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The Great IT Hiring He-Said / She-Said
Nemo the Magnificent writes: Is there an IT talent shortage? Or is there a clue shortage on the hiring side? Hiring managers put on their perfection goggles and write elaborate job descriptions laying out mandatory experience and know-how that the "purple squirrel" candidate must have. They define job openings to be entry-level, automatically excluding those in mid-career. Candidates suspect that the only real shortage is one of willingness to pay what they are worth. Job seekers bend over backwards to make it through HR's keyword filters, only to be frustrated by phone screens seemingly administered by those who know only buzzwords.
Meanwhile, hiring managers feel the pressure to fill openings instantly with exactly the right person, and when they can't, the team and the company suffer. InformationWeek lays out a number of ways the two sides can start listening to each other. For example, some of the most successful companies find their talent through engagement with the technical community, participating in hackathons or offering seminars on hot topics such as Scala and Hadoop. These companies play a long game in order to lodge in the consciousness of the candidates they hope will apply next time they're ready to make a move.
Meanwhile, hiring managers feel the pressure to fill openings instantly with exactly the right person, and when they can't, the team and the company suffer. InformationWeek lays out a number of ways the two sides can start listening to each other. For example, some of the most successful companies find their talent through engagement with the technical community, participating in hackathons or offering seminars on hot topics such as Scala and Hadoop. These companies play a long game in order to lodge in the consciousness of the candidates they hope will apply next time they're ready to make a move.
You misread the job description. The JOB is experienced. The salary is intermediate.
I was greatly amused when the HR department at my company was looking for "Pearl" developers.
Love sees no species.
Well it goes with Ruby, right?
Well, you get a lot of applicants to any job these days. A lot of people are looking for work. But you need to find appropriate candidates.
You can't hire anyone too young, because they don't have the skills and haven't proven themselves at a real job. You don't want to hire anyone over 35 because the field moves quickly and you don't want someone who doesn't keep up.
You also need people who have the hot skill right now. Ruby used to be really hot, but now we are looking for Python. Can you train a Ruby programmer to be a Python programmer? When you are running a business you can't take the risk to find out!
You're really looking for about five years experience and experience with the right technologies. This doesn't sound to hard, but a lot of these people are asking for outrageous amounts of money!
Furthermore, you need the right cultural fit. At my company, we all wear hoodies. We wouldn't want to hire someone who wears a fleece. We need someone who breathes code. Last week I interviewed someone who was a good match, except he said he swam in code! We had to cut that interview short.
Also, you can't hire people with too much self-esteem. People with self-esteem are always asking if they can be managers and constantly leaving you just because someone offered them more money. So in addition to the exact right amount of experience, in the right field, and cultural fit, you need someone who is a little bit broken that you can build up into your perfect coder.
It is all very difficult. And we are a firm anyone would want to work for. We can only pay $50,000 a year, but you get to work with really cutting edge technologies like Python! So I'm sure if we have difficultly finding the right people, anyone would.
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I lost out on a job because I didn't have experience with Windows XP Server.
Honestly, it works best when HR passes on the bulk of the applications to the department that needs the staff member, and lets that director and supervisor(s) weed through them for candidates. They can even go with redacted versions that don't show the name or the alma mater of the applicant, and are limited to the last couple of disclosed jobs. It still requires a lot of labor-hours to go through that and to go through a good interview process though, and technical people that work for the company and will probably work with the new hire must be free to ask freestyle questions in addition to the HR-mandated set, to actually learn the technical capabilities of the interviewee.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Can't resist tooting my own horn. These are from my Klein bottle website:
TOPOLOGY CONSULTANT Part-time design of low-dimensional manifolds in glass, wool, plastic, titanium, niobium, pentium, and unobtanium. Ideal candidate is fresh out of college with 20 years experience in applied topology; and can solve Poincare's, Heawood's, and Hodge's conjectures. Pay & benefits are epsilon above unemployment. Compensation package includes trillions in worthless stock options.
GLASSBLOWER Construct borosilicate manifolds using lampwork. Handy with glass lathe, oxy-hydrogen torch, and bandaids. Must know the usual cuss words to describe breaks & cracks. Experienced in minor burn treatment. Special bonus if you know the difference between inside and outside.
MANIFOLD OPERATOR. Curvaceous, conformal Riemannian vector field desires normalized Ricci tensor with nice eigenvalues. Will relocate within proper metric space. No polymorphic permutations, please.
From http://www.kleinbottle.com/job...