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this does NOT match my experience as an interviewer. Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fi

this does NOT match my experience as an interviewer. Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. I hope the folks we hired are paid enough to retain because there were was absolutely no glut of talent. It was hard to find the folks we wound up hiring. There was a glut of applications, yes, but the vast majority were totally unqualified.

stego-tech 2y ago
So you're confusing your specific requirements with my generalization of "talent". Depending on your specifics, there might not be a glut of talent in that specific field or expertise, but there's still a surplus of domestic college grads unable to find work in their chosen fields, and companies who refuse to pay domestic graduates what they're worth when they can outsource to contractors, MSPs, or offshore work entirely for less. My perspective on this issue is that the reason there's an abundance of candidates in any given application pool is because of a mismatch of expectations between employees and employers, even today. Employers have cultivated an environment where candidates must job hop frequently to grow their earnings, because internal advancement has dried up and employers haven't respected loyalty in decades. This results in a plurality of the workforce "always looking for work", because they see no potential in their current role for growth or advancement; in fact, the whole reason they applied to your role is because they wanted that growth or advancement, and now they have it, so it's time to apply elsewhere for the next step up. I get that this environment totally sucks for both parties, but it's important to note that employers are the only ones who can change the system, since they hold the bulk of the power in individual negotiations. Unfortunately, the current attitude seems to be more of the status quo: more technology to "make it easier to find the best candidates" (thus removing humans from even more of the hiring process), forcing existing workers out (thus increasing the applicant pool), and then bemoaning about their problems on Business News ("too many unqualified applicants") or forums. Applicants didn't create this mess, and we can't fix it.
- dahart 2y ago
  > we can’t fix it Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. At least at Google and Facebook’s doors, anyway. It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well. It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you. Knowing that there is an abundance of low quality applications is useful information. Mismatch of expectations might be an accurate generalization, but arguing the expectations of applicants isn’t part of the problem is not accurate at all. Applicants definitely aim high and spam companies with resumes for jobs they’re not qualified for. I even tell new grads to aim a little higher than the exact job description, but within reason. To be fair, a lot of people don’t know what’s reasonable and don’t know how competitive their cohort is and they have little to lose by taking their chances. The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t get confused by hearing stories. Neither the number of stories you hear, nor the story-teller’s confidence in their take, proves anything about how the business world works. You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop. Companies do promote people, and some companies do respect loyalty. Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    > Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class. > It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well. That is the (unspoken) point I've been trying to make, without being so overt about it. People need more money. Prices keep going up, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages have stubbornly refused to keep historical pace in the long view. The need for ever-growing sums of money just to survive is a key driver in the constant glut of applicants for jobs, one that is exacerbated by the staunch refusal of businesses to pay appropriate wages outside of the tech sector. > It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you. They're really not, though. Employers whine about a lack of qualified domestic candidates as justification for outsourcing jobs or importing migrants on precarious visas, but then also refuse to engage with local Higher Education institutions to "properly train" the candidates they need or contribute to on-the-job training. As the age-old HR koan goes: The CEO asks HR, "What if we pay for job training and they leave?", while HR replies, "What if we don't pay for training and they stay?" There is no zero-sum game being played, here, and the actions of employers do not align with their verbal complaints about the state of job applications and the labor market. They're complaining the basement is flooded while leaving the firehose turned on. > The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today. Yeah, nah. This is a recent trend, and a very recent narrative. In the 2000s and early 2010s, I was still being actively penalized for the appearance of job hopping, in the form of lower salaries and limited upward mobility. That really only began changing in the 2014-2016 window, when suddenly it became more acceptable as most millennials and Xers hadn't exactly had stable careers like our predecessors. In less than a decade, that shift from "job hopping=bad" to "job hopping=acceptable" accelerated to "job hopping=required if you want to survive and thrive". That attitude only came about because the cost of everything kept going up, and up, and up, while our wages and upward mobility stagnated if we stayed put. Loyalty hasn't been rewarded since the 80s, but especially in a post-2008 world, it's been a hindrance to individual success and is solely the fault of employers, not employees. > You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop. I have plenty of first-hand knowledge from my own career, and have second-hand knowledge from the careers of my parents' circles compared to the careers of my senior mentors (Xers), colleagues, and juniors. Add in the data curated by all the other groups trying to sell their own narrative, data gathered by governments, and just casual observations of both domestic and global employment trends, and this isn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach by anyone reasonably well-informed and suitably objective about it. > Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you. It is a fight, though. A fight for everyone to be able to make rent, pay bills, and have a decent quality of life on a full-time job. That's the fight. Such a lifestyle has increasingly been constrained solely to those in Big Tech, especially in urban areas, and it's why there's such a fierce resistance to arbitrary RTO mandates and a willfulness to cheat on exams. Your retorts to me essentially boil down to the age-old propaganda of, "Workers should know their place and follow the rules for their own good," which only works when the rules ensure their basic needs are met. That is not the case, as can be evidenced from even a casual glance at current global events. Populism doesn't arise from peace, love, and good times for all, it arises from a broken system that doesn't satisfy the needs of the masses. That is why hiring is broken, in a nutshell. A good leader understands the system they operate within, its flaws as well as its strengths, and what is or isn't within their ability to fix or improve upon. Individual managers and employers simply cannot fix what amounts to a broken system rooted in short-termism. Sure, working with recruiters can ease the burden, but that also comes at a substantial cost. The point is that the usual refrains in self-help books or "visionary thought leaders" don't work when the system itself is at fault, and that's very much the case here. It's not possible to eliminate cheating solely through discipline; rather, the system must be amended such that there's little to no incentive to cheat in the first place. Right now, there's every incentive to cheat the system when it could lift you out of poverty or give you a substantially improved quality of life, and that's why it's on the rise professionally today, just as it was in academia not a decade ago. Desperation is the root cause of a multitude of negative outcomes. To reduce those outcomes, you must reduce the amount of desperation in a society.
Glyptodon 2y ago
It's often not clear what qualifications for a role really are - I think most of us have accepted roles where we had to learn "required" things on the job. Or where one of the requirements was a joke, liking knowing how to use some random tool or software (internal wiki, expensing system, etc.) that anyone could pick up in 15 minutes. Especially in tech. I've personally gotten jobs in languages I didn't know yet a couple times. I do agree that for any given job a large chunk of applicants are people who have no business applying (IE barely capable coding themselves out of a paper bag or didn't read the job description), but there's always a long tail of plausible applicants if the job isn't a trash posting.
aguaviva 2y ago
Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. Except you don't always simply know they weren't qualified. Only that they didn't pass your filter. I know, I know: In many cases, it's reasonably clear the candidate simply isn't even ballpark qualified. But when we get to "maybe" territory, the recall-precision gap, and hence room for false negatives, is also quite large.

stego-tech 2y ago

So you're confusing your specific requirements with my generalization of "talent". Depending on your specifics, there might not be a glut of talent in that specific field or expertise, but there's still a surplus of domestic college grads unable to find work in their chosen fields, and companies who refuse to pay domestic graduates what they're worth when they can outsource to contractors, MSPs, or offshore work entirely for less. My perspective on this issue is that the reason there's an abundance of candidates in any given application pool is because of a mismatch of expectations between employees and employers, even today. Employers have cultivated an environment where candidates must job hop frequently to grow their earnings, because internal advancement has dried up and employers haven't respected loyalty in decades. This results in a plurality of the workforce "always looking for work", because they see no potential in their current role for growth or advancement; in fact, the whole reason they applied to your role is because they wanted that growth or advancement, and now they have it, so it's time to apply elsewhere for the next step up. I get that this environment totally sucks for both parties, but it's important to note that employers are the only ones who can change the system, since they hold the bulk of the power in individual negotiations. Unfortunately, the current attitude seems to be more of the status quo: more technology to "make it easier to find the best candidates" (thus removing humans from even more of the hiring process), forcing existing workers out (thus increasing the applicant pool), and then bemoaning about their problems on Business News ("too many unqualified applicants") or forums. Applicants didn't create this mess, and we can't fix it.

dahart 2y ago
> we can’t fix it Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. At least at Google and Facebook’s doors, anyway. It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well. It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you. Knowing that there is an abundance of low quality applications is useful information. Mismatch of expectations might be an accurate generalization, but arguing the expectations of applicants isn’t part of the problem is not accurate at all. Applicants definitely aim high and spam companies with resumes for jobs they’re not qualified for. I even tell new grads to aim a little higher than the exact job description, but within reason. To be fair, a lot of people don’t know what’s reasonable and don’t know how competitive their cohort is and they have little to lose by taking their chances. The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Don’t get confused by hearing stories. Neither the number of stories you hear, nor the story-teller’s confidence in their take, proves anything about how the business world works. You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop. Companies do promote people, and some companies do respect loyalty. Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear. Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class. > It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well. That is the (unspoken) point I've been trying to make, without being so overt about it. People need more money. Prices keep going up, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages have stubbornly refused to keep historical pace in the long view. The need for ever-growing sums of money just to survive is a key driver in the constant glut of applicants for jobs, one that is exacerbated by the staunch refusal of businesses to pay appropriate wages outside of the tech sector. > It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you. They're really not, though. Employers whine about a lack of qualified domestic candidates as justification for outsourcing jobs or importing migrants on precarious visas, but then also refuse to engage with local Higher Education institutions to "properly train" the candidates they need or contribute to on-the-job training. As the age-old HR koan goes: The CEO asks HR, "What if we pay for job training and they leave?", while HR replies, "What if we don't pay for training and they stay?" There is no zero-sum game being played, here, and the actions of employers do not align with their verbal complaints about the state of job applications and the labor market. They're complaining the basement is flooded while leaving the firehose turned on. > The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today. Yeah, nah. This is a recent trend, and a very recent narrative. In the 2000s and early 2010s, I was still being actively penalized for the appearance of job hopping, in the form of lower salaries and limited upward mobility. That really only began changing in the 2014-2016 window, when suddenly it became more acceptable as most millennials and Xers hadn't exactly had stable careers like our predecessors. In less than a decade, that shift from "job hopping=bad" to "job hopping=acceptable" accelerated to "job hopping=required if you want to survive and thrive". That attitude only came about because the cost of everything kept going up, and up, and up, while our wages and upward mobility stagnated if we stayed put. Loyalty hasn't been rewarded since the 80s, but especially in a post-2008 world, it's been a hindrance to individual success and is solely the fault of employers, not employees. > You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop. I have plenty of first-hand knowledge from my own career, and have second-hand knowledge from the careers of my parents' circles compared to the careers of my senior mentors (Xers), colleagues, and juniors. Add in the data curated by all the other groups trying to sell their own narrative, data gathered by governments, and just casual observations of both domestic and global employment trends, and this isn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach by anyone reasonably well-informed and suitably objective about it. > Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you. It is a fight, though. A fight for everyone to be able to make rent, pay bills, and have a decent quality of life on a full-time job. That's the fight. Such a lifestyle has increasingly been constrained solely to those in Big Tech, especially in urban areas, and it's why there's such a fierce resistance to arbitrary RTO mandates and a willfulness to cheat on exams. Your retorts to me essentially boil down to the age-old propaganda of, "Workers should know their place and follow the rules for their own good," which only works when the rules ensure their basic needs are met. That is not the case, as can be evidenced from even a casual glance at current global events. Populism doesn't arise from peace, love, and good times for all, it arises from a broken system that doesn't satisfy the needs of the masses. That is why hiring is broken, in a nutshell. A good leader understands the system they operate within, its flaws as well as its strengths, and what is or isn't within their ability to fix or improve upon. Individual managers and employers simply cannot fix what amounts to a broken system rooted in short-termism. Sure, working with recruiters can ease the burden, but that also comes at a substantial cost. The point is that the usual refrains in self-help books or "visionary thought leaders" don't work when the system itself is at fault, and that's very much the case here. It's not possible to eliminate cheating solely through discipline; rather, the system must be amended such that there's little to no incentive to cheat in the first place. Right now, there's every incentive to cheat the system when it could lift you out of poverty or give you a substantially improved quality of life, and that's why it's on the rise professionally today, just as it was in academia not a decade ago. Desperation is the root cause of a multitude of negative outcomes. To reduce those outcomes, you must reduce the amount of desperation in a society.

Glyptodon 2y ago

It's often not clear what qualifications for a role really are - I think most of us have accepted roles where we had to learn "required" things on the job. Or where one of the requirements was a joke, liking knowing how to use some random tool or software (internal wiki, expensing system, etc.) that anyone could pick up in 15 minutes. Especially in tech. I've personally gotten jobs in languages I didn't know yet a couple times. I do agree that for any given job a large chunk of applicants are people who have no business applying (IE barely capable coding themselves out of a paper bag or didn't read the job description), but there's always a long tail of plausible applicants if the job isn't a trash posting.

aguaviva 2y ago

Our company went through piles of candidates who were not qualified and it took us months to find a good fit after going through hundreds of resumes and scores of interviews. Except you don't always simply know they weren't qualified. Only that they didn't pass your filter. I know, I know: In many cases, it's reasonably clear the candidate simply isn't even ballpark qualified. But when we get to "maybe" territory, the recall-precision gap, and hence room for false negatives, is also quite large.