14 ms·

And while I sympathize with your frustration, workers are caught between companies who can't even be bothered to send a rejection form letter anymore, companies

And while I sympathize with your frustration, workers are caught between companies who can't even be bothered to send a rejection form letter anymore, companies posting "ghost jobs", and companies who post such broad salary ranges (if any at all) that they're unusable. Then you roll in the "resume farms" abroad (shady recruiters submitting candidates without approval and who don't match the requirements, so they can net a payday), and it's a nightmare for both sides (workers and employers). Where my sympathy dissipates, though, is the knowledge that workers are merely responding to the ever-increasing demands of employers. It's ultimately up to the employers to fix this mess, because they're the ones who created it in the first place. It might mean an in-person career event to weed out remote candidates, if you're adamant about a local hire, with humans reviewing resumes in-hand, in real time, absent ATS and AI systems getting in the way. It might mean forgoing practical interviews entirely, in favor of better verbal interviews that assess skills and competencies, with hypothetical questions AI can't quickly or reliably answer. And it also might mean rebuilding company loyalty and incentivizing people to stay instead of leave. It might mean reducing the amount of jobs you're posting externally by resuming promoting internally again. It might mean dangling carrots that keep workers from jumping ship every two years to grow wages in a meaningful way. Point is, there's a lot of ways to address this, but the current attitude is "MOAR TECHNOLOGY", which doesn't seem to address either side's core grievances around the hiring and employment processes.

gotoeleven 2y ago
How do employers fix being blasted with resumes from unqualified morons?
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. I applied directly and got ghosted but a month later a 3rd party recruiter reached out to me and I got the same job I applied for. Lots of other jobs have funnels through referrals and networks, people can make recommendations of past colleagues. The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.
  - Viliam1234 2y ago
    For coding interviews, the company could make an application form that gives you three simple coding exercises, the submitted code is automatically tested, and when the tests pass you are asked to upload your CV. When you come to the company, you get two more coding exercises of the same difficulty, if you pass at least one of them, you can talk to a human. (This last step is to turn away the candidates who asked someone else to do the exercises for them.)
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    > The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal. So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years. In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd. Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable: > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game, and employers who need help digging through reams of documents. That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change. If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    > Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary. In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad. > no single employer can fix this either Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.
- xethos 2y ago
  Employers used to promote internally, train and up-skill their people, and strive to keep them around for longer than the two to five year stint that seems to be the average in tech Hiring low-level employees requires less vetting. Upskilling for more senior roles within your own company means you get to skip things like cultural fit (because they presumably already are), work history (it's in the employers own records), and references (that would be the coworkers and managers they already have). Pay enough to keep the ones worth keeping (and increase it with time, to match inflation at minimum), upskill employees, and promote from within, and this problem should pretty well fix itself

gotoeleven 2y ago

How do employers fix being blasted with resumes from unqualified morons?

__turbobrew__ 2y ago
A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. I applied directly and got ghosted but a month later a 3rd party recruiter reached out to me and I got the same job I applied for. Lots of other jobs have funnels through referrals and networks, people can make recommendations of past colleagues. The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  For coding interviews, the company could make an application form that gives you three simple coding exercises, the submitted code is automatically tested, and when the tests pass you are asked to upload your CV. When you come to the company, you get two more coding exercises of the same difficulty, if you pass at least one of them, you can talk to a human. (This last step is to turn away the candidates who asked someone else to do the exercises for them.)
- stego-tech 2y ago
  > The only way to stop people from blasting resumes is to make it cost them something, for example charge $5 — which goes to charity — to apply for the job. That's just more short-termism. It ignores the desperation of the masses for the Middle Class lifestyle they've been promised, in favor of yet-another-hurdle to be jumped over for a chance at a job they need to survive. All you'll end up doing is encouraging further fraud with such a proposal. So what can we try instead? Well for starters, we can focus on reducing the need to seek external applicants in the first place. While labor mobility is critical to a healthy workforce, it's also worth noting that most workers would rather have stability over mobility, all else being equal. People want to work to live, not live to work - and having a reliable job, with a reliable wage that keeps pace with inflation, that enables them to buy a home and pay the bills and maybe take a vacation every year, will keep them from seeking other opportunities elsewhere, thus reducing the overall applicant pool for new positions. Workers are surprisingly fine with their excess value going to Capital, provided they're not having to decide between paying for insulin or rent this month because they haven't had a raise in three years. In addition to decreasing applicant pools by improving job stability and longevity, we can also stop placing arbitrary requirements irrelevant to the position at hand. This sounds counter-intuitive - if you remove the degree requirement from a role, you'll have more applicants - but the reality is that oftentimes workers will pass up roles not requiring a degree because they'll perceive it as being more "junior". This isn't a great idea for every role or business, obviously, and YMMV, but it can be a different way of thinning the herd. Then there's the tried, the true, the oft-reliable: > A lot use recruiters to reach out to talent, that is how I got my current job. Look, in case my comment history doesn't make this glaringly obvious, I'm not great at the whole social networking thing. Recruiters connect highly-effective introverts like myself, with employers who don't want to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals (especially in an era where said referrals are openly traded or sold on forums like Blind). All of my big career moves came through external recruiters, of whom I'm profoundly grateful to for opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I'm generally against outsourcing as a practice, the fact is that a good recruiting firm will save your teams time they can use on meaningful work, and only present candidates to you they feel will meet your needs. Whether or not the employer will trust the recruiter is a topic for another day (I've lost count of the number of times my recruiter, myself, and the customer's PoC all thought I was perfect, but a Director somewhere didn't want to trust outsiders), but it's still arguably one of the better investments a company can make in talent acquisition.
stego-tech 2y ago
Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money, but it's likely to be an order of magnitude less than the cost of ATS systems and AI resume scanners. Recruiters have always been the best path forward, as they serve as valuable "social grease" between high quality applicants who aren't extroverted enough for the network game, and employers who need help digging through reams of documents. That said, I suppose I should amend my conclusion: no single employer can fix this either, as this problem is the collective result of businesses forcing shorter cycles of tenure in general; short-termism, in other words. Your company can make it easier on yourselves by retaining a great recruiting firm or retaining good hires for longer, but you'll still be inundated with a glut of paperwork until and unless other firms do the same thing in large enough quantities to affect real change. If everyone is struggling to keep their heads above water, those dwindling few manning the lifeboats are undoubtedly going to get swarmed.
- eastbound 2y ago
  > Recruiters are the tried-and-true method of thinning the herd effectively. A good recruiter relationship might cost your company some money I know the price: Instead of an ad on LinkedIn (100€ per recruit in 2019), we now pay recruiters 20% of the yearly salary. In France the “salaire brut” is 60k€ → We pay 12k€ before an employee starts working, excluding the time WE spend in interviews. That’s a 12.000% increase over a simple ad. > no single employer can fix this either Yes, thank you for diagnosing the problem! For me, it’s due to LinkedIn. They know perfectly well that bulk-apply-in-1-click is hell. They could fix it in one day.
xethos 2y ago
Employers used to promote internally, train and up-skill their people, and strive to keep them around for longer than the two to five year stint that seems to be the average in tech Hiring low-level employees requires less vetting. Upskilling for more senior roles within your own company means you get to skip things like cultural fit (because they presumably already are), work history (it's in the employers own records), and references (that would be the coworkers and managers they already have). Pay enough to keep the ones worth keeping (and increase it with time, to match inflation at minimum), upskill employees, and promote from within, and this problem should pretty well fix itself