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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.
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.
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").
several of our Software Engineer jobs have been open for over 2 months and they are still open.
Vacancy duration is a different problem. This study was about Interview duration.
My guess is we don't pay enough - or people presume we don't pay enough.
More likely your HR department is bottom feeding, only sending you candidates who are asking for below average salaries.
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...
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?
What the fuck for? Its a job listing website.
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.
Well maybe, but it sounds like the right kind of candidates aren't showing up for the interview which makes it kinda hard to give them offers. Unless they're being overly up-front and present a low and narrow salary range, I'd look into other reasons why they're not attractive enough. If they are scaring them away, be less specific and say you're ready to offer competitive terms for the right candidate. Then you might at least get the right kind of people in the door and maybe sell them on the other benefits, or if not you'll at least know what kind of pay range is necessary.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
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...
There are the cool jobs that everyone wants but hardly anyone gets. Then there are the uncool jobs (anything not at Google) that no one wants because they're still trying to get the cool jobs. Plus if the skill sets you want don't match the current fads then it's hard for the recruiters to find people. The economy is still pretty crappy right now and a lot of smart people still want to stay put where it's safe and stable.
Sometimes the recruiters just aren't good at finding the right people.
That doesn't make sense, unless you're saying there are more A people than C people.
Otherwise, having B people in charge, who would be happy to hire C people, should make hiring *easier*.
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.
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.
I hope they make exceptions for the cream of the crop, or otherwise they will have very few.
For an industry which has billion dollar IPOs without their prospectus's even being read they are awfully selective.
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.
Since they often don't know what the key words actually mean it's very difficult for them to do so. That's the problem with using general recruiters instead of getting someone with a skillset related to that of the person you want to employ involved early in the piece. If the perfect employee lists a skill of which the desired skill is a subset the general recruiter is going to reject them because they only know the key words and not what they actually mean. If your degree says engineer and the recruiter is looking for a programmer many recruiters are going to reject the application without even getting as far as considering experience in previous employment.
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.
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
Problem is we want programmes, but 95% of people who are programmes won't fit the job. EE people are better at low level and systems programmers than CS people these days. CS people are better at excuses though.
When given task to write some simple code they say "I don't normally do this sort of thing you know, there's a library that does this." But if they're too scared to think through a simple problem on their own then I'll be too scared to hire them.
"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.