Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates? 292
Nerval's Lobster writes The short answer: Yes. Many employers' "required" skill sets seem to include everything but the ability to teleport and build a Shaker barn; the lengthy requisites of skills and experience seem achievable only by candidates who've spent the past four decades using a hundred different programming languages and platforms to excel at fifty different, complicated jobs. Why do a lot of tech companies do that? Dice asked around and discovered a bunch of different reasons. Companies want to make investments in talent, but the inherent costs of that talent also make them wary of hiring anyone but the absolute best. The need to find the right talent, and the concern over cost, often leads to employers producing job descriptions too broad for the actual position. There's also pure idiocy: PHBs don't know what they want, don't understand the technology, and throw just anything into the description that pops to mind. Is there any way to stop this scourge?
Alternate Link (Score:5, Funny)
Alternate link [dice.com]
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__________
And the article misses a BIG obvious reason for laundry lists. The better, more experienced candidates don't have certifications for any current technology because they have been working while the current technology was invented and rolled out.
The young "certified" candidates will command a significantly smaller wage and they might even be able to do the job. They also won't push back on the endless demands that you
Fuck Off Dice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nerds are allergic to advertising. We already know how to select preferred items from what is available for purchase.
Re:Fuck Off Dice (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it costs me more than .000007 cents' worth of my time to twiddle my thumbs while the advertisement payload downloads from the Internet and loads into my browser.
Re:Fuck Off Dice (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also note the "if you have a decent browser and connection" assumption - because everyone has that, right?
Those of us on crappy slow and/or expensive connections and unable to upgrade? I guess we should know better than to live in a remote area.
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I think using slashdot to promote their own trash articles is a bit sketchy.
Take a look at Nerval's Lobster's user page. The account exists for the sole purpose of posting dice.com garbage. There is no way actual users submit this crap. The URL even has a campaign id in it so they can track the success of their shit posting.
This kind of behaviour makes me want to be defiant in the least significant and most petty way possible... so I took slashdot off my adblock whitelist.
The elephant in the room.. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Dice, are you fearful?
I'm not... why isn't H1-B scams listed as a reason?
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Nah, Dice is just inciting fear and confusion. It's good for their business to make hiring seem like an insurmountable challenge.
Seriously, there's an entire cottage industry set up around tech contracting. It used to be individual headhunters running around doing this stuff, but now it's much more organized and... permanent?
It makes sense in some respects... there's more flexibility in the workforce if you can contract out a lot of your labor for exactly what you need when you need it, and then send them
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No one really makes long-term investments in their employees anymore, since anything they learn they'll use to jump ship for higher pay elsewhere.
And who is to blame for this? The companies themselves, which a few decades back stopped treating their employees like people, more often now like temporary "resources". The offshoring practices have been just an extension of the same thing.
That won't reverse until the companies do. It has to be them, because nobody is going to say "I'm going to be loyal and hardworking and let them treat me like dirt, until the day they come around and realize I'm worth more than that, and start treating me better."
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Also the pile of anti-discrimination themed hiring laws.
Whether or not a company is trying to avoid being shaken down Americans with Disabilities Act style, or actually a bunch of racist assholes, turning down someone who falls into a protected category is always going to be risky. That person could turn around and cause a lot of legal headache and expense (not to mention bad PR) if they start claiming you didn't hire them because of discrimination. List a bunch of requirements that no one can possibly fulf
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Agreed. The "blue platypus" requirements on the tech ads are, in many cases, just to provide cover so that they can bring in an H1B person because "nobody fit the job requirements". This ignores the fact that he H1B import doesn't fit the original requirements either.
Don't blame Dice though. Any company smart/unethical enough to do this is also smart enough not to admit it, even in an anonymous survey.
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and you will be accused of racism and discrimination. Also, it is very hard to prove resume fudging and such in the court of law. Remember this is private sector we are talking about. They can do anything they want.
All it means is (Score:4, Insightful)
The post was done by a mindless HR drone. Once you actually get to talk with people actually heading that section you realize the requirements are more reasonable.
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed.
Most decent companies, HR is just a first hurtle. Make sure you specifically use all the key words in the job description exactly as they appear (don't use networking if they asked for TCP/IP .. say TCP/IP), use phrases like "I've been involved with x and similar technologies for <number of years they want> when x is something that has only existed for a year, etc. The project manager/team lead who ultimately interviews you probably has the same level of respect for the HR technical evaluation as you do.
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Interesting)
Most decent companies, HR is just a first hurtle.
In any sensible company doing technical recruitment, HR (and Legal) aren't even involved until a relatively late stage in the proceedings, to ensure that the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed. Of course, there aren't that many sensible companies when it comes to technical recruitment. :-(
If you have HR as your front-line recruitment organisation, you are almost doomed to mediocrity. Very few good candidates actually change jobs by replying to that kind of ad and playing the HR skills database lottery, so you have eliminated many of the people you would most like to hire before you start.
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And truth be told, if I see an indian name and an unknown number, I let it go to voicemail. If I can't understand them and there's an email with the full description of the req they're trying to fill, I'll reply via email.
That is so true. When the contact is for some job half way across the country at half my salary, more often than not it's Indian name. Folks calling about local work that has at least a remote chance of being interesting seem to have much more varied backgrounds.
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Funny)
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Interesting)
Skills to Salary converter... That is what is needed... So mindless HR drones start to plug in all these "requirements" and they see the salary for the person they are looking for skyrocket and come to the realization they are asking for the moon at a walmart payscale... Hiring offshore labour with a HB1 seems to significantly lower the requirements oddly enough...
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Nah the HB-1 doesn't lower the requirements because he's "certified" to know whatever you want him to know. Of course when he actually gets on the job it turns out that he doesn't know jack shit.
Re:All it means is (Score:4, Funny)
Nah the HB-1 doesn't lower the requirements because he's "certified" to know whatever you want him to know. Of course when he actually gets on the job it turns out that he doesn't know jack shit.
You mean my 15 yrs Java developer experience is not good enough!!? I also have 10 yrs of android developement, springs struts, struts2 and hibernate.
What my age you say? 22 yrs.
Office Politics in Play (Score:3)
It's important to understand the politics of the HR department. The ability to learn and adapt is indeed usually more important than a check-list of past paid tool skills.
However, that's difficult to quantify objectively. If a candidate can't figure out a given tool, HR can potentially be blamed for not verifying paid experience in that tool. But if the candidate doesn't work out for some other "team fit" kind of issue, HR is generally held less responsible.
Thus, HR protects against issues they are more lik
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No, if you're actually one of the desirable workers they want, you can also just refuse to work for them in the first place, and refuse to consider any positions where you encountered that nonsense.
That's real life. Willingness to be treated like shit is only an advantage at the bottom of the scale.
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If you think you are so "great" such that it's not an issue for you, why are you even commenting on it?
What is the theory at play there? Only people disadvantaged by a claim can understand it and examine it?
What if I told you that none of my comments were personal stories in the first person, but that they were abstract opinions based on an analysis of the publicly known and discussed variables?
How do you make your greatness shine in a way that you can bypass the usual HR nonsense?
You get over yourself and your sense of entitlement. You make life decisions that will achieve your goals. You set higher goals than just, "working for whichever lame corporation whose ways of doing business I dislike
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I'm not the OP, but I do the same thing. If you're any good, you'll network at least a bit at least online. You'll see job postings on mailing lists from mailing list members, you'll be contacted by companies from the community, etc. That will usually help you get through some of the buzzword bingo, and talking to people who understand the tech, or are the people hiring for the position.
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Curious perspective - I have heard HR blamed for a lot of things, but never whether or not a new hire can actually do the job.
In my experience, HR just handles the job posting and the front-line resume filtering. Once they've narrowed the field down to a manageable number of resumes, they pass the pile along to the hiring manager and from that point on, s/he takes all the responsibility for finding the right person.
only bringing up a
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In fact I do send two resumes. A one pager, that I expect humans to read, and a long form, which contains _ALL_ the buzzwords.
Nobody with a day on the job is going to try to read the long form. It's unreadable by design.
Re:All it means is (Score:4, Insightful)
Not always, sometimes it's that they want perfection. I had one case where the requirements were pretty much the existing guy's exact experience but they forgot that they didn't hire him in that condition he grew into it as their needs expanded. In the end they found no one and put the decision off for later. In the meantime I wish them the best of luck finding a Linux server admin, storage admin and Mac deployment expert in a single person.
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Likely you won't get to talk to that person unless you have alternate access, or claim to meet the requirements.
Which is probably why most positions end up being filled by alternate methods, like "networking."
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Re:All it means is (Score:4, Interesting)
Not so much lazy in the obvious way. HR's priority is to avoid employees that create work for HR, such as managing risk or dealing with employees as individuals, and they work very hard at that goal. This is why they avoid putting people with any creativity in jobs that require it, and why they have zero tolerance for the kind of frictions that naturally occur in groups of humans.
Re:All it means is (Score:5, Insightful)
Most HR is done by the unqualified.
It really is as simple as that. Staffing is key. If you have an HR department you are, more or less, fucked.
HR should be about benefits and legalities. Hiring should be done by team leads who should have 'executive assistants' to do initial resume sorts under close supervision.
A 'qualified' HR person isn't going to be cheap, if they exist at all, but (s)he will be much cheaper in the long run then the average checklist monkey.
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Hence they need assistants to do the mechanics of the screening. But the assistants need to work for the team leads.
HR doesn't listen.
I can't count the hours spent on useless team members, I'd rather hire myself. I also can't count the number of 'lost' resumes I've asked people to submit, only to have them filtered away by incompetent HR. Try and run a side door path through HR and watch their failure % (these are all pre-vetted people).
If falls apart when the team can't hire fast enough to maintain
Conversly (Score:4, Interesting)
I see resume's for people with less than 5 years experience with "expert" level knowledge in 200+ things. Meaning that they saw it once.
It really seems that it's the HR departments that are using this stuff as checkbox gatekeepers. In a perfect world I want to see some of your code but thats nearly always locked up under contracts. But as long as the list of checkboxes gets longer so does the list of lies.
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Agree.
If the resume is going to be read by a human and not keyword filtering software, I think a decent programmer only needs to list the things he is specifically skilled in. I'm going to presume someone with 5 or 6 years experience knows a handful of scripting languages, knows what version control is, can do basic database stuff, can use a bug tracker, etc.
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Bingo. Pretty much without having all the keywords checked off, most resumes get round-filed before they even hit a HR person.
The problem is navigating the Scylla and Charybdis between the two. Two few keywords, your resume is gone. Too many, and you wind up being booted from the interview for resume inflation.
I've ended up finding my job prospects through contacts, people at the renaissance faire I go to, for example.
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Any experienced programmer who doesn't have mountains of code they've written on their own time and could show you a sampling of, should raise a huge red flag for you.
Personally, I take a CD "portfolio" of code snippets I've written to every interview. If they ask about it, I hand them the CD. Even better if they don't specifically request code samples, but ask something like "So how would you solve b
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Sure...you want me to write the code you want? You object to my keeping my good job? That wasn't part of the deal, fuck off.
Is there any way to stop this scourge? (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't want to up the ante for experience (Score:5, Informative)
They want everything, but when someone who has everything applies, they don't want to up the ante with high pay.
Re:They don't want to up the ante for experience (Score:5, Interesting)
They want everything, but when someone who has everything applies, they don't want to up the ante with high pay.
This. I was speaking the owner of a company last week. He loved my capabilities and experience, kept going on about the pivotal role I could play in his company and then said to my face that he was not going to pay market rates (but not in those words) - and no, he didn't mean he'd pay above market rates, he wanted to pay about 15% to 20% below market rates, and he was not offering anything in return of that.
Re:They don't want to up the ante for experience (Score:4, Interesting)
You show the point. They don't want to pay. They want someone who is gullible. And that reduces to someone who is as young and inexperienced as possible with the minimum required knowledge. The long list is for lowering the applicant self esteem and make her/him believe that she/he hit the jackpot if hired.
Actual Counterexample (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked with a guy who was the best materials scientist in our industrial research group. His degree was in biology.
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Shake a tree near any university. A dozen physics and math post docs will drop out. Don't let them land on top of you.
Give them a few years and they can learn to be decent engineers. It takes a while to adapt to the more complicated job, but many can get past their education handicaps and pick up the business, art and complicated trade-off aspects of engineering.
I've seen one that could write a decent data entry screen. despite having spent the previous few years at CERN.
Experimentalists are a better
It makes it easy to support "not enough skilled" (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Do I feel lucky? The smart ass in me, or maybe it's just age... would want to retort, with "Well do you?" I'd feel as if it was fortuitous that we both met in this situation. Out of the whole world, what are the odds.
Smart ass interview questions used to just confuse me, now they irritate me. Next time I get one I may just be honest about it.
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Shouldn't that be "Well, do ya, punk?" [youtube.com]
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the average job offer these days is a toilet brush of bullshit
While I agree with the rest of your post, I have to ask: "How do you get a bull to use a toilet?"
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Very carefully. They kick.
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Google waterboards candidates with a barrage of questions that betray just how much money they make off you.
If you get that far. I was contacted by google a while back for recruiting, when I was at an equivalent of a temporary assistant professor job. "temporary lecturer" over here in the UK. It was quite literally the most stressful job I've ever had and left me quite badly burned out after pulling too many hours for too long.
They wanted me to go through nearly a day's worth of coding exams before they'd e
Interesting, Given Age (Score:5, Interesting)
This is fascinating to me, inasmuch as I just hit a landmark birthday (the Big Five-Oh). Theoretically, I've got all the accumulated talent that one would be looking for in my field.
However, the reality is that the industry likes youth. I'm one of the oldest people at the company where I work, and absolutely the oldest sysadmin.
It was also extremely difficult finding this job. I had to be clear that I'm very negotiable on salary, and in fact I took less than I've earned in 20 years.
But it was the only job for someone my age.
Where do old geeks go? We can't all go into management -- I know I lack the temperament for it. Many of us do.
So where are all the people who theoretically could meet the exacting standards of experience that some employers require?
Honestly: where do they go? Where are all the people I started out with in my 20s? They're not at any company I've worked for in the last ten years.
Re:Interesting, Given Age (Score:4, Interesting)
This really does scare me.
The only options I really see (for myself at least) are:
- management, which as you mentioned isn't for everyone
- self employment / consulting
- develop a niche skillset in a long term industry (aerospace, defense, medical, etc.. some company that will keep you around until you retire because you speak the language, can talk to the customer, and have legitimately valuable experience in some niche area).
Personally I'm banking on 3, with 2 as a fallback.
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I'm actually just now at the "oh shit, I really gotta figure out how money works" stage in my life.
I managed to save enough for a decent down payment on a house by dumping cash into a savings account for a bunch of years, and I have RRSPs because it was a checkbox and a form when I joined the company. I'm pretty good about living within my means (no debt aside from the mortgage), but I don't know shit about investing and if the "retirement calculator" on our companies group retirement page is any indication
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I see three routes to take:
1: Management. It sucks, but it pretty much is the way to go, and keep going until your retire.
2: Carve a distinct niche, a position of authority for yourself in a company.
3: Get a bunch of clients and people who respect you, and go freelance. With a solid name, this can be lucrative. However, unless one has extremely good creds, there are thousands of others who are going after the same clients.
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You left out
Education. Assuming you have a 4 year degree plus a few classes post grad, or a masters, or PhD, you can get a good job teaching at a community college or similar. Great hours, decent pay, decent benefits, and you can pass on your years of industry experience to the new blood.
Lazy Job Requirements. (Score:2)
I think the biggest issue is just lazy use of job requirements.
A company is hiring here are some of the reasons.
1. They are replacing someone who had left the organization. (Chances are he was a valuable employee) So they just blindly rebrand the guys resume as a job requirement. Not this is stupid, because for one, you will probably not find an exact match, but more importantly, the person who left, means with his skills he could find a better job. It is better to bring back your requirements, to core s
And not just that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies very often do NOTHING to retain top talent.
I have this exact problem right now where I work: one of my co-workers was a top notch cloud/orchestration ace.
He left last week, after his request for additional training and a pay raise was denied for the third time in a row by our boss.
The stupid idiot who did that is now scrambling to fill in my co-worker shoes. And, surprise, surprise, after three years in the fscking company, I also gave him my resignation, just as we were going to talk about diving into all the Puppet rules and configuration files my co-worker programmed to run our in-house cloud.
All in all, out of four Linux admins, three of them resigned in the space of three months. And the one guy left has already told upper management there is no way he'll be able to do the job of four guys.
Here is a hint to all PHBs and HR drones everywhere: when you have top-notch talent, just remember they can find job elsewhere pretty much whenever they want. Listen to your guys, for fsck sake, or suffer the consequences!
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Call us back in fifteen years when you're more expensive and tell me if your 10% per annum salary increase rate is still holding up. I'll bet you money it won't be.
Re:And not just that... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in IT and I've never gone a year without a raise, for a single employer.
The thing is, it isn't a startup, and it isn't a software company either.
Whether you call it a raise or not is another matter, but if companies NEVER increase base salary they're basically asking their employees to leave. That's the only avenue left open to getting a raise.
DICE OWNS SLASHDOT, disclaimer needed! (Score:5, Informative)
Dear Slashdot editors,
Don't forget your journalistic rigor. I know it's so very often forgotten these days, but I've chosen Slashdot as one of my last "traditional" news outlets (in the sense that it the editors, including Nevral's Lobster [slashdot.org], are paid to curate the content) because it used to be better about this. It is irresponsible of Slashdot to omit the fact that Dice owns Slashdot in the article summary.
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Dear Slashdot editors,
Don't forget your journalistic rigor.
Is it possible to forget something that you never had?
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We used to at least get a disclaimer, even if it was just an article _about_ something geeknet owned.
Slipping their own garbage in the mix with things a user might have actually submitted is pretty shitty, and the campaign id in the URL is just obscene.
laughable (Score:2)
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What they are asking for is 5 years experience in slinging bullshit, claiming skills you don't already posses and (backfilling your skillset/faking it) after the offer is made.
I've got decades at that.
In the real world, it's not a hurdle (Score:4, Informative)
If you think you are going to find a job by replying to specific job postings on a jobs board (an internal company board, a site like Monster or Dice, whatever), you are probably wrong.
A very large chunk of tech jobs are filled through referrals (a.k.a. "Networking") most of the rest are filled by companies trolling career sites, (and LinkedIn is huge here.) A vanishingly small number are filled by looking through resumes submitted to public postings.
I know that I was referred to the job I have now (from one division of my company to another.) The only person that could have possibly fit the qualifications the official posting called for was somebody that had already been doing the job for about five years. I was explicitly instructed to simply check all the "skills" boxes saying I was able to do all those things, and then submit an accurate resume with my real experience. Even though I didn't actually have any experience in this specific position, I not only got the job, I got a promotion into the top salary band for the position (it had a range of my current band and the next one up.)
Is this a good system? It depends... decent referrals will certainly be a better source of adequate candidates. I guess the public postings are structured to get only somebody highly likely to work out to submit (okay, that and pathetic liars.)
Required & Beneficial (Score:3)
It cuts both ways (Score:3)
Having faced these huge walls of product names, operating systems and languages as a job candidate, it can be very intimidating and scare people away from applying. No one is a complete expert on everything. What I do offer is the ability to be flexible, learn what is needed and pick it up as I go. Companies don't like that because they want a drop-in replacement for whoever left, plus someone they don't have to train. This is why the consultant market is so lucrative for those who don't mind the vagabond lifestyle.
And, having sifted through resumes and conducted interviews, now that I also have a say in hiring, companies often have the reverse problem. Candidates put a "wall of experience" on their resume because (a) they know that's the only way to get past the zero-clue HR filters, and (b) they see what companies are doing, and feel that if they've seen something once it needs to go on the resume. Also, I know there's a lot of debate about the skills shortage, but in some sectors there really is one. It takes a lot of sifting through resumes to find a group to interview, and it's very frustrating to bring someone in only to find that they have grossly misrepresented their familiarity with a requirement of the job. I'm in the systems integration world, so we hire a lot of system admin types. One of the most common misrepresentations I've seen is someone with Windows administration experience, who lists scripting and automation on their resume. When you bring them in, you find out that they were just running other people's scripts, and don't have any background or knowledge to build on. Last year I interviewed someone with 10+ years of Windows Server experience, who proudly proclaimed "I don't do scripts."
I'm not sure how to solve it. Recruiters aren't the answer -- they're often the offenders in this case, editing the candidate's resume. I think the only "solution" would be to guarantee at least a phone interview to everyone who applies, just as a basic BS filter. That doesn't scale, but if candidates can't trust job descriptions and employers can't trust candidates, what's the fix?
Only older employees have those skills, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The irony is that sometimes they **can** find a person with a huge laundry list of skills, but quite often won't hire them because they're too old and cost too much.
Well, don't forget... (Score:5, Informative)
You can no longer be hired just for the job. You must show "passion" for the company and whatever the hell it happens to be doing at the moment. If you are not "passionate" about your work to the point of putting in 60-70 hour weeks, then we can find someone more "passionate" than you.
Note that this is a good cultural barrier to keep old people out, too, as their "passion" has been tempered by years of experience and thus, they are not seen as "passionate" enough by hiring manager. We like 'em young, stupid, and cheap in out industry and "passion" is a good way to weed out anyone who might derail corporate planning and say something negative about a proposed product, project, or plan which might be flawed. Your job is to code without commentary, monkey boy.
Excuse me - your "passion" is to code without commentary, monkey boy..
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there are a lot of passionate old people around, you just don't know how to activate them....
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there are a lot of passionate old people around, you just don't know how to activate them
Honestly, when I was a hiring manager, I did know how to - and the 60 yo. guy (and the 50 yo. guy and most of the 35-45 yo's) I managed thought so. And I caught shit from my management every time I treated them like human beings rather than the wage slaves they wanted. Given that the company had many managers coming in from India, they had plenty of managers that liked to treat any worker like shit (let alone older one
The best part... (Score:2)
When company HR departments blindly insist that candidates need "5+ years" of experience in some technology that didn't even exist as a recreational github repo 5 years ago. Specific examples I can think of include Java in 1999, and .Net circa 2004. I mean, *seriously?!?* 5 years?!? I don't think James Gosling had 5+ years of experience with Java at that point (and if he did... most of Sun's own Java development team probably didn't). Oh... the punch line... the position was for "entry-level web developer".
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lead to over-applying and under-applying (Score:5, Interesting)
The All Day Interview is What Kills Me (Score:5, Interesting)
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There is a shortage of tech workers because companies don't like whiners like you - they'd rather that everyone is PROFOUNDLY grateful for ANY job or conditions within which to do said job. Until that day comes, there will only be calls for more tech workers.
On the other hand, you are right.
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The weird thing is I've been on the receiving end of this after being contacted by Google trying to tempt me out of a very stressful job with insane hours (academic). They seemed to lose interest when I simply didn't have the time to do silly coding exams.
Skill vs talent (Score:2)
Skill on the other hand, can be easily teach, but they can also easily measure how much skill you already have.
So what ends up happening is they look for their keys directly under the streetlight, even though they lost them in the dark area on the other hide of the street.
PHBs *do* know what they want... (Score:2)
...they want everything, in return for nothing.
Nothing new (Score:2)
I remember seeing something very much like this - http://www.gshotts.com/HUMOR/f... [gshotts.com] - billed as a "system programmer's exam" back in the '70s.
Among my favorites:
21) Sketch the development of human thought; estimate its significance. Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.
and
23) Define the universe in detail. List three examples.
HR filters for the best liars... (Score:2, Insightful)
And not much else. Look, I've walked out of interviews where they asked me goofball, irrelevant questions. As for job description listing requirements like "5 years of Windows 8.1 programming" (no joke), they don't even get a look. I no longer have to work for irrational crazies.
This, by the way, explains your "talent shortage." Want good employees? Fine. CUT THE BULLSHIT! Ask relevant, job-related questions - and nothing else. You don't need to know my community activities, why manhole covers are round,
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Not being an anti-social dick is a job skill. Yeah, we don't need to be buddies, but why hire someone who refuses to speak to coworkers, etc.
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All developers should add 'diplomacy' to their skills inventory. Even if it's not strictly 'true'.
Purple Unicorns and the Meat Grinder (Score:4, Interesting)
Reposting as a non AC.
There are some reasons for the unrealistic job descriptions, they are a lure, and are generally loosely associated with the role (ie: 80%). We're hoping for a purple unicorn, but know that they don't exist. But would settle for a winged horse, a unicorn, a purple horse or more realistically a good horse. But occasionally one of the unrealistic mix of experience does come through.
It has been almost a decade since I last went through an applicant list for a particular role.
What happens most times now is an application is added to an applicant tracking system. This parses the resume (from word, pdf or text) and creates a database of candidates matching keywords. This meatgrinder approach means that when I am looking to fill a position, I don't actually look for applications - I might - or the HR might quickly review the actual applications. What I do is search and screen. Search for a set of keywords, and from that list look for obvious issues (applicants to every job, rejected candidates, age of resume, etc). And then the HR recruiter will screen down from there.
I'll typically get 20 or so resumes to review. The recruiter may review 100 to 200 resumes. There pool of candidates may be 2000 to 3000 of which only a small portion are for my position.
This is part of the reason that resumes have gone from minimalistic to more fully descriptive with keywords sprinkled throughout them.
they also require background & credit check, S (Score:3)
your personal information is not your own. i've been kicked out of the job-seeking process by my refusal to turn over my SSN or submit to a credit check. my poverty shouldn't bar me as a candidate but companies have zero fucks to give.
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"Absolute Best", a philosophy bound for disaster (Score:3)
What a recruiter told me (Score:3)
"We ask for god in person, hoping to get the prophet, and usually we only have the faithful"
So yes, the requirements are not realistic, and they don't expect anyone to meet them at the price they are ready to pay. In fact these just give an idea of the profile they need and serve as a starting point for the negotiation.
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AngularJS + VHDL (Score:2)
I was recently presented with a job description that included a lot of web dev. stuff like Angular as well as niche EE dev. experience in the VHDL language. This was a former DJIA listed company. It was completely baffled but let the recruiter submit me for the job just for kicks (I'm an EE). Needless to say I "wasn't qualified" for the job.
When I see this crap it's a signal to run away fast. It's clear that the the person who wrote the job description is a clueless moron and the person who approved it is t
"Requirements" == "Guidelines" (Score:3)
Never take requirements too literally. I've done a fair amount of hiring, and been involved in writing job descriptions of this sort. If it says, "Requires 5 years C++ experience", what we really mean is, "Requires C++ proficiency typical of someone who has been doing it for several years." If you've only been doing it for 3 years but your skills are solid, that's good enough. It's also kind of a wish list. If it lists four required skills, that means we'd really like someone with all four skills. But if the best candidate only has three of them, that's not a deal breaker. A competent person can pick up the last one fairly quickly.
If you think you can do the job, don't let "requirements" prevent you from applying.
Re:Want to hire the best? (Score:5, Interesting)
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or third, get a MBA and start your own shop.
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I'd think the pre-MBA lobotomy would hurt your chances of success. Just start your own shop.
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and the motivated experts will get the MBA, start their own shop and wipe out the competition.
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Please ignore, accidentally posted as AC. They may have got rid of beta, but now have a small login expiry, and the site looks the same logged in or not...