Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?
vox.com
vox.com
As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of apples or actual apple consumption?
I really don't like this as it hurts the applicants time and distracts them from finding a place that does want to hire them now.
It's pretty easy to puncture that though, simply ask how many open positions they have for each department and when the last hire was for each department. That will show quickly whether or not they are actually growing and at what rate. (You can't lump them all together because with a larger company one department may be growing while another is declining).
The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received:
(a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen)
(b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either)
My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute each because so many of the resumes are unqualified.
You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process.
Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.
A couple reasons why I didn't list comp:
1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area. 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.
Like the article hypothesizes, I thought we'd get 50-100 resumes because it's so easy to apply for jobs on the internet and was surprised at how few we actually got.
The reasons you listed are all nice, but most of the people who do it are doing it for reasons like #3 above. You risk ending up in the same pot as they do.
You can sell your company however you like, but at the end of the day, you're offering to pay me money for my time. It's an important part of my assessment of your job offer that I know how much. Sending out CV's is stressful, and I have to prep for interviews on a per-job basis.
If you won't tell me how much you pay until after the interview, your job offer gets put on the "too coy to be worth dealing with" pile, along with all the people who only let you contact them via webform.
I have no idea how common it is, but I certainly used that option when I looked for jobs. Otherwise you have to wade through all the shitty jobs.
This is an extreme red flag for me. While your motives may be better, as I don't know you and won't assume, I've never met a potential employer who said that who wasn't trying to run a cult. I contend that there is no "employee friendly" company (outside of cooperatives, which don't really exist in tech) and that company culture is generally used to exert pressure to make people overwork themselves for somebody else's gain.
The best people, as well as best developers, I've ever worked with are nearly fully coin-operated (with obvious carve-outs for "not working for terrible people," etc.). They do excellent work, expect to be paid well for it, and go home.
If they "play hard," it's not with their co-workers.
However, I've known lots of companies who offer good compensation and good work-life balance, but still think it's important to be "employee-friendly". Again, agreed that there can be conflicts of interest, especially in a non-cooperative model. But still, happy employees tend to be more useful employees. It can be useful to hire people whose motivation isn't solely limited to the compensation.
For senior good developers, an employee friendly culture is an hygienic factor, not a competitive factor. By not posting compensation you cheated yourself out of your order winner.
All I see is an employer who isn't willing to pay, and then I move on from that listing.
Even with how little time and work goes to sending a resume now, you're listing hasn't made it worth the time it does take.
If I work for a for-profit I expect to profit as per my market value...
So...
> 1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area
...you provide the information only for those you don't want?
> 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work.
By hiding information away? By pretending to know their motives? When I don't see this information listed, I make an assumption that they are paying market rates, which are substantially lower. While the work itself is important as well, so is supporting my family. And if a company can't be upfront and honest with me from the beginning, that doesn't bode well for the future.
It amazes me that in a field that preaches understanding the customer to build a product that resonates, we haven't bothered to look at the hiring process the same way. And it should be even easier to do considering our target market is made up of people very similar to ourselves. When I started hiring, I didn't have much success until I started to look at what type of ads resonated with me and the ways that I went about looking for work. I spent weeks going through job postings collecting ones that I felt I'd apply to if I didn't have a job and then started to look for themes.
One theme I found was that they didn't follow the 3-part format with a description of the company, description of the skills desired and description of the likely tasks of the position. And not one of them included the bit about "working closely with the product manager"...there's no surer sign of uninteresting work than that cliché.
But biggest theme I found was that I had heard of and formed a positive impression about the companies posting the ads I was interested in. A good example of a relatively small company that I feel has done a good job with this is Segment.io. They've discussed their transition from primarily NodeJS to Go very publicly as well as a few other technical topics which led me to investigate their Github repository a few months before. So when I saw one of their ads, it immediately registered as one I would have applied to if I needed work.
And lastly, I realized that I haven't found a job from a job posting in over a decade. It's really a pretty crappy way to connect with employers. Every job I've gotten since the downturn has been the result of either a referral from a former coworker or a pre-existing connection that I've made with others from the technical community. I realized during the downturn that if something like that happened again, I wanted to be prepared, so I started building connections that I could reach out to to find work. Those connections are such a better way to find work since it's essentially like sending a proxy you trust through the interview process to weed out the companies that aren't worth working for. And those connections are also a great way to bring find great people to bring into any work quality work environment.
Hiring is hard for people who aren't willing to put in the effort or want to see it as a process that you only put effort into during the hiring phase. It gets significantly easier when you view it as a continual process to position yourself (or, more accurately, whoever is your employer at the time) as an appealing place for your ideal candidates to work. Put yourself in their shoes and design your hiring process in the customer-centric process you're probably already using for your actual produce and you'll be a lot more successful.
Here are some assumptions.
1. You're ideal ios dev is working. The unemeployment rate among good ios devs is 0%.
2. He is probably getting paid above market wage.
3. He doesn't have a lot of time to research positions.
4. Most job openings are shitty because shitty job openings take longer to fill than good ones(or never get filled).
5. Your ideal ios dev doesn't have time to look up glass door salaries on every job that comes along on indeed. So they probably won't look up yours.
So how do you differentiate yourself to your would-be dev? Well you could tell them that you have an AMAZING-COOL workplace with GREAT people. Problem is even terrible companies say they have an AMAZING-COOL workplace, sometimes even more vocally then legitimately great workplaces. So whats an employer to do? Put your money where your mouth is. Tell your prospective employees that you offer above average compensation[0]. This signalsthat your workplace takes their devs seriously. It will tell them your employer hires professionals who take software seriously. And a a workplace that respects their devs, and hires great people, that IS an AMAZING-COOL workplace where I and many other devs want to work.
[0] - Use actual numbers because many employers are in denial about what the actual market rate is.
TL;DR - The only honest signal a company can give me in a job ad is compensation and from that signal I extrapolate working conditions, culture, and caliber of workers.
It would be like saying that listing a used iPhone on eBay will probably fetch more than its market price on eBay. It kind of doesn't make any sense at all.
However, it certainly can make sense if you define "market rate" more broadly than the amount that ideal devs are themselves earning. If you define market rate as the rate for all devs, then the ideal dev may be making more. So what this really means is that ideal candidates have a much higher market rate than the general market rate.
If this is the case, then advertising that much-higher market rate will very possibly flood the advertiser with applications from average devs (the broader market).
But if this segmentation isn't what you mean, then it's very hard to interpret your point 2, and I would like you to expand on it.
I know of companies that have literally won awards for being 'best places to work' that treat their employees like disposable work units to have every last ounce of motivation wrung out of them through gaslighting and cultish "we're just a family here!" I know this from knowing people who actually work there and I'd have to be pretty desperate to work for them.
Needless to say I, personally, don't really put much stock in how companies sell themselves on the soft side of things any more. I suspect a lot of people with a bit more experience don't.
Where 'employee-friendliness' comes into the picture more is in retention and it can have a big impact there, since once a person is working for you they will know very quickly whether the employee-friendliness rhetoric is steeped in bullshit, or not. But it is not a very effective recruitment tool except perhaps with the very naive i.e. people just joining the job market.
If anything, I think I've realized from my limited experience that companies who push how great their culture is are usually the ones with really high turnover and HR is being pressured into creating an environment (on job sites and screening) that new dev's want to work at.
I can get job offers. What I can't get is offers that work out to be more money after adjusting for cost of living and benefits - as well as life impact of moving. I might just be at a personal maximum - I'm not worth more to anyone else. So far I'm fine with that.
What I hate though is spending weeks doing application, phone interview, fly or drive for hours for full day interview, suit, etc - to then finally get what the salary is. And I know instantly that that salary is too low and turn them down. What's worse is my most recent expectation asked desired salary. I gave a number. They came back with 1/3 less than that number. Sure I will negotiate, but 1/3 is a big mismatch... I mean, why did they ever even contact me?
Strong understanding of objective C and iOS SDK Swift experience a plus Passion for design / UX Proven track record of quality apps in app store
That's literally all I had under qualifications.
1. Interview process MAX 1 afternoon. We commit to AFFIRMATIVELY giving you an accept or reject within 2 weeks. (in other words, we respect your time)
2. Need to hire for this position by [DATE]. (this is a real job opportunity and we are not just fishing)
3. We're not going to ask you to spend a weekend on a work sample or to write code for us for free. (again, we respect your time, and potentially your IP agreement with your current employer)
4. To apply, just upload your resume or send us your LinkedIn URL. You don't have to fill out a 500-form field online application. (see a pattern here?)
5. We offer detailed feedback after unsuccessful interviews. (we earnestly want you to re-apply later if you're better then)
6. If you're good but not an exact fit, we may suggest to you an alternate role rather than just reject and make you wonder if you should re-apply. (serious about finding talent rather than filling a specific narrow role)
I'd also love to see the company publish their current employee retention rate for similar roles, but I know that's asking for a lot.
When I already have a job, one of the main reasons I don't apply to other jobs more often, even ones that look very interesting, is that most hiring processes are opaque, endless, and generally painful. If you're not getting enough candidates into the funnel, maybe include something about how painless your particular funnel is.
But I just wanted to add that I don't think your #5 could ever work, because of liability. There's a good reason why companies don't do post-interview feedback— to avoid legal liability.
1.) Why go to the trouble? What's in it for us? Yes, we shouldn't leave you hanging and should in general behave professionally but detailed feedback as part of a formal process seems more than one can reasonably expect.
2.) It invites prolonging the process. A lot of people told that they have insufficient experience in X will want to respond that they really do and it must just not have come out in the interview.
3.) This may be truer for non-technical roles, but think of it like dating. A lot of the time people get rejected because the potential hiring company "Just wasn't that into them" or just preferred someone else better.
Everyone is expected to work hard. When it's explicitly spelled out in a job description, that is usually code for "long hours, required face time, leading to burnout". And Play hard? What does that even mean in the context of a job? I don't go to the office to play games.
Mainly when I see "work hard, play hard" I read "I'm way too old to be working there"
hrmm there's a million and one good buzzwords that make me lol but I can't remember them all right now.
Also, I think you should mention some details:
The size of the team -- lone iOS developer, small team (2-4 people), or larger?
Whether the application is a standalone mobile app (and the business is built around it), or simply a frontend for a pre-existing web application/product. (i.e. Working on Tinder versus working on OKCupid's mobile app)
Disregard this if you included this already in the actual listing, and/or you're hiring for an iOS shop that will be dealing with outsourced projects
Degree of control/ownership that the developer will have on the project
I think you will attract different candidates based on these cases.
I did have some information about the work in there but nothing really about the team size - I'll keep that in mind for future listings. Completely agree on your statement that the type of candidate you'll attract depends on the team, the company, the project.
Another consideration: if there's ten roles I'm considering and yours is the only one which doesn't list compensation, I'm not going to waste my time applying for the role. You're competing in a marketplace for limited resources, failing to say how much you're willing to pay doesn't tell me anything about your company culture, it tells me you're unwilling to say how much you'd pay in compensation.
But, while I understand what you're saying, and for all I know maybe being humble works well for you as internal company culture, humble really isn't a good marketing strategy - there's a good reason why marketing if anything traditionally errors on the side of boastfulness! I don't advocate exaggeration, but if you really are offering good pay and good working conditions, you should specify this in your job listing. Remember, in many cases a candidate will start off knowing nothing about your company except what he sees in the listing.
You're not marketing to employees - you're marketing to people who are not yet employees.
What difference does it make whether they built an iOS app if they are a mobile app developer?
Also, why not look for a web app developer specializing in front end. Same skills, just a few minor technical details are different.
I think a lot of employers do not understand what the word "skill" actually means. Generally skills increase with years of experience and if you take someone at the right level and throw a new platform at them, they will spend a week on reading and tutorials and then dive into a prototype of the app they need to build.
After all, Google hires Apple and Microsoft engineers, then expects them to build stuff on the Google internal platform. And they DO!
They're not just "a few minor technical details." The toolchains are different, the UI design details are different, the event model is different, the model/backend details are different, and there are significant conceptual differences.
I would be astonished if someone could move from web dev to iOS dev in a week with no previous experience. A good coder can probably bolt together a twinky do-nothing hello world app that quickly from a cold start, but they'll be a long way short of what's needed for a solid commercial-grade app with useful features.
I can not fathom the mindset that goes into the line of thought "yeah he's clearly a great developer - sadly he is currently working from framework X and we would need him to work from framework Y". I can only hope that such an attitude leaves a company more likely to go out of business (and I suspect it does).
A strong engineer with a proven track record building enterprise-level applications is not going to become a shit-hot iOS developer in a week. However he will be just as likely to bring in 10x his salary in value to your company in his first year, as nearly anyone else you hire. But most hiring managers will probably not bother to promote such an applicant to even a phone screen, since it would take too much time out of everyone's daily 'where are all the iOS devs' bitch session on HN or proggit or whatever.
This is just a guess, of course :) Is your HR/interview/hiring process easy for people to go through, who can do and have done the job?
It's funny because they get REALLY persistent about it too. Like a pissed off "I've been trying to reach you for the past week!" type of attitude.
Please stop pissing away this once in a career opportunity!
-Recruiter McRecruiterson
There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers" [1]
In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today, they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers. They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it ...
I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening.
Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed. They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take people above a specific age.
[1] http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...
"Relevant experience is nice, but if you're as good a person as we want, you'll be able to pick it up in a week or two."
And finally:
"We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry."
That worked. Autodesk ended up owning the CAD industry and the animation industry.
If your company is complaining that it can't find programmers, try that.
And no company seems willing to offer 'apprenticeship'. You are working on a hard problem with latest methodologies and tools? Then it's very likely you won't find anyone out there who has the experience in the methodologies and tools. You just can't hold out looking for the perfect candidate. You are not google or apple. So just give up and hire the best you can find in the pool. Don't wait till you find the ONE. Again, you are not google or apple.
The other problem I think is HR department itself. How many small/mid HR departments keep track of hiring process like SEO metrics are kept/measured? Do they know which manager seems to hire the most duds? AFAIK, HR department is the least automated piece of a tech company. I can tell because they are still scheduling interviews using emails.
And lastly, please take a look at your Job desc/requirement. Is it real or are you just copying/pasting from some other job postings?
People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the same.
I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with, but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of people on the market.
It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things.
And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.
* Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job
* Education is poor: at all levels actual learning is not emphasized. Especially learning how to do things. From preschool to graduate school, the game of education far surpasses actual learning. Students aren't interested in learning and teachers are only interested in grades and tests.
Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most conservative and uncreative criteria possible.
The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week" technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be friction and failure and massive wastes of money.
There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment" type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.
Employer A decides that if they can get an employee at a low wage, they would hire another employee and they create an advertisement for the opening. If the economy has moved up, they don't fill it and it remains open.
Meanwhile employer B loses an essential employee for some reason and they go out and actively try to recruit a replacement (generally from other employers in the same industry / space) They find employer A's top performer and offer them a raise to come work for B (which A takes because they have had really poor wage increases over the last 5 years)
Now Employer A has a problem, they are down a key employee and they had an "opening" already so they are in danger of losing income if they don't replace their employee. In order to do that they raise what they are willing to pay the "right" person who walks in the door. And they may try to recruit out of other employers.
"Nice to fill" job openings are an indicator that the business is profitable enough to add labor, which means that the labor it is employing is at or above the productivity rate needed to succeed or expand. In that environment some firms will seek to grow more aggressively than others and that will result in opportunities to be employed at the entry level.
That is a good indicator for folks who are coming into the workforce. How the rest of the economy responds will be interesting indeed.
It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation.
I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member.
I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving.
After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me.
I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better.
Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.
It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes.
> After harassing HR at my company,
Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.
The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in.
Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.
With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly.
But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.
The majority of candidates have never used source control or haven't spent the time to brush up on basic data structures questions.
Your adversarial approach to hiring doesn't help. You think of it as filtering out incompetents so you can concentrate on successful candidates. I think of it as shooting down candidates without giving them a chance to show what they can do.
I suspect that your job requirements may be a bit unrealistic. Expert at Objective C and Swift and design with apps in the App Store? Chances are that person already has a happy job, probably working for Apple.
People list 100 technologies to get through the automated HR filters. If companies would just list the core skills required, instead of a unicorn wish list, people would put less keyword spam in their resumes.
Your interpretation of it being insulting doesn't preclude it from being true.
I currently (somewhat) interact with people that have rejected me for jobs in the past (within the local tech scene). I find it difficult, but such is life. It is easier to handle when you're not still looking for work and interacting with the person that rejected you for what (to you) was a petty reason.
Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.
1. Finding good mentors is hard, because companies (even large ones as opposed to startups) have cut back and folded several positions into one, all while wages are flat. That means nobody has time to mentor. Everybody's working insane hours at their primary responsibilities. Only the most well-funded startups do mentoring well. Most startups are "all hands on deck" with developers doing a lot of other functions essential to business that wouldn't normally be part of their job description. But these functions are "tyranny of the urgent" life support and there's no time for training.
2. Everybody on both sides of the table knows that the only real way to get a raise or change direction is to leave and get a new job. That's good for the employee who wants to be mobile and transferable, and good for the company that needs warm bodies and is growing, but it's terrible for training/mentoring and the people who want to think long-term.
The problem then becomes that there isn't enough skilled talent. If companies aren't going to train developers, then who is? Computer science isn't software development. Someone or something other than a company has to fill the training vacuum, and that's why coding bootcamps are getting popular—even though a lot of people don't trust them yet since they are in their infancy and are a new paradigm.
I guess this is what pricey conference workshops are for...
Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
> 5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable.
Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world!
I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.
I so relate to this.
I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position.
My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job.
I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.
Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months.
It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market".
Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process).
The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to.
The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR.
The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity.
Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions).
(1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete.
The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.
The job was for a devops type role with a very niche healthcare environment. Simple fact of the matter is that very few people that already met the requirements they were asking for exist and expect to be paid market rates as a result. That means most people have to train into the role.
The massive disconnect with HR was that they were totally unequipped to understand what skillsets would translate into the position they were seeking to fill. The massive problem with their process is they weren't involving the hiring manager in determining those skillsets and were actively resisting her input on the matter.
I don't doubt that their were probably candidates that would have been an even better fit than I was that were rejected out of hand because HR didn't know what they were looking at. The only reason my hiring manager knew I evn existed was because she had specifically asked me to apply for the job.
We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions.
This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.
Well it is Vox.com
The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.
There are plenty of good engineers like myself who are at times actively or semi-actively looking for a job. I'm in Dallas, and I have a lot of hot keywords associated with myself that are not my core competency. What that means is over 90% of the jobs I get approached about are inappropriate, sometimes wildly. I only get approached by the highly active recruiters, since so many seem to have limited geographical areas and I am not in a position to network with non-recruiting people. These recruiters frequently misinterpret or misunderstand my background.
Thus, I am forced to actively apply to openings if I want something new. Hearing things like this gives me the impression that I will be viewed as inferior just because I had to stoop to the level of applying like the rest of the plebs.
Here are some indicators:
* They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online.
* They will not be posted to the company's website.
* They'll require a specific education level
* They'll require experience that is oddly specific
I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.
1) Very few candidates would leave a well paying job where they are constantly learning for a bit more money. I wouldn't leave my current company for less than a 20% raise.
2) A well trained productive employee is worth much more than market rate. However, due to information asymmetries the market is rarely going to pay them even 20% more than average.
Combine 1 and 2 and you see that all a company has to do is offer 20% over market rates and offer in depth training etc and they will have great retention.
Options that are not liquid, however are a different kettle of fish. Mentally, I will usually value them at close to zero when comparing with other job offers (because more often then not that's what they'll end up being worth).
Outside the valley nobody cares about stock options. Even within the valley many people are aware they're a gamble at best. You're most likely not working for the next Facebook.
Now I work in sports science. I try to hire brilliant people who have never played the sports in question. Still very, very hard.
There is this "law" that proclaims this is what happens in bureaucratic organisations - hierarchies tend to be grown for that purpose.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...
Because that is my ideal, and I would be willing to give up a lot to get that sort of thing. I need stability, but live pretty frugally, so I would only be interested in an otherwise traditional full-time position. Any input greatly appreciated.
And don't complain that you don't get them along with the resumes. 1) Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job. 2) Discard applications that don't include them. 3) Resist the urge to look through the resumes anyway.
And if you directly ask for a cover letter, and you get anm application that doesn't have one, send the applicant a form letter that says. "This is a form letter. Apparently you do not care about finding a job because you failed to follow the instructions in the job posting. We have deleted your application/email. If you still want to be considered for the job, apply again WITH A COVER LETTER that explains why you are the right fit for the job".
If Employers want Job Applicants to do the right thing, then they need to be proactive and teach. Nobody else trains job applicants how to apply for a job, how to help the employer see quickly that you deserve to get an interview.
How does this help anything. Plenty of these out there which the applicant can attached to the application.
"I am very enthusiastic to leverage my [INSERT HERE] skills to help [COMPANY] transform the [WHATEVER] industry "
99% of cover letters will just be, self-importance exaggeration, prospective employer excessive praise, etc.
I am a decent programmer but not exceptional, but when you read my resume you will see that I am a child prodigy - and that is done without any lying at all just selective highlighting facts.
Some people will describe their work as "Built an application from scratch that filters numbers based on mathematical properties while also generating said list of numbers based on stakeholders specification"
(This is FizzBuzz btw)
They put on paper everything the recruiter wants to hear, they recognize no weakness on themselves, they "accept all challenges", etc
For many jobs, you don't even need that. There are a lot of jobs where any given applicant will have applied to dozens if not hundreds of companies. The only thing an enthusiastic cover letter tells you in those cases is that they are lying.
Unless you're looking for co-founders or C-level managers, they don't have to have big ideas about how they can make your company better. But they should know how to do their job and be interested in finding ways to help you help them do their job better.
Job applications are for coarse filtering based on vague qualifiers. Two years experience as a C# drone at a bank? Too bad, we're looking for Clojure greybeards. Shoddy formatting and everything is misspelled? We need people that care about the quality of their deliverables. And so on. It's a first impression, not a hiring decision.
Of course this all depends on the number of applicants, the number of openings and the size of the company.
But yes, if you expect certain things to be in a job application, be explicit about it. If you want the cover letter to answer some interview questions ahead of the actual interview, say so.
I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you dont get in no matter how good you think it went.
When I was looking for my current job, I forgot to even ask about wages. So maybe what they gave me in pay is "flat" from five years ago, but it's still twice what any of my friends my age are making, while they have degrees and I do not.
I do not know about tech wages in the US. In Germany, the tech wages are not inflated, at least not in my opinion. The normal tech wages have risen maybe 3-5% per year the last few years in Germany (I don't call this inflated) and the years before it was even less.
In the same time, the wages for top-managers have risen maybe 10-15% per year and are since decades incredible high above the wages of "tech wages" (the difference is climbing and climbing). I call that inflated.
Your statement of course is more logical than that of the OP.
Also, in Germany you're at a 40% income tax rate at €43k, while in the US at €62k you're only taxed at 25%.
Sure, that 40% income tax rate gets you universal healthcare, while in the US we're paying ~6,339.71 Euros a year to insure a family of four. But I think even accounting that, wages are much higher in the US.
Likewise, programmers are quite useful as they can automate things and so act as a lever on requirements. But that doesn't mean companies have $500K to pay to someone to do that. It just means the volume at the normal programmer salary is very low compared to the demand at that same salary.
that actually sounds perfect, and it seems inflated before. when it was over 1.5
so, what's the problem?
I have never heard a programmer complain about not enough pay. They do, however, complain about incompetent bosses, not enough vacation, and having to deal with non-programmers.