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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.
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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Brilliant advice. Next you'll tell me to get a larger monitor for the headlines that don't even fit in a maximized window. BTW, some of us like to use our remaining screen real estate for other uses (multitasking, how does it work?). How about instead demanding that they not overlay icons over the headline text any more?
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.
If you want me to take less money, you need to provide additional value elsewhere. Better environment, equity, bonuses, vacation days, work/life balance, etc. If you don't why should I work for you over taking the money? If you do, you need to sell that.
But having positions open for 2 months, especially if you're looking for experienced developers, isn't uncommon- in fact if you were filling most of your positions in 2 months you'd be amazingly good at recruiting. Good developers are hard to find- that's why they're expensive. Decide what's more important to you- the value that having the role filled will bring the business, or the cost of actually making your offers competitive. If the second brings more value, up your offers.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Not really. The prospective employee usually has a job, and is working. You have a vacancy, so you're not really "losing" work. It does however balloon scheduling issues and leaves some low priority work undone. In theory the low priority work is necessary to do, but does not cause anything to explode if it waits a couple weeks. There is certainly some lost work here: people are being rejected, losing some amount of man-hours on each reject in the screening, background checking, profiling and interviewing. I'm not sure it would be millions, but there is a trade off: if its too cheap to throw someone back companies will only hire the 1 in a million applicant that somehow convinces them he's Jesus Christ, but if it's too expensive they will either downsize their projects or hire morons. A certain level of pain is healthy.
The only thing I read from this is employers are feeling there are enough applicants that they can be more selective, which is a sign that the labor pool is adequate.