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I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searc

I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past. So in technical roles there are a lot of companies that are always hiring. Recruiters work for free until they find you someone and placing job listings online is so inexpensive it barely registers as a cost. On top of that, most states are "at will" employment, so even if a company does not have any openings, if they find someone better, and cheaper, than another employee that is currently working at the company, they can hire them and then eventually let that other employee go. For example, I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but if a brand new, top of the line laptop came up for sale at half price, I'd probably buy it. Its so cheap to look for new talent due to automation, so most companies will shop around in case they get lucky and land a fantastic bargain. Many are not seriously looking to fill an immediate need. With that said, there are still plenty of companies out there with an immediate need, so please do not get discouraged by that group of companies that are "always hiring".

mattnewport 7y ago
> Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them. The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.
- areyouseriousxx 7y ago
  Believe it or not, those interviews usually aren't that expensive. You probably have a mix of managers, which spend all their time in meetings anyway, and engineers, which are paid salary so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing. Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary. If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    If there are 10 hours of interviews, and each one is attended by an average of 1.5 current employees, who make, on average, $100K, then the labor cost (not including opportunity cost) of that round of interviews with that candidate is on the order of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. So you might have a point there.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - lovich 7y ago
    >so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Yeah... no. Most engineers and programmers don't interview for free. They do it on company time. If their other work falls behind because they spend too much time interviewing, well that is the company's problem. I have never worked with anyone that would stay late because they interviewed someone that day. That is ridiculous. And as for staying late "to get the work done", what job do you work in where the work is ever "done"?
Game_Ender 7y ago
Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least. That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.
- areyouseriousxx 7y ago
  The current data we have about hiring practices seem to disagree with you. So either, this process is not as expensive as you think it is, or companies believe it is less expensive than it actually is. Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    searching is easier in terms of internet ads and reviewing candidates. But hiring dev candidates is extremely hard. Virtually everyone has a job who is experienced already, college students get offers somewhere in the early junior year, so you hire them with at most 2 internships. It's very difficult to pull people out of an existing job, it's kind of begging them to consider you. Then for random applicants to a company, you can check their resume, but many people end up failing our interview. So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.
    - mooreds 7y ago
      Are you in the Bay area or Seattle? That's higher rates than what I have seen for new college hires (I have seen in the 40-60k range).
      - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
autokad 7y ago
those are some good points, I been wondering if they are doing things like that myself. I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools. for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc. for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team" point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned
ranci 7y ago
"I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past." Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > once you are given 2 or more options You mean 3 or more? Because saying 2 or more just means you have options and therefore any options induces paralysis
  - ranci 7y ago
    only a programmer could produce such a pedantic comment such as this.
- fopen64 7y ago
  https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-tinder-of-labor-marketplace-d5ea644e0501 https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-...
enjo 7y ago
This isn’t right. The cost of finding an employee at my current company (which Is considered an excellent company in the games industry) is near $70k. The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door. My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories. The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building. Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  And yet, despite all the difficulties, most job ads just look more or less the same- 3 pages of tech requirements, a ton of self praise about the company and 3 lines about what successful applicant would get: bean bag in the corner, Foosball and a spot in an open space office...
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I think the talent is intent on showing up. They’re just absolutely atrocious at detecting it even when it is right in front of them.
mcv 7y ago
If it's cheap for them to waste our time with bogus interviews, it's also cheap for us to compile lists of deceitful employers and recruiters. Let's blackball them. There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable. [0] https://blacklist-recruiters.nl/archive/ https://blacklist-recruiters.nl/archive/
anovikov 7y ago
There's also cost of switching itself which could be pretty steep. Pay someone to learn his role being essentially useless for the first month or so, and having several other people distract to show him/her the way around.
claydavisss 7y ago
> "but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past." And also made many of us irrelevant. Most of the things I have build over my career have just moved to the cloud. Every company is now the same - glue cloud stuff together with Python/Java/Go whatever. 95% of work is now identical, which is why a company's actual business is increasingly irrelevant to me.
RubberbandSoul 7y ago
I wonder if automation actually distorts the recruitment market? As the initial cost of recruitment goes down, thanks to automation, more recruiters gets involved because it's cheaper to enter the market. As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are. As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten. This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.
maehwasu 7y ago
You've clearly never worked on the hiring side of a company. I mean that literally and not snidely: you're completely unaware of the costs and complications and risks that go into hiring from the company's side.
x0x0 7y ago
Searching for new employees is incredibly inexpensive == I now know you don't do any interviewing or hiring. Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight. The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per. If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time. If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime. The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.
- areyouseriousxx 7y ago
  $1.5k is a significant expense for your organization? A $250 ad listing is a lot for your organization? I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring. You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience? How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark. I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.
  - x0x0 7y ago
    This should have been obvious, but buttresses my thesis: we do more than one ad. Run rate order of $140k for 2019. obviously $2k is not a significant expense, but that's per position per interview. So we pay that well more than once. Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!. We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.
rafiki6 7y ago
I don't totally buy this argument. It's not cheap to hire. They might have increased the number of candidates in the pipeline sure, but I don't think the turnaround time to hire is any less. Also, there's the paradox of choice. The more candidates you have, the harder it is to hire. You actually need to apply filters to reduce the overall quantity you will pick from.

mattnewport 7y ago

> Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them. The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.

areyouseriousxx 7y ago
Believe it or not, those interviews usually aren't that expensive. You probably have a mix of managers, which spend all their time in meetings anyway, and engineers, which are paid salary so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing. Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary. If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  If there are 10 hours of interviews, and each one is attended by an average of 1.5 current employees, who make, on average, $100K, then the labor cost (not including opportunity cost) of that round of interviews with that candidate is on the order of a few hundred to a thousand dollars. So you might have a point there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lovich 7y ago
  >so they typically end up putting in a couple extra hours when they fall behind due to interviewing Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Yeah... no. Most engineers and programmers don't interview for free. They do it on company time. If their other work falls behind because they spend too much time interviewing, well that is the company's problem. I have never worked with anyone that would stay late because they interviewed someone that day. That is ridiculous. And as for staying late "to get the work done", what job do you work in where the work is ever "done"?

Game_Ender 7y ago

Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least. That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.

areyouseriousxx 7y ago
The current data we have about hiring practices seem to disagree with you. So either, this process is not as expensive as you think it is, or companies believe it is less expensive than it actually is. Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  searching is easier in terms of internet ads and reviewing candidates. But hiring dev candidates is extremely hard. Virtually everyone has a job who is experienced already, college students get offers somewhere in the early junior year, so you hire them with at most 2 internships. It's very difficult to pull people out of an existing job, it's kind of begging them to consider you. Then for random applicants to a company, you can check their resume, but many people end up failing our interview. So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.
  - mooreds 7y ago
    Are you in the Bay area or Seattle? That's higher rates than what I have seen for new college hires (I have seen in the 40-60k range).
    - NotSammyHagar 7y ago

autokad 7y ago

those are some good points, I been wondering if they are doing things like that myself. I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools. for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc. for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team" point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned

ranci 7y ago

"I find it strange, as software developers, that we discuss the effects on automation all the time, but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past." Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.

hanniabu 7y ago
> once you are given 2 or more options You mean 3 or more? Because saying 2 or more just means you have options and therefore any options induces paralysis
- ranci 7y ago
  only a programmer could produce such a pedantic comment such as this.
fopen64 7y ago
https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-tinder-of-labor-marketplace-d5ea644e0501 https://medium.com/@carlosreutemann/tech-job-interviews-the-...

enjo 7y ago

This isn’t right. The cost of finding an employee at my current company (which Is considered an excellent company in the games industry) is near $70k. The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door. My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories. The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building. Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.

cosmodisk 7y ago
And yet, despite all the difficulties, most job ads just look more or less the same- 3 pages of tech requirements, a ton of self praise about the company and 3 lines about what successful applicant would get: bean bag in the corner, Foosball and a spot in an open space office...
Aeolun 7y ago
I think the talent is intent on showing up. They’re just absolutely atrocious at detecting it even when it is right in front of them.

mcv 7y ago

If it's cheap for them to waste our time with bogus interviews, it's also cheap for us to compile lists of deceitful employers and recruiters. Let's blackball them. There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable. [0] https://blacklist-recruiters.nl/archive/ https://blacklist-recruiters.nl/archive/

anovikov 7y ago

There's also cost of switching itself which could be pretty steep. Pay someone to learn his role being essentially useless for the first month or so, and having several other people distract to show him/her the way around.

claydavisss 7y ago

> "but no one seems to understand that automation has made searching for new employees incredibly inexpensive and efficient compared to the past." And also made many of us irrelevant. Most of the things I have build over my career have just moved to the cloud. Every company is now the same - glue cloud stuff together with Python/Java/Go whatever. 95% of work is now identical, which is why a company's actual business is increasingly irrelevant to me.

RubberbandSoul 7y ago

I wonder if automation actually distorts the recruitment market? As the initial cost of recruitment goes down, thanks to automation, more recruiters gets involved because it's cheaper to enter the market. As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are. As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten. This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.

maehwasu 7y ago

You've clearly never worked on the hiring side of a company. I mean that literally and not snidely: you're completely unaware of the costs and complications and risks that go into hiring from the company's side.

x0x0 7y ago

Searching for new employees is incredibly inexpensive == I now know you don't do any interviewing or hiring. Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight. The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per. If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time. If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime. The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.

areyouseriousxx 7y ago
$1.5k is a significant expense for your organization? A $250 ad listing is a lot for your organization? I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring. You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience? How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark. I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.
- x0x0 7y ago
  This should have been obvious, but buttresses my thesis: we do more than one ad. Run rate order of $140k for 2019. obviously $2k is not a significant expense, but that's per position per interview. So we pay that well more than once. Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!. We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.

rafiki6 7y ago

I don't totally buy this argument. It's not cheap to hire. They might have increased the number of candidates in the pipeline sure, but I don't think the turnaround time to hire is any less. Also, there's the paradox of choice. The more candidates you have, the harder it is to hire. You actually need to apply filters to reduce the overall quantity you will pick from.