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Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you hav
by john_moscow 8y ago
Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you have about a 10% chance to convince a PHP4 hater to still go ahead and take the offer. Now consider 2 strategies:
A) Write "we use PHP4" in the job description. In this case, 98 candidates will nope out when they read this (say 2% won't notice PHP4 or will be desperate) and 10% out of the remaining 2 gives you 0.2 people on average.
B) Be as vague as possible. Write that you use modern tooling and technologies, don't give any details. Now 80 candidates proceed to the next stage. If you only convince 10% of them, you still end up with 8 instead of 0.2.
It's similar to spam - even though >99% people will delete it without even reading, as long as there is a tiniest chance of someone actually buying the advertised product, the spammers will be in the black.
- hackits 8y agoYou're making a straw-man argument.
- Terr_ 8y agoI don't think they are -- who is the person whose argument is being characterized? It's just being cynical about companies and recruiters.
- carlmr 8y agoI'd say this is true, but only if you're working with terrible technology. If you're working with Elm or some other cool language/technology I'm sure strategy A would fare much better.
- repolfx 8y agoI think you radically over-estimate the number of people who want to learn Elm in order to apply for a job. I've done a lot of hiring and we use a "cool" language (Kotlin). We don't mention the language to recruits although it's not a secret (discussed on our website), because we want to hire people with many different platform backgrounds.
- bm1362 8y agoWe had a problem advertising Clojure, everyone showed up wanting to write Clojure but didn’t care about our product. As a series A company it was hard to get purist to focus on shipping and we started weeding candidates out that gave off a ‘I just want to work in Clojure’ vibe. Eventually new stuff got written in Java and we migrated off of it due to the hiring pipeline mostly but when we told candidates some honestly dropped out because they were excited to work in Clojure.
- pjmlp 8y agoNot really, because most companies will ignore those without Elm repositories on github. I cannot be bothered to create Elm, Haskell, OCaml, F#, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Rust, Go, Swift, Angular, React, VueJS, Flutter, Dart .... github repositories, after work on evenings and weekends, just for the tiny chance of getting around the next round. As if almost 30 year of experience across multiple business domains are worthless.
- dapreja 8y agoYou're giving these recruiters too much credit on their intelligence. They're vuage because they're ignorant and need to reach a certain word count to their pitch, and the same way they need to get a certain number of submissions. In short they're like monkeys incentivized is to give the minimum amount of vuage info in the shortest amount of time until the candidate agrees to continue with submission.