their reputation
What's worse though, a reputation for ghosting candidates, or a reputation for privately sending transparent but polite feedback based on the interviews?
Not sending a simple "sorry, we're proceeding with other candidates" is detrimental to everyone, because without knowing if you've been rejected or not you're just incentivised to send out more applications, which doesn't really benefit anyone, including companies who will now have even more applications to sift through.
Also I've had companies ghost me after doing several what seemed like promising interviews. It's okay they decided to pick someone else, but outright ignoring at this stage is just being a dick. "Begone peasant, you're not even worth talking to".
If you use an email provider they don't dislike however, you might go a step further and do a logic, language and mathematics automatic test.
Apparently they do these things because they have too many applicants and need random ways of filtering them out.
But if your problem is having too many applicants, shouldn't you stop spamming emails to people asking them to apply?
But what do I know, my email provider ends with .it so I am not hireable at spotify :D
Blanket rules like "do not provide feedback" exist because in a large enough org you eventually hire an idiot who will say something to a candidate that gets you sued.
Failing to initially respond to an applicant is not ghosting. It's selection.
If you are hiring a lot of people on the regular, sure, you'll probably have a good idea what reasonable is.
If you only hire once in a while, and especially if you are trying to hire for the first time, it is impossible to know what is reasonable until you start talking to people. And in the typical case you're not going to be able to talk to the right people until you put out an ad compelling them to talk.
Perhaps you can pick at random to get the ball rolling, but your random selection probably won't be what anyone else will consider reasonable.
Physical Demands:
The physical demands of the position are typical of those found in a traditional office environment. Employees will not need to walk significant distances nor lift substantial weight. Employee will need to be able to remain seated at a desk for 8-9 hours in a typical workday.
Damn well I applied.
Also, "team player" and "amazing opportunity" are sure signs that you should click "next".
To help candidates understand the compensation level, instead of "competitive salary" mention the percentile at which you are paying.
If you are paying at 60th or above percentile, this will look attractive, and be quantifiably true.
If you are paying at 50th or below, better not say anything.
Also, state all the things that are non-negotiable. If you need occasional weekends on-call, state that. If you offer remote work from different timezones, but require occasional meetings in the afternoon in US Pacific time, state that. You will avoid wasting so much time and spare future discomfort if you do.
Someone will always be paying in the first percentile, but you can't possibly advertise with that. A really well-paying job (say, CEO of Mozilla) might be a perfectly fine salary but if literally everyone else pays even more insane amounts then it sounds like the job is not worth even glancing at. By having to say the percentile, you can make any amount of compensation sound ridiculous and cannot offer a job whenever you don't have the budget to pay higher than average salaries
Perhaps even more importantly: if there were a clear market salary range, people would just look that up and ask for that compensation. As it is, people often get paid twice as much for the same job within one company because they simply don't know of each other's compensation. Across companies this becomes virtually impossible to accurately say. I can only imagine this leading to companies making up favorable numbers and nobody would truly be able to say it's below market pricing when the job ad says it's at the 80th percentile
This ad was featured here last week (and also last month), they're a YC company. If you can get to the end of it with a straight face, I'll buy you a coffee.
Reads as if one, purposely, wanted to cram as much red flags as possible into a job description.
The actual description for the openings are two ambiguous and crude sentences.
Getting a lot of downvotes on that, wonder if I broke some unspoken rule by talking bad about a YC company.
You want more written about it? Go ahead. Sharing an example of a bad job ad is perfectly reasonable and I don't suspect that's what the down votes are for.
This is not only possible but (see for example the explicit reference to "How to succeed in MrBeast production") quite likely: they are looking for people who like the red flags.
People who believe that they are "A players", who move to New York for job opportunities and don't care about working from home, who don't intend to have a life outside work, who seriously consider a random startup something they might be fanatic about.
Schedule multiple people to interview at the same time. Create a tournament with brackets and events related to the job. The winner gets the job.
And of course it's fake and manipulated, the least technically competent are set up to win and the most competent set up to lose. The people with the best sportsmanship get job offers.
strongly reminded of this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4n1j9lvrdeo
"During a group interview, everyone was asked to crawl around on their hands and knees and “moo like a cow”.
“We did that for about three to four minutes,” she recalls.
"At the time, I was quite annoyed. It was highly inappropriate.
"But there was a bit of peer pressure because everyone else was doing it."
The interviewer said they were trying to see if the candidates were "fun", though Ms Fu suspects that "maybe someone just had a bit of a power trip"."
Oh, god, this. Please. I've been fighting this battle for my entire career. After 34 years, it's kind of difficult to count how many years I've spent on this or that skill, and even for things where I've shipped multiple solutions using TechX I may not have 5 contiguous years of experience. Is that 5 years ONLY using TechX? Does it count if I used TechX alongside TechY, TechZ, and TechAA, and was learning TechNext while doing maintenance work on TechX?
It's utterly bogus.