It's hard for me to fathom that such a large proportion of candidates are terrible.
> That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he’s the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they’re getting the top 0.5% when they’re actually getting the top 99.9801%.
Many of the remaining 10% have read enough they'll try to fake the requisite experience or understanding of it, but on the job would fail almost immediately (and not in a coachable 'oh yeah, we use bit x instead of y here', but in a 'have no idea how to use the calendar App we use, despite claiming years of hands on experience). Only a couple % of applicants for a public posting will have the actual experience and ability to do the job.
And that is before we start talking about fit with others/ability to work in the culture effectively, and other soft skills.
I've had candidates apply for senior Java developer positions that couldn't write out the most basic class structure on a white board while claiming 10 years of experience (like class Foo {}), candidates applying for engineering managing jobs that struggled with basic arithmetic, candidates applying for executive admin jobs that had no idea how to process an inbox at all (except to sort everything with a billion filters - except I needed them to, you know, actually figure out what needed to happen and sort out the junk, not categorize the junk for me to sort through), and a million other weird things like that. I had a lawyer who wasn't a lawyer once. That one I filed a criminal complaint against.
Sometimes it may be brain lock, but in many cases I think it was fluffery and 'fake it till you make it' thinking.
A large part of being a successful company is figuring out how to filter out the frauds/incompetents/won't actually fit or work outs, from the people who can get things done and can work with everyone who is already there without making a giant mess. It's surprisingly hard. Most don't do a good job at it.
It’s not that most candidates are terrible, it’s that most job applications are 90% mismatched. Don’t forget many many people are applying to multiple jobs, and most of them are great candidates for something, just maybe not the high paying lead role as the first job out of college.
As someone who’s done a lot of hiring and mentoring, I often tell people to apply lots of places and punch above your weight class, a little, for some of it. This is just like applying for college - you put in the app to Harvard on the wild off chance you’ll get in, you put in the app to your state school so you have a safety, then you apply for a range of schools, half of them long shots. Turns out, Harvard rejects more than 90% of their applications... because they get a lot of them, and most of them are long shots. This does mean they have some filters in place, for better or worse.
I see this same advice play out among applicants - many of them are applying for jobs that they might have only half or a third of the qualifications for. But maybe that’s okay, especially for junior positions. Many companies hire people who don’t have 100% of the listed qualifications, so as an applicant, it might be worth checking if you pass their filter, and as a hiring manager, it might be worth learning how to avoid interviewing people who are obviously more hopeful than qualified.
It's the natural outcome of there being a very small group of bad candidates who apply for a lot of jobs, and a very large group of good candidates who don't apply for jobs very often. What if there's only 50 bad candidates in a particular region, but they all apply for every posted job opening? That's a lot of chaff to get through on every single job posting.
Things aren't that simple for a lot of reasons, but the basic idea holds - you don't need a huge number of people applying for jobs they're clearly unsuited for in order for those people to add up to a huge portion of applicants for any particular job opening.
The really badly interviewing candidate might end up doing 50 a month for a year before they stop looking - and be on the market in another 6 months to a year, where they do it all again.
You'll see the bad pennies a whole lot more often than the good ones.
Bootcamps are hit or miss, but sometimes I think they spend more time on having their students create shiny LinkedIn and GitHub profiles to impress recruiters than teaching them how to write software.
That or the "I've been working with Drupal for 10 years" and now I'm applying to a position looking for 4ish years of Java. Sometimes I need someone with experience and that's just not going to cut it.
My favorite is getting word doc resumes filled with red squiggles. How am I going to trust you to care about accurate code when you can't be bothered to spell check a resume.
Majority of 'decent' applicants that passed the filtering step very obviously followed some tutorial once, and promptly listed it under their skills. Many didn't have much, if any, work on GitHub. During the interview process a few were clearly fabricating their experience, and would get very uncomfortable if we asked for any more details.
I don't get it - it's disrespectful of our time, and a waste of theirs, to lie. Do they just hope they will get that first job without any relevant knowledge, train on the job for a year, and be a proper dev then? Like, we're hiring for a business not a bootcamp. If you can't be semi-productive within a few months, who knows if we ever do get some return on the investment, both in terms of other dev's time, and in terms of compensation.
Ended up filtering more on ability to communicate, parse requirements, and how well they could pick new skills up, than what they already knew. This was for a lower/mid range dev, in terms of experience.
Additionally, this may be a popular opinions, but there are a lot of places where you don't have to be particularly competent where you can earn more money than you could otherwise.
