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How about kitchen sink technology lists? These tell me two things about a potential employer. First, their HR department uses keyword matching to filter resumes

How about kitchen sink technology lists? These tell me two things about a potential employer. First, their HR department uses keyword matching to filter resumes. Second, the person writing the JD is inexperienced or has an extremely low hiring bar.

vonmoltke 12y ago
Low hiring bar? Kitchen sink "requirements" give me the impression that they are looking for a magical unicorn.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Have a look at the ads wanting several years of experience coding in Swift. (Apple has only supported it for about three months now.) When MS first shipped C++ for windows, quite commonly the recruiters wanted candidates with five years of windows C++ experience.
  - cratermoon 12y ago
    That sort of thing seems to happen when the folks writing the job posting attempt to take the actual requirements from the hiring manager and rewrite them to some standard format. A manager might want "someone who knows C++ for Windows" and "someone who is intermediate in experience". The HR person will look up "intermediate" and see "minimum 5 years" and then glue it onto the technology. Has anyone ever had a favorable experience working with a hiring company or recruiter that is especially particular about how many years of experience a candidate has in some technology? Exactly how much a programmers knows isn't directly dependent on how long the programmer has been working with the tool. There is such a thing as "1 year of experience 5 times".
- zerotolerance 12y ago
  The impression that I get is that people with weak technical hiring skills use these lists as a proxy metric. It would be impossible to validate any claim that an applicant can demonstrate proficiency with all the skills in the list and equally unimportant. These people just want someone to walk up to them and lie. If they can't evaluate the quality of the people they hire, they've already hired shitty engineers and I don't want to work with them.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
    Interesting perspective I had not thought of before. It aligns with my one and only experience with a professional resume writer, who took my resume and fluffed it up with exaggerations and borderline lies.

vonmoltke 12y ago

Low hiring bar? Kitchen sink "requirements" give me the impression that they are looking for a magical unicorn.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Have a look at the ads wanting several years of experience coding in Swift. (Apple has only supported it for about three months now.) When MS first shipped C++ for windows, quite commonly the recruiters wanted candidates with five years of windows C++ experience.
- cratermoon 12y ago
  That sort of thing seems to happen when the folks writing the job posting attempt to take the actual requirements from the hiring manager and rewrite them to some standard format. A manager might want "someone who knows C++ for Windows" and "someone who is intermediate in experience". The HR person will look up "intermediate" and see "minimum 5 years" and then glue it onto the technology. Has anyone ever had a favorable experience working with a hiring company or recruiter that is especially particular about how many years of experience a candidate has in some technology? Exactly how much a programmers knows isn't directly dependent on how long the programmer has been working with the tool. There is such a thing as "1 year of experience 5 times".
zerotolerance 12y ago
The impression that I get is that people with weak technical hiring skills use these lists as a proxy metric. It would be impossible to validate any claim that an applicant can demonstrate proficiency with all the skills in the list and equally unimportant. These people just want someone to walk up to them and lie. If they can't evaluate the quality of the people they hire, they've already hired shitty engineers and I don't want to work with them.
- vonmoltke 12y ago
  Interesting perspective I had not thought of before. It aligns with my one and only experience with a professional resume writer, who took my resume and fluffed it up with exaggerations and borderline lies.