Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here (although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a month.
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?
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
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?
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.