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.