18 ms·

You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

348 points by pixelcort 8y ago

dexen 8y ago
re-post of my earlier post: >I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements]. It's not companies, it's the individuals. Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that: - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites") - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away. The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author. Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify. It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway". Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results. -- [1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down
- __s 8y ago
  Really well put from the corporate perspective I'll give a perspective from a small company: boss is doing hiring, asks what tech we use, try to explain that I don't care if they know React, if they've used Vue/Angular/FooBar4Ui2038, good enough. Then some explanation that we should put specific tech to attract people with that specifically, & we can select for people who have tangent experience. In the end we hired some guy with experience with Ruby on Rails (we don't use any Ruby, PHP/C#/Nodejs)
  - dexen 8y ago
    Thanks for the anecdote, your company sounds like a pretty cool place to live given its openness to learn at work. >from the corporate perspective Aside of a brief stint at 15k-large corporation years ago, my customers tend to be small & medium sized businesses (10...100 employees). They seem to suffer from the "corporate-like" cookie-cutter hiring practices just as well.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  It's been my experience that the worst hires are fakers who for whatever reasons do not consider themselves able to point to real capabilities, therefore they tailor their resumes to say they have done all of that stuff you are asking for and maybe a bunch more stuff. The ones who won't - perhaps because they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job, and perhaps it's these folks you actually want to hire.
  - dexen 8y ago
    >they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job From my experience people judge the company both by the hard facts, and also by the feel (impression, emotions) the first contact conveys - usually an ad, or word-of-mouth information. Potential employees will skip over word-of-mouth offers and ads that don't convey the kind of workplace they imagine themselves at. While we may abhor stereotypes, there's often a kernel of truth to them; different professions attract predominantly different characters. The first contact better be tailored to either the prevailing character - or perhaps to the long tail, depending on the current state of jobs marketplace. Point in case, first contact for sales associate ought to be much different - literally "make mad money, meet demanding sales targets, enjoy strong coffee & fast growth!" than for a highly skilled production worker - "good morning, consider joining team of experienced people like yourself; we offer efficient organization, well-supplied workspace and regular working hours, discounted meals and parking space.".
TheAdamist 8y ago
Unless HR prescreens all the applicants before they make it to staff, then you need 200%, or 0%. Sometimes it's rather frustrating working for bigcorp.
scarejunba 8y ago
Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  > And let’s be honest “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.
  - tazard 8y ago
    I read that a different way. I understood it as an ad from Company X which lists '5 years of Python' as the requirement. Candidate 1 has 5 years of Python at Google, and Candidate 2 has 5 years Python at InfoSys.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      That's precisely what I meant. Thanks! Edited to hopefully clarify.
    - Double_a_92 8y ago
      Does the Google experience really teach one that much better? Or is it just perception? I mean, at the end you are just a little cogwheel in some big corporation anyway. The python tasks you need to solve there are probably just as mundane as everywhere else.
austincheney 8y ago
You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.
- sovietmudkipz 8y ago
  What is this proposed personality filter letting through and what is it filtering out?
  - midasz 8y ago
    IN: INT* OUT: anything not NT. I used to really like the MBTI-type stuff, but honestly think it's kinda nonsense now. You need a diverse team to be the best imho.
    - pessimizer 8y ago
      This is absolutely it. MBTI is garbage, but since I've always consistently tested INTJ, when they start personality-testing doors start opening.
- sethammons 8y ago
  Aside from personal experience, can you point to any data on this, and maybe go into some more detail? When I think of personality tests, I think of quack science. "Do you get angry a lot?", "Is it easy for you to get angry?", "Would you say it is difficult to make you angry?, and four other similar questions in a 200 question quiz. They ask the same thing multiple ways to try to know if you are an person categorizable as x, y, and/or z, and anyone sensible will put the socially desired response. An interesting take on this is CultureAmp's surveys, where they determine your working style and can rate how well you might work with different colleagues. I work great with someone I scored a 98 with. Turns out I also work great with a person I scored a 4 with. So, while fun, it seems all bunk.
  - austincheney 8y ago
Melchizedek 8y ago
Wow, women have an interview rate almost double that of men, an also dismiss jobs almost twice as often. That's some serious female privilege!
- dexen 8y ago
  Too soon. This forum is on an intersection of progressives, who by default champion womens' causes, and entrepreneurs, who favor expanding labor pool to lower workforce costs. HN will needs to see a lot more papers & articles on this subject to start turning around on the issue. Find more documents, post them, and hunker down for a few more years. Generation Z will get this sorted out once it starts joining the workplaces. Point in case, most of HN is staunchly pro immigration with little to no restrictions, for what seems to be mix of ideological reasons, and labor pool expansion reasons. However there's a glaring exception: the (american) H1B visa program. A lot of HNers have learned of the magnitude of terrible abuse and wage suppression the H1B holders suffer, and thus prefer serious reform of this program. Awareness of the facts on the ground makes one question the ready-made ideological answers.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Generation Z will get this sorted out once it starts joining the workplaces. Are they noticeably less ageist than any previous generation?
    - dexen 8y ago
      That one I don't know. They seem tolerate me just fine so far, for what it's worth. Call them "realists" perhaps? While gaming, they are well aware I have much worse reaction times and working memory than them, but I can make it up with relevant experience to certain extent. You raise a very good point, and I will take care to spread the message of "respect your elders". Obviously behaving respectably is a prerequisite. I think the Gen Z-ers feel a less hung out to dry by the adults than the Millenials, so there ought to be less resentment and less distrust. On the other hand, the holders of higher education degrees may end up looked down with a degree of sneer in a decade or two, due to the current title bubble.
MattHeard 8y ago
My last job hunt resulted in a 12% success rate of getting an interview, which matches well with this data.
mszcz 8y ago
https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01 https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01 I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.
- wil421 8y ago
  Sometimes it isn’t even an HR person. A computer will scan your resume and if you don’t match enough keywords a person won’t even read it.
  - pc86 8y ago
    This is bad too (in its current state of sophistication) but I still think it's better than having some HR generalist with 6 months on the job and no technical knowledge scanning resumes before anyone who knows what they're doing gets to them. At least if you know your resume will be scanned by a computer before-hand you can optimize for that. It's hard to optimize for a person with no skill-set. The place I've worked with the best HR department realized that they didn't have any legitimate role in determining whether someone was fit for a job, only whether or not they were fit for the company. So they'd handle the background checks, the reference checks, etc, usually after the phone screen and before the on-site interview. But they didn't have any say in who got the job other than vetoing candidates with company-wide disqualifying features.
    - wil421 8y ago
      I recently changed jobs and the company I work for now does exactly what you say in your last paragraph. It was the best hiring experience I’ve been through. A couple other companies I applied to followed the HR screen first and I’m sure I failed. What’s weird is the same company that denied me has recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn monthly, as recent as last week.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      HR has one other job that you might not realize: make sure that your hiring/interview process is legally fair. You better not interview in such a way to make it impossible for some types of otherwise qualified people to pass (female, black...) while others find it easy (males, white...).
hocuspocus 8y ago
Recently I've seen a lot more job ads with minimal technical requirements and rather a focus on more generic skills. That's good but please, if you aren't Google or Facebook, don't take it to the other extreme. If I have no idea about your tech stack I'm not going to apply, and the same probably holds true for a lot of experienced developers.
pacuna 8y ago
Could be, but what if the requirements you're missing are supposedly essential for the job? Some jobs say you need to know X programming language. What if you're a good programmer but haven't worked with that particular language? Should you bother to apply?
- midasz 8y ago
  I did, and it worked out fine for me. However the languages are a bit similar. I went from C# to Java. I was upfront with it, and showed my eagerness to learn and develop. They did only give me a 1-year contract, and a stipulation to get some Oracle cert but did support me throughout. Now that I've shown them that I can adapt (be productive/billable, and got the certs done) they offered me a permanent contract (indefinite period of time). So yes, bother to apply. But put the work in to show them you can adapt.
GuB-42 8y ago
A recruiter once told me "we ask for God in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the followers".
- stingraycharles 8y ago
  That's a good way to get the worse part of developers divided by their Dunnin-Kruger score.
  - Lio 8y ago
    I think that Dunning-Kruger effect in interviews is a very real problem going the other way too. I worry that the questions that I only ask questions of candidates that I think are important and that I already know the answer too. If you're looking for good hires you're going to want people who know stuff you don't and finding that out is tricky because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- bregma 8y ago
  That's doomed to fail because the only applicant who qualified was over 30 and was visbly middle-eastern.
bitwize 8y ago
In my experience, unless you meet all of the requirements in the req, and substantially exceed a few of them, you will probably be passed over for a candidate with "more experience in technology X". Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called in to interview means next to nothing.
jkingsbery 8y ago
"They're more what you'd call 'guidelines.'"
GhostVII 8y ago
It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a better fit, regardless of job requirements.
- Blackstone4 8y ago
  We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling them for an interview...
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    So it is indeed because of gender discrimination/diversity?
  - AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
    > since we need female candidates May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
    - jkestner 8y ago
      Because that's how you get Apple Health omitting a monthly bodily function that a majority of the population has. Diversity of perspective makes a better product.
      - refurb 8y ago
        Is that really the reason why Apple Health didn't include menstrual cycle tracking? Or did they just decide not to add it in additional to a bunch of other things?
mathattack 8y ago
A lot of job descriptions are written overly precise to specifically include or exclude internal candidates.
carlmr 8y ago
I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate for this position. The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers. EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  >The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    Or more likely fake postings to show investors they are a successful company that is hiring.
    - carlmr 8y ago
      There are plenty of hires. I think it was one very picky department head.
    - Uberphallus 8y ago
      Internal hire doesn't show investors much, also there was an interview which is pointless for fake postings.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Do they still require you look locally and "not find" someone before you go H1B?
- kamarg 8y ago
  Seems to me that this was a job put together with a specific person in mind and somehow that didn't work out and they just didn't know what to do after that. Seen this same scenario play out before at multiple companies.
bradleyjg 8y ago
I recently was involved in drafting a job posting that was extremely flexible. For example it didn’t specify a particular programming language, just listed a few and said “or other similar languages”. However the essence of the posting was clearly for a programmer. Significantly more than half the people that applied were not programmers. We saw some resumes from seemingly quite accomplished statisticians but we were not looking for a statistician (or “data scientist”). So I think which 50% matters. If someone is a self starter and has great communication skills but can’t program she isn’t going to be hired as a programmer.
rossdavidh 8y ago
I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator" Yeah, this is where bias and other cruft comes creeping in. "Passionate about software development" usually means, "our PM sucks, but he's the CEO's nephew, so you're going to work late to meet deadlines".
  - chaosite 8y ago
    Or it could mean "our HR dept likes flowery language in job postings". I.e., it means literally nothing.
    - bausshf 8y ago
      Both are synonyms
- cimmanom 8y ago
  But then there's that research that shows that on average, men will apply to a job if they meet less than half of of the requirements, so if you don't overspecify you'll be flooded with crap applications. Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.
codingdave 8y ago
That does match up with my job search I just completed. I sent out 5 resumes, got an interview on every one where I had a majority of the qualifications, did not get called on the 2 that were more off-target. But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead. The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.
- monsieurbanana 8y ago
  On the other hand, you keep doing what you're already doing. I have a really high ratio of interview / job offers, but that's because I choose to apply for jobs where I had nearly 100% of the requirements. I think this was a mistake. I should have taken more risks, try to apply for more challenging jobs that aren't completely in my comfort zone.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    My strategy has been to take a new position that is a good fit for my current skill set and allows me to grow in the direction I'd like to move. Coming from the linux side of the house, I wanted to move more into software engineering. Each job hop moved me into more and more software development-centric roles. Fortunately for me, it's usually meant an increase in pay as well, though I didn't maximize pay at each hop. I could have been paid more at different firms I declined during each move, the position responsibilities were always key for me.
BenjaminBlair 8y ago
I find that very frustrating. When a person is looking for a job he or she is stressed out already, and when reading all those huge qualification criteria you sometimes really feel like a total loser, not knowing anything at all. It's really important to still try and send a CV and go to an interview with a positive attitude, willing to learn that is. But I'd really like to see some reasonable hiring criteria, so you can know for sure that you have what they're looking for.
rb808 8y ago
The most interesting thing was 12% interview rate - is that normal? I was discouraged when getting 20% rates, maybe I need to apply to more stuff.
- manfredo 8y ago
  I think it's pretty dependent on your application strategy. Some people are fairly R-selected in their strategy. Large number of applications, but little customization of resumes for each job and no cover letter. Others are more k selected, they'll write good cover letters and change up their resume to better highlight relevant experience.
tombert 8y ago
Heh, I think most autodidacts have discovered this independently. I'm a Physics-Major dropout, and have managed to find jobs in big brand-name companies that have "strict requirements" for a degree. Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome (I've posted about it on HN before), but at the same time, it demonstrates that these "requirements" are more "strong preferences". Sadly, it does seem like the research-oriented jobs aren't BSing about their requirements; when I've tried to apply to MS Research and the like, they've always declined me due to lack of credentials, since the postings usually require at least a masters, preferably a PhD.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome I challenge that what you're feeling is imposter syndrome in this case. I posit it's the realization that at the next economic downturn, should you find yourself out of work and the landscape for being hired is more competitive, you are at a strategic disadvantage. Upward mobility into Director/VP roles is also quite limited without a degree, even though a degree in CompSci has little to do with running a business.
  - tombert 8y ago
    I don't particularly worry about that stuff, honestly. It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through the proper steps". I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.
    - linuxftw 8y ago
      > I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles. Interest aside, being qualified for those types of roles would raise the bar for salaries for individual contributors because both types of positions are competing for the same finite labor pool. > It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through the proper steps". The question, IMO, is whether or not an employer will feel the same way about you at some point in the future. I think this applies to those who have a degree as well. Ivy league school vs state school. #1 ranked school vs #2. It's all relative, I suppose.
create_novelty 8y ago
Most important job requirement - get a warm introduction to the HR / Hiring Manager via an existing employee of the company!
scaleout1 8y ago
Unfortunately in Bay Area and specially at FAANG you need 0% of job "Requirements" on your resume as they will leetcode the shit out of you in the interview without asking one relevant question pertaining to your resume or even to the actual job. One of the reason given for this is that the stack used at these companies is completely homegrown so your experience using framework $X for $Y years has no relevance
proxygeek 8y ago
Wondering if there is a corpus of "stop-phrases" like stop-words which will include gems like "passionate about software development", "good communicator", "truth-seeker" and the likes. It might be interesting to do a basic pre-processing of the JD to remove all such stop-phrases before evaluating the role being offered.
paultopia 8y ago
From the "methodology" section of this post: First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. This is... not plausible. Effectively, they're trying to infer causality here, not merely do prediction. That has to be the case, because this is presented as useful advice---to go ahead and apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications. But when you're trying to infer causality you're doing social science, not data science, and that means you need to worry about omitted variables. Here's an example: what if less qualified people who nonetheless apply are more confident. And what if that confidence is associated with other good things that show up on resumes, like attending prestigious schools, having had prestigious prior jobs, having a record of success in some other fashion, or even just doing things like paying careful attention to formatting? This is why social scientists use tried and true techniques like old fashioned OLS regression with control variables rather than throw everything into a random forest and see if the hypothesized association standing on its own predicts things. (Insert remark about how companies should be hiring data science people with science backgrounds rather than just pure cs backgrounds here)
- gefh 8y ago
  Thank you! Finally some reason.
- achompas 8y ago
  Very well put, I agree completely. The absence of controls in their model for school, education, experience etc. means we cannot draw definitive conclusions from their analysis. Another commenter also pointed out the fit curve. Note the wide prediction intervals starting at ~40% and frequency of points across all charts. It's hard to draw conclusions above that cutoff, since outcomes vary significantly and high-matchers are scarce. This may also be a failure of the "proprietary" qualification-extracting algorithms. Most applicants also seemingly interview at a <10% rate, and the data in general looks fishy. I know they sampled from ~6,300 applications, but the joint distribution of matches & interviews seems bimodal: either you barely match and barely interview, or you greatly match and interview far more often. Weird, weird post. It should be titled "we rarely see > 50% match in job requirements, which either says something about applicants or our proprietary algorithms."
gefh 8y ago
This data is weirdly bucketed and the fit curve looks sketchy. I don't think it's a robust finding and I don't trust it. Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes though.
zaidf 8y ago
Someone I know applied for a designer AND front end dev position at a startup. He went through multiple rounds plus a project. This describes my friend: - super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product - great designer with a few years of experience - degree in CS from a reputed school - picked up react recently - few years of work experience doing design and coding He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.
sxp62000 8y ago
I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their list of requirements. If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
As someone who hires for technical roles, I tend to profile the roles into a 5 X 5 grid. 5 core areas of proficiency, 5 levels of proficiency. a proficiency of 4 across the board is uncommon. If I can find a 5, 4, 4, 3, 2 of combination of that, I'm happy. That's about 70%. That sort of profile should also provide learning opportunities for the candidate and typical that is intrinsically motivating for technical types.

348 points by pixelcort 8y ago

re-post of my earlier post: >I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements]. It's not companies, it's the individuals. Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that: - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites") - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away. The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author. Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify. It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway". Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results. -- [1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down

__s 8y ago
Really well put from the corporate perspective I'll give a perspective from a small company: boss is doing hiring, asks what tech we use, try to explain that I don't care if they know React, if they've used Vue/Angular/FooBar4Ui2038, good enough. Then some explanation that we should put specific tech to attract people with that specifically, & we can select for people who have tangent experience. In the end we hired some guy with experience with Ruby on Rails (we don't use any Ruby, PHP/C#/Nodejs)
- dexen 8y ago
  Thanks for the anecdote, your company sounds like a pretty cool place to live given its openness to learn at work. >from the corporate perspective Aside of a brief stint at 15k-large corporation years ago, my customers tend to be small & medium sized businesses (10...100 employees). They seem to suffer from the "corporate-like" cookie-cutter hiring practices just as well.
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
It's been my experience that the worst hires are fakers who for whatever reasons do not consider themselves able to point to real capabilities, therefore they tailor their resumes to say they have done all of that stuff you are asking for and maybe a bunch more stuff. The ones who won't - perhaps because they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job, and perhaps it's these folks you actually want to hire.
- dexen 8y ago
  >they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job From my experience people judge the company both by the hard facts, and also by the feel (impression, emotions) the first contact conveys - usually an ad, or word-of-mouth information. Potential employees will skip over word-of-mouth offers and ads that don't convey the kind of workplace they imagine themselves at. While we may abhor stereotypes, there's often a kernel of truth to them; different professions attract predominantly different characters. The first contact better be tailored to either the prevailing character - or perhaps to the long tail, depending on the current state of jobs marketplace. Point in case, first contact for sales associate ought to be much different - literally "make mad money, meet demanding sales targets, enjoy strong coffee & fast growth!" than for a highly skilled production worker - "good morning, consider joining team of experienced people like yourself; we offer efficient organization, well-supplied workspace and regular working hours, discounted meals and parking space.".

TheAdamist 8y ago

Unless HR prescreens all the applicants before they make it to staff, then you need 200%, or 0%. Sometimes it's rather frustrating working for bigcorp.

scarejunba 8y ago

Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.

electricslpnsld 8y ago
> And let’s be honest “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.
- tazard 8y ago
  I read that a different way. I understood it as an ad from Company X which lists '5 years of Python' as the requirement. Candidate 1 has 5 years of Python at Google, and Candidate 2 has 5 years Python at InfoSys.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    That's precisely what I meant. Thanks! Edited to hopefully clarify.
  - Double_a_92 8y ago
    Does the Google experience really teach one that much better? Or is it just perception? I mean, at the end you are just a little cogwheel in some big corporation anyway. The python tasks you need to solve there are probably just as mundane as everywhere else.

austincheney 8y ago

You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.

sovietmudkipz 8y ago
What is this proposed personality filter letting through and what is it filtering out?
- midasz 8y ago
  IN: INT* OUT: anything not NT. I used to really like the MBTI-type stuff, but honestly think it's kinda nonsense now. You need a diverse team to be the best imho.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    This is absolutely it. MBTI is garbage, but since I've always consistently tested INTJ, when they start personality-testing doors start opening.
sethammons 8y ago
Aside from personal experience, can you point to any data on this, and maybe go into some more detail? When I think of personality tests, I think of quack science. "Do you get angry a lot?", "Is it easy for you to get angry?", "Would you say it is difficult to make you angry?, and four other similar questions in a 200 question quiz. They ask the same thing multiple ways to try to know if you are an person categorizable as x, y, and/or z, and anyone sensible will put the socially desired response. An interesting take on this is CultureAmp's surveys, where they determine your working style and can rate how well you might work with different colleagues. I work great with someone I scored a 98 with. Turns out I also work great with a person I scored a 4 with. So, while fun, it seems all bunk.
- austincheney 8y ago

Melchizedek 8y ago

Wow, women have an interview rate almost double that of men, an also dismiss jobs almost twice as often. That's some serious female privilege!

dexen 8y ago
Too soon. This forum is on an intersection of progressives, who by default champion womens' causes, and entrepreneurs, who favor expanding labor pool to lower workforce costs. HN will needs to see a lot more papers & articles on this subject to start turning around on the issue. Find more documents, post them, and hunker down for a few more years. Generation Z will get this sorted out once it starts joining the workplaces. Point in case, most of HN is staunchly pro immigration with little to no restrictions, for what seems to be mix of ideological reasons, and labor pool expansion reasons. However there's a glaring exception: the (american) H1B visa program. A lot of HNers have learned of the magnitude of terrible abuse and wage suppression the H1B holders suffer, and thus prefer serious reform of this program. Awareness of the facts on the ground makes one question the ready-made ideological answers.
- gaius 8y ago
  Generation Z will get this sorted out once it starts joining the workplaces. Are they noticeably less ageist than any previous generation?
  - dexen 8y ago
    That one I don't know. They seem tolerate me just fine so far, for what it's worth. Call them "realists" perhaps? While gaming, they are well aware I have much worse reaction times and working memory than them, but I can make it up with relevant experience to certain extent. You raise a very good point, and I will take care to spread the message of "respect your elders". Obviously behaving respectably is a prerequisite. I think the Gen Z-ers feel a less hung out to dry by the adults than the Millenials, so there ought to be less resentment and less distrust. On the other hand, the holders of higher education degrees may end up looked down with a degree of sneer in a decade or two, due to the current title bubble.

MattHeard 8y ago

My last job hunt resulted in a 12% success rate of getting an interview, which matches well with this data.

mszcz 8y ago

https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01 https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01 I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.

wil421 8y ago
Sometimes it isn’t even an HR person. A computer will scan your resume and if you don’t match enough keywords a person won’t even read it.
- pc86 8y ago
  This is bad too (in its current state of sophistication) but I still think it's better than having some HR generalist with 6 months on the job and no technical knowledge scanning resumes before anyone who knows what they're doing gets to them. At least if you know your resume will be scanned by a computer before-hand you can optimize for that. It's hard to optimize for a person with no skill-set. The place I've worked with the best HR department realized that they didn't have any legitimate role in determining whether someone was fit for a job, only whether or not they were fit for the company. So they'd handle the background checks, the reference checks, etc, usually after the phone screen and before the on-site interview. But they didn't have any say in who got the job other than vetoing candidates with company-wide disqualifying features.
  - wil421 8y ago
    I recently changed jobs and the company I work for now does exactly what you say in your last paragraph. It was the best hiring experience I’ve been through. A couple other companies I applied to followed the HR screen first and I’m sure I failed. What’s weird is the same company that denied me has recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn monthly, as recent as last week.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    HR has one other job that you might not realize: make sure that your hiring/interview process is legally fair. You better not interview in such a way to make it impossible for some types of otherwise qualified people to pass (female, black...) while others find it easy (males, white...).

hocuspocus 8y ago

Recently I've seen a lot more job ads with minimal technical requirements and rather a focus on more generic skills. That's good but please, if you aren't Google or Facebook, don't take it to the other extreme. If I have no idea about your tech stack I'm not going to apply, and the same probably holds true for a lot of experienced developers.

pacuna 8y ago

Could be, but what if the requirements you're missing are supposedly essential for the job? Some jobs say you need to know X programming language. What if you're a good programmer but haven't worked with that particular language? Should you bother to apply?

midasz 8y ago
I did, and it worked out fine for me. However the languages are a bit similar. I went from C# to Java. I was upfront with it, and showed my eagerness to learn and develop. They did only give me a 1-year contract, and a stipulation to get some Oracle cert but did support me throughout. Now that I've shown them that I can adapt (be productive/billable, and got the certs done) they offered me a permanent contract (indefinite period of time). So yes, bother to apply. But put the work in to show them you can adapt.

GuB-42 8y ago

A recruiter once told me "we ask for God in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the followers".

stingraycharles 8y ago
That's a good way to get the worse part of developers divided by their Dunnin-Kruger score.
- Lio 8y ago
  I think that Dunning-Kruger effect in interviews is a very real problem going the other way too. I worry that the questions that I only ask questions of candidates that I think are important and that I already know the answer too. If you're looking for good hires you're going to want people who know stuff you don't and finding that out is tricky because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
bregma 8y ago
That's doomed to fail because the only applicant who qualified was over 30 and was visbly middle-eastern.

bitwize 8y ago

In my experience, unless you meet all of the requirements in the req, and substantially exceed a few of them, you will probably be passed over for a candidate with "more experience in technology X". Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called in to interview means next to nothing.

jkingsbery 8y ago

"They're more what you'd call 'guidelines.'"

GhostVII 8y ago

It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a better fit, regardless of job requirements.

Blackstone4 8y ago
We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling them for an interview...
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  So it is indeed because of gender discrimination/diversity?
- AnaniasAnanas 8y ago
  > since we need female candidates May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
  - jkestner 8y ago
    Because that's how you get Apple Health omitting a monthly bodily function that a majority of the population has. Diversity of perspective makes a better product.
    - refurb 8y ago
      Is that really the reason why Apple Health didn't include menstrual cycle tracking? Or did they just decide not to add it in additional to a bunch of other things?

mathattack 8y ago

A lot of job descriptions are written overly precise to specifically include or exclude internal candidates.

carlmr 8y ago

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate for this position. The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers. EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.

24gttghh 8y ago
>The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?
- bluGill 8y ago
  Or more likely fake postings to show investors they are a successful company that is hiring.
  - carlmr 8y ago
    There are plenty of hires. I think it was one very picky department head.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    Internal hire doesn't show investors much, also there was an interview which is pointless for fake postings.
- duxup 8y ago
  Do they still require you look locally and "not find" someone before you go H1B?
kamarg 8y ago
Seems to me that this was a job put together with a specific person in mind and somehow that didn't work out and they just didn't know what to do after that. Seen this same scenario play out before at multiple companies.

bradleyjg 8y ago

I recently was involved in drafting a job posting that was extremely flexible. For example it didn’t specify a particular programming language, just listed a few and said “or other similar languages”. However the essence of the posting was clearly for a programmer. Significantly more than half the people that applied were not programmers. We saw some resumes from seemingly quite accomplished statisticians but we were not looking for a statistician (or “data scientist”). So I think which 50% matters. If someone is a self starter and has great communication skills but can’t program she isn’t going to be hired as a programmer.

rossdavidh 8y ago

I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
> e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator" Yeah, this is where bias and other cruft comes creeping in. "Passionate about software development" usually means, "our PM sucks, but he's the CEO's nephew, so you're going to work late to meet deadlines".
- chaosite 8y ago
  Or it could mean "our HR dept likes flowery language in job postings". I.e., it means literally nothing.
  - bausshf 8y ago
    Both are synonyms
cimmanom 8y ago
But then there's that research that shows that on average, men will apply to a job if they meet less than half of of the requirements, so if you don't overspecify you'll be flooded with crap applications. Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.

codingdave 8y ago

That does match up with my job search I just completed. I sent out 5 resumes, got an interview on every one where I had a majority of the qualifications, did not get called on the 2 that were more off-target. But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead. The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.

monsieurbanana 8y ago
On the other hand, you keep doing what you're already doing. I have a really high ratio of interview / job offers, but that's because I choose to apply for jobs where I had nearly 100% of the requirements. I think this was a mistake. I should have taken more risks, try to apply for more challenging jobs that aren't completely in my comfort zone.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  My strategy has been to take a new position that is a good fit for my current skill set and allows me to grow in the direction I'd like to move. Coming from the linux side of the house, I wanted to move more into software engineering. Each job hop moved me into more and more software development-centric roles. Fortunately for me, it's usually meant an increase in pay as well, though I didn't maximize pay at each hop. I could have been paid more at different firms I declined during each move, the position responsibilities were always key for me.

BenjaminBlair 8y ago

I find that very frustrating. When a person is looking for a job he or she is stressed out already, and when reading all those huge qualification criteria you sometimes really feel like a total loser, not knowing anything at all. It's really important to still try and send a CV and go to an interview with a positive attitude, willing to learn that is. But I'd really like to see some reasonable hiring criteria, so you can know for sure that you have what they're looking for.

rb808 8y ago

The most interesting thing was 12% interview rate - is that normal? I was discouraged when getting 20% rates, maybe I need to apply to more stuff.

manfredo 8y ago
I think it's pretty dependent on your application strategy. Some people are fairly R-selected in their strategy. Large number of applications, but little customization of resumes for each job and no cover letter. Others are more k selected, they'll write good cover letters and change up their resume to better highlight relevant experience.

tombert 8y ago

Heh, I think most autodidacts have discovered this independently. I'm a Physics-Major dropout, and have managed to find jobs in big brand-name companies that have "strict requirements" for a degree. Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome (I've posted about it on HN before), but at the same time, it demonstrates that these "requirements" are more "strong preferences". Sadly, it does seem like the research-oriented jobs aren't BSing about their requirements; when I've tried to apply to MS Research and the like, they've always declined me due to lack of credentials, since the postings usually require at least a masters, preferably a PhD.

linuxftw 8y ago
> Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome I challenge that what you're feeling is imposter syndrome in this case. I posit it's the realization that at the next economic downturn, should you find yourself out of work and the landscape for being hired is more competitive, you are at a strategic disadvantage. Upward mobility into Director/VP roles is also quite limited without a degree, even though a degree in CompSci has little to do with running a business.
- tombert 8y ago
  I don't particularly worry about that stuff, honestly. It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through the proper steps". I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    > I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles. Interest aside, being qualified for those types of roles would raise the bar for salaries for individual contributors because both types of positions are competing for the same finite labor pool. > It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through the proper steps". The question, IMO, is whether or not an employer will feel the same way about you at some point in the future. I think this applies to those who have a degree as well. Ivy league school vs state school. #1 ranked school vs #2. It's all relative, I suppose.

create_novelty 8y ago

Most important job requirement - get a warm introduction to the HR / Hiring Manager via an existing employee of the company!

scaleout1 8y ago

Unfortunately in Bay Area and specially at FAANG you need 0% of job "Requirements" on your resume as they will leetcode the shit out of you in the interview without asking one relevant question pertaining to your resume or even to the actual job. One of the reason given for this is that the stack used at these companies is completely homegrown so your experience using framework $X for $Y years has no relevance

proxygeek 8y ago

Wondering if there is a corpus of "stop-phrases" like stop-words which will include gems like "passionate about software development", "good communicator", "truth-seeker" and the likes. It might be interesting to do a basic pre-processing of the JD to remove all such stop-phrases before evaluating the role being offered.

paultopia 8y ago

From the "methodology" section of this post: First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. This is... not plausible. Effectively, they're trying to infer causality here, not merely do prediction. That has to be the case, because this is presented as useful advice---to go ahead and apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications. But when you're trying to infer causality you're doing social science, not data science, and that means you need to worry about omitted variables. Here's an example: what if less qualified people who nonetheless apply are more confident. And what if that confidence is associated with other good things that show up on resumes, like attending prestigious schools, having had prestigious prior jobs, having a record of success in some other fashion, or even just doing things like paying careful attention to formatting? This is why social scientists use tried and true techniques like old fashioned OLS regression with control variables rather than throw everything into a random forest and see if the hypothesized association standing on its own predicts things. (Insert remark about how companies should be hiring data science people with science backgrounds rather than just pure cs backgrounds here)

gefh 8y ago
Thank you! Finally some reason.
achompas 8y ago
Very well put, I agree completely. The absence of controls in their model for school, education, experience etc. means we cannot draw definitive conclusions from their analysis. Another commenter also pointed out the fit curve. Note the wide prediction intervals starting at ~40% and frequency of points across all charts. It's hard to draw conclusions above that cutoff, since outcomes vary significantly and high-matchers are scarce. This may also be a failure of the "proprietary" qualification-extracting algorithms. Most applicants also seemingly interview at a <10% rate, and the data in general looks fishy. I know they sampled from ~6,300 applications, but the joint distribution of matches & interviews seems bimodal: either you barely match and barely interview, or you greatly match and interview far more often. Weird, weird post. It should be titled "we rarely see > 50% match in job requirements, which either says something about applicants or our proprietary algorithms."

gefh 8y ago

This data is weirdly bucketed and the fit curve looks sketchy. I don't think it's a robust finding and I don't trust it. Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes though.

zaidf 8y ago

Someone I know applied for a designer AND front end dev position at a startup. He went through multiple rounds plus a project. This describes my friend: - super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product - great designer with a few years of experience - degree in CS from a reputed school - picked up react recently - few years of work experience doing design and coding He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.

sxp62000 8y ago

I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their list of requirements. If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

As someone who hires for technical roles, I tend to profile the roles into a 5 X 5 grid. 5 core areas of proficiency, 5 levels of proficiency. a proficiency of 4 across the board is uncommon. If I can find a 5, 4, 4, 3, 2 of combination of that, I'm happy. That's about 70%. That sort of profile should also provide learning opportunities for the candidate and typical that is intrinsically motivating for technical types.