Some of the pain points I observe are:
1. Applicants must wade through large volumes of job postings, which are often poorly written, and frequently lacking key information which is important to the applicant.
2. Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
3. Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
4. Applicants are then annoyed with the lack of replies.
5. By the time an employer finds a potential match, the applicant may be difficult to reach, or is no longer interested.
6. By the time an applicant hears back from an employer, they are disappointed in the quality of the response, and already have a bad impression of the employer.
What is working well today to address these pain points?
What are other Possible Fixes?
They also tend to reach out to you over linkedin and refuse to give you the actual job description unless you give them your email/phone-number and CV, which is just infuriatingly arrogant.
My hope is that tech job listings stop listing stuff like Must have Experience with XXX and YYY application/framework and instead start listing skills needed to be success full in the role. Tech becomes outdated so incredibly fast and we're allways learning in our jobs that it's kinda futile to list tech instead of skills.
Sure Need to know Python, C#, Assembler, that is a skill, but applications and frameworks are something that you can learn, and besides each company use them slightly different so you'd need internal training anyway.
Human's are complex social beings and each individual has a unique set of strengths and talents. However, this complexity is incompatible with how the labor market works. Specifically it's incompatible with how labor is commodified.
Let's use a tech parallel to explain how labor is treated as a commodity. Take Docker for instance. Docker commodifies applications by wrapping them in a uniform interface. The whole point is that packaging up the whole app into a standardized container makes it easier to work with. You don't have to care about the internal complexity of the application, you interact with all Docker containers the same way.
Commodification of goods goes hand in hand with the mass production of goods and the ability for markets to function. Think of commodity markets as an example. Oil is traded in barrels, a standardized container for oil, and at regulated grades. This makes buyers confident that they are getting what they're paying for when they buy oil. One barrel of sweet crude is just as good as any other barrel of sweet crude. We trade commodities as a means to an end.
The problem happens when we do the same to people. The debasement we feel during the hiring process is due to how people are treated as a commodity. Take the resume as an example. The resume is an abstraction of you as a person. It helps HR and hiring managers sort through candidates because of the way it abstracts labor. But at the same time, it reduces a person to a list of bullet points on a page or two at most. There is a stark contrast between the whole person as a living breathing human being and a list of bullet points. Some people find being treated as a means to and end humiliating.
I think by now you can choose others parts of the hiring process and use this lens to see in which ways people are treated as commodities.
I expect to get reactions along the spectrum from "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Of course that's how it works!" to "Huh, I never thought of it that way before." Both are fine. I've heard it all.
Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates. All interviewed candidates pool their knowledge about the employer so the next suggestions from the guild will be even better matches.
Medieval guilds made sure that craftsmen could be trusted. Programmers can do the same thing.
> Employers at first communicate with the guild and only have to evaluate 5-10 candidates.
Yeah, no. It's not friendly when there's an obvious hierarchy and competition for jobs involving large amounts of money. And who decides the criteria? How are other developers even supposed to "rate" you if they haven't worked with you?
Putting all software engineering hiring in the hands of one central authority is one of the worst ideas ever. It's good when different employers have different hiring criteria. What sucks is when a bunch of employers cargo cult on the same hiring methods. We need more diversity in hiring, not less.
Guilds already exit as networks of friends who recommend each other. Hiring is only dehumanizing for those who are not part of an informal network. With guilds, there could be accessible knowledge to everybody on how to be or become a good professional.
The fact that programmers haven't already organized themselves in guilds suggests that they are not the right layer of abstraction. It remains funny that programmers create formal processes and structures for everything but not for themselves.
They get paid a lot for finding a candidate so their incentives are a lot more aligned with your own. You can openly ask about salary and timelines. They're not gonna waste your time or theirs if they know you require X while the employer is willing to pay a lot less.
They also work across different orgs so they can place you accordingly. They can even help you prep for an interview and work with only serious employers (they don't get paid unless you get hired). It's very reputational. Some workers use the same headhunter their whole careers. Plus it's very industry specific so it's more personalized. Head hunters for hedge fund jobs will be very different than those for IT departments for law firms.
It's not perfect but it's decentralized and you can choose the head hunter you want to work with as opposed to being stuck in an industry with a bad guilde. It's not perfect and you still have to jump through hoops but i think that's unavoidable
The main benefit of our current system is that it's very equitable. I'm the furthest thing from an SJW, but I do believe that in essence, the current way we interview helps people at the lower rungs of the ladder. People with no CS background can learn and if they pass the test, they can work at a FAANG. There's no guild, there's no politics, there's just performance on a well-defined measure.
It's not the greatest system, but it's also extremely fair and gives a shot to people who wouldn't normally get a shot.
We might be close to developing that model, or we might not. I personally don't know that we need to rush there. I'm of the auto-didactic hustler crop of hacker/engineers and many of us wouldn't have fared well if there was already a strong guild culture as we were coming up. I'm not sure I'm ready to start building that wall behind me yet.
To join, one must have some amount of professional experience and pass a test. Members pay some nominal fee to support an internal liaison team. That team communicates with with companies looking to hire. Create some sort of internal ranking metric (which includes filters for e.g. location and pay), and top ranked members will be connected directly with HR at the company.
This is basically what H1B sourcing companies do. No reason it can’t be for full time as well.
I also have some concerns about how you manage problems as this sort of guild scales. How do you keep a consistent standard of skill? what if members performance changes over time?
In another startup, management asked every IC on hiring teams to find at least one potential candidates - every week. Time to find them was allocated into sprints. The referral bonus was raised from 2k to 3k.
The first example was more successful from what I remember.
He left to talk to the owner, came back with a (in hindsight very small) number on piece of paper, and I started that week.
When I started at my current gig over a decade ago I had a three-day ordeal of interviews. In person, telephone, full day of in person again. Spoke with at least six different sets of people. Jobs I've applied for in the interim have been even worse.
As someone who has been in a hiring position myself, I think that first informal interview tells you way more than any checklist. If you need the checklist items answered, put them on the application. Interviews should be for getting to know the person.
I don't do hiring these days, but from what I've heard, DEI doesn't want us going off pre-approved script at all. I understand where that's coming from but it seems like it would do more harm than good.
These kinds of processes just feel designed to dilute the blame.
When I was responsible for hiring at my previous project, that's also what I did: I want to get to know the person. Is this someone I can work with? I was much more interested in what their most interesting project was, than in which checkboxes they checked. If there was one checkbox I had, it was: "can they admit they don't know something?" because some people just started spewing nonsense if they didn't know the answer to a question.
The last thing I want is waste the other persons time.
It's disappointing being interviewed by people who are assh*les, really makes other people feel like sh!t!
All we did in the interview was to discuss things they have worked on before, going deep into all the details. Talking about why they decided to implement it the way it was implemented, what the trade offs were, what they would do differently today, the hardest problems they had to solve, how they would have implemented it given different biz constraints etc.
No white-boarding, silly puzzle questions, online coding games, or other BS nonsense. Just deep questions about things they claim they have worked on in the past. It works really well. It is easy to identify experienced smart developers by how clear their thinking is and how well they articulate their decisions, problem solving etc.
It’s simple. It works. Highly recommended.
The quickest hires IMHO are via referrals - but this is sort like arranged marriages/dates and it comes with it's own set of issues (nepotism etc).
I think companies need to have dedicated HR / Recruiters (or hire headhunters) to cut down on such frustrations. But the problem is tech hires, unlike construction / temp hires require high touch interviews with department heads etc. Add flood of resumes (now that WFH is a thing) and it's so difficult to speed up the process since it's costly to hire the wrong candidate.
I think this is where small companies really have a huge advantage over larger companies, and they should be taking advantage of it!
> Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
> Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
Employers should stop casting such a wide net, then. If you post on a site like monster and say the position is remote then obviously you're going to get a lot of applicants. If you're not prepared for that you should post locally or tailor your advertisement better.
IMO the job postings are often deliberately written that way because the people doing the hiring a) don't understand what they're looking for (see: "we need 10 years of experience in [technology that was released last year]) or b) they know they need a body but don't want to lock that person into a particular "role". It's just another version of "and other duties as required".
The remaining points in your OP can be solved when employers solve the problems in 1-3.
They can fix it by actually posting minimum requirements.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I've often had companies who did interview me take weeks to initiate the process from when I applied.
I also try to make small talk, have a quick conversation and so on. This has been mostly good except with a couple candidates. They were hasty and basically like ok let’s get to the question
It’s so interesting how groomed candidates are with LeetCode and Sys Design videos. Sometimes when I ask anything off course, like a basic question, it’s like a huge curve ball for some people
So my suggestion would be: think about people you know or could meet and ask them if they like where they work? Are they hiring? Then, if you have a position somewhere you don't need to be perfect, but it helps to be memorable.
Only "apply" to jobs where you already know at least one person at the company
That's really the answer although it's probably not very actionable for a lot of more junior people.
1. Geo restriction (when required).
2. Skills required in the job (listed by employer). Any resume that don’t meet a percentage of required skills will be notified immediately after uploading the resume.
3. Filtering questions. That could be anything from skills, required certifications, ability to start in certain times.
It is an attempt though, I don’t know if it will work but to explain the reasons behind the platform:
1. The application rate of online jobs is less than 8% due to complicated long forms. Which means employers are missing many talented applicants. See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33341263
To fix, I implemented an easy apply similar to LinkedIn. You only upload the resume, it will be parsed to validate skills.
2. With the remote work, there are companies who want to limit the remote to their own country or certain time zones. Writing that in the job description doesn’t stop people from applying. As you mentioned, ghosting is one of the main reasons why candidates apply to as many jobs as possible.
To fix, there will be a message saying the job is not available in your region when applying from outside the designated regions.
3. The skills filtering will help candidates to understand immediately why they had been rejected instead of just being ghosted. It will help in reducing the number of unqualified applications.
4. Filtering questions will be for things that can not be identified in resumes. That could be ability to relocation, having certain certifications, security clearance … etc.
As an human you are probably applicable to a multitude of jobs in all different kinds of industries and therefore the sheer process of going through the list to find "the one" is going to prove very difficult.
Its not that hiring is inhuman, but unnecessary moats are. Those are there in turn because a large number of people are applying to those same jobs. Combine that with the fact of remote working, you pretty quickly realize that you will get resource management problems no matter what you do.
Finally, its also that most people hiring have no actual clue as to whom they would like to hire for the position to begin with. Just as all recruiters don't really understand the position they are hiring for.
Like they used to do in 1970's.
Not a fan of: 1) Global pool of candidates 2) Leet code bullshit 3) Remote work
Fan of 1) Permanent hiree after 3 months of time with us. 2) You will be part of our family, we'll build great things together 3) You'll get a decision when you visit us. Just drop by, no appointment necessary. We'll make time. 4) If you get rejected, we’ll tell you in the most honest way possible. No HR bullshit talk.
> 1) Global pool of candidates
Why not? global pool could potentially get you a lot more bang for your buck. I've employed folks from outside the US and it was a joy to get really talented folks and pay them stupidly well for their location. They were super excited to work with us for that and we were super excited to pay them a lower rate than hiring in the US. Win-win.
> 3) Remote work
Why not?
> 1) Permanent hiree after 3 months of time with us.
I think this works well on paper, but not so much in practice. I wouldn't be interested in wasting 3 months of time (even if I'm paid) just to find myself back in the job hunt process again. I can't imagine on a large enough or complex enough project that three months would be sufficient to be measurably productive. I'd rather use that time to find a longer-term place that is a better fit for me. This is just me though.
> 2) You will be part of our family, we'll build great things together
Oof, no thanks. I'm exchanging my time and experience for money. I don't need additional weird social hierarchy or hidden rules about behavior (not to mention the passive exploitation).
> 3) You'll get a decision when you visit us. Just drop by, no appointment necessary. We'll make time.
Gosh, as an employee there, this would signal to me that I might be expected to be interrupted and context-switch to an off-the-street interview. That doesn't sound like fun.
> 4) If you get rejected, we’ll tell you in the most honest way possible. No HR bullshit talk.
Sometimes that "HR bullshit talk" is to protect you and your company from lawsuits. Honesty combined with "HR bullshit" is possible and not mutually exclusive.
----
On another note, I appreciate such visible signals that I would not be a good candidate for your company.
I'm fine with the former. Mostly wouldn't be with the latter.
I was a hiring manager for 25 years. I hired experienced C++ engineers, for fairly hairy algorithm work (image processing pipelines).
Leetcode was absolutely worthless. There was no way to test for the stuff we did. The algorithms were nowhere to be found in most textbooks (they could be found in some textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars, though).
Also, our company was cheap. They offered "competitive" salaries. This probably reduced our candidate pool by 90%. We were a marquée imaging company (great to have on your résumé), so the only folks that applied, were fairly serious about the job.
I had to filter for folks that had the basic tech chops to get into our codebase, and also had the ability to learn the stuff we did.
It was challenging.
Also, once we hired someone, Japan wouldn't even acknowledge their existence, until they'd been on the team for at least a year. Training them on our algorithms was also a multi-year process, so I hired for the "long haul," and keeping people for many years was important.
I didn't look for people that would work crazy hours, but I wanted folks that would be dedicated enough to the job, that they would be conscientious in their work, and put in extra time, if needed (which I was careful not to do too often).
I looked for folks that I thought could work in an extremely diverse team; spread throughout the world, and that were capable of treating their teammates with respect; not competition.
I did OK. Never had a technical bomb, but I did make a couple of mistakes, when it came to folks that could integrate into the team. They generally found it uncomfortable, and went their way, but that still hurt, because of all the time we had to invest.
All very old-fashioned stuff, and probably not representative of most of today's companies.
I will say, that, towards the end of my tenure, there, the HR started to get really rapacious. They were run by the Corporate General Counsel, and tended to treat the employees as threats. Shielding my team from them was pretty important, and it meant that I was occasionally called on the carpet.
Requiring someone to drop off a resume reduces friction and frustration--I can give you my resume that tells you everything, and I don't have to write it again into your weird HR software that requires me to set up an account for a job I probably won't get.
It gives you a chance to do a short prescreen as soon as the applicant drops off their resume, giving instant feedback to them.
Honestly, although that culture isn't what I'm looking for now, when I was starting out, I would have loved to see somewhere like this near me.
Treating business like a part of the family is a bad idea. You will end up with nepotism in the organization and shun out new ideas. Yet some real businesses embrace this mantra and bad things have been happening.
The other one of those four just came to me directly through my network.
Now that I think about it, of the 7ish jobs I've held in about 23 years, I don't think a single one came from "fill out this online application form". I've done those, but it's never gotten me a job. Recruiters, responding to a very-basic listing on Craigslist that didn't involve some online form and was all-email, network, and just walking in. The "normal" process, not once, I don't think. But I also think the normal process takes a lot longer than any of my job searches have (longest was about a month? Most two weeks or less) to yield results, in most cases, so IDK, maybe it would eventually have worked for me.
I guess maybe the '00s are onion-on-my-belt-territory now, though.
[EDIT] Incidentally, I do think it helps to be fairly young when attempting this. Putting on my other-side-of-the-table hat, I'd probably be more likely to have positive feelings about a 24-year-old walking in like this and asking for some time, than a 34-year-old. 24 year old does it, "huh, interesting, they clearly have some amount of spirit or hunger to them, let's see what they're like, I can find a few minutes"; 34-year-old: "WTF are you doing?" I've not attempted it since crossing the 30-year-old barrier.
I think the risk would be that no one ever shows up. :-(
One big reason that companies go through the lengthy song and dance of multiple tests and interviews in a crazy hiring process with dozens of people is that trying to fire somebody is always a risk, even in places with at-will hiring. You have to worry about severance and other legal requirements, you have to worry about discrimination lawsuits. Additionally, hiring has become so expensive (multiple interviews and tests with multiple teams with multiple candidates) that it's kind of a feedback loop that incentivizes a very careful process because you can't get it wrong when you spend so much effort on it.
What should be a much more common practice is agreeing to quickly hire somebody who has a good resume and passes a basic knowledge interview, and then firing them fairly quickly without severance pay or legal risk if they don't work out. If they can't hack it in a job (the most fair job interview possible because it's literally the job) firing them should be the easiest thing in the world. This could incentivize a much easier and quicker hiring process that should take a day or two, not weeks or more. You might get it wrong a bit more often, but this should be counterbalanced by getting it right sometimes much, much quicker and cheaper.
Hiring is only going to get worse in technology related fields.
The competition has increased 10x in the last couple months compared to the last year for a single jr - mid developer position at my company. That's going from 1000 applications to 10,000 applications.
I even created a jupyterhub notebook to do some analysis on the unfiltered resumes over the weekend. I can easily see over half are liberals arts majors who switched careers in the last 5 years via bootcamps or masters programs. The next 25% are are mostly people who were laid off. The final 25% are new graduates with either no experience or an internships.
A lot more jr developers basically, I imagine the senior devs are being kept happy, or weren't laid off. Yet those are the only people a bunch of our tech teams want to hire . . . .
Also yes we filter out a lot of resumes using keywords, but the latest batches of interviews didn't go well. So I've been re-evaluating our processes.
[EDIT] Incidentally, in the age of ChatGPT, I suspect I'm going to be recommending this more and more often for a lot more use-cases....
Unfortunately, you probably would have an adverse selection process. Anyone who can (or thinks they can) easily land a job will be F this crap. And the truly desperate will jump through the hoops.
(I do not believe this, but many do)
If you're applying to jobs, you're bound to be doing lots of puzzles anyway, so it's just more practice. It filters out the 80% bottom of the barrel and this might mean one less tech interview stage.
Heck just give them fizzbuzz straight away and it should filter about 80% anyway.
1) I wonder if the problem of being overwhelmed by applicants can be solved in the same way that dating sites work, because they somewhat have a similar issue. Perhaps restrict job seekers from applying to more than X jobs per day or week, like some dating sites do. At the least, this ensures that effort is put into individual applications and people are more selective about applying to jobs they think they have a reasonable chance to get rather than applying to anything they're remotely qualified for and playing a numbers game. Everybody will be applying to fewer jobs and can be more conscientious about the process, improving it for all.
2) And speaking of minimum requirements, in most cases they're not strict absolutes for performing the job. If you're going for some hard-core game developer job and you don't know C++, yeah that might be a big problem. But if you're going for a web-developer job and you haven't used one of 6 Ruby gems they listed in their ad, who gives a fuck? You should still apply because you're experienced enough to know that your general knowledge is in the ballpark of what they're really looking for.
You don’t have to be the best sports player to be a great sports coach. You don’t have to be the best programmer to be a great engineering manager. The problem is that companies have not decided it cost effective to pay more for recruiters that know how to code or even have a CS degree.
This said, I think AI, ChatGPT/LLMs, and probabilistic models can make inferences about skill transferability. Interacting with ChatGPT could effectively become a fizzbuzz programming interview. Potentially, we can have the AI randomly remove a line of code from otherwise correct code, and interacts with the interviewee to debug what’s wrong with the code.
The coding questions at both places were not anything I had seen before (despite studying on leetcode), however none of them needed any esoteric tricks or algorithms. Recursion, loops, hashmaps, lists, etc was all that was needed to pass the coding portions.
I'd say the questions would be considered 'hard' on leetcode, but still only needing fundamental understanding of DS&A. And I was given about 40 minutes.
I also had some coding rounds that were 100% practical stuff. Basic 'data munging' kind of stuff. It was non trivial but again nothing weird or funky.
System design rounds were practical and engaging and fun.
I think the template is pretty solid, it's just most places have poor implementation (and from what I've heard, it's very possible to roll poorly at Google and get someone who asks a super weird or challenging question).
When I first started studying for interviews, I would absolutely panic with someone watching me, I could barely do a proper for loop. But after enough practice it became fine.
Overall the interviews were challenging but NOT what I was expecting, I thought they did a good job of asking unseen questions that tested coding fundamentals.
Only in some litigative societies. On the course of my career I can count lawsuits by employees on the fingers of one hand, and these were cases of glaring misconducts by the employer.
> 1. Applicants must wade through large volumes of job postings, which are often poorly written, and frequently lacking key information which is important to the applicant.
This is nothing new - it's been this way for over 20 years. Job postings are not more poorly written than in the past.
> 2. Employers are overwhelmed with large numbers of applicants, most of whom don't meet the requested minimum requirements.
Because many/most employers are willing to hire people who don't meet the minimum requirements. Or rather, they are sloppy when they made the job posting. Therefore, applicants who actually honor the minimum requirements are at a disadvantage.
> 3. Employers are then too overwhelmed to reply to all the applicants.
Same reason as above. Employers got themselves into this mess because they are not strict with their minimum requirements.
I don't have solutions for the whole system, but a given employer can do much to improve things:
1. Employer posts accurate postings and are strict about minimum requirements. Applicants who submit applications where they clearly are not meeting the requirements are blacklisted for a year (make this clear up front).
2. Do not let people apply to more than 3 positions at once.
3. Require a proper cover letter.
4. Develop a reputation for good candidate management. If someone applies, they should hear from you in a decent timeframe (even if it is a simple rejection).
5. Write in reasonable detail about the interview process. Will it involve Leetcode style questions? Etc.
Most applicants will just not apply to you, but that's fine. The key to making it work is step 4. As an example, I almost never include a cover letter, because it consumes a lot of my time, and I discovered that over 90% of openings that have an option for a cover letter never read them. If I'm submitting a cover letter, I want a strong commitment that it will be read.
> Because many/most employers are willing to hire people who don't meet the minimum requirements. Or rather, they are sloppy when they made the job posting. Therefore, applicants who actually honor the minimum requirements are at a disadvantage.
Seriously—treat "requirements" as "a wishlist" is basically job hunting 101—because it works. Sucks for the employers who really, super-duper mean it when they write "requirements", but that's not most of them.
> 5. Write in reasonable detail about the interview process. Will it involve Leetcode style questions? Etc.
I swear to god, some companies protect this stuff like it's a state secret. I promise you that making details of your process public, or at least sharing them with applicants on first contact, won't ruin it. If FAANG can practically provide a study guide and get by, I'm pretty sure Jim Bob's House of Software or Boring Business Bank Incorporated isn't going to be ruined by providing a schedule and some guidance on the kind, difficulty, and broad domain of any technical assessments that will be performed. Meanwhile, leaving candidates with no clue what to expect when the real-world range of what happens in these interviews is unreasonably enormous, is simply shitty.
If you're actually going to reject someone for having a bad cover letter, does that not heavily bias against people who aren't as proficient in your chosen language?
> If you're actually going to reject someone for having a bad cover letter, does that not heavily bias against people who aren't as proficient in your chosen language?
Then get ChatGPT or a friend to write it? :-)
When I say "proper", I don't mean "good grammar", but things like why you think you'd be a good candidate. Why does this job appeal to you[1]? Etc.
[1] I personally don't like this one as much,
So to answer your question, OP, we can fix it by going back to using want ads in the paper and physical correspondence for the entire process.
I work for a startup that is selling a CRM to addresses all of those pain points. We have many large customers and were recently valued >1B.
We have several competitors that make the same sort of thing.
The point at when our product makes sense cost wise is apparently 8+ recruiters so that certainly excludes a large number of smaller companies.
The solutions range from boring (e.g. CRUD things, advanced search, campaign management) to fancy (e.g. automation, AI things).
Our approach is basically to reduce / automate as much as possible to free up as much time for the recruiter to do actual human things.
Apparently it's very common for applicants to just spam their resume out to every employer, since there's no cost to do so.
If it were standard practice to implement some kind of hurdle, so that the applicant would have to spend an hour of their time to get a resume in front of a human, then there would be a lot less resumes to sift through and therefore a lot more time that could be given to each one by the employer.
Another commenter mentioned having to drop off resumes in person, but I suspect something as simple as this could have a huge impact on spam.
I was involved in one phase of picking submittals for a conference recently and there were no small number of submittals where basically one person sent in a half-dozen or more generic submissions, possibly with a sentence tacked on to make it relevant to this specific conference.
I'm a big fan of conferences limiting the number of submittals or at least throwing enough hoops in the way of shotgunning a bunch of generic proposals to discourage the practice.
(Basically, more submittals mean that the conference committee is going to end up being more random evaluating submittals against each other.)
Let me introduce you to my little friend: the leetcode quiz.
I agree with the commentary about guilds, unions, etc. I'm self-taught and would appreciate the legitimacy that these groups could offer through testing/training/merits etc. By relying on specialist organized groups you're abstracting the non-human issues from the humans themselves.
It was basically explaining my passion for a cross-industry move. But for most people for most jobs, most of the time, a job is just a somewhat match for their skillset and there isn't much else to say. Now I'm hiring I don't pay much credence to cover letters or objective statements, but they can still be meaningful for certain people's circumstances. I think cover letters have a bad rep because a generic one is meaningless.
The vast majority of jobs go unposted. Friends get friends work. In the last seven days I’ve had three loose acquaintances ask me if I knew of engineers and designers looking for work in three different countries.
The key to always be at the top of people’s lists is: 1. Be excellent at your job. 2. Be kind and interested in other people’s problems. 3. Say “hi” when you don’t need anything.
Elaborate and lengthy interview processes have become normal in a number of industries, along with high rates of rejecting candidates.
The two natural consequences are people apply for more jobs, anticipating the high rate of rejection, and the people doing interviews get tired of how many they have to do.
The absolutely grueling, pointless, insane interviews processes are the lion's share of problems in this field. To the point that its an industry of its own, with Leetcode and the likes. Its pathetic, inefficient and just in terrible taste.
All of these problems exist because we are human, so I’m not sure how it’s become dehumanized.
They didn't work 20 years ago, still don't work, however interviewing someone like they're a person, asking questions, finding their passion, that has had 100% return for me and my companies.
Word of mouth has been the best way I've been able to hire a lot of really skilled people. My team members have told me many times that I'm the best manager they've ever had.
It's because I don't do anything the way you're supposed to.
Try being a place worth working for and you'll see skilled people show up, and they know how to get ahold of you since they're highly skilled and motivated.
If you're a small company who has tapped out their current team's referral network, how do you get out the word that you're a good place to work, and how would people find out that you're a good place to work?
One thing I might do is have a blog which had genuinely interesting content that's both related to what the company does and working there.
I have been writing software for over 20 years and probably interviewed at two dozen places before moving in with the current employer. Here is what I have learned:
* Don’t be awesome. Employment normalizes to a bell curve. Awesome is a less compatible outlier. If you want to be awesome write software outside of work as a hobby and write about the things you learned.
* Be selective. If you are confident in your skills and experience (realistically, not a Dunning-Kruger fantasy) you can afford to be less desperate about who you will work for. High pay is great but maximize for emotional fulfillment.
* Vanity is for the fashion industry. Software is about automation. Many developers never see the distinction. They try to make things into something they aren’t and are miserable and low performing as a result. Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with intelligence so smart people frequently fail hard at this and cannot see it.
* The qualities that are most well rewarded in employee assessments are helpfulness, honesty, and writing. These take time and deliberate action. It also means maximizing mutual respect but simultaneously don’t shy away from hard truths or disagreements.
1. market saturation, everyone and their dog is a developer now
2. infiltration and appropriation of hiring process by HR/"Tech Recruiters"
3. cargo culting of interview process
This one-sided process is dehumanizing due to a lack of visibility and transparency of the process. Inconsistencies in the process develop when the hiring managers are responsible for too much and just let things slip. I'm of the opinion that increased automation could actually make the process feel more humanizing.
Here's my ideal state I've envisioned in a platform. I'm not in a position to explore this right now, but I'd love to chat with someone who is.
1. Employers should be forced to define their applicant funnel stages. Each stage, including the initial application, should be associated with an expected timeline and an automated message.
2. Rejection types and corresponding automated messages should all be set up front. Standard picks would be "Did Not Meet Requirements" (location, sponsorship, etc.), "Bad Fit (Resume Review)", "Bad Fit (Screening)", "Bad Fit (Post-Interview)", "Did Not Respond", and "Position Filled/Closed".
3. Applicants should have a dedicated portal where they can see the status of their application. It should show the entire funnel, their current status in that funnel, and the expected timeline based on their position in the funnel. It should even show details like who has viewed your application, when, and how many times. Additionally, all communication between the applicant and the employer should be shown here in a consolidated chat view.
4. When an employer moves the applicant from one stage to the next (kanban style) the applicant automatically receives a message with clearly defined steps to engage with the new stage. This should include scheduling links, project uploads, etc.
5. Stage timelines should be treated as SLAs. Employers can set up automated reminders to ensure they meet their SLA timeline for each candidate. If the employer doesn't meet their SLA, the situation should be handled based on automated rules. If the SLA isn't met due to lack of response/scheduling from the applicant, automated processes can be put in place to follow up or close out the application. If the SLA isn't met due to lack of employer interaction, the candidate gets the choice to let their application expire (incentivizing employers to be on time) OR the candidate can be automatically moved to the next stage (if feedback is present).
6. Using all of this information, applicants should be able to see an employers average response time, timeline adherence, etc.
7. When the position is closed, all applicants currently in the funnel should receive the appropriate rejection message.
8. Through (hopeful) economies of scale, applicants would eventually be able to track multiple applications through a single portal on their side.
If you want to get extra dicey, you could have it where applicants are also able to see team comments/feedback so employers are forced to be very structured about their feedback and there are fewer rejections without a shared understanding. I sympathize with both sides here.
--- I'm not a saint - I've created my fair share of bad candidate experiences. But it's never out of malice. It's always from bad process or tooling. Would love to hear thoughts on this idea.
All of this is designed to let you know that you are not in control of your own labor. Sure you can decide which capitalist to let own you for a time, but that's most people's only option. The few people who do make it on their own are used as propaganda to convince you that if you just put in extra work and make extra profit for a capitalist, you might make it someday too! "Just keep working harder and ignore the fact that you can afford less and less each passing year. It's all those lazy people who want workplace democracy who are to blame for the record-breaking profits the capitalists rake in every year".
The fix is stop using an economic system with a hierarchy of parasites embedded in it's design. It'll take work and it won't happen overnight, but some of us are already getting started because there is no future under Capitalism other than slavery.
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• 20+ years' experience in BI and Analytics with 8+ experience in data science
• Degree in an analytical field (e.g., Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, Management Science). Any Data Science Certification and Project Management Certification will be an added advantage.
• Leverage data and business principles to solve modern devices, real estate modernization and network infrastructure problems.
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical project plans.
• Manage/develop strategic planning for a variety of key projects.
• Onsite customer interaction and co-ordinate with onsite data scientists.
• Extensive experience in project management & delivery of Data Science Model for actionable insights.
• Industry experience in Data analytics/BI, Data modelling and visualization, Optimization, and statistics.
• 5+ years of Scripting with one of these languages (R, PYTHON).
• Ten or more years of overall IT/DBMS/Data Store experience.
• Three or more years of experience in, big data and data visualization and handling of 10 Petabyte of data per month
• Drive programs/projects from project initiation through delivery.
• Responsible for data cleaning and developing various Data science models using R and Python. Provide insights using the various modelling technique like classification, Regression, RNN model, XGBoost, Random Forest, Decision Trees with association rules, Ensemble Learning etc
• Experience in implementing A&I solutions using NLP, Luis, Machine Learning and Deep Learning
• Responsible for building end to end pipelines for Machine learning and data science model.
• Prior experience with Teams, Modern devices, real estate and networking infrastructure services and/or data analytics projects preferred.
• Strong experience in visualization and storytelling to present to business
• Expert in querying and analyzing big data using Kusto, Scope Scripts
• Experience working with unstructured big data (Hadoop and/or Cosmos)
• Experts in advanced Excel functions (e.g., creating formulas, pivot tables) and Power BI
• Prior knowledge of data modelling and processing techniques for big data systems
• Solid understanding of BI and data solutions, including Power-pivots, cubes, and data marts.
• Self-motivated, agile and driven to think out-of-the-box
• Ability to influence diverse audiences and build strong partnerships with stakeholders
• Ability to work independently or to manage a virtual team that will research innovative solutions to challenging business problems.
• Ability to collaborate with partners and drive analytic projects end to end,
• Superior communication skills, both verbal and written
• Attention to detail and data accuracy.
• Business reporting
• Experience with writing requirements as features or user stories
• Ability to be a self-motivated team player.
• Possession of excellent oral and written communication skills
• Possession of excellent teamwork and interpersonal skills
• Experience with Agile tools
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