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In 2021, you don’t even have to search for engineering jobs. You either start out with a shortlist of companies and roles or a recruiter reaches out to you and

In 2021, you don’t even have to search for engineering jobs. You either start out with a shortlist of companies and roles or a recruiter reaches out to you and kicks off the process. Maybe this would be useful for folks just starting their career, but on the hiring side of this, in the last year I haven’t made an offer to a candidate who didn’t already have at least one other offer on the table. Overall I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how people are hired from the recruiter side — which is why most of these platforms see the recruiter as the target customer, not engineers. I get that y’all are trying to change that, but without insight into the hiring practices at any given company (e.g. my company gives a lot of latitude for salary negotiations but every hiring manager negotiated differently) it’s going to be hard to pull a signal from the noise.

crooked-v 5y ago
While the constant supply of recruiter contacts and even direct internal company contacts I get is nice, I repeatedly see the sort of basic issues as mentioned in the piece of concealment of or lying about pay (or incredibly broad pay ranges), entirely leaving out information about a job's location even when it's on the other side of the country, trying to offer entirely inappropriate junior positions that I'm never going to be interested in... all stuff that has zero cost to a hiring manager but wastes my time. I could see a lot of usefulness in something to push back against that in a structured way.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  On the recruiting side (I’m not a recruiter but a director making a lot of hires), we actually do the opposite all the time — we post relatively senior positions then downlevel whoever we hire to fit their experience level. A lot of people think more highly of themselves than the employment market does. We look at the job posting as a brand marketing — all we’re really trying to do is get you to apply and fill the funnel. The whole hiring process is designed to be a calibration on role, cultural fit, compensation, etc.
  - htrp 5y ago
    Downleveling is a flaming trainwreck in almost every case. Seems almost like the bait and switch that the OP company is railing against in the blog post. I'm curious to see how you guys have managed it without disgruntled employees quitting within 18 months.
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      We have the conversation about level before we give an offer. It’s genuinely because we don’t want to put someone in a role they’re going to struggle with and be unhappy or burn out. I would much rather underlevel someone starting out and promote them 6 months later than hire them at a higher level and then needing to have the conversation about performance early in their tenure or cut their bonus. I work in consulting so high turnover is just expected. We’re actually a lot lower than the industry average. The job isn’t for everyone, but there are people who thrive in this environment. For everyone else who isn’t a good fit, we get a year or so worth of billable hours, they get exposed to a lot of different scenarios, and we give folks a lot of runway to find something they do like. It’s just the nature of the beast though. If I get a candidate who is legitimately at level, I bring them in at level. There’s no need to be shady about it, but job search sites are what they are and that’s the game you play.
rachofsunshine 5y ago
In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have competing offers, they wouldn't hold the amount of power they do. That being said, the experienced engineers who can get that kind of attention have other desiderata in their job search beyond just "get an offer". "Get -an- offer" is a goal more typical of a new graduate or someone trying to break into the industry than it is a goal of experienced engineers. To people who are sure they can get a job, there's a big difference between a 150k offer at a company that has none of the workplace traits they want and a 200k offer at a company that they'd genuinely love to work for. And right now, they can't necessarily tell the difference between those jobs before going through a bunch of application steps. The example we mention in the post - of a highly credentialed and very senior engineer who kept having his time wasted by recruiters who refused to admit that they couldn't offer what he was worth - wasn't cherry-picked. It came up organically while we were doing user research, because it's a really common problem, and was echoed further by a number of other senior engineers we spoke to. (Of course, we care about the folks just starting their career, too, so I don't want to totally ignore the importance of solving problems for them. But I think we are solving an important problem for senior devs here, too!)

crooked-v 5y ago

While the constant supply of recruiter contacts and even direct internal company contacts I get is nice, I repeatedly see the sort of basic issues as mentioned in the piece of concealment of or lying about pay (or incredibly broad pay ranges), entirely leaving out information about a job's location even when it's on the other side of the country, trying to offer entirely inappropriate junior positions that I'm never going to be interested in... all stuff that has zero cost to a hiring manager but wastes my time. I could see a lot of usefulness in something to push back against that in a structured way.

wayoutthere 5y ago
On the recruiting side (I’m not a recruiter but a director making a lot of hires), we actually do the opposite all the time — we post relatively senior positions then downlevel whoever we hire to fit their experience level. A lot of people think more highly of themselves than the employment market does. We look at the job posting as a brand marketing — all we’re really trying to do is get you to apply and fill the funnel. The whole hiring process is designed to be a calibration on role, cultural fit, compensation, etc.
- htrp 5y ago
  Downleveling is a flaming trainwreck in almost every case. Seems almost like the bait and switch that the OP company is railing against in the blog post. I'm curious to see how you guys have managed it without disgruntled employees quitting within 18 months.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    We have the conversation about level before we give an offer. It’s genuinely because we don’t want to put someone in a role they’re going to struggle with and be unhappy or burn out. I would much rather underlevel someone starting out and promote them 6 months later than hire them at a higher level and then needing to have the conversation about performance early in their tenure or cut their bonus. I work in consulting so high turnover is just expected. We’re actually a lot lower than the industry average. The job isn’t for everyone, but there are people who thrive in this environment. For everyone else who isn’t a good fit, we get a year or so worth of billable hours, they get exposed to a lot of different scenarios, and we give folks a lot of runway to find something they do like. It’s just the nature of the beast though. If I get a candidate who is legitimately at level, I bring them in at level. There’s no need to be shady about it, but job search sites are what they are and that’s the game you play.

rachofsunshine 5y ago

In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have competing offers, they wouldn't hold the amount of power they do. That being said, the experienced engineers who can get that kind of attention have other desiderata in their job search beyond just "get an offer". "Get -an- offer" is a goal more typical of a new graduate or someone trying to break into the industry than it is a goal of experienced engineers. To people who are sure they can get a job, there's a big difference between a 150k offer at a company that has none of the workplace traits they want and a 200k offer at a company that they'd genuinely love to work for. And right now, they can't necessarily tell the difference between those jobs before going through a bunch of application steps. The example we mention in the post - of a highly credentialed and very senior engineer who kept having his time wasted by recruiters who refused to admit that they couldn't offer what he was worth - wasn't cherry-picked. It came up organically while we were doing user research, because it's a really common problem, and was echoed further by a number of other senior engineers we spoke to. (Of course, we care about the folks just starting their career, too, so I don't want to totally ignore the importance of solving problems for them. But I think we are solving an important problem for senior devs here, too!)