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Comment by twawaaay | Hacker News Reader

> Getting a job these days sans personal collections requires sending out many, many applications.

I am sorry this is the way you see it.

Have you ever tried figuring out where you would like to work, researching the company, be excellently prepared for the interview and working them to get the best terms?

Trust me, it is easier than ever and I have been a long time on the job market. Right now, trying to put ANY effort will immediately put you in front of other candidates because 99% of candidates, frankly, are too lazy for barest effort on their part. Which this entire comment section is an excellent example of.

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Have you ever tried figuring out where you would like to work, researching the company, be excellently prepared for the interview and working them to get the best terms?

One of the reasons I got fed up of being someone else's employee and shifted towards B2B and entrepreneurialism was exactly that the above strategy wasn't really working even back then. If it's a direct approach without a personal introduction there's too much randomness to justify jumping through a lot of hoops in a recruitment process even if in fact there would be a great fit and everyone would be happy if they ended up working together.

With the kind of market we've had in the tech industry for at least a decade now it doesn't make sense for good candidates to spend too much time on potential employers who make it too difficult to work with them. Maybe that will change again if the growing economic problems persist for more than a year or two but I'm a long way from placing that bet right now.

Found the manager/C-level. a thread with 8 million valid reasons why people are unwilling to do this and Twawaaay's takeaway:

'candidates, frankly, are too lazy for the barest effort'.

You know what they used to call people who would not do something unless they were greeted with red carpet? A diva.

If you join the company, there will be a lot of things that will not work perfectly and yet you will be asked to do things anyway. Everything is in constant flux at any startup because of growth and at large companies things are broken because of entrenched mistakes.

If everything works perfectly it means the company obsesses over its internal processes to the point of ignoring everything else. Which is also a problem.

There exists no company that is in a state of change where everything works perfectly. And every non trivial company is always in a state of change.

If you can't get over one broken form you simply aren't cut for the job.

But that state I will be payed for my efforts.

Unless you do something truly groundbreaking or contributing to a cause I deeply care, which makes me to want to really work there, I will just go to the next company where will be a lot of things that also not work perfectly, but I don't have to jump through these hoops.

If you can't get over one broken form you simply aren't cut for the job.

I guess the good people will just have to go work for one of the 20 other companies who will hire them based on a personal introduction and a couple of reasonable interviews instead then.

Two of the most reliable indicators I have ever found for places I wouldn't want to work are employers who think they're special and only want to hire true believers who agree and employers whose HR and/or legal teams manage to create so much unnecessary friction in the recruitment process alone that it's actively difficult to work with them even if the people doing the useful work there would want to make the hire. These behaviours seem to be quite accurate predictors of poor working environments for those who do get hired in the end.

There's money companies I could work for without this attitude. I shouldn't need to "jump through hoops" to fill out an application. That sort of thing is just a red flag that shows me I wouldn't actually want to work for a company. Why would I want to work at a place that would make me do unnecessary work, especially without getting paid? What makes your company so special anyway?

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