Do Tech Companies Ask For Way Too Much From Job Candidates?

Nerval's Lobster writes The short answer: Yes. Many employers' "required" skill sets seem to include everything but the ability to teleport and build a Shaker barn; the lengthy requisites of skills and experience seem achievable only by candidates who've spent the past four decades using a hundred different programming languages and platforms to excel at fifty different, complicated jobs. Why do a lot of tech companies do that? Dice asked around and discovered a bunch of different reasons. Companies want to make investments in talent, but the inherent costs of that talent also make them wary of hiring anyone but the absolute best. The need to find the right talent, and the concern over cost, often leads to employers producing job descriptions too broad for the actual position. There's also pure idiocy: PHBs don't know what they want, don't understand the technology, and throw just anything into the description that pops to mind. Is there any way to stop this scourge?

Comments

Fuck Off Dice

[Anonymous Coward]

We all use Adblock, you are not getting any money out this.

Re:Fuck Off Dice

[allquixotic]

Because it costs me more than .000007 cents' worth of my time to twiddle my thumbs while the advertisement payload downloads from the Internet and loads into my browser.

The elephant in the room..

[MickyTheIdiot]

So, Dice, are you fearful?

I'm not... why isn't H1-B scams listed as a reason?

It makes it easy to support "not enough skilled"

[justcauseisjustthat]

This is one way they support the claim that there are not enough skilled people, totally bogus.

Re:All it means is

[Anrego]

Indeed.

Most decent companies, HR is just a first hurtle. Make sure you specifically use all the key words in the job description exactly as they appear (don't use networking if they asked for TCP/IP .. say TCP/IP), use phrases like "I've been involved with x and similar technologies for <number of years they want> when x is something that has only existed for a year, etc. The project manager/team lead who ultimately interviews you probably has the same level of respect for the HR technical evaluation as you do.

Re:All it means is

[Greyfox]

That's exactly what it means. All these job postings read the same way because HR doesn't really understand what you'll be doing, what your department does or really even what the company does in a lot of cases. This leads to people playing buzz word bingo on their resume even more than they were previously. Letting HR be the gatekeeper for your hiring isn't doing your company or the industry as a whole any favors. It has not improved the quality of the candidates companies are hiring one bit.

Re:All it means is

[HornWumpus]

Most HR is done by the unqualified.

It really is as simple as that. Staffing is key. If you have an HR department you are, more or less, fucked.

HR should be about benefits and legalities. Hiring should be done by team leads who should have 'executive assistants' to do initial resume sorts under close supervision.

A 'qualified' HR person isn't going to be cheap, if they exist at all, but (s)he will be much cheaper in the long run then the average checklist monkey.