You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”
talent.works
talent.works
They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate for this position.
The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers.
EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.
Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?
applying to employer sponsors green card though does require proof of lack of local hires, and job reqs that are created to prove this often go to this crazy level and have to be met 100%.
So I get where you are coming from, but not having the 1/20 requirement is a much easier excuse than explaining why they don't want someone who thinks it's ok to do this.
The only way in which this bothers me is that these (I assume) fake, unfilled jobs are used for political reasons. But that's a global problem.
Also I think you can drop the English requirement as most people willing to go to China will speak English (it is certainly not independent).
With this corrected, we get around 0.5 which still means it is unlikely they find someone.
Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filtering candidates. These people have no idea what any of these technologies are, so for them it's a liability on their ass if they let people through that don't satisfy the "requirements". Managers, when you write up "requirements" and that is being sent to an HR department, keep in mind you might want to move some of those to a "nice to have" category.
That being said, there ARE competent, non-technical HR departments that do understand technical hiring.
Edit: Ohh... I wanted to add too, it's nice being in a startup where you really don't just "leave it up for a year". In a startup each and every candidate is literally needed when it's posted. It's kinda crazy and shows just how much larger companies hire just to hire if they can just sit on positions for a long time. Are they really "needed" if the position can go unfilled for an entire year?
Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?")
So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.
But yeah, for the most part, those kinds of questions help. It does depend on what your needs are.
I would add be more general if possible. Someone with 5 years of postgres sql will pick up sql server pretty quickly. So maybe just: Relational Database experience. Somebody who has used 5 different ui frameworks will pick up the whichever you use pretty quickly. So perhaps: Web UI development. Etc.
I have a feeling this isn't any different at a startup.
I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither of which would apply to FAANG.
I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038
We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff.
This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.
You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...
Of course, it's also plausible that they just never took the posting down.
Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.
Some examples to give you an idea:
- we like you, you did well at the interview. But we have one position open right now, and Joe, who is the star engineer at our competitor, is making signs that he'd be willing to finally join us. We have been courting him for two years. So we put your application on hold, until Joe makes a move. Nothing you can do, and we sure won't tell you, in case Joe doesn't jump ship, and then we call you back as if nothing had happened.
- we like you, but we are about to close a new contract in the middle of Texas. If that contract closes, we'll need to hire someone ASAP there, instead of here. So while technically the position we have is here, we are waiting just a bit to see if the contract closes and if we need to shift our hiring. We should know this week, so no point in telling you anything. One week later, it turns out the contract is not signed yet, but it looks really close. Let's wait another week, we should know for sure by then... A month goes by...
etc.
BOTH of your examples are things that in no way whatsoever make you liable legally and you have no reason not to tell the candidate in either situation. You could literally tell the candidate even vaguely that there might be issues that will take awhile to clear up before the company can make a hiring decision. You can vaguely say that these are based on internal business processes that you aren't at liberty to explain.
Please TELL the candidate that they did well and you would hire them and might be interested in hiring them in the future if not for 'vague thing that lets the candidate know it is the company and not you'. This is incredibly frustrating and there is no reason for lying about it.
My recommendation: If they delay or have excuses then don't bother. How they treat you before is how they treat you after. My rule for professional communications is 24-72 hours.
Of course, if you are using a proverbial “you”, my comment doesn’t apply.
From the perspective of running several consulting/job-shop types of business, this happens all the time from clients/customers/prospects (who are effectively employers, and are in very analogous positions here).
We'll be going along through the process of sales, project definition, quoting, etc, and then all of a sudden they just go silent. No reason, no explanation, just ghosted. For days, weeks or months.
Then, suddenly, with no warning or explanation, they call/email again, and the process picks up as if not a day has passed -- the only difference is often they are in a bigger rush and want the project more. (seen similar with VCs too)
So what happened? Almost anything. Other business have their own priorities, and their own fires to put out, and can often quickly get distracted from a project.
The difference is one of perspective. For us the employee or service provider, this job is a critical priority. For them, it's one of many, even for top priority projects.
It's just not the same sense of urgency from different sides of the table. I've learned (after way too much anxiety) to just accept and ignore it -- mostly.
And the times I couldn't just ignore it and felt that I had to do something, and only barely managed to hold myself back? Almost always glad I played it cool (even if I wasn't cool inside my head).
YMMV
I just don't put this int the category of disrespect, but of "they've probably got their own problems, so I ought to have a bit of compassion".
(If I put any unannounced hiatus in the sales process in the disrespect category, I'd have very few clients left, as I generally fire clients that treat us with any significant disrespect.)
It'd certainly be nicer if they were more forthcoming, but I've seen it in two industries, software & manufacturing, and it just seems that
1) they're writing the checks and determining the schedule, and 2) their schedule is often determined by THEIR clients, and when that has a hiccough, the entire downstream supply chain gets a cold.
I've just found it better for everyone to be sanguine.
I've applied to jobs that required a long and tedious hiring process and in the end unfortunatley I didn't get hired, but I also had nice HR drones contacting me to provide a thorough review of my application.
Regardless of your decision process, if you don't give any feedback to those job seekers you turned down then you are the problem. The reason why candidates overanalyze stuff is because you left a wide gaping hole by providing no feedback.
Moving the goalpost to more specific information, weakens the employer position. Now they are no longer interviewing potentially qualified people, but interviewing people trying to intentionally pass themselves off as specializing in a few skills. Weak hiring practices are the norm, so the strategy of hiding information (the most valuable skills) benefits the employers. People are very good at faking skills at a cursory (or specific depth, like side projects), which is part of the reason Headhunters are derided, prepping both sides to fail for their own commission.
That's great, but others do want it and also find any feedback to be very helpful.
Either way -- in tech (and for some reason more so than in other industries) -- when it comes to hiring, it's head games all up and down. And generally to an extent far more than can really be called "necessary".
They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal candidates they needed it for.
I know of at least one person at a fairly well known UK company that had to undergo the same waiting process.
Generally if the position is ultra-specific compared to their other postings, it's for someone they have in mind.
First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors.
This is... not plausible. Effectively, they're trying to infer causality here, not merely do prediction. That has to be the case, because this is presented as useful advice---to go ahead and apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications. But when you're trying to infer causality you're doing social science, not data science, and that means you need to worry about omitted variables.
Here's an example: what if less qualified people who nonetheless apply are more confident. And what if that confidence is associated with other good things that show up on resumes, like attending prestigious schools, having had prestigious prior jobs, having a record of success in some other fashion, or even just doing things like paying careful attention to formatting?
This is why social scientists use tried and true techniques like old fashioned OLS regression with control variables rather than throw everything into a random forest and see if the hypothesized association standing on its own predicts things.
(Insert remark about how companies should be hiring data science people with science backgrounds rather than just pure cs backgrounds here)
Another commenter also pointed out the fit curve. Note the wide prediction intervals starting at ~40% and frequency of points across all charts. It's hard to draw conclusions above that cutoff, since outcomes vary significantly and high-matchers are scarce. This may also be a failure of the "proprietary" qualification-extracting algorithms.
Most applicants also seemingly interview at a <10% rate, and the data in general looks fishy. I know they sampled from ~6,300 applications, but the joint distribution of matches & interviews seems bimodal: either you barely match and barely interview, or you greatly match and interview far more often.
Weird, weird post. It should be titled "we rarely see > 50% match in job requirements, which either says something about applicants or our proprietary algorithms."
Secondly, the people applying who have <100% of the requirements, know this, and are trying to guess if they meet all of the _actually_ required criteria. The ones who apply anyway, and get an interview, might be doing a better job at guessing which "requirements" are real.
However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.
Yeah, this is where bias and other cruft comes creeping in. "Passionate about software development" usually means, "our PM sucks, but he's the CEO's nephew, so you're going to work late to meet deadlines".
I.e., it means literally nothing.
Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.
They have the option to distinguish "minimum/required" vs "nice to have", though.
Shame on someone for writing unrealistic or unnecessary "requirements", but also shame on the engineer who doesn't even apply because of them.
I wonder how truly good a candidate is if they get discouraged so easily. Maybe a hidden requirement 1 is showing a willingness to try to punch above one's weight or displaying some self confidence during the application process. After all, what's really the difference between 4 years of development experience in X language vs 5?
I am perfectly willing to apply to a posting with missing requirements, right up until I have to create an account to apply, chop up my resume into pieces, and paste the bits into form boxes. That's when I say, "screw this, it wasn't a close match anyway".
If the application process is "attach resume document to an email" then I might even spend some extra time on the cover email, explaining why am applying without being a 100% match for the requirements.
The difference is the expectation of a payoff. That application management system is going to automatically filter out mismatches, and making me do all the work to disqualify myself as a candidate. The email might get read by an actual person with an interest in the outcome.
On the flip side, I don't mind an overly ambitious position description if a recruiter has reached out to me. I know I have an actual human on the other end, and they have enough sense to determine I might actually be a good fit.
Since it was a small-ish company, I thought maybe this was just their generic "senior software engineer" posting. Nope. I asked them. They actually expected people to be able to work on all of those things. By my count, that's about 5 different teams that should be working on those things... except that this place has ~15 engineers. I self selected out of that process because, although I could certainly do the API and integrations stuff, if I'm the best person you've got to work on ML, your company is in bad shape.
I probably could have applied and gotten an interview anyway, maybe even gotten the job, but I know it wouldn't have been someplace I could do my best work. I'm very glad I'm not there.
As someone who has written and hired technical talent - this is absolutely true.
> so many quite good candidates won't apply.
I agree with your sentiment but generally disagree in practice. The reality is I get 100's of applications that are nowhere near qualified for positions I've listed. We're talking like recent grads applying for a VP of E-commerce (~10 years exp on the spec).
Got some data to back that up?
Adding requirements that aren't actually requirements is a good way to get your posting sorted to the end of my applications queue indefinitely, or ignored entirely. I will apply to the closest matches first, and stop when I pass a time threshold. If your process costs me more than an hour, and I only tick off 50% of your listed requirements anyway, I'm probably never going to apply.
There are all kinds of new postings, added daily, that will jump ahead of yours in my queue. So if I am searching while holding a job, I only apply to postings with the very highest estimated payoff, which are the very close matches.
So, single point of anecdatum: I will self-select against applying. The threshold for matches depends on how motivated I am to change jobs. About now, I will even ignore 100% matches, if they don't have a salary range listed, and an easy application process.
You argument is like asking for women to stop being so demanding about all of the qualities they want in a man. Sure you can take a stand against that and say "I'm only going to meet women who match my exact profile and seek those who have realistic set of expectations". This is just simply not how it works and anyone who has individualistically "taken a stand" ends up losing out and just goes back to market norms.
In other words - a noble effort, but discrediting human behavior in aggregate won't get you very far.
This strategy works perfectly fine when I already have a decent job and wouldn't be averse to trading up, if the opportunity is right. If nothing seems good right now, I can still go to work. There will probably be more opportunities in the future.
But even when I need to find new work now, or run out of money to pay bills, I still shove the lowest estimated payout/effort prospects to the back of the queue. There is nothing any individual company could do to change my behavior. I will always pick the ripest fruit whenever I get hungry. I will always avoid wasting my own time with snipe hunts and wild goose chases.
Your dating analogy crumbles in a lot of very reasonable cases. Job hunting is only superficially like dating. Getting hired is not very much like getting married, unless you are in a cult featuring polygamy/polyandry for the leader (and maybe their top disciples), with chastity and celibacy for everyone else.
But in some sense, it is apt. If your profile says you're looking for someone who is:
- rich
- pretty
- single (never married)
- faithful
- sane
- attentive to my every need
- definitely not an axe-murderer
- also not a con artist
- has a garish tramp-stamp tattoo featuring Yosemite Sam
- minimum height 190cm; maximum weight 100kg
- able to cook dried pasta correctly
- not a *complete* asshole
Like so many hiring managers have veto’d a hire due to a perceived slight / offense.
Go ahead and take that stand. The only thing you are missing out on is the very worst the world has to offer. Have reasonable standards, and uphold them. It's okay. If you can't find anyone who actually meets your standards, it's probably because their signal is currently being overwhelmed by the noise. You won't ever be able to find them if you just set a dumb filter just above the noise floor.
If a company wants five years of experience in a two-year-old technology, add them to your blacklist for a year, and just let them hire as many liars as they can find. If they're all working somewhere else, they're less likely to apply to be your co-workers. And that company certainly won't be paying 2.5x as much for 5 years experience as the market rate for 2.
And that's what's missing from the article. It focuses on the amount of overlap between candidate and job description, and completely ignores whether the posting itself is offering a reasonable compensation for the mythical candidate it wants. How many times have you seen "WANTED: full-spectrum engineer with 10 years of experience who is an expert in all levels of multiple technology stacks; 6-month contract-to-hire $60k/year, relocation required"? That isn't even hyperbole. It's cherry-picked and amalgamated from the worst postings I have ever seen, but it is not an exaggeration.
Those dating profiles with the unrealistic expectations are all about what the person wants, and nothing about what is offered in return. You're never going to get a partnership between equals from someone like that. You can certainly get to be the cult leader's consort/concubine, but you're usually better off with someone who actually values you as an individual.
Some skills can be picked up easily. Others are difficult to teach. You have a detail oriented position, you need a detail oriented person. If they’re sharp they can learn pretty much everything else.
Hell I’ve taken over internationalization coding because I understand how grammar works in two languages and an inkling of Japanese grammar. I couldn’t translate a UI to save my life but the hard part is stitching sane sentences together from data.
>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.
I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.
At least if you know your resume will be scanned by a computer before-hand you can optimize for that. It's hard to optimize for a person with no skill-set.
The place I've worked with the best HR department realized that they didn't have any legitimate role in determining whether someone was fit for a job, only whether or not they were fit for the company. So they'd handle the background checks, the reference checks, etc, usually after the phone screen and before the on-site interview. But they didn't have any say in who got the job other than vetoing candidates with company-wide disqualifying features.
My boss at a company I worked for recently wanted to hire a guy that is living in Poland but is self-employed in the UK. The HR said to him, literally, "we can't hire him because we don't know the implications of working with someone incorporated out-of-country". Yeah, not like it was their job to find out. That would be hard, could cut into their water cooler gossip time, no way!
Resume: "Ported XYZ from Angular to React, built a Rails app"
Response: "Sorry, we need someone with JavaScript and Ruby experience"
I think it's best to have two resumes, one that's more or less a big list of keywords, and another that you can show actual humans.
\subsection{Technology Fluencies} Java \textbullet{} Python \textbullet{} PHP \textbullet{} Ruby on Rails \\ Javascript \textbullet{} NodeJS \textbullet{} ReactJS / Native \\ SQL \textbullet{} SQLite \textbullet{} MySQL \textbullet{} DB2 \textbullet{} Redis \\ Postgres \textbullet{} Bitcoin / Blockchain \textbullet{} REST \\ ActionCable / WebSocket \textbullet{} JSON \textbullet{} XML \\ ElasticSearch \textbullet{} JWT \textbullet{} JUnit \textbullet{} Jest \\ TestNG \textbullet{} Selenium \textbullet{} Robot \textbullet{} Maven \textbullet{} Ant \\ ESXi \textbullet{} Docker \textbullet{} Flynn \textbullet{} Dokku \textbullet{} Heroku \\ Analytics 360 \textbullet{} Google Tag Manager \\ Salesforce DMP \textbullet{} Github \textbullet{} Git \textbullet{} SVN \\ JIRA \textbullet{} Vagrant \textbullet{} Ansible \textbullet{} Perforce \\
\subsection{Additional Fluencies} Amazon Web Services \textbullet{} Agile Dev. \\ TDD \textbullet{ }SDLC \textbullet{} SaaS \textbullet{} IaaS \textbullet{} PaaS \\
You can probably integrate both by having a keyword-only layer in white on white below the real text.
He told me the HR lady would like to see my abitur certification (sth like a high school diploma) ... I am 34 years old for christ's sake. I seriously considered not applying. Ah - and according to the recruiter an asset of mine is not being older than 40 - what?
In short - a lot of HR people are causing serious damage to companies and the industry in my opinion.
And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.
To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.
I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.
Edited to hopefully clarify.
I mean, at the end you are just a little cogwheel in some big corporation anyway. The python tasks you need to solve there are probably just as mundane as everywhere else.
Startup founders looking for VC money want to be able to add "Team of ex-Google, ..." to their pitch.
That and the fact that by applying your CV is typically sent to 4 - 6 other offices around the country and world, each for identical roles.
Sadly, many talented tech candidates early in their careers tend to interpret job descriptions far too literally and self-select themselves out of good opportunities. These same candidates also rely too much on responding to impersonal web-based job-postings rather than working through their networks of contacts, or just putting themselves out there and reaching out to real people.
Two decades of OpenGL experience?, sorry we are looking for someone with Vulkan experience. Two years of OpenGL experience? when can you come in?
It's the stagnation that leads to lower job offers. You need to convince me that you were a dedicated employee for 10 years (which you are), but you also need to show that you're willing to learn something completely different. This can be a side project (doesn't have to be crazy, but slightly more then just going through the tutorial), certification of some sort, or _something_ that tells me you're not just going to write java-esque rails.
I would even go so far as I prefer people with diverse backgrounds, who are really willing to learn, so that we benefit from mistakes they made at previous employers.
Have you actually had examples where this wasn't the case? This seems like a common sentiment that I myself have thought, but I honestly can't think of a single instance where a candidate with good experience or knowledge wouldn't actually be willing to learn something new, or wouldn't model code they write along existing idioms.
I'm not going to expect them to be completely self-sufficient within a month. But they should be capable of implementing performant solutions to nontrivial problems with autonomy and collaboratively reviewing code with their peers.
Stated another way - what are they doing for 2 - 3 years before they're comfortable that isn't worth it to hire them?
For me personally the worst unsecurity is not knowing where to put new code, without messing up some architectural separation that I'm not aware of.
Note that due to the letter of the EEO law, there is NOT actionable age discrimination if all candidates were over 40, and for example, the 60 year old was rejected in favor of a 41 year old for the same reason as above.
edit: I should also mention IANAL
For example, national origin is a protected class and there was a case a few years ago where the EEOC got involved. It was a company owned by Indian-Americans(?) (might have been another nationality) who routinely turned down non-Indian-American job seekers (mostly whites) solely because they where non-Indian-American and they pretty much only hired other Indian-Americans and Indians. This was official policy.
So everyone's national origin is protected, no matter what it is. Everyone is in a protected class.
But say, people who have finger or face tattoos could be turned down for a job solely for having finger and face tattoos because people who have finger and face tattoos aren't a protected class.
“Protected class” is something of a misleading piece of legal jargon; “class”, in it, means something closer to “axis of differentiation” than “group”. [0]
So, “black” is not a “protected class”, “race” is.
(This gets confusing because there is a related concept in Constitutional anti-discrimination jurisprudence of a suspect class, in which “class” does mean “group"; blacks are a suspect class—a group historically subject to discrimination, such that government actions which discriminate against them are subject to strict scrutiny—and whites are not, but both blacks and whites are protected by employment anti-discrimination law because race is a protected class.)
[0] There's a wrinkle in that “age over 40” is an asymetric “protected class” in employment anti-discrimination law.
Non-whites are a suspect class (relevant legal term was colored race).
If you were hiring an intern and you got two resumes in order to comply with the law you'd have to consider a 60 year old intern still in college the same way you'd consider a 19 year old intern still in college.
https://www.themuse.com/jobs/capitalone/machine-learning-sof...
We even set the requirements to match what we felt could do the job. The roll has actually been fairly difficult to fill though. Recruiting decks I have seen actually suggest creating more requirements and being vague in an attempt to lure more applicants. After this experience, they are probably correct. Lure them in then explain more after they meet the team (i.e. get them excited)
Let me rewrite this into two different job openings:
1. Junior Machine Learning Software Engineer
Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience /
At least 1 year working with statistics, mathematics or engineering programming /
At least 1 year programming in Python and one or more of Ruby, R, Matlab, C++, Scala or Java /
At least 1 year of experience working on full stack solutions
Master's Degree or PhD /
At least 2 years of experience with cloud software design using microservices /
At least 2 years of experience with machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, Pytorch or Keras /
Demonstrated original research in this or related area
What it does is that it biases hiring process against self-aware or humble without right network to tell them to exaggerate.
People need legal reasons to say no. In a bureaucracy, that means that administrative types come up with objective measures to identify the perfect candidate, or to defend against less than honorable or completely fake people who simply lie about their skills. I have seen every level of bullshit, from a guy who told me he dealt with conflict at his last job by taking a swing at his boss to situation where three different people impersonated a candidate. Sometimes institutions come up with unique ways to handle that.
In reality, the meaning varies depending on the bureaucracy and how stringent oversight is. If someone is going to get an audit finding for hiring someone with 4 years, 11 months of experience, they care. Usually people choose to see what they see. Another reason for the laundry list is that editing is impossible. In a big company, the recruiter in Timbuktu has a phalanx of bureaucrats between the job req and the hiring manager. It's easier to have a mandatory requirement for 15 years of Windows 95 experience and add Python as an optional skill than to re-write.
Unless Infosys employees code on computers bought to earth by aliens, for their business software requirements, I can't even imagine what the difference between code written at Google and Infosys could be. Its code, at the end of the day. The differences are in productivity and quality of projects at hand.
You would also be a little surprised to learn given the narrow profit margins at places like Infosys, the productivity demands are way higher compared to any web company you will ever work at. That includes Google. There are places at Infosys, where your average joe is doing 3x - 5x more work, both volume and quality wise than Google.
Google is a classic example of Gate keeping through leet code style interview proxy. People getting in feel they are indulging in some highly intellectual activity and are a part of some special club. So they are above homo sapiens.
Both implementations might work for the original use-case in the happy-path case. However as soon as the first unexpected error occurs, the bad implementation might break down. It might be a lot bigger in size than the better one and contain a lot of duplication. And it might not be extensible or maintainable, and have not (regression) tests. And of course the time it took to produce the codebases might have been very different.
Those are typical differences one sees between code that had been written at more professional software shops, and code that had been written elsewhere (e.g. by electrical engineers, students, non-engineers, etc.). However I have no idea how things look like at Google or Infosys, so I can't speak for those.
I did that for the company I work at (Wire) and it worked really well! We got 50 Haskellers, some extremely qualified.
A lot of them had commented in how they specifically liked the job ad, so I'll post it here: https://medium.com/@neongreen/wire-is-hiring-a-haskell-devel...
Yep the Infosys guy has experience of being airdropped into unfamiliar companies in foreign countries, getting up to speed with business requirements and technical constraints and producing something reasonable in three months.
The Google guy probably spent five years writing Yet Another Messager App.
>I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements].
It's not companies, it's the individuals.
Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:
- she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
- she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires
The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.
Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.
It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".
Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results.
--
[1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down
I'll give a perspective from a small company: boss is doing hiring, asks what tech we use, try to explain that I don't care if they know React, if they've used Vue/Angular/FooBar4Ui2038, good enough. Then some explanation that we should put specific tech to attract people with that specifically, & we can select for people who have tangent experience. In the end we hired some guy with experience with Ruby on Rails (we don't use any Ruby, PHP/C#/Nodejs)
>from the corporate perspective
Aside of a brief stint at 15k-large corporation years ago, my customers tend to be small & medium sized businesses (10...100 employees). They seem to suffer from the "corporate-like" cookie-cutter hiring practices just as well.
The ones who won't - perhaps because they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job, and perhaps it's these folks you actually want to hire.
From my experience people judge the company both by the hard facts, and also by the feel (impression, emotions) the first contact conveys - usually an ad, or word-of-mouth information. Potential employees will skip over word-of-mouth offers and ads that don't convey the kind of workplace they imagine themselves at.
While we may abhor stereotypes, there's often a kernel of truth to them; different professions attract predominantly different characters. The first contact better be tailored to either the prevailing character - or perhaps to the long tail, depending on the current state of jobs marketplace.
Point in case, first contact for sales associate ought to be much different - literally "make mad money, meet demanding sales targets, enjoy strong coffee & fast growth!" than for a highly skilled production worker - "good morning, consider joining team of experienced people like yourself; we offer efficient organization, well-supplied workspace and regular working hours, discounted meals and parking space.".
Sadly, it does seem like the research-oriented jobs aren't BSing about their requirements; when I've tried to apply to MS Research and the like, they've always declined me due to lack of credentials, since the postings usually require at least a masters, preferably a PhD.
I challenge that what you're feeling is imposter syndrome in this case. I posit it's the realization that at the next economic downturn, should you find yourself out of work and the landscape for being hired is more competitive, you are at a strategic disadvantage.
Upward mobility into Director/VP roles is also quite limited without a degree, even though a degree in CompSci has little to do with running a business.
I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.
Interest aside, being qualified for those types of roles would raise the bar for salaries for individual contributors because both types of positions are competing for the same finite labor pool.
> It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through the proper steps".
The question, IMO, is whether or not an employer will feel the same way about you at some point in the future.
I think this applies to those who have a degree as well. Ivy league school vs state school. #1 ranked school vs #2. It's all relative, I suppose.
May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
The developers of facial recognition tools were aware of the early devices' limitations, and dedicating resources towards an approach that worked better on subsequent iterations. Why people think things would have automagically worked on the first iteration if the teams building the devices were more diverse, and why people continue to use this as an example of the necessity of diverse teams is a mystery to me.
For example, at my company 27% of our tech workforce is women, as compared to an industry average of 20% (figures are from our head of diversity). Despite already having an overrepresentation, we continue to enagage in discriminatory hiring policies that favor women and we've bumped our target for women in tech roles up to 33%.
I haven't worked outside of SV in 5+ years but this level of aggressiveness in pursuing diversity is not something I witnessed elsewhere.
I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. You're comparing your number to the current standard which is often considered insufficient.
But I think we'll probably have to agree to disagree on that point, because this isn't the subject of the thread.
An above average representation is the definition of an overrepresentation. I'm not sure why you are attempting to state otherwise. Whether you desire a larger representation of women in tech as a whole does not alter the objective fact that a company with a share of women in tech roles larger than the tech industry average has an overrepresentation of women in tech roles.
In case this was missed in my original comment, my company does have explicitly discriminatory hiring policies that favor women over men (as well as favoring certain races). To call my company's hiring policies discriminatory is indeed an objective statement - regardless of whether you wish to call my company's representation of women an overrepresentation.
To clarify, my original point is that while many companies apply discrimination to balance out underrepresentations, it is quite aggressive to continue to apply discriminatory hiring policies even when the favored demographic is already overrepresented by a significant margin. I have rarely seen companies outside of SV go to the these lengths.
0. Merriam Webster defines overrepresentation as, "having representatives in a proportion higher than the average", https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/overrepresented
I was stating that your figure on the current representation of women in the industry may not be an objective representation but may be the result of many factors, and is not useful as a baseline for beginning to even determine what is over- or under-representative. Therefore, it can't be objectively considered.
But, that's all for me on this subject for now. All the best...
Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
Longer: mostly because there is real value in team diversity, and it's almost impossible to remove your decision biases without actively addressing them. So if you identify a potential bias, it's not crazy to try and do something about it and see how that works for you.
https://www.wired.com/story/fei-fei-li-artificial-intelligen...
edit: my phrasing wasn't very clear. I mean for having a team from a diverse makeup.
I don't understand why, if you have a bunch of resumes, do you seem to be holding out for some female applicants. Why not just interview the ones that seem like the best options and choose the best person for the job, regardless of their gender and how many qualified female candidates you have (or don't have)? You don't control who applies to the position.
Also, why would a missing email be an automatic no if they included another way to reach them using a standard method of communication? Or are you saying that they included no way of reaching them and you had to somehow locate a phone number for this person?
Tech is a great example, where software engineering positions are very competitive and most of the applicants are men. This would pull down the numbers for men in general, making it seem like they need to fill more of the requirements for a job than women, when in reality they are just applying for more competitive jobs more often.
It would be more instructive to compare the numbers for the same type of job in order to see what the bias really is.
However the essence of the posting was clearly for a programmer. Significantly more than half the people that applied were not programmers. We saw some resumes from seemingly quite accomplished statisticians but we were not looking for a statistician (or “data scientist”).
So I think which 50% matters. If someone is a self starter and has great communication skills but can’t program she isn’t going to be hired as a programmer.
I worry that the questions that I only ask questions of candidates that I think are important and that I already know the answer too.
If you're looking for good hires you're going to want people who know stuff you don't and finding that out is tricky because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product
- great designer with a few years of experience
- degree in CS from a reputed school
- picked up react recently
- few years of work experience doing design and coding
He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.
That's good but please, if you aren't Google or Facebook, don't take it to the other extreme. If I have no idea about your tech stack I'm not going to apply, and the same probably holds true for a lot of experienced developers.
If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"
Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes though.
But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead.
The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.
I have a really high ratio of interview / job offers, but that's because I choose to apply for jobs where I had nearly 100% of the requirements.
I think this was a mistake. I should have taken more risks, try to apply for more challenging jobs that aren't completely in my comfort zone.
Fortunately for me, it's usually meant an increase in pay as well, though I didn't maximize pay at each hop. I could have been paid more at different firms I declined during each move, the position responsibilities were always key for me.
It might be interesting to do a basic pre-processing of the JD to remove all such stop-phrases before evaluating the role being offered.
Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called in to interview means next to nothing.
If I can find a 5, 4, 4, 3, 2 of combination of that, I'm happy. That's about 70%. That sort of profile should also provide learning opportunities for the candidate and typical that is intrinsically motivating for technical types.
They did only give me a 1-year contract, and a stipulation to get some Oracle cert but did support me throughout. Now that I've shown them that I can adapt (be productive/billable, and got the certs done) they offered me a permanent contract (indefinite period of time).
So yes, bother to apply. But put the work in to show them you can adapt.
I used to really like the MBTI-type stuff, but honestly think it's kinda nonsense now. You need a diverse team to be the best imho.
When I think of personality tests, I think of quack science. "Do you get angry a lot?", "Is it easy for you to get angry?", "Would you say it is difficult to make you angry?, and four other similar questions in a 200 question quiz. They ask the same thing multiple ways to try to know if you are an person categorizable as x, y, and/or z, and anyone sensible will put the socially desired response.
An interesting take on this is CultureAmp's surveys, where they determine your working style and can rate how well you might work with different colleagues. I work great with someone I scored a 98 with. Turns out I also work great with a person I scored a 4 with. So, while fun, it seems all bunk.
Ahem... Sorry.
I worked at a place that was bought out and the new team immediately made everyone take a battery of these style tests. A few days later they did a mass firing based on the results. I survived long enough to find work elsewhere.
Presumably it is not illegal to require a particular educational level or particular certificate pass which are likely to be close proxies for an "IQ" test result?
While technically not always illegal, giving an IQ test is a minefield for HR and that's why almost everyone avoids it. It all boils down to whether it is required for the job or not, and whether it would discriminate against someone who could otherwise do the job but fail the test.
Also, anger is an emotion opposed to a personality designation.
What qualifies Bridgewater's take on this? How have they leveraged it and to what effect? Correlation, causation, all that jazz too - if I want to be taller, I should obviously play basketball.
[edit] you edited your response as I posted mine :) Yes, I'm assuming what a personality test is because you've given us very little to go on. Give us more. Honestly, if it is better, I'm sure others want more than "this practice is good." We want to know how, what, and why.
Then I recommend getting in contact with a behavioral health professional.
> What qualifies Bridgewater's take on this?
Their success and retention.
When I went through the Bridgewater process there were about 6 different personally tests I took. Some were more precise than others. I measured a 96% objectivity score which is a statistical anomaly. I ultimately dropped out as I found a less risky position in my local metro far away from the east coast.
In my experience selective bias cannot be avoided unless you remove humans from the initial selection process. It is also my experience that potential in a given field is a predictable quality not discerned from resumes.
Competence is hard to assess without having to ask hard open technical questions. The alternative I hope you are not seriously proposing, going with gut feelings or "personality tests", is actually the epitome of surrendering to bias. Don't do it, resist.
What is the optimum personality type to employ for a specific role anyway? You might hire based the idea that you want people who won't "rock the boat" and just end up with a group that are shy of giving you bad news.