Some of the pain points I observe are:
1. Applicants must wade through large volumes of job postings, which are often poorly written, and frequently lacking key information which is important to the applicant.
2. Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
3. Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
4. Applicants are then annoyed with the lack of replies.
5. By the time an employer finds a potential match, the applicant may be difficult to reach, or is no longer interested.
6. By the time an applicant hears back from an employer, they are disappointed in the quality of the response, and already have a bad impression of the employer.
What is working well today to address these pain points?
What are other Possible Fixes?
They also tend to reach out to you over linkedin and refuse to give you the actual job description unless you give them your email/phone-number and CV, which is just infuriatingly arrogant.
My hope is that tech job listings stop listing stuff like Must have Experience with XXX and YYY application/framework and instead start listing skills needed to be success full in the role. Tech becomes outdated so incredibly fast and we're allways learning in our jobs that it's kinda futile to list tech instead of skills.
Sure Need to know Python, C#, Assembler, that is a skill, but applications and frameworks are something that you can learn, and besides each company use them slightly different so you'd need internal training anyway.
Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates. All interviewed candidates pool their knowledge about the employer so the next suggestions from the guild will be even better matches.
Medieval guilds made sure that craftsmen could be trusted. Programmers can do the same thing.
In another startup, management asked every IC on hiring teams to find at least one potential candidates - every week. Time to find them was allocated into sprints. The referral bonus was raised from 2k to 3k.
The first example was more successful from what I remember.
He left to talk to the owner, came back with a (in hindsight very small) number on piece of paper, and I started that week.
When I started at my current gig over a decade ago I had a three-day ordeal of interviews. In person, telephone, full day of in person again. Spoke with at least six different sets of people. Jobs I've applied for in the interim have been even worse.
As someone who has been in a hiring position myself, I think that first informal interview tells you way more than any checklist. If you need the checklist items answered, put them on the application. Interviews should be for getting to know the person.
I don't do hiring these days, but from what I've heard, DEI doesn't want us going off pre-approved script at all. I understand where that's coming from but it seems like it would do more harm than good.
The last thing I want is waste the other persons time.
It's disappointing being interviewed by people who are assh*les, really makes other people feel like sh!t!
All we did in the interview was to discuss things they have worked on before, going deep into all the details. Talking about why they decided to implement it the way it was implemented, what the trade offs were, what they would do differently today, the hardest problems they had to solve, how they would have implemented it given different biz constraints etc.
No white-boarding, silly puzzle questions, online coding games, or other BS nonsense. Just deep questions about things they claim they have worked on in the past. It works really well. It is easy to identify experienced smart developers by how clear their thinking is and how well they articulate their decisions, problem solving etc.
It’s simple. It works. Highly recommended.
The quickest hires IMHO are via referrals - but this is sort like arranged marriages/dates and it comes with it's own set of issues (nepotism etc).
I think companies need to have dedicated HR / Recruiters (or hire headhunters) to cut down on such frustrations. But the problem is tech hires, unlike construction / temp hires require high touch interviews with department heads etc. Add flood of resumes (now that WFH is a thing) and it's so difficult to speed up the process since it's costly to hire the wrong candidate.
I think this is where small companies really have a huge advantage over larger companies, and they should be taking advantage of it!
> Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
> Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
Employers should stop casting such a wide net, then. If you post on a site like monster and say the position is remote then obviously you're going to get a lot of applicants. If you're not prepared for that you should post locally or tailor your advertisement better.
IMO the job postings are often deliberately written that way because the people doing the hiring a) don't understand what they're looking for (see: "we need 10 years of experience in [technology that was released last year]) or b) they know they need a body but don't want to lock that person into a particular "role". It's just another version of "and other duties as required".
The remaining points in your OP can be solved when employers solve the problems in 1-3.
I also try to make small talk, have a quick conversation and so on. This has been mostly good except with a couple candidates. They were hasty and basically like ok let’s get to the question
It’s so interesting how groomed candidates are with LeetCode and Sys Design videos. Sometimes when I ask anything off course, like a basic question, it’s like a huge curve ball for some people
So my suggestion would be: think about people you know or could meet and ask them if they like where they work? Are they hiring? Then, if you have a position somewhere you don't need to be perfect, but it helps to be memorable.
Only "apply" to jobs where you already know at least one person at the company
1. Geo restriction (when required).
2. Skills required in the job (listed by employer). Any resume that don’t meet a percentage of required skills will be notified immediately after uploading the resume.
3. Filtering questions. That could be anything from skills, required certifications, ability to start in certain times.
It is an attempt though, I don’t know if it will work but to explain the reasons behind the platform:
1. The application rate of online jobs is less than 8% due to complicated long forms. Which means employers are missing many talented applicants. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341263
To fix, I implemented an easy apply similar to LinkedIn. You only upload the resume, it will be parsed to validate skills.
2. With the remote work, there are companies who want to limit the remote to their own country or certain time zones. Writing that in the job description doesn’t stop people from applying. As you mentioned, ghosting is one of the main reasons why candidates apply to as many jobs as possible.
To fix, there will be a message saying the job is not available in your region when applying from outside the designated regions.
3. The skills filtering will help candidates to understand immediately why they had been rejected instead of just being ghosted. It will help in reducing the number of unqualified applications.
4. Filtering questions will be for things that can not be identified in resumes. That could be ability to relocation, having certain certifications, security clearance … etc.
As an human you are probably applicable to a multitude of jobs in all different kinds of industries and therefore the sheer process of going through the list to find "the one" is going to prove very difficult.
Its not that hiring is inhuman, but unnecessary moats are. Those are there in turn because a large number of people are applying to those same jobs. Combine that with the fact of remote working, you pretty quickly realize that you will get resource management problems no matter what you do.
Finally, its also that most people hiring have no actual clue as to whom they would like to hire for the position to begin with. Just as all recruiters don't really understand the position they are hiring for.
Like they used to do in 1970's.
Not a fan of: 1) Global pool of candidates 2) Leet code bullshit 3) Remote work
Fan of 1) Permanent hiree after 3 months of time with us. 2) You will be part of our family, we'll build great things together 3) You'll get a decision when you visit us. Just drop by, no appointment necessary. We'll make time. 4) If you get rejected, we’ll tell you in the most honest way possible. No HR bullshit talk.
One big reason that companies go through the lengthy song and dance of multiple tests and interviews in a crazy hiring process with dozens of people is that trying to fire somebody is always a risk, even in places with at-will hiring. You have to worry about severance and other legal requirements, you have to worry about discrimination lawsuits. Additionally, hiring has become so expensive (multiple interviews and tests with multiple teams with multiple candidates) that it's kind of a feedback loop that incentivizes a very careful process because you can't get it wrong when you spend so much effort on it.
What should be a much more common practice is agreeing to quickly hire somebody who has a good resume and passes a basic knowledge interview, and then firing them fairly quickly without severance pay or legal risk if they don't work out. If they can't hack it in a job (the most fair job interview possible because it's literally the job) firing them should be the easiest thing in the world. This could incentivize a much easier and quicker hiring process that should take a day or two, not weeks or more. You might get it wrong a bit more often, but this should be counterbalanced by getting it right sometimes much, much quicker and cheaper.
Hiring is only going to get worse in technology related fields.
The competition has increased 10x in the last couple months compared to the last year for a single jr - mid developer position at my company. That's going from 1000 applications to 10,000 applications.
I even created a jupyterhub notebook to do some analysis on the unfiltered resumes over the weekend. I can easily see over half are liberals arts majors who switched careers in the last 5 years via bootcamps or masters programs. The next 25% are are mostly people who were laid off. The final 25% are new graduates with either no experience or an internships.
A lot more jr developers basically, I imagine the senior devs are being kept happy, or weren't laid off. Yet those are the only people a bunch of our tech teams want to hire . . . .
Also yes we filter out a lot of resumes using keywords, but the latest batches of interviews didn't go well. So I've been re-evaluating our processes.
If you're applying to jobs, you're bound to be doing lots of puzzles anyway, so it's just more practice. It filters out the 80% bottom of the barrel and this might mean one less tech interview stage.
Heck just give them fizzbuzz straight away and it should filter about 80% anyway.
1) I wonder if the problem of being overwhelmed by applicants can be solved in the same way that dating sites work, because they somewhat have a similar issue. Perhaps restrict job seekers from applying to more than X jobs per day or week, like some dating sites do. At the least, this ensures that effort is put into individual applications and people are more selective about applying to jobs they think they have a reasonable chance to get rather than applying to anything they're remotely qualified for and playing a numbers game. Everybody will be applying to fewer jobs and can be more conscientious about the process, improving it for all.
2) And speaking of minimum requirements, in most cases they're not strict absolutes for performing the job. If you're going for some hard-core game developer job and you don't know C++, yeah that might be a big problem. But if you're going for a web-developer job and you haven't used one of 6 Ruby gems they listed in their ad, who gives a fuck? You should still apply because you're experienced enough to know that your general knowledge is in the ballpark of what they're really looking for.
The coding questions at both places were not anything I had seen before (despite studying on leetcode), however none of them needed any esoteric tricks or algorithms. Recursion, loops, hashmaps, lists, etc was all that was needed to pass the coding portions.
I'd say the questions would be considered 'hard' on leetcode, but still only needing fundamental understanding of DS&A. And I was given about 40 minutes.
I also had some coding rounds that were 100% practical stuff. Basic 'data munging' kind of stuff. It was non trivial but again nothing weird or funky.
System design rounds were practical and engaging and fun.
I think the template is pretty solid, it's just most places have poor implementation (and from what I've heard, it's very possible to roll poorly at Google and get someone who asks a super weird or challenging question).
When I first started studying for interviews, I would absolutely panic with someone watching me, I could barely do a proper for loop. But after enough practice it became fine.
Overall the interviews were challenging but NOT what I was expecting, I thought they did a good job of asking unseen questions that tested coding fundamentals.
> 1. Applicants must wade through large volumes of job postings, which are often poorly written, and frequently lacking key information which is important to the applicant.
This is nothing new - it's been this way for over 20 years. Job postings are not more poorly written than in the past.
> 2. Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
Because many/most employers are willing to hire people who don't meet the minimum requirements. Or rather, they are sloppy when they made the job posting. Therefore, applicants who actually honor the minimum requirements are at a disadvantage.
> 3. Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
Same reason as above. Employers got themselves into this mess because they are not strict with their minimum requirements.
I don't have solutions for the whole system, but a given employer can do much to improve things:
1. Employer posts accurate postings and are strict about minimum requirements. Applicants who submit applications where they clearly are not meeting the requirements are blacklisted for a year (make this clear up front).
2. Do not let people apply to more than 3 positions at once.
3. Require a proper cover letter.
4. Develop a reputation for good candidate management. If someone applies, they should hear from you in a decent timeframe (even if it is a simple rejection).
5. Write in reasonable detail about the interview process. Will it involve Leetcode style questions? Etc.
Most applicants will just not apply to you, but that's fine. The key to making it work is step 4. As an example, I almost never include a cover letter, because it consumes a lot of my time, and I discovered that over 90% of openings that have an option for a cover letter never read them. If I'm submitting a cover letter, I want a strong commitment that it will be read.
So to answer your question, OP, we can fix it by going back to using want ads in the paper and physical correspondence for the entire process.
I work for a startup that is selling a CRM to addresses all of those pain points. We have many large customers and were recently valued >1B.
We have several competitors that make the same sort of thing.
The point at when our product makes sense cost wise is apparently 8+ recruiters so that certainly excludes a large number of smaller companies.
The solutions range from boring (e.g. CRUD things, advanced search, campaign management) to fancy (e.g. automation, AI things).
Our approach is basically to reduce / automate as much as possible to free up as much time for the recruiter to do actual human things.
Apparently it's very common for applicants to just spam their resume out to every employer, since there's no cost to do so.
If it were standard practice to implement some kind of hurdle, so that the applicant would have to spend an hour of their time to get a resume in front of a human, then there would be a lot less resumes to sift through and therefore a lot more time that could be given to each one by the employer.
Another commenter mentioned having to drop off resumes in person, but I suspect something as simple as this could have a huge impact on spam.
I agree with the commentary about guilds, unions, etc. I'm self-taught and would appreciate the legitimacy that these groups could offer through testing/training/merits etc. By relying on specialist organized groups you're abstracting the non-human issues from the humans themselves.
The vast majority of jobs go unposted. Friends get friends work. In the last seven days I’ve had three loose acquaintances ask me if I knew of engineers and designers looking for work in three different countries.
The key to always be at the top of people’s lists is: 1. Be excellent at your job. 2. Be kind and interested in other people’s problems. 3. Say “hi” when you don’t need anything.
Elaborate and lengthy interview processes have become normal in a number of industries, along with high rates of rejecting candidates.
The two natural consequences are people apply for more jobs, anticipating the high rate of rejection, and the people doing interviews get tired of how many they have to do.
The absolutely grueling, pointless, insane interviews processes are the lion's share of problems in this field. To the point that its an industry of its own, with Leetcode and the likes. Its pathetic, inefficient and just in terrible taste.
All of these problems exist because we are human, so I’m not sure how it’s become dehumanized.
They didn't work 20 years ago, still don't work, however interviewing someone like they're a person, asking questions, finding their passion, that has had 100% return for me and my companies.
Word of mouth has been the best way I've been able to hire a lot of really skilled people. My team members have told me many times that I'm the best manager they've ever had.
It's because I don't do anything the way you're supposed to.
Try being a place worth working for and you'll see skilled people show up, and they know how to get ahold of you since they're highly skilled and motivated.
I have been writing software for over 20 years and probably interviewed at two dozen places before moving in with the current employer. Here is what I have learned:
* Don’t be awesome. Employment normalizes to a bell curve. Awesome is a less compatible outlier. If you want to be awesome write software outside of work as a hobby and write about the things you learned.
* Be selective. If you are confident in your skills and experience (realistically, not a Dunning-Kruger fantasy) you can afford to be less desperate about who you will work for. High pay is great but maximize for emotional fulfillment.
* Vanity is for the fashion industry. Software is about automation. Many developers never see the distinction. They try to make things into something they aren’t and are miserable and low performing as a result. Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence so smart people frequently fail hard at this and cannot see it.
* The qualities that are most well rewarded in employee assessments are helpfulness, honesty, and writing. These take time and deliberate action. It also means maximizing mutual respect but simultaneously don’t shy away from hard truths or disagreements.
1. market saturation, everyone and their dog is a developer now
2. infiltration and appropriation of hiring process by HR/"Tech Recruiters"
3. cargo culting of interview process
This one-sided process is dehumanizing due to a lack of visibility and transparency of the process. Inconsistencies in the process develop when the hiring managers are responsible for too much and just let things slip. I'm of the opinion that increased automation could actually make the process feel more humanizing.
Here's my ideal state I've envisioned in a platform. I'm not in a position to explore this right now, but I'd love to chat with someone who is.
1. Employers should be forced to define their applicant funnel stages. Each stage, including the initial application, should be associated with an expected timeline and an automated message.
2. Rejection types and corresponding automated messages should all be set up front. Standard picks would be "Did Not Meet Requirements" (location, sponsorship, etc.), "Bad Fit (Resume Review)", "Bad Fit (Screening)", "Bad Fit (Post-Interview)", "Did Not Respond", and "Position Filled/Closed".
3. Applicants should have a dedicated portal where they can see the status of their application. It should show the entire funnel, their current status in that funnel, and the expected timeline based on their position in the funnel. It should even show details like who has viewed your application, when, and how many times. Additionally, all communication between the applicant and the employer should be shown here in a consolidated chat view.
4. When an employer moves the applicant from one stage to the next (kanban style) the applicant automatically receives a message with clearly defined steps to engage with the new stage. This should include scheduling links, project uploads, etc.
5. Stage timelines should be treated as SLAs. Employers can set up automated reminders to ensure they meet their SLA timeline for each candidate. If the employer doesn't meet their SLA, the situation should be handled based on automated rules. If the SLA isn't met due to lack of response/scheduling from the applicant, automated processes can be put in place to follow up or close out the application. If the SLA isn't met due to lack of employer interaction, the candidate gets the choice to let their application expire (incentivizing employers to be on time) OR the candidate can be automatically moved to the next stage (if feedback is present).
6. Using all of this information, applicants should be able to see an employers average response time, timeline adherence, etc.
7. When the position is closed, all applicants currently in the funnel should receive the appropriate rejection message.
8. Through (hopeful) economies of scale, applicants would eventually be able to track multiple applications through a single portal on their side.
If you want to get extra dicey, you could have it where applicants are also able to see team comments/feedback so employers are forced to be very structured about their feedback and there are fewer rejections without a shared understanding. I sympathize with both sides here.
--- I'm not a saint - I've created my fair share of bad candidate experiences. But it's never out of malice. It's always from bad process or tooling. Would love to hear thoughts on this idea.
All of this is designed to let you know that you are not in control of your own labor. Sure you can decide which capitalist to let own you for a time, but that's most people's only option. The few people who do make it on their own are used as propaganda to convince you that if you just put in extra work and make extra profit for a capitalist, you might make it someday too! "Just keep working harder and ignore the fact that you can afford less and less each passing year. It's all those lazy people who want workplace democracy who are to blame for the record-breaking profits the capitalists rake in every year".
The fix is stop using an economic system with a hierarchy of parasites embedded in it's design. It'll take work and it won't happen overnight, but some of us are already getting started because there is no future under Capitalism other than slavery.
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