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.

Comments

It's Quite a Lot of Fuckery To Be Sure

[Greyfox]

Add to the mix a huge bunch of incredibly low quality recruiters who swarm any resume update on the job boards. These can be Indian recruiters trying to find a body to fill a position to outright scams trying to convince you to buy something up front for a job opportunity, or just criminals looking to steal your identity. On the employer side, so many candidates are playing buzzword bingo to try to get through HR that it's impossible to identify a qualified candidate by looking at anyone's resume. It's a huge waste of time for everyone.

Basically the job boards are now so useless that your best bet is to start networking in-person with as many local companies as you can. I've already run across some companies that are starting to realize this and host technology meet-ups. While this isn't the best state of affairs, at the very least we might be able to start flushing out some useless HR staff that make it impossible to even interview remotely qualified employees. It'd be funny if this entire process goes full circle and we end up with job postings in classified sections of local papers. That would probably be better than what we have now.

Re:There's a clue shortage

[lgw]

While we're happy to review any resumes HR sends our way, managers where I work spend significant amounts of time personally searching sites like Linked-in and reading resumes themselves, and directly calling candidates who look good. Our biggest problem is willingness to relocate - candidates who are already on the West Coast are so hammered by recruiters that it's hard to find anyone actually looking, but there are plenty of qualified engineers elsewhere.

The moral of the story is: make sure your resume appears in the right places, and does a good job of selling you (protip: no one cares about "duties and responsibilities" - explain cool problems that you personally solved instead). And realize most of the programming jobs are in Silly Valley and (increasingly) Seattle, so look where demand exceeds supply, not in a town with 2 programming jobs and 3 programmers.

Re:Asperger syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

or there's a huge number of people who interview really terribly.

I wonder how many of these people have an autism spectrum disorder. An interviewer might get so put off by a candidate's lack of superficial social skills that he or she cannot adequately judge the candidate's competency for the job itself.

An extremely relevant comic comes to mind. People with real ASDs are often barely functional and wouldn't make it past the phone screen.

Fuck you. Both my girlfriend and I have real ASDs. I just got laid off from a major government contractor one month ago, and I have already had three phone screenings for two separate jobs. I am currently waiting to hear back from at least one of them and get an on site interview. Not all ASDs are low functioning, and there are a lot of us that are high functioning that have to WORK OUR ASSES OFF to get by in an interview panel. I had several interviews where I bombed out on the social interaction part, but the technical part I aced. My girlfriend is also pretty good when it comes to the technical aspect and prefers to be out of sight of people. She would rather be back in the lab vs. talking to the marketing department/managers about their golf game. We had to LEARN quite a bit on the social interaction scale vs. most neurotypical people.

What am I doing wrong?

[havoc]

I'm a "former" developer and current IT hiring manager. I am trying to fill a couple of developer positions. I worked with HR to craft the job description that best described the job opening... Without any crazy years of experience requirements. It is a senior level position though. At any rate, we have received only two qualified candidates in two months. And we have received only four or five resumes so it's not as if we have been weeding out a ton of candidates before interviewing them. One received a promotion from their current employer before we could bring them back for a second interview, the other was asking for almost double what we could have offered plus wanted to telecommute from out of state half the week. We just are not seeing candidates. Where do developers go when they are looking for jobs? Job boards are expensive and we can't afford to hit every one of them.

Re:"Progressive" Labor Laws

[ruir]

Often hiring subcontractors, is also a shift-blaming game. Difficult or controversial projects are more prone to be subcontracted. And here we also have the fashion of fake "subcontractors" that have a small firm for facade, but have been on the same very "client" for several years.

Re:There's a clue shortage

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

If you spent less time being a faux-cynical hiptard you'd know that it's the reason Larry Wall's opus is spelled the way it is.

Re:There's a clue shortage on the hirEE side

[Anonymous Coward]

>Your audience isn't going to read 1800 words of a rant loaded with spelling and grammatical errors.

Him: (Score:5, Insightful)
You: (Score:0)

You are exactly what he is talking about. Delusional--you clearly have no clue about the audience you're attempting to attract to your positions.

Re:There's a clue shortage

[schlachter]

I was told by Google HR that they do NOT require CS degrees for their computer scientist / software engineer positions. They were eager to hire me for this position despite my not having a CS degree (I have a related advanced technical degree). However, I wanted a product manager position, and they refused to even interview me for it on the basis that I didn't have a CS degree. They said a CS degree WAS required for this position. We went round and round about the absurdity of not requiring it for a computer science position but requiring it for a product management position, until I said, fuck it, this doesn't sound like the place for me. Sad.