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Average Duration of Hiring Process For Software Engineers: 35 Days
itwbennett writes: Despite the high demand for tech workers of pretty much all stripes, the hiring process is still rather drawn out, with the average time-to-hire for Software Engineers taking 35 days. That's one of the findings of a new study from career site Glassdoor. The study, led by Glassdoor's Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, analyzed over 340,000 interview reviews, covering 74,000 unique job titles, submitted to the site from February 2009 through February 2015. Glassdoor found that the average time-to-hire for all jobs has increased 80% (from 12.6 days to 22.9 days) since 2010. The biggest reason for this jump: The increased reliance on screening tests of various sorts, from background checks and skills tests to drug tests and personality tests, among others.
So the duration is 12 days longer than the average, so what? 20-30 days is usual across all the industries and sectors (private and public) that I have worked in. The far more interesting story is the 80% increase in the average in just 5 years. I suspect some form of selection bias (people with long interview processes might be reluctant to fill out a survey afterwards but this effect decreased over time as their sample size increased, or something) but it would be interesting to see their raw data anyway.
I'm getting tired of not being able to read the entire heading for these stories, Slashdot. I know 8 year olds that would be better at web design than whatever "team" is handling it for you guys.
So is the average duration of a job search 35 years? 35 minutes? 35 seconds? 35 months?
#DeleteChrome
Of course hiring process takes time. A friend of mine had to quit smoking weed for like 10 DAYS to get the job.
This is hardly surprising:
- It seems like an unwritten rule that the tools and websites (third-party and homegrown) that business use for hiring are horrible. I have to assume they're designed to be a gauntlet so that only the most stubborn and persistent candidates make it to the end.
- Automated tools that scan resumes looking for specific things have led to people putting all sorts of crap on their resume, just in hopes of getting a foot in the door. This leads to interviews like "So it says you have a lot of experience in SQL. Can you elaborate on that?" Candidate: "Oh, yeah, I took an online class a few years ago and I did some SELECTs!"
- Most recruiters have a clear conflict of interest and some of them take a scattergun approach that interviewers need to filter through.
- Wishy-washy managers always want to wait and put off giving an offer "in case something better comes along" (I've heard that many times in post-interview discussions).
- Internal politics when there's any kind of restriction on how many open seats will be filled leads to infighting between groups, delaying an offer because nobody knows who they'd work for yet.
I could go on and on, but suffice to say that HR at most places is filled with depressing things, but the hiring process is one of the worst.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Brought on three software developers in the last four months. Once the verbal offer is accepted it's about a month for our company. Background checks, references verifications, etc make it a lengthy process indeed. I just agreed to bring on a contractor who already has a background check, and he won't land for three weeks even though he's on the bench.
Now you know one of the prices you are paying for legal protections. Legal protections are a good thing. Good things cost you. Knowing what good things cost you can help you decide how many good things you can afford.
This is from many hiring folks at different companies i have heard or experienced personally:
I have to hire internally. I get over 100 qualified applicants per job. Outsiders have no chance.
Indians are bred to sit in front of a computer all day long.
If you're good; you're employed. Unemployed need not apply.
You need industry experience. You can be a C++ GOD on Windows but if you haven't got (industry experience) you won't be hired because there are plenty who do.
There is no STEM shortage. GE is recruiting from SV and mostly from India for their Industrial Internet. They have NO problem getting qualified people. If you have to ask why they have no problems getting qualified people then you are in idiot.
They check everything.
Leave out the Masters or Ph.D. because you need a job? You are a liar for leaving out facts.
Being out of work for any reason is a red flag.
Being out of work means you forgot "skills" - even if it means you were in the Peace Corps.
tl;dr: If you don't play the game, toe the line, and be the perfect candidate, you are "Unqualified".
Say you interview at two companies. You're awesome, and they both love you. One gives you a firm offer the next day. The other sends you a firm offer 35 days later, which isn't even slow for the industry.
Are you still waiting on day 35 for that second offer? Probably not.
Nimble companies will score the best employees. The real question: does the slow-as-hell hiring bureaucracy weed out bad employees and help the company overall? If not, they're at a competitive disadvantage.
I've been hiding in the storage closet for the last 8 weeks, still collecting my paycheck and deleting all emails from india. The good thing is i just got an email for a resume that expired online from 3 years ago. I told them I would need some time t9 think it over.
Subject tested positive for a personality.
Have gnu, will travel.
We're in a competitive area and several of our Software Engineer jobs have been open for over 2 months and they are still open.
I've helped interview several candidates and a lot of people grossly embellish to the point that you think they have almost no experience.
My guess is we don't pay enough - or people presume we don't pay enough.
Yes we don't pay as much as the big boys nearby but pretty darn close. Respectable for a small company.
What is this, a job for Scientology Programming?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Hiring managers read about how Google would bring a candidate back several times and have them talk to dozens of people. Hey, if that works for Google it must be cool, so we need to do it too.
HR is Lucy holding the football. Charlie Brown is everyone trying to get work done.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
And they actually manage to find any? Wow, impressive! Or rather, can I get a list of these companies so I can short their stock, since they apparently resort to people that desperate for a job?
Our (illegal) drugs-of-choice vary, but I can count the number of programmers I know who don't use anything on one finger (and even she has "tried" weed, "back in college").
I couldn't see in the article but what are the time measurements between? Is it from job going live to someone accepting? In which case 30 days for a high level role is REALLY REALLY low. Some of the roles I hunt for take 3 months just to find someone who can do the job...
What the fuck for? Its a job listing website.
To get my current position it was just over four months from application to offer; my first day on the job was just less than six months after I applied. Not unusual for biotech/pharma at the time (2012).
TFA leaves out a shitload of tech jobs. If they mean programmer they should write programmer.
is now less than one microsecond.
With all the regulations and civil litigation around termination, and articles on the psychological "harm" caused by being too honest with certain types of people (read: millennial special snowflake types), is it any wonder that companies that have to go through an act of congress to fire someone are more wary of hiring someone without a lot of verification? Consider also that since about the late '90s, when someone called you as a reference for someone, you could only say, "Yes, that person worked here on the dates specified." How else would a company hedge their bets?
My first employer out of college did, and presumably still does. I've never seen it as a downside. They offered higher pay and better benefits than any of my other job offers did, and so the company itself was quite attractive. I consume a fair amount of alcohol and caffeine, but nothing more exotic than that. In a 70,000 person company, and even among the 300 in my office, I'm sure that there are some that partake. I don't know anyone that would have a problem giving up an illegal habit for a short time to get a job, provided that the offer was attractive enough.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I have a rather specialized skill set: compiler code generators (retargeting to new platforms), language runtime libraries, binary translation, etc.
I got laid off in Oct, 2013, and had one 'inquisition' style interview quickly. But since I was not able to prove to the interviewers @NVidia that I was capable of instantly answering the inane and somewhat obscure test questions, I got a "no thank you" from them. Given the arrogance and ineptitude of the interviewers, I'm actually kind of glad that I "failed" their 'tests'. The next serious interview I had was a couple of months later, but resulted in an offer prior to me leaving the interview. And I can candidly state that said adventure was absolutely delightful. Well worth the wait.
Moral of the story: if you have somewhat complex & unusual skills, be willing to wait. And don't waste your time with NVidia. Their interviewers are more interesting in proving that you are stupid than they are in discovering whether or not you actually are an effective engineer.
If you look at the listing of 20 tech positions, the Software Engineer position is a strange outlier. Its 35 day duration is almost 7 days higher than the #2 position, Senior Applications Developer, which is 28.3 days. The rest of the time-to-hire durations group together much nicer, which the overall trend being more senior positions taking longer and entry level positions taking less time.
So the duration for senior level tech positions appears to be around 27-28 days, which is what the summary should have focused on.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This study seems to match my personal experience. Gone is the one phone screen, one half day of interviews, written offer all in one week approach. The last few times I've interviewed, the phone screens have tripled and HR does not hesitate to require you to come in for multiple onsite interviews even if you are currently employed. The last place that tried this one me, I ended the interview process telling the recruiter that neither the position nor the company were worth my time.
I really think its more of the philosophy of making the candidates jump through enough hoops to make it seem like it must be a special company to work for if they make it that difficult to get an offer. And once you've joined the new company, you'll be less likely to leave. I bet companies that do this have a turnover problem.
I'm in this process right now. It has taken between 3 and 4 months to get to the end of the interview process with each of the big companies in Silicon Valley, depending on the company. Google alone has had me onsite for 8 separate interview days, not counting 3-4 phone screens. I'm highly qualified (PhD in CS from MIT, postdoc at Harvard Medical School, and as a Xoogler, I technically don't even have to interview to return to Google), but that hasn't expedited things. The hiring climate right now is ridiculously stringent. It wasn't this way even 3 years ago, I could walk into almost any job, and go from sending in a resume to getting an offer in a week or less.
Give it up? LOL, that's where UrineLuck comes from...
A people hire A people. B people hire C people. Since there are so many B people in charge these days they keep looking without end.
Druggies tend to stick together. Of course your world view is going to be of people like you. I've never done drugs (though I'm still against drug testing) and I know a lot of other programmers who haven't.
I'm not honestly sure I know any programmers that DO; probably because I live so close to the DC-area-borg-cube
hack the mind bro
Great devs pick and choose. It's not an employers market, wake up and smell the coffee. You can hire all the H1B's you want, but if you really want work done then it's time to put a fat offer on the table post haste. It's just common sense, supply and demand, only noobs will drool and play your waiting games.
I just looked at a position, 7 years of client-side jquery/single page app experience, etc.. $70k an year. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. There are positions for veritable newbs or old "senior" developers that walk into jobs at $80k/year in the southwest. Hilarious that development is becoming client-side, you better be savvy to develop manageable client-side code, including bootstrap/JQuery,/SASS/Angular/Node.js/Gulp/Grunt etc... You want to develop the standard technology stacks, and you think you have the luxury to wait? Typical corporate idiocy. As complexity rises, H1B's become even less viable.
These type of tests tell me all about an employer that I need to know. Often these tests are worthless.
If you subject candidates to these, they will just walk away.
Also, if they wanted to drug test me, they'd end up in court. That is most definitely illegal where I live.
Our recruiters are horrible. Then when we actually do bring people in, many of the interviewers are extremely picky. We probably hire less than 10% of the people we bring in for interviews.
Which doesn't work on some forms of screens, apparently (according to the product page). It seems like a lot of trouble to go through for something that isn't that important, anyhow.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It's very important if your job suddenly has a "random check" and you have partaken within the past 30 days...either that or getting fired. And if your job is paying for your test to be ran through a mass spectrometer. your already screwed / under serious suspicion.
Personality tests are voodoo that's very easily gamed and do we really need HR folk going over our Facebook posts for many hours to see if we are a "good fit"? As for drug tests - are you driving a forklift? Handling explosives? No? Does it fucking matter then? It's very intrusive for almost zero gain and is also starting to be gamed (eg. artificial urine is a thing that really exists to fool drug tests).
So why all the extra bullshit that current employees didn't have to go through apart from HR empire building and pointless attempts to cover arses? An employee does not need to be the sort of person you can discuss a shared interest in a popular TV show to be able to do their job. They do not have to even give a shit about the local football team to be able to do their job. For the majority of jobs personality does not matter at all, even a complete arsehole can put on their customer service face and get a job done.
Meanwhile back in reality it's very easy to get rid of people when they fuck up. If they don't and you just don't like them or want to get someone cheaper it's not that hard to get rid of them in some places and a bit more difficult in others. The power very much lies with the employer and it has to be a very incompetent manager indeed that leaves themselves open to legal action from firing an employee, mostly only those people that think they should be able to do it on a whim. Sadly there are a lot more of those than there should be so we get misconceptions like the above where problems are blamed on "the system" instead of someone acting rashly finding out that a contract is supposed to give at least something to both parties.
It's the god's-honest truth. Truth hurts.
One of the elephants in the room in hiring tech these days is Google. Many interesting people in technology today put in applications for the variety of roles Google advertises. But Google apparently doesn't interview for the particular roles, and they have an _extraordinarily_ long time between application and phone screen that may be for a different job, another period of weeks or even months before scheduling the on-site interview that again is often for a different job, and weeks or even months before making an offer that may be for a very different job.
Several of my colleagues have been through this, during their work with us and before they wound up with us, and several of my peers now at Google explained it recently. Google used to spend an extraordinary amount of time and resources finding people who "fit" environments, and only then finding a specific role for them and making the offer. The result was apparently a great deal of political and social monoculture, and the hiring process took so long that only personal referrals would put up with it and not find another job long before Google made the offer. They still take an extraordinary amount of time making an offer, but now they seek out talent first, and fit second, and recruit a big pool of high level talent from which they then match a role and try tp place the people. The result seems to still include a long hiring time, and waiting in that pool of talent for long periods, as if tech people were taxis waiting in a queue for the next passenger. It's quite odd in the tech world. Google seems unwilling to acknowledge or uncaring that people they interviewed and approved a year ago are only now getting offered particular roles. But according to the Google personnel I spoke with at a conference a month ago, it's much less of a monoculture now, and they consider this a benefit of the shift to "seek talent first, cultural fit second, particular job last".
This long delay before hiring is fairly common in academia, where the pay is small but leadership of a group or prestige of a particular role are so valued that they can call a candidate after a year or years and the candidate will still take the offer. I work with several people whom Google made offers to a year or more after a successful interview,including one senor team member who just got an offer last week, over a year after their quite successful interview at Google. It's been quite extraordinary to watch Google spend so many man-hours interviewing and recruiting people and watch those people get hired elsewhere, first.
> Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
One of the tricks of doing this is that it reveals medical issues and medical history, which can be quietly collected and assessed even if discrimination is technically illegal. Much like the interview and job description tuning that be used to select only for H1B visa holders instead of hiring American, the paperwork and even the tests themselves can reveal productivity and medical cost relevant conditions such as gender, age, pregnancy, depression, diabetes, blood pressure, sexual history, etc.
One HR skype interview (~1 hour)
One technical skype coding interview (~1.5h hours)
One manager skype interview (~1 hour)
One home exercise (~8 hours over one week)
One on-site interview
It took some time (around 40 days), but I thought the overall process was fair. The worst part was that after every interview it took around one week to get any response from the company, they should had really streamlined the process so I could take the several interviews in a row and take the home exercise in a single day.
And say goodbye to getting any jobs east of the Mississippi.
In the Denver area, in the past 2 months, this has been my steady and consistent flow
Day 1 - send out a resume (Keep it 1 page, no matter what, when they want specifics talk about it in the interview. I have 15 years experience FWIW)
Day 2 - company calls me in for interview (Consistently, sometimes there is a 2 day wait)
Day 3 (Or day 4) - come in for interview.
They give me the timeline for callbacks (If for a second interview or the decision). Give it 5 business days after that to follow-up (If their primary choice declines, I could be second choice).
Rinse and repeat until I have a jorb. Since I can start immediately, the hiring process would be 14 - 21 days (depending on 2nd interviews). If you have to put in 2 weeks notice, it would add time on.
Second interviews - I have only interviewed at 2 companies that I got called back for second interviews (Where they needed them) and wasn't selected either time. The second interviews were both more of a "get to know you / fit in with us" type of interview. I know from past experience to ALWAYS be yourself in those interviews, what you like to read, watch, play, etc. It does no one any good to be someone you aren't if you want to fit in with a great company. /If you need an Oracle developer / Mainframe Dev / Tech guy in Denver, let me know. //Difficulty - Not near the DTC and prefer not to commute there ///I know, I know, I used to work at IBM near Boulder.
Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
Our (illegal) drugs-of-choice vary, but I can count the number of programmers I know who don't use anything on one finger (and even she has "tried" weed, "back in college").
You are living in strange land. I am working with my head not strong back or mucking organic residue. ...
I am professional . Professionals are taking care about their tools. (show me master carpenter who is not caring for his tools). I am taking care about that gray matter between ears because it is providing me quite good living.
What is so strange? Learn on mistakes of others, you really do not have to repeat them all
Oh yeah, much longer since they don't think they need software quality.
Background checks. SKILLS CHECKS - isn't that what the hiring manager is supposed to ascertain via the a) resume, b) phone interview, c) personal interview?
This, actually, points directly to where the problem is: HR, who DO NOT KNOW what they company does or what they're hiring someone to do, AND DON'T CARE TO LEARN. To paraphrase the old line from SN, they're ignorant sluts, Jane".
Here's another point: it takes 35 days (is that business days, or calendar?). Then, in a lot of cases, they'll be there 3 years (oh, unless they're contractors, and so many big companies, like AT&T, say two years), and they're out the door, let go, or off to a new job.
HR: a waste of space and money.
mark
You might want to change _something_ you're doing, those sentences do not pass simple a English grammar check.
Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
Yep. The company I work for does. 'Tis also why I mostly post from home...
"Something that isn't that important anyhow" was meant to refer to whichever banned substance you're trying to mask.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.