8 ms·

As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programmi

• heavenlyblue 4y ago
  > "I work for the highest bidder" Uhm, I find people like these are actually the easiest to keep. They know their price and define it. You know what to expect.
  • strgcmc 4y ago
    There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not). We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.
    • madrox 4y ago
      This is well said and sums up my experience
    • dilyevsky 4y ago
      > As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s By that same logic most managers also fall into B just like ICs. So that statement is incorrect - Bs are perfect material for empire building and As are usually not
      • deleted 4y ago
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    • opportune 4y ago
      You can’t have all A’s. I’d rather have B’s than a hypothetical C who is just trying to hold down a job and not get fired, or a D who DGAF but isn’t middle of the pack and takes your lower-paying job because it’s the best they could do (sure, the B is basically the same, but at least there is some theoretically higher quality on average).
    • vsareto 4y ago
      You simply won’t get (A) in some industries. People love making things like games, not boring CRUD apps driven by people outside of development who also resemble (B). These views are always short-sighted like that.
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• mbg721 4y ago
  How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.
  • r3012 4y ago
    > How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.
    • mbg721 4y ago
      Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.
      • madrox 4y ago
        I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA. A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.
• eastbound 4y ago
  I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers… You are correct, it’s incredibly hard to detect.
  • richiebful1 4y ago
    Most companies forget how expensive hiring, onboarding and training is. And how rare finding an amazing employee is. Great on you for rewarding him generously for his performance!
  • baobabKoodaa 4y ago
    Can you disclose which company you work for / what your company does?
    • eastbound 4y ago
      Not much, I’d like to remain anonymous, sorry. We’re doing apps for Jira and Confluence Cloud.
  • germinalphrase 4y ago
    For what role did you hire that person?
• CSMastermind 4y ago
  Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates. > Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring. Strongly agree with this point.
• calderwoodra 4y ago
  Maybe this is part of why I got my first job - told my interviewer my plan was to become the CEO