6 ms·

> 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

by 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.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The correct thing to do there is to continue to consult and charge them $HR_IS_DUMB.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      I did, of course :). But eventually the product revision I was consulting on was discontinued, I didn't feel like being a salesperson and a dev anymore, and I slowly found my way back into the traditional job market.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I once applied for a position at a company a friend worked at, and got a rejection less than a day later. I told this to my friend and he presumably got in touch with someone to assure them of my competence, and I got an email with steps to move forward to interviews the next day. HR filters are weird.
htrp 5y ago
>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. I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss. As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.
- celticninja 5y ago
  Our HR just checks if they completed the application correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift. The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is done by developers and so are the interviews.
  - aj3 5y ago
    This sounds like an amazing hiring process. Hopefully it becomes more common.
    - fridif 5y ago
      A CV should not be necessary Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as "cover letter" instead of CV. I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable here. Sorry!
      - celticninja 5y ago
        How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to invite to interview? edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.
        muffinman26 5y ago
yardie 5y ago
This also happened to me. Was seeking promotion for the job I was already doing. But university rules required the job be posted for 30 days. So I wrote the job description and requirements sent it to HR. And submitted my CV, which the job description was based on, into their portal. And was roundly rejected, automatically. My manager spoke with HR to ask what the hell was going on. And found out some politicking was involved and my CV was dumped for a better connected candidate.
- vimy 5y ago
  Did you get the promotion?
  - yardie 5y ago
    Yes. My manager had to intervene. She's the one that told me why I wasn't being forwarded after asking HR.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have strong network effects working for me. I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.
  - zubiaur 5y ago
    It takes time. Some people have a jumpstart, it is true, but there are ways for us who didn't, to build a network of trust. Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to you, stay close with those who help you, and who you helped. Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster. Some start in the middle of it, we started in the periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only keep growing. It's non linear. Something something preferential attachment.
coredog64 5y ago
HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because they were also used for compensation research. It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.
- bombcar 5y ago
  But why would you remove "Windows Network Technology" from a network position? Hehehehehe.
  - dkarl 5y ago
    It's a joke and you're getting downvoted, but that is exactly the kind of reasoning the HR team I was describing would use. Lots of "common sense" like that, but they would use their own "knowledge" to do things like replace "OOP" with "Java." Harmless stuff if they had been working collaboratively (preferably in real time) with hiring managers who could double-check their work, but they were unwilling to do that. They wouldn't even let hiring managers view a req before they published it. And if you suggested that they not change technical terminology and not promote nice to haves to must haves, they acted like you were attacking their professional ability and their right to earn a living.
bambataa 5y ago
Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness capitalism is efficient, right? /s
gurchik 5y ago
I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single person applying. This was a large employer in a small town that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were several years of experience each in Java, Python, and JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages, why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did have those skills were unhappy once they realized they weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis, and be up front with candidates about the job responsibilities. On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug. This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.
jauer 5y ago
FB job reqs are drafted in collaboration with engineering, not imposed by HR (but really they are often copy-pasted and slightly modified from existing). If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment and support" cover those roles). ~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some of us asked why specific items were in the req since they didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals). Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got a lot shorter and less exclusionary. You might note that we tend to not have any education requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees. This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or Ph.D on the other. e.g. zero education requirements section in job reqs for my team: https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/
908B64B197 5y ago
> Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. That means it's too big and time to cut full time employees and hire contractors. If HR are in charge of hiring for technical positions, the company has deep issues...
swiftcoder 5y ago
Yep, we used to do this dance on almost every job posting. Manager sends out the requirements, job posting goes up with completely different requirements, manager spends weeks getting the wording updated to something approximating the original... meantime, all our referrals have been rejected for not meeting the (incorrect) posted requirements.

by dkarl 5y ago

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.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The correct thing to do there is to continue to consult and charge them $HR_IS_DUMB.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    I did, of course :). But eventually the product revision I was consulting on was discontinued, I didn't feel like being a salesperson and a dev anymore, and I slowly found my way back into the traditional job market.
saagarjha 5y ago
I once applied for a position at a company a friend worked at, and got a rejection less than a day later. I told this to my friend and he presumably got in touch with someone to assure them of my competence, and I got an email with steps to move forward to interviews the next day. HR filters are weird.

htrp 5y ago

>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. I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss. As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.

celticninja 5y ago
Our HR just checks if they completed the application correctly, i.e, included a CV and (if requested a covering letter). If they fail this bit they don't get to the sift. The sift of CVs/resumes (to whittle down for interview) is done by developers and so are the interviews.
- aj3 5y ago
  This sounds like an amazing hiring process. Hopefully it becomes more common.
  - fridif 5y ago
    A CV should not be necessary Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as "cover letter" instead of CV. I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable here. Sorry!
    - celticninja 5y ago
      How else can i whittle down 30 applicants to 5 or 6 to invite to interview? edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.
      - muffinman26 5y ago

yardie 5y ago

This also happened to me. Was seeking promotion for the job I was already doing. But university rules required the job be posted for 30 days. So I wrote the job description and requirements sent it to HR. And submitted my CV, which the job description was based on, into their portal. And was roundly rejected, automatically. My manager spoke with HR to ask what the hell was going on. And found out some politicking was involved and my CV was dumped for a better connected candidate.

vimy 5y ago
Did you get the promotion?
- yardie 5y ago
  Yes. My manager had to intervene. She's the one that told me why I wasn't being forwarded after asking HR.
bluefirebrand 5y ago
This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have strong network effects working for me. I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.
- zubiaur 5y ago
  It takes time. Some people have a jumpstart, it is true, but there are ways for us who didn't, to build a network of trust. Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to you, stay close with those who help you, and who you helped. Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster. Some start in the middle of it, we started in the periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only keep growing. It's non linear. Something something preferential attachment.

coredog64 5y ago

HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because they were also used for compensation research. It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.

bombcar 5y ago
But why would you remove "Windows Network Technology" from a network position? Hehehehehe.
- dkarl 5y ago
  It's a joke and you're getting downvoted, but that is exactly the kind of reasoning the HR team I was describing would use. Lots of "common sense" like that, but they would use their own "knowledge" to do things like replace "OOP" with "Java." Harmless stuff if they had been working collaboratively (preferably in real time) with hiring managers who could double-check their work, but they were unwilling to do that. They wouldn't even let hiring managers view a req before they published it. And if you suggested that they not change technical terminology and not promote nice to haves to must haves, they acted like you were attacking their professional ability and their right to earn a living.

bambataa 5y ago

Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness capitalism is efficient, right? /s

gurchik 5y ago

I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single person applying. This was a large employer in a small town that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were several years of experience each in Java, Python, and JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages, why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did have those skills were unhappy once they realized they weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis, and be up front with candidates about the job responsibilities. On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug. This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.

jauer 5y ago

FB job reqs are drafted in collaboration with engineering, not imposed by HR (but really they are often copy-pasted and slightly modified from existing). If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment and support" cover those roles). ~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some of us asked why specific items were in the req since they didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals). Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got a lot shorter and less exclusionary. You might note that we tend to not have any education requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees. This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or Ph.D on the other. e.g. zero education requirements section in job reqs for my team: https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/ https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/

908B64B197 5y ago

> Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. That means it's too big and time to cut full time employees and hire contractors. If HR are in charge of hiring for technical positions, the company has deep issues...

swiftcoder 5y ago

Yep, we used to do this dance on almost every job posting. Manager sends out the requirements, job posting goes up with completely different requirements, manager spends weeks getting the wording updated to something approximating the original... meantime, all our referrals have been rejected for not meeting the (incorrect) posted requirements.