I hope you'll address a few points:
1.Job hunting is dehumanizing: Most of the time you will receive no response to a carefully worded cover letter. There is no option to speak with a human, or point of contact. (I dub this /Throwing hope into the void and see what sticks/.)
2.Job hunting is primarily online. From searching job posts to application, the reach of an open position is literally world-wide.
3.Due to Covid, remote work is now in the zeitgeist, opening up remote work to many who otherwise wouldn't have considered it.
4.Digital tools for resume writing and bulk sending.
5.The stagnation of salaries, increased cost of living, and poor investment options has forced many into living paycheck to paycheck. In order to /get ahead/ the only option is to constantly seek new positions.
The deluge recruiters are feeling is merely the tip of a iceberg.
Overemployment, moonlighting etc. is another interesting aspect and the heady mix of remote work, inflationary pressure, job insecurity and stagnating wages creates a motivator to take 2 or more jobs.
I see parallels between this comment’s points and online dating
It is very much like that.
Hiring is like dating from a woman's point of view, you post the job and then sift through an exhausting number of dud applicants for one that you think is up to the job and is not an asshole.
Applying to jobs is like dating from a man's point of view, you take a punt, over and over again, getting ghosted or if you're lucky, rejected, in the hopes of landing that first date and showing your charm.
And like online dating, applying for jobs works much better if you skip the online part entirely and instead use your networks in the real world to make connections.
If you fail at online dating, you are lonely.
If you fail at job hunting, you end up homeless. And lonely.
Every aspect of life will be commoditized, and every living person reshaped into a gear for the system.
Many job postings are far too open versus the reality of who they’d accept. If you’re expecting a deluge, then make sure you are highly transparent on how you’d vet or sift the initial applications. That doesn’t mean to introduce new “high bars” just to reduce the number, it means to be clear about the checklist you’d use to classify those who get to the next round.
That works for people like you or me who are good faith applicants and wouldn't want to waste anyone's time. But people like you or me aren't really the problem.
The real problem is spam. Of those 2,000 I bet at least 75% are just useless time wasters (no work authorisation, wrong TZ, complete mismatch in what was asked for, outright fraud, etc.) They're just shot-gunning everything. Much of this is probably bot'd.
Like most spam, you can't really lose by sending it: it's free to send and there is no global "time wasting shitdicks" blacklist to put these people on (many companies don't even keep internal list for this). So you can endlessly vomit in everyone's face and never suffer any consequences.
I want to see a site that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.
That would build incentives for dark patterns to encourage people to pay to submit themselves to jobs they'd never get, and then force the company to pay to ignore them. It probably would fail fast, but if it did work, it would be truly an evil concept.
There could be a term/agreement, that you only get money back if your resume actually met the minimum requirements. If you have a completely irrelevant profile you lose your application fee.
Non-free to send an application signals scam. I would never use this.
It could be a platform that organizes the payment like an escrow. The fee could be refunded on application acceptance/rejection, as long as you applied matching the criteria.
A site where employers can find the worse candidates?
Various people have told me over the years that you have to write the job ad broader or else you will get nothing but applicants that satisfy all requirements. By making it more vague about precisely what you want, you can then narrow it yourself afterwards based on the real job requirements. I don't think this is a good strategy personally, but I have been told this repeatedly.
The problem is that so many job advertisements have typically listed the nice-to-haves as requirements. So people have been trained over the years to apply if they have most of the requirements.
Not saying it is impossible but you need to be very explicit and realistic in the language of the advertisement.
Are there hundreds of applications for every engineering role? Yes. But most of those applications don’t meet the minimum requirements. A senior position requiring 4yrs experience will see > 90% of its applications coming from new grads with zero experience. It’s mostly noise.
It should be noted that many companies don’t have any entry-level roles open. That’s not ideal, but new grads are arriving with minimal practical skills while the landscape of complexity continues to increase. Sure the top tier are amazing but they go to FANG to get rich on RSUs, or become a founder themselves.
> That’s not ideal, but new grads are arriving with minimal practical skills
Yeah and how are you supposed to get those skills if no one is hiring you?
If you graduated this decade you should be applying for junior-to-mid-level positions to get that experience. It's not just alignment with the stack, it's the full spectrum of working on a team and software with lots of moving parts and team mates who rely on senior developers to provide the right leadership and informed mentorship and decision making.
You get lucky, or you just don't.
Unfortunately, this complaint is echoed across many industries.
Internships while you study. Freelancing.
I think the grads cant get hired is overstated.
Beancounters can't resist a the lower $ per neuron of hiring grads.
If you intern, do you consider that “work experience”? What I’ve heard says no (and my internship work has often been very “basic”).
It depends. Where I have worked interns have done real work like a grad. I also interned. I didnt even know the word intern! To me it was a summer job where I wrote code.
The main difference intern vs grad is tbey know you'll leave soon for uni so it tends to be not too deep. The project will be something quick go get started on and probably not the main gnarly monorepo.
But yeah internship can also mean making tea... metaphorically.
What I have seen is some minor resume CAPTCHA in the job description, like "answer 7 + 12 in your cover letter" or something similar.
I imagine that will filter out a good swath of robo-submitters as well as those with low attention to detail (but maybe not the chatGPT responders).
Anecdotally, if there is any extra step after submitting a resume I notice my response rate is much much higher. Whether an email to verify information in their ATS or a small test, just any secondary step.
I attribute it to so many people shotgunning resumes and this weeds them out, so I’m more likely to be noticed.
A survey with a few informational questions also probably works.
We used to have a line on our job ads for infra roles that asked the candidate to provide the contents of a DNS TXT record on our domain for a guaranteed interview. Only one candidate ever provided it.
There is probably an opportunity here for someone to provide a service offering advertisers a simple customisable form that includes some basic questions that needs to be completed prior to submission. It would have to be simple (e.g. no programming tests). Bonus points if the advertiser can then filter submissions based on various combinations (and possibly assigned weights) of answers.
e.g.
- Do you have a legal right to work in x
- Have you had y years experience in z
- Could you indicate which of the following you are familiar with
Obviously, all of these things are usually included in an application, but having them associated with applications in a standard format that can be used to filter or prioritise applicants could be very helpful I imagine.
This probably exists, but I'm not in the field and very rarely apply for jobs so I wouldn't know.
You don't need a separate site for that. Some LinkedIn "quick apply" applications have exactly those sorts of questions. ("How many years of experience do you have with Toolname?" or "Do you have more than 8 years experience in the Foobar industry?"
I never once got an interview from those companies.
Those sites exist, but candidates are ghosted anyways, even if you give "the correct" answer for all questions.
Joel Spolsky suggests the problem is you are probably in a market for lemons in Finding Great Developers
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...
Working within the staff’s professional networks is the way to avoid the deluge. As a consequence, you need to be a place people want to work and hire people who other people want to work with.
Otherwise, you hire staff that allows the organization to manage the deluge. Managing the deluge needs to be someone’s priority — not be a distraction from someone’s performance metrics. It’s the kind of thing that makes a place a place people want to work.
The staff professional network thing is limited in scale. I love my job but am I going to burn goodwill spamming people to apply and then there are 50-1 odds per person I contact applying and maybe 1000-1 that they will get offered and accept a job. So I annoy 1000 people (most I barely know) to get $5k bonus. Or I just don't bother.
Exception: high up moves to a company and brings a bunch of henchmen along. But this has its own issues around bias/fairness. Have you been trojaned?
Exception: high up moves
They work the way they work because the people want to work together. The motivation is not a one time bonus. It is working with people you want to work with and who want to work with you.
A lot of people are not the kind of people other people want to work with. That’s what happened to their careers,
I explained it poorly I think.
I meant to say the bonus is a poor motivation for anyone. You can get 5 bonuses a year for no effort by asking for a higher salary or good tax planning!
So for many you burn social capital by trying to recruit to your company. It only is worth it if you think your company is good and the job would be such a good match for John that he should leave his job and vesting etc.
The exception to this is bringing across people you like to worth with.
I am sure that this happens and can be good. I have not seen it happen at IC or Manager level (although heard of it talking ti someone at a meetup).
I have seen VC level do it so 2 levels above manager bringing their mates across. I have seen this usually lead to a bad outcome for existing staff and the business.
In my experience a lot of it comes down to “proof of effort”
We had a position that received around 1000 applicants.
Only around 200 had the most basic keywords the job required, like “python” and “SQL”
Only around 50 of those had a cover letter.
Only around 20 of the cover letters mentioned our company by name.
Only 1 applicant called the office and asked to speak with us.
People just have AI write a cover letter now.
High effort may just indicate someone is desperate for work, which is perhaps not the best sign.
High effort is just a sorting algorithm to see which resumes to look at first. It’s basically an improvement over random selection. We still do interviews, etc
>Only 1 applicant called the office and asked to speak with us.
Is that desirable behavior?
It’s a signal to give their application a look. Nothing more.
A lot of applicants won’t even have their CV looked at, simply because we will hire someone before we have time to get through them all.
Fuck so I need to put SQL in my CV? Do I also need to say "can eat with cutlery"? You probably filter out people who explain their impact in the CV rather than keyword soup.
We need something like driving tests for this basic stuff. Do it every 10 yrs. Standard vocational qualifications that all companies accept. Likena forklift.
> Do I also need to say "can eat with cutlery"?
Only if it’s a core part of the job (it wasn’t in our case, we were fine if the candidate eats with their hands).
You're right, we will absolutely filter out a lot of good people. We aren’t trying to find the best, and it’s not obvious that if we did read through every application in detail that it would result in a better outcome, because it would take significantly longer and good applicants will have had other offers by then.
Thanks. There has to be a better way. At risk of sounding cliche an LLM could probably do a better job. If yiu ask if the person probably knows SQL and they talk about setting up a postgres cluster... a natutal language model might score them as very likely and you keep em in. Maybe that wasnt available at the time.
Otherwise screen with a 5 to 10 minute quiz. Which also would probably encur the wrath of a HN snark from someone else but I accept these sorts of thing as a necessary evil and fair modulo creating more work for busy people.
Selecting for people who try to make other people’s lives easier is a feature not a bug.
It is a game where I need to psychicly guess what keywords to put in.
Hopefully it is the ones on the job ad.
I am not suggesting lying.... this is about 100-1000 technologies buzzword lists based on wide experience.
I have used MySQL, InnoDB, MyIsam, Full Text Search, Foreign Keys, MySQL Flexible Instances on Azure, ...
We had over 500 applicants for our recent intern position. HR screened out 5 for me, and I interviewed 2.
It was a fantastic hire, but ultimately entirely random.
I have seen many TV ads for a company called Indeed, that promises to provide companies who are hiring, a curated list of qualified candidates. I am sure there are other agencies out there trying to do the same thing.
I have never used one of them, but I am curious if those who have used them really think that their service ended up being worthwhile.