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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?
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So, Dice, are you fearful?
I'm not... why isn't H1-B scams listed as a reason?
The post was done by a mindless HR drone. Once you actually get to talk with people actually heading that section you realize the requirements are more reasonable.
I see resume's for people with less than 5 years experience with "expert" level knowledge in 200+ things. Meaning that they saw it once.
It really seems that it's the HR departments that are using this stuff as checkbox gatekeepers. In a perfect world I want to see some of your code but thats nearly always locked up under contracts. But as long as the list of checkboxes gets longer so does the list of lies.
No sir I dont like it.
The short answer is "No"
They want everything, but when someone who has everything applies, they don't want to up the ante with high pay.
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I worked with a guy who was the best materials scientist in our industrial research group. His degree was in biology.
This is one way they support the claim that there are not enough skilled people, totally bogus.
the average job offer these days is a toilet brush of bullshit, especially coming from established corporations asking for immediate and deep expertise in 15 year old nearly defunct software only they have heard of and that is made mandatory for consideration. and startups, oh man. The constant "what do you LOVE about us?" and "explain why YOU want to work here" crap is an insult to intelligence. ive once answered "what makes YOU the best devops engineer?!" For starters, I have the power to condense an entire resume, into which i have invested considerable time and effort, into a single textbox entry on a broken website soliciting engineers with an alphabet soup of industry buzzwords lifted from a dell sales brochure and a TV remote instruction manual.
the interview process isnt a lot better. Google waterboards candidates with a barrage of questions that betray just how much money they make off you. 'how do you build a datacenter on the moon' and 'how many hard disks fit into a schoolbus' are questions that, in any other corporate interview paying airfare and hotel, would send HR managers through the roof. GoDaddy once asked me, in an interview, if i 'felt lucky.' Considering Im not paying for the hotel sauna or food, yes, i and my lobster thermador feel very lucky indeed. other job interview questionaires have included questions about what was the most "constipated" technology id encountered.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is fascinating to me, inasmuch as I just hit a landmark birthday (the Big Five-Oh). Theoretically, I've got all the accumulated talent that one would be looking for in my field.
However, the reality is that the industry likes youth. I'm one of the oldest people at the company where I work, and absolutely the oldest sysadmin.
It was also extremely difficult finding this job. I had to be clear that I'm very negotiable on salary, and in fact I took less than I've earned in 20 years.
But it was the only job for someone my age.
Where do old geeks go? We can't all go into management -- I know I lack the temperament for it. Many of us do.
So where are all the people who theoretically could meet the exacting standards of experience that some employers require?
Honestly: where do they go? Where are all the people I started out with in my 20s? They're not at any company I've worked for in the last ten years.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Companies very often do NOTHING to retain top talent.
I have this exact problem right now where I work: one of my co-workers was a top notch cloud/orchestration ace.
He left last week, after his request for additional training and a pay raise was denied for the third time in a row by our boss.
The stupid idiot who did that is now scrambling to fill in my co-worker shoes. And, surprise, surprise, after three years in the fscking company, I also gave him my resignation, just as we were going to talk about diving into all the Puppet rules and configuration files my co-worker programmed to run our in-house cloud.
All in all, out of four Linux admins, three of them resigned in the space of three months. And the one guy left has already told upper management there is no way he'll be able to do the job of four guys.
Here is a hint to all PHBs and HR drones everywhere: when you have top-notch talent, just remember they can find job elsewhere pretty much whenever they want. Listen to your guys, for fsck sake, or suffer the consequences!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Dear Slashdot editors,
Don't forget your journalistic rigor. I know it's so very often forgotten these days, but I've chosen Slashdot as one of my last "traditional" news outlets (in the sense that it the editors, including Nevral's Lobster, are paid to curate the content) because it used to be better about this. It is irresponsible of Slashdot to omit the fact that Dice owns Slashdot in the article summary.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
If you think you are going to find a job by replying to specific job postings on a jobs board (an internal company board, a site like Monster or Dice, whatever), you are probably wrong.
A very large chunk of tech jobs are filled through referrals (a.k.a. "Networking") most of the rest are filled by companies trolling career sites, (and LinkedIn is huge here.) A vanishingly small number are filled by looking through resumes submitted to public postings.
I know that I was referred to the job I have now (from one division of my company to another.) The only person that could have possibly fit the qualifications the official posting called for was somebody that had already been doing the job for about five years. I was explicitly instructed to simply check all the "skills" boxes saying I was able to do all those things, and then submit an accurate resume with my real experience. Even though I didn't actually have any experience in this specific position, I not only got the job, I got a promotion into the top salary band for the position (it had a range of my current band and the next one up.)
Is this a good system? It depends... decent referrals will certainly be a better source of adequate candidates. I guess the public postings are structured to get only somebody highly likely to work out to submit (okay, that and pathetic liars.)
Required should be no more than a handful of things unless you are willing to pay a kings ransom' Beneficial/Favorable can be a mile long. Also in tech the education requirement needs to ALWAYS have 'Or Equivalent' experience. Otherwise you will interview the the Doctorate who hasn't touched a computer in 10 years and ignoring the self taught whiz right out of the box. A handful of employers have skipped over me because I lack a degree as if a degree in technologies from 25 years ago would be beneficial in some way?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Having faced these huge walls of product names, operating systems and languages as a job candidate, it can be very intimidating and scare people away from applying. No one is a complete expert on everything. What I do offer is the ability to be flexible, learn what is needed and pick it up as I go. Companies don't like that because they want a drop-in replacement for whoever left, plus someone they don't have to train. This is why the consultant market is so lucrative for those who don't mind the vagabond lifestyle.
And, having sifted through resumes and conducted interviews, now that I also have a say in hiring, companies often have the reverse problem. Candidates put a "wall of experience" on their resume because (a) they know that's the only way to get past the zero-clue HR filters, and (b) they see what companies are doing, and feel that if they've seen something once it needs to go on the resume. Also, I know there's a lot of debate about the skills shortage, but in some sectors there really is one. It takes a lot of sifting through resumes to find a group to interview, and it's very frustrating to bring someone in only to find that they have grossly misrepresented their familiarity with a requirement of the job. I'm in the systems integration world, so we hire a lot of system admin types. One of the most common misrepresentations I've seen is someone with Windows administration experience, who lists scripting and automation on their resume. When you bring them in, you find out that they were just running other people's scripts, and don't have any background or knowledge to build on. Last year I interviewed someone with 10+ years of Windows Server experience, who proudly proclaimed "I don't do scripts."
I'm not sure how to solve it. Recruiters aren't the answer -- they're often the offenders in this case, editing the candidate's resume. I think the only "solution" would be to guarantee at least a phone interview to everyone who applies, just as a basic BS filter. That doesn't scale, but if candidates can't trust job descriptions and employers can't trust candidates, what's the fix?
Salaries are important, but that's not all that matters, especially when you get up to senior positions, since most senior positions will pay more than enough money to live comfortably off of. To me, working hours are quite important. I know people who make more than me (and less than me for that matter), but they often have to work evenings or come in on weekends. I don't want a job that I'll have to work tons of extra hours. Once you get beyond the the first 5 or 10 years of your career, having an enjoyable working environment is much more important than your actual salary, assuming a reasonable salary.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The irony is that sometimes they **can** find a person with a huge laundry list of skills, but quite often won't hire them because they're too old and cost too much.
You can no longer be hired just for the job. You must show "passion" for the company and whatever the hell it happens to be doing at the moment. If you are not "passionate" about your work to the point of putting in 60-70 hour weeks, then we can find someone more "passionate" than you.
Note that this is a good cultural barrier to keep old people out, too, as their "passion" has been tempered by years of experience and thus, they are not seen as "passionate" enough by hiring manager. We like 'em young, stupid, and cheap in out industry and "passion" is a good way to weed out anyone who might derail corporate planning and say something negative about a proposed product, project, or plan which might be flawed. Your job is to code without commentary, monkey boy.
Excuse me - your "passion" is to code without commentary, monkey boy..
That is all.
It's important to understand the politics of the HR department. The ability to learn and adapt is indeed usually more important than a check-list of past paid tool skills.
However, that's difficult to quantify objectively. If a candidate can't figure out a given tool, HR can potentially be blamed for not verifying paid experience in that tool. But if the candidate doesn't work out for some other "team fit" kind of issue, HR is generally held less responsible.
Thus, HR protects against issues they are more likely to be blamed for. This does tilt the emphasis toward a check-list of skills over more nebulous factors such as adaptability and personality fit. But, bureaucracies do have a degree of waste and bias built in due to the way rewards and punishments are measured and doled out. HR is not "evil" per se, they are just surviving in their environment as they encounter it.
That's just life in the work world. Without re-engineering humanity, I don't know if a real fix. One must understand this bias and learn techniques to work with it as-is as a job seeker.
Unfortunately, it may result in having to lie about your background to compete, especially during IT recessions. Sometimes you just have to counter BS with more BS. If you want to be an "honest angel" and "go to heaven", then you may have to struggle professionally. It may be one of the reasons why the Bible de-emphasized wealth. I'm not preaching theology here, only bringing up a potential moral dilemma that you'll have to work out in your own way via your own belief system.
Table-ized A.I.
I have found (while reading through resumes trying to find candidates) that the response of most applicants to this phenomenon is to just apply for jobs for which they aren't really qualified at all, because no one is completely qualified. Which leads to probably the exact situation employers are trying to avoid (having tons of unqualified people apply) And for me personally, when I'm looking for work, it has the opposite effect - I try to not apply for something unless I really look like a fit, but with these Les Miserables-sized qualification lists, I'm not qualified for anything at all. So I think I end up under-applying for jobs.
Seems in the last couple of years tech companies have adopted the notion that a Developer's time has no inherent value and that a job candidate has nothing better to do with their day than spend 11am till 5pm at their offices in an "interview" and that somehow offering "lunch" make it ok. Hell, I've even seen one or two companies state that they put all candidates through a 3 or 4 hour "coding test"! Seriously, it's disrespectful, demanding and FUCKING DEGRADING. It presumes that I as a person have nothing better to do with my time. It presumes that I want a job so much that I will be wiling to do ANYTHING to get it. It presumes that somehow by making someone waste their entire fucking day in your offices, that you'll somehow be better equipped to make a hiring decision. Being that I only casually consider FT jobs with companies WHO APPROACH ME and am happily SELF-EMPLOYED, yes, I do have better things to do and any company who expects me to spend more than 2 hours at their offices for an interview is promptly given an immediate decline. And no, coming back around to "try to work something out" is off the table, because I've already seen your culture, and it's toxic. No amount of beer kegs and ping pong can hide the vile cesspool that is your company's core. But, seeing that this practice is fast becoming the norm, I shall probably remain independent since it seems a lot of tech companies are just fucking toxic with abusive management.
Not being an anti-social dick is a job skill. Yeah, we don't need to be buddies, but why hire someone who refuses to speak to coworkers, etc.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Reposting as a non AC.
There are some reasons for the unrealistic job descriptions, they are a lure, and are generally loosely associated with the role (ie: 80%). We're hoping for a purple unicorn, but know that they don't exist. But would settle for a winged horse, a unicorn, a purple horse or more realistically a good horse. But occasionally one of the unrealistic mix of experience does come through.
It has been almost a decade since I last went through an applicant list for a particular role.
What happens most times now is an application is added to an applicant tracking system. This parses the resume (from word, pdf or text) and creates a database of candidates matching keywords. This meatgrinder approach means that when I am looking to fill a position, I don't actually look for applications - I might - or the HR might quickly review the actual applications. What I do is search and screen. Search for a set of keywords, and from that list look for obvious issues (applicants to every job, rejected candidates, age of resume, etc). And then the HR recruiter will screen down from there.
I'll typically get 20 or so resumes to review. The recruiter may review 100 to 200 resumes. There pool of candidates may be 2000 to 3000 of which only a small portion are for my position.
This is part of the reason that resumes have gone from minimalistic to more fully descriptive with keywords sprinkled throughout them.
your personal information is not your own. i've been kicked out of the job-seeking process by my refusal to turn over my SSN or submit to a credit check. my poverty shouldn't bar me as a candidate but companies have zero fucks to give.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The GM automobile assembly plant in Arlington, TX. Nearly closed down because they only looked for “the absolute best.” Suddenly their absolute best are all retiring and there are no “absolute best” to fill the positions. GM scrambled to the local high schools and trade schools. Offering full coverage of tuitions and above average pay for the new automotive technicians. The hiring of the “absolute best “ philosophy is a disaster waiting to happen.
"We ask for god in person, hoping to get the prophet, and usually we only have the faithful"
So yes, the requirements are not realistic, and they don't expect anyone to meet them at the price they are ready to pay. In fact these just give an idea of the profile they need and serve as a starting point for the negotiation.
Never take requirements too literally. I've done a fair amount of hiring, and been involved in writing job descriptions of this sort. If it says, "Requires 5 years C++ experience", what we really mean is, "Requires C++ proficiency typical of someone who has been doing it for several years." If you've only been doing it for 3 years but your skills are solid, that's good enough. It's also kind of a wish list. If it lists four required skills, that means we'd really like someone with all four skills. But if the best candidate only has three of them, that's not a deal breaker. A competent person can pick up the last one fairly quickly.
If you think you can do the job, don't let "requirements" prevent you from applying.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I am just a Windows/AD/Network Admin, and I get "headhunter" emails all the time. To read the position descriptions nowadays is hysterical. Most describe the duties of a full on DBA, a Network Engineer, a Help Desk Tech, and a Programmer. Not to mention specific SAN and Virtualization mastery. They want a 4 year degree (understandable for a large organization), and it's usually understood that you end up doing some Help Desk type work on occasion. But they only want to pay for a level 1 Help Desk tech. It is laughable that they make their offers with a straight face like there is a thousand IT Admins out there chomping at the bit to work for $40,000.00 a year. They may have gotten spoiled after the tech bubble burst years ago, when many of us were out of work and starving. But those days are long gone in my opinion. They may get some young kid fresh out ITT Tech for that, but you only get what you pay for. That's not to say there aren't some serious prodigy's out there, but most of us older guys with much more field experience, and usually a better work ethic just won't work for that kind of money.