Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

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> The market for talent is competitive.

A couple months ago interviewing.io posted something bragging about how "we do anonymous mock interviews. If people perform well in those interviews, they get introduced directly to a decision-maker at top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper." ( https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-... )

This annoyed me enough that I sent in an email complaining that their introduction process specifically notes that I am not eligible for anything, despite performance measured by the site as "highest ever achieved: 94th percentile" (so, knock that down a bit for being a high water mark), because of an insufficient number of years of experience.

They responded:

> It really sucks, especially in this market, but this policy is a function of us having tried for years to get companies to take junior intros, and it didn't work. We offered to do it completely for free, too, fwiw, and no dice.

How competitive is the market for talent? Let's stipulate that, because of a lack of prior employment, I'm not qualified to have a job. How exactly would that situation change?

Founder of interviewing.io here.

Clarification: Just because companies don't want a 3rd party like us providing them with junior candidates, it doesn't mean they don't want them. Even back in 2017-2019, when the market was booming, we couldn't get employers to take our juniors... because they generally have their own robust pipeline.

So the solution is to go to companies directly, rather than relying on a 3rd party service like ours, which companies tend to use specifically for roles they can't fill on their own.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. My point was that the market for talent is not particularly competitive, with the opinion of interviewing.io given as an illustration of that.

You seem to be confirming that the market for talent isn't competitive - in your view, companies have more applications than they want.

Or maybe you're going for a different point? For the suggestion, my experience is that companies won't consider direct applications either, and in the general case do not ever even list junior positions. (An observation which is not unique to me; see e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/fr... )

If you're worried that I'm implicitly slamming interviewing.io for claiming to do something very different than what they actually do, I don't think you've rebutted that - "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies as long as we think their resume looks good" isn't particularly similar to "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper".

Yes, companies do indeed have more applications than they want (I'd argue that means the market IS competitive).

The point I was making is that even though companies don't want to hire juniors through us, they still DO WANT to hire juniors in the absolute. So junior hiring isn't dead.

>> The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk

Here, saying "the market for talent is competitive" clearly means that hirers are competing with each other over potential employees. Deciding that you already have too many potential employees is the opposite of that. It would mean that the market to sell talent is competitive, which isn't what was claimed.

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