Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Well, it is not a "talent shortage" except in HR. It is a "credentials shortage."

Here's the thing. I don't have a CS degree. I can program financial systems pretty well, but I am not a CPA either. I know enough about these things to have intelligent discussions with accountants and CS experts.

However I engineer frameworks for building accounting systems. I can do this self-employed. Nobody asks me for credentials. People find the software and they come to me for services. I also provide database consulting.

However from time to time I get job offers. During tough times I have inquired about them only to find out that I am "not qualified."

So I am "not qualified" to do a job for which they will pay me less than what folks pay me otherwise, largely because I do not have a piece of paper saying that someone else says I passed some classes. So I don't care, get back to running my own business, and work on growing that.

Excessive credentialism is a problem here. Companies don't know how to recruit, and they expect HR to do the wrong things. Resume-screening by HR is the single biggest problem in employment in the US today.

This is true for some companies, sure. It doesn't tell the whole story, though. As a counter-anecdote, I've had no trouble being hired in engineering roles with no CS degree, and nor have several acquaintances of mine.

In my experience it is the general rule (there may be exceptions) for companies which have HR do resume screening unless you have an in with the employer or manager.

"unless you have an in with the employer or manager."

That's usually the key point. I have a number of friends without college degrees that do just fine. Their usual modus operandi is to meet someone from the company at a conference, consult for them for a while, and then get hired once the company sees how awesome their work is.

I wish this weren't needed, but hiring managers function under conditions of very low information, and they wade through too many resumes of low quality to avoid filtering it on some criteria. Degrees and GPA are the most easily quantifiable filtering criteria, and so that's what makes it into the filtering software.

So replace hiring managers with competent staff who aren't feeding resumes through a filter.

The problem is that "competent staff" are still under conditions of low information, deluged with resumes from unsuitable candidates, and lacking suitable discriminating power between the resumes they do see. I'd encourage you to look through 100 random resumes online and try to decide who you'd hire; most likely, you will pick someone like yourself, not someone who's best for the job. In other words, don't hate the player, hate the game, because otherwise you will end up hating yourself.

I think what's ultimately needed is a way to reveal more information about a candidates' abilities in a very short amount of time. Contract-to-hire works for this, but has the problem that many candidates (and in particular, good candidates) don't have time to devote to a project that may lead to a job. So does tokenadult's persistent suggestion of a work-sample test (and HireArt's implementation), but these both have the problem of being able to cut down an employee's daily duties into a small problem that can be given as a short task. Many of the skills that a really experienced employee brings to the table are only evident on long, hard, extremely challenging problems.

What is ultimately needed is a renewed understanding that personal contacts are what are important and for both hiring managers and potential employees to seek out these kinds of connections.

That's precisely what LinkedIn is for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com