52 ms·

General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the pers

General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive. (Though honestly, I don't think this general comment applies to the job post in Carmack's tweet. Honestly I can't fault the job post for the way it was worded. I say the higher you are in an SE-org chain, the less this is a problem.)

Aeolun 5y ago
In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I don’t know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document so badly.
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's a skill set requirement on the HR position's miminum standards.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job. That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason. Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time. On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you mentioned.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  >You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the language) & not a language by itself.
  - dtech 5y ago
    Why did you feel the need to be pedantic about that? It's not a strange question to ask if someone has experience in Blub 7 or its popular framework Blubbimate.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. Then remove them? It says “Minimum Requirements”. It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what they’re doing at these companies, then we can only conclude they’re doing it on purpose.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    Incredibly cynical. What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that. This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"
krick 5y ago
I'm not sure the answer to that could be generalized, probably depends on the company and HRs in question. I, for one, had a very difficult time explaining to HRs that I don't care if a candidate had any experience with PHP whatsoever (it was the "main" language in that company), given he is simply ready to use it in a future job. I'm pretty sure they felt like they know better than me. Apparently, the idea that being good in programming and being proficient with a specific language are quite tangentially related skills is difficult to grasp. I can only hope that other HRs in other companies are a bit more useful.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  For certain things HR considers it set in stone. For example, when dealing with accounting jobs, they'll sometimes ask for specific certifications. We've ended up just basically saying "3 years experience with developing software" and shoved everything else into "some of the following would be nice".
- magpieengineer 5y ago
  I wonder if the problem is calling them programming 'languages'. Learning a new human language is hard, learning a new programming language not so much. You wouldn't hire someone for a job requiring Spanish if they spoke Russian instead. For non-technical people the metaphor around 'languages' might be confusing.
eatonphil 5y ago
I am very explicit with any screeners I use that any of these X languages or databases are qualifiers for the job. I haven't really had any issues finding folks with experience outside of our stack when doing this.
giantg2 5y ago
You mention accurate description reducing the candidate pool, which I can agree with when it gets long. Another big issue is the lack of precision in the description. When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? And then do that for 10 out of the 10 listed competencies/technologies? Who determines if I'm highly motivated? The specs they list are simply not realistic and ask for everything and the kitchen sink. Candidates have seen through this BS and just apply to anything that might possibly fit them. This means that companies get a ton of underqualified candidates. If they were just real and cut the BS, that could make the whole process more efficient. Dont even get me started in "5 years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 3 years or less. Reading job posts is probably something I hate even more interviews. At least in interviews you can have a conversation and get some questions answered.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? For me? Never. For my agency? As soon as I complete a single job well.
xroche 5y ago
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening Here's your mistake. Don't involve HR except to sign paperwork.
- ajross 5y ago
  Here's your mistake. Now you have your product engineers screening a thousand resumes every week and doing endless phone interviews. Yes, HR is bad at hiring engineers. Nonetheless hiring engineers is a lot of work, and engineering departments need someone somewhere to take that load. The solution is hard[1], but at the end of the day needs to be something much closer to "better HR" than "don't involve HR". [1] And something very few large companies have cracked. Small outfits can usually get by with networking via their existing staff, but that doesn't scale well and leads to feedback effects like toxic monocultures.
dkarl 5y ago
> Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive. It depends on the HR department. Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him. He resorted to this after he informally recruited a new hire, wrote a job description specifically targeted at them, and then, after waiting two weeks for their application to filter through the system, found out that HR round-filed it because they supposedly weren't qualified. HR refused to collaborate with him on editing job descriptions, so every time he submitted one, he had to check every day until he found out what garbage they posted so he could go beg them to fix it. They would randomly add technologies and "change the wording" of desired qualifications (how do you "change the wording" of proper nouns and jargon from somebody else's field?) and they were especially fond of turning nice-to-haves into absolute requirements because we supposedly didn't have enough. My boss was convinced they were under pressure to filter out a target percentage of applicants, because he begged them to just pass all the resumes to him, and they refused, hence his cloak-and-dagger tactics to get his hands on them.
- faster 5y ago
  That just happened to me! I have been a contractor at a Fortune 50 company for a while and they opened a position for the job I'm doing. I applied and was rejected by the HR algorithm (the rejection email came about 2 minutes after I submitted my application so I seriously doubt that any humans were involved). The job site I had to apply through was taleo.net. Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies. They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I had a similar experience years ago. I was bootstrapping a startup and using consulting to pay the bills in lean months. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to reach my market without massive investment to keep up with the PR of the 800lb gorillas, and I didn't want to go that route. One of the engineering managers I had been working with as a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from the engineering manager.
mmmBacon 5y ago
As much as we all love to blame HR it is unfair to put this on HR. The hiring manager writes the job description and comes up with the requirements. In many cases these job descriptions are written by a senior IC and the hiring manager just massages.
taffronaut 5y ago
The missing step can be that in a large company HR needs to assign a grade/job type to the role before they advertise it and these are standardised typically with respect to both education qualification and years of experience. The combination of the hiring managers spec and the HR grade/type definition is what gets posted. This is usually the cause of a job asking for pointless qualifications or more years of experience than a given technology has existed.
mywittyname 5y ago
I work super closely with recruitment and HR to ensure this doesn't happen. If they are unsure of a candidate, they just send a quick note on slack asking for a thumbs up/down on them. Honestly, after a year or so of experience, they kind of learn what technologies are analogs to the ones we use. We recently had a person who did COBOL apply, which through recruiting for a loop. I do get frustrated with the way our engineering manager write job descriptions. Especially since they can be wishy-washy on what they actually want (early on, candidate is good, but later on, mgmt wants more experience). It's been even worse recently as they've been just throwing out seemingly random job titles in order to just get candidates to bite. So I go for an interview and see they are applying for a job title like "data science engineer," and when I ask the manager wtf that is, they say, oh, that's your position (def NOT data science), but that job title gets more applicants. I used to think HR was the problem, but the more I make sausage, the more I realize that engineering managers are a big part of the problem.
dharmab 5y ago
> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. We once had an open position on a team that was tied to our office in a lower-population city in a low-population US state. The wording of our listing made it clear that the list of technologies was mostly "nice to have" and not strictly required. The first recruiter just punched in all the technologies into LinkedIn search and sent a form message to everyone that matched and already lived near the office. The result: My entire team got emails offering them to interview themselves for their own jobs.
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  This is very common. I work as a contractor, and recruiters (for permanent and contracting work) very often contact me to work in projects I am already in. I mean it makes sense, living close by is one of the major bonuses when I decide to take a project; the farther away the less likely I'll take it - especially since the companies usually have a fixed hourly rate in mind, and the farther I live away the less likely I would be able to compete with local contractors that can offer lower rates - so I don't even waste time to go through the application process.
gwbas1c 5y ago
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Part (but not all) of the problem is resume spam. There's a small amount of people who apply for every job under the sun, even though they aren't qualified. That, IMO, is what HR resume filtering should be: Making sure someone isn't just spamming their resume. Otherwise, the "We use FooLang, so your X years of experience with BarLang is okay" really is a decision the hiring manager needs to make. [Edit] Ideally, HR should know enough to not pass along a resume from someone who just completed a 3-month coding bootcamp for an architect-level position.
darksaints 5y ago
I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs with anything more specific than a generic software engineer description, because they rely on having a general pool of applicants that they can shuffle around to different teams. While that might work for most software teams, my team has a couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we typically consider their entire first year to be a training year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a well experienced senior level engineer. So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience with geospatial information systems and standards. Or experience with constraint programming or other forms of mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp standards. And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively, unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.
Scoundreller 5y ago
> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. I call this fingerprinting. If there’s 5 different choices for each layer and there’s 5 different layers, assuming an even distribution, there’s 3k combinations right there. If you require that combo, you’ve just eliminated 99.97% of candidates. It’s not just an IT problem. “We want someone with experience in (already niche industry) but uses our (unusual choice of) system”. I get the problem you’re trying to solve with a shovel-ready candidate, but…
CodeMage 5y ago
> General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. Perhaps the solution is to not always aim for the narrowest possible fit. There are many people who would like an opportunity to learn new things and grow. I understand that this thinking can't be applied to all positions. If, for example, you want to bring in someone new to your company and put them in charge of "everything Foo-related", then you need someone with suitable experience in Foo. However, too many companies tend to extend that too far down the ladder.
gentleman11 5y ago
I was turned down in screening interviews last week for not enough experience in tools - hr thought were critical but they clearly weren’t. Why use non technical hr?
jimnotgym 5y ago
This! I am trying to find front end devs to work on an Electron app, using react. Recruiter is ignoring people with Node/ React or Vue, angular etc and just replying that there are no candidates!
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I find it insane that HR is interfering with engineering hiring. In all my jobs we ALWAYS sidestepped HR to do any form of hiring, even though we used recruiters which had their own ways of sourcing candidates (that was mainly useful to get candidates of a certain race and gender to fill in diversity quotas). The CTO has the budget and agrees benefits with HR. After that the job post and ways of sourcing candidates is through the engineering team. Once we do an offer, the ball is back to HR and they finalise the contract / bureaucracy.

Aeolun 5y ago

In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I don’t know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document so badly.

dylan604 5y ago
That's a skill set requirement on the HR position's miminum standards.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job. That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason. Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time. On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.

ipaddr 5y ago
Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you mentioned.
srvmshr 5y ago
>You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the language) & not a language by itself.
- dtech 5y ago
  Why did you feel the need to be pedantic about that? It's not a strange question to ask if someone has experience in Blub 7 or its popular framework Blubbimate.
ctvo 5y ago
> That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position. Then remove them? It says “Minimum Requirements”. It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what they’re doing at these companies, then we can only conclude they’re doing it on purpose.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Incredibly cynical. What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that. This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"

krick 5y ago

I'm not sure the answer to that could be generalized, probably depends on the company and HRs in question. I, for one, had a very difficult time explaining to HRs that I don't care if a candidate had any experience with PHP whatsoever (it was the "main" language in that company), given he is simply ready to use it in a future job. I'm pretty sure they felt like they know better than me. Apparently, the idea that being good in programming and being proficient with a specific language are quite tangentially related skills is difficult to grasp. I can only hope that other HRs in other companies are a bit more useful.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
For certain things HR considers it set in stone. For example, when dealing with accounting jobs, they'll sometimes ask for specific certifications. We've ended up just basically saying "3 years experience with developing software" and shoved everything else into "some of the following would be nice".
magpieengineer 5y ago
I wonder if the problem is calling them programming 'languages'. Learning a new human language is hard, learning a new programming language not so much. You wouldn't hire someone for a job requiring Spanish if they spoke Russian instead. For non-technical people the metaphor around 'languages' might be confusing.

eatonphil 5y ago

I am very explicit with any screeners I use that any of these X languages or databases are qualifiers for the job. I haven't really had any issues finding folks with experience outside of our stack when doing this.

giantg2 5y ago

You mention accurate description reducing the candidate pool, which I can agree with when it gets long. Another big issue is the lack of precision in the description. When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? And then do that for 10 out of the 10 listed competencies/technologies? Who determines if I'm highly motivated? The specs they list are simply not realistic and ask for everything and the kitchen sink. Candidates have seen through this BS and just apply to anything that might possibly fit them. This means that companies get a ton of underqualified candidates. If they were just real and cut the BS, that could make the whole process more efficient. Dont even get me started in "5 years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 3 years or less. Reading job posts is probably something I hate even more interviews. At least in interviews you can have a conversation and get some questions answered.

pessimizer 5y ago
> When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? For me? Never. For my agency? As soon as I complete a single job well.

xroche 5y ago

> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening Here's your mistake. Don't involve HR except to sign paperwork.

ajross 5y ago
Here's your mistake. Now you have your product engineers screening a thousand resumes every week and doing endless phone interviews. Yes, HR is bad at hiring engineers. Nonetheless hiring engineers is a lot of work, and engineering departments need someone somewhere to take that load. The solution is hard[1], but at the end of the day needs to be something much closer to "better HR" than "don't involve HR". [1] And something very few large companies have cracked. Small outfits can usually get by with networking via their existing staff, but that doesn't scale well and leads to feedback effects like toxic monocultures.

dkarl 5y ago

> Could it be then that this is a communication problem between the Engineering team and the HRD? After all, the Eng'g team writes the requirements for the job post, HRD just checks it and makes it look attractive. It depends on the HR department. Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him. He resorted to this after he informally recruited a new hire, wrote a job description specifically targeted at them, and then, after waiting two weeks for their application to filter through the system, found out that HR round-filed it because they supposedly weren't qualified. HR refused to collaborate with him on editing job descriptions, so every time he submitted one, he had to check every day until he found out what garbage they posted so he could go beg them to fix it. They would randomly add technologies and "change the wording" of desired qualifications (how do you "change the wording" of proper nouns and jargon from somebody else's field?) and they were especially fond of turning nice-to-haves into absolute requirements because we supposedly didn't have enough. My boss was convinced they were under pressure to filter out a target percentage of applicants, because he begged them to just pass all the resumes to him, and they refused, hence his cloak-and-dagger tactics to get his hands on them.

faster 5y ago
That just happened to me! I have been a contractor at a Fortune 50 company for a while and they opened a position for the job I'm doing. I applied and was rejected by the HR algorithm (the rejection email came about 2 minutes after I submitted my application so I seriously doubt that any humans were involved). The job site I had to apply through was taleo.net. Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies. They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I had a similar experience years ago. I was bootstrapping a startup and using consulting to pay the bills in lean months. Eventually I decided that I wasn't going to reach my market without massive investment to keep up with the PR of the 800lb gorillas, and I didn't want to go that route. One of the engineering managers I had been working with as a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from the engineering manager.

mmmBacon 5y ago

As much as we all love to blame HR it is unfair to put this on HR. The hiring manager writes the job description and comes up with the requirements. In many cases these job descriptions are written by a senior IC and the hiring manager just massages.

taffronaut 5y ago

The missing step can be that in a large company HR needs to assign a grade/job type to the role before they advertise it and these are standardised typically with respect to both education qualification and years of experience. The combination of the hiring managers spec and the HR grade/type definition is what gets posted. This is usually the cause of a job asking for pointless qualifications or more years of experience than a given technology has existed.

mywittyname 5y ago

I work super closely with recruitment and HR to ensure this doesn't happen. If they are unsure of a candidate, they just send a quick note on slack asking for a thumbs up/down on them. Honestly, after a year or so of experience, they kind of learn what technologies are analogs to the ones we use. We recently had a person who did COBOL apply, which through recruiting for a loop. I do get frustrated with the way our engineering manager write job descriptions. Especially since they can be wishy-washy on what they actually want (early on, candidate is good, but later on, mgmt wants more experience). It's been even worse recently as they've been just throwing out seemingly random job titles in order to just get candidates to bite. So I go for an interview and see they are applying for a job title like "data science engineer," and when I ask the manager wtf that is, they say, oh, that's your position (def NOT data science), but that job title gets more applicants. I used to think HR was the problem, but the more I make sausage, the more I realize that engineering managers are a big part of the problem.

dharmab 5y ago

> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. We once had an open position on a team that was tied to our office in a lower-population city in a low-population US state. The wording of our listing made it clear that the list of technologies was mostly "nice to have" and not strictly required. The first recruiter just punched in all the technologies into LinkedIn search and sent a form message to everyone that matched and already lived near the office. The result: My entire team got emails offering them to interview themselves for their own jobs.

littlecranky67 5y ago
This is very common. I work as a contractor, and recruiters (for permanent and contracting work) very often contact me to work in projects I am already in. I mean it makes sense, living close by is one of the major bonuses when I decide to take a project; the farther away the less likely I'll take it - especially since the companies usually have a fixed hourly rate in mind, and the farther I live away the less likely I would be able to compete with local contractors that can offer lower rates - so I don't even waste time to go through the application process.

gwbas1c 5y ago

> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team. Part (but not all) of the problem is resume spam. There's a small amount of people who apply for every job under the sun, even though they aren't qualified. That, IMO, is what HR resume filtering should be: Making sure someone isn't just spamming their resume. Otherwise, the "We use FooLang, so your X years of experience with BarLang is okay" really is a decision the hiring manager needs to make. [Edit] Ideally, HR should know enough to not pass along a resume from someone who just completed a 3-month coding bootcamp for an architect-level position.

darksaints 5y ago

I'd like to point out that that is exactly what you want to do sometimes. Our HR department absolutely refuses to put out reqs with anything more specific than a generic software engineer description, because they rely on having a general pool of applicants that they can shuffle around to different teams. While that might work for most software teams, my team has a couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we typically consider their entire first year to be a training year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a well experienced senior level engineer. So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience with geospatial information systems and standards. Or experience with constraint programming or other forms of mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp standards. And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively, unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.

Scoundreller 5y ago

> You might even find that your candidate pool is exactly the people you are already working with. I call this fingerprinting. If there’s 5 different choices for each layer and there’s 5 different layers, assuming an even distribution, there’s 3k combinations right there. If you require that combo, you’ve just eliminated 99.97% of candidates. It’s not just an IT problem. “We want someone with experience in (already niche industry) but uses our (unusual choice of) system”. I get the problem you’re trying to solve with a shovel-ready candidate, but…

CodeMage 5y ago

> General SE hiring comment: One thing I realized, for most IT/SE jobs, the more accurately you describe your current stack in the requirements (or maybe the person you are replacing), the smaller your candidate pool is. Perhaps the solution is to not always aim for the narrowest possible fit. There are many people who would like an opportunity to learn new things and grow. I understand that this thinking can't be applied to all positions. If, for example, you want to bring in someone new to your company and put them in charge of "everything Foo-related", then you need someone with suitable experience in Foo. However, too many companies tend to extend that too far down the ladder.

gentleman11 5y ago

I was turned down in screening interviews last week for not enough experience in tools - hr thought were critical but they clearly weren’t. Why use non technical hr?

jimnotgym 5y ago

This! I am trying to find front end devs to work on an Electron app, using react. Recruiter is ignoring people with Node/ React or Vue, angular etc and just replying that there are no candidates!

jokethrowaway 5y ago

I find it insane that HR is interfering with engineering hiring. In all my jobs we ALWAYS sidestepped HR to do any form of hiring, even though we used recruiters which had their own ways of sourcing candidates (that was mainly useful to get candidates of a certain race and gender to fill in diversity quotas). The CTO has the budget and agrees benefits with HR. After that the job post and ways of sourcing candidates is through the engineering team. Once we do an offer, the ball is back to HR and they finalise the contract / bureaucracy.