7 ms·
Seen that job listing for a while, its no coincidence
- s_dev 11y agoI personally have little confidence in job postings that I've seen available for at least three months. Similarly with apartments rentals - in a market where developers and apartments are high in demand I usually see it as a red flag if a job or apartment has been available for three or more months. It begs the questions - why didn't others take it? I never considered that the average interview process is getting longer.
- vkjv 11y agoThis fails to take into consideration a growing team. We have had a single job listing open well over a year, but that single listing at one point represented 7 open positions. It's interesting to see this possible view. We might be better off posting duplicates to make this nuance more obvious.
- jerf 11y agoEven just an annotation "This post represents multiple open positions" might be good. It also directly sends a message you want to send ("we're growing and hiring lots!"), instead of implicitly by number of listings, which might be missed by a candidate doing searches.
- surge 11y agoProbably saves money where most job listing sites post per listing. You can simply list that you're hiring for multiple open positions in the listing itself.
- dagw 11y agoThe other difference between job postings and apartment rentals is that only one person can rent an apartment, but lots of people can be employed to the same position. You could have same ad out for 6 month, and over that time hire 5-10 people.
- madcaptenor 11y agoOnly one person can rent an apartment, but a large apartment complex will have many similar apartments that could be fairly represented by the same ad.
- ufmace 11y agoI have thought that too - if they keep the same listing up for too long, I may wonder if there's some reason why they can't hire and/or keep employees. If your company is actually trying to fill multiple identical positions, it's probably best to make that clear somehow - that they're growing rapidly and the listing isn't for a specific position so much as that they're always open to hiring anybody who has the right qualifications.
- pjc50 11y agoSome long-term job listings, especially the vague ones, are dummies put there by recruitment firms who are keen to get you on their books.
- to3m 11y agoThis would be my instant assumption as well! Perhaps too many people are now wise to this? And so recruitment firms have had to arrange for articles (such as this one) to muddy the waters ;)
- arethuza 11y agoAnother tiresome tactic that recruitment firms use is to leave up ads for roles that were actually filled months ago - either to attract CVs and/or make them look busier than they actually are. Edit: There's probably a book waiting to be written on the dodgy tactics of recruitment firms. Mind you, I became a bit less harsh on individual recruiters when I was in an office that shared a floor of a building with a recruitment firm and got to see how they treated their staff. They were too cheap to hire meeting rooms when they were doing staff reviews so we regularly had people getting complete bollockings in the shared kitchen area - which isn't much fun to witness and a pretty ghastly way to treat your own staff.
- fecak 11y agoI've been recruiting for almost 20 years and have been considering writing a book about various tactics. My blog regularly exposes some of the recruiter tricks and strategies on topics from counteroffers to candidate control. If I become convinced there would be even modest demand, I'd write it.
- arethuza 11y agoI love this book "exposing" management consulting: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consulting-Machine/dp/1872188060 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consul... I'd like to read an equivalent for recruiters and as more people encounter recruiters than management consultants I expect the audience would be much larger!
- gumby 11y ago> “The jobs disappearing from the economy are routine, really simple jobs. The kind of jobs that are booming are jobs that take lots of judgment and creativity. They’re harder to hire for and so it takes longer.” Funny they ended with this. It makes some sense. The inverse is true too (for a truck driver, one can do more investigation to see if she has a safe & trustworthy background for instance) but certainly it takes more work to hire a developer than a retail salesperson.
- aidos 11y ago23% of interviews have a drug test. What's the incentive behind that?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoTo avoid addictive folks who will have a high incidence of no-show when on a binge. Or long absences while in jail.
- aidos 11y agoI can imagine what the theory is, but does it make sense in practice? Do you know which industries it tends to apply to? Would a developer be asked to take a drug test? It's interesting, because I've worked with a lot of people in a lot of places over the years and I've never seen drugs as a problem that impedes workplace attendance / performance. Alcohol / hangovers, sure - plenty of times - but they're not testing for that, right?
- tbomb 11y agoI'm not sure they can test for alcohol since it is federally legal (I know that most places would test for on the job incidents however. I'm meaning it in a "drug test" style screening). Aside from that, I'm not sure how long you can find traces of it in your system. I wouldn't guess it to be longer than 48 hours. EDIT: parentheses content.
- spacemanmatt 11y agoCO allowed a company to fire an employee for testing positive for THC. It's fully legal there.
- vonmoltke 11y agoAlso, health care companies have been allowed to prohibit employees from using tobacco.
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- mayukh 11y agosome long-term job listings come from: > the larger companies are for roles where there is constant churn (or growth) and they need to keep the pipeline of active candidates warm > As mentioned already, spammy recruiters looking to collect cv's Also: > Companies are in-undated with applications and really can't separate the wheat from the chaff. They have thousands of resumes for one or two job openings because its so easy now to apply online and click submit. Perversely the harder they make it to apply online, causes those most in need of a job to jump through hoops to fill out a complete application Tried hiring help on a local jobs board I was swamped and astounded with volume and eagerness of the responses. Ended up going with someone who was recommended by a friend as I didn't have the resources to process and filter the applications
- auxym 11y agoAs a fresh grad interviewing for (real, non-internship) jobs for the first time, I'm really surprised at how long the hiring process is. The article mentions 23 days average. I'm currently interviewing for a BigCo where I already had done an internship, so they knew me. After I contacted my former supervisor, it took him 2 weeks of wrestling bureaucracy to open a position, then HR insists on collecting CVs for 4 weeks, after which I got a phone screen. HR lady told me she would be phone screening for 2 weeks before passing on the CVs to the hiring manager who would contact people for in person interviews. I'm finally scheduled for an interview next week. But really, 60 days before even interviewing a candidate they already have experience with? I'm surprised they even manage to hire people before they are extended another offer. But then again, this is not programming.
- jackgavigan 11y agoHR are a major problem in many large companies. Oftentimes, they're lazy (outsourcing most of their job to expensive recruiters and agencies), obstructive (creating all manner of stupid, bureaucratic, red-tape hoops you have to jump through before they'll approve whatever it is you're trying to do), and add zero value to the actual process of recruiting an employee. My hat of HR know no limit.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoSounds like they are working on job security in the same way a developer does when he make undocumented code only he can understand. Considering how many developers actually think like that, it shouldn't be surprising to see this in HR as well. Some places where I've worked at, if you fail to hire (say you select a candidate and they get a better offer), you have to start all over at square 1. Square 1 being justifying to HR why you need the position (a multi-week process).
- rwallace 11y agoAgreed, but when it comes down to it, that's laziness or incompetence at the executive level. The personnel department should not be given that sort of power; that's not what they're for. It's the CEO's job to make sure they aren't.
- njloof 11y agoSeems like the kind of story you see just before a call to expand the H1-B program. I've worked with many fine H1-Bs but its purpose is to fill a need you can't fill locally, not to get someone to take a job that is underpriced.
- airza 11y agoBusiness-oriented publications and companies that are hiring always seem to carefully avoid the easy way to fix long hiring times: Increase wages.
- pjc50 11y agoThe long hiring times seem not to be due to lack of applicants, but due to internal hiring politics and process. Rising conservativism about making a "bad hire", perhaps.
- airza 11y agoYou can't discount the role of applicant volume in that, though; if you have a 20 day hiring process with one person going through it at a time, the odds of it taking 40-60 days are a lot better than if you have 2-3 going through at once.
- pjc50 11y agoThose are unrealistically low applicant volume numbers, surely? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10949825/Employers-receive-39-applications-for-every-graduate-job.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10949825/Employers-r...
- airza 11y agoIt's not clear to me how many of those applicants would actually be valid for the job, so i'm not sure. The companies that i've worked at which had stagnant wages had barely 1 candidate per position most of the time, so i've seen it somewhere at least.
- madcaptenor 11y agoThey get 39 applicants per job, but how many of those are actually going through the hiring process? In my experience most resumes end up getting looked at and not considered as a candidate.
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- mjbellantoni 11y agoHiring velocity is one area where small companies can use their agility to advantage when competing against larger companies for talent. As a hiring manager, I always endeavor to make this process as streamlined as possible. A couple of anecdotes: I was able to hire an outstanding candidate simply because I got them through the process and extended them an offer. Our competition was a reasonably high-profile company in the area. In the end he joined us because after more than a week, the other company was unable to execute their paperwork to get an offer generated. More recently, I saw a very big name West Coast company (think Google/Facebook/Uber) lose out on a great person because they had a third party do a reference check. In the time it took for that check to happen, the job seeker had lots of time to re-consider the offer and instead ended up working for a smaller company on the East Coast which kept in touch and was able to move blindingly fast.
- skolor 11y agoI work for a pretty large company, and the more involvement I have with the hiring process the more painful it is to see. We just move so incredibly slowly, with frequent false starts, and we've lost a number of good candidates because of it. I'm fairly concerned we're going to lose someone I referred because of it, but there's only so much prodding I can do and that doesn't serve to fix the problem.
- bsbechtel 11y agoThis sounds like a major cost that maybe isn't really considered when studies are done that evaluate the cost of potentially hiring a bad employee.
- iamthepieman 11y agothe article mentions 27 days as the average time from job candidate to actual employee. This seems like a very reasonable amount of time for anything that is not traditionally high turnover like retail, certain service industries etc. I like to give at least 3 weeks notice simply because it usually takes that long to transfer all my projects and responsibilities. That only leaves 6 days for the active screening and interviewing process. The article seems to be covering very general employment and job statistics so most likely the 27 day average vacancy is quite high for service and retail positions and fairly low for tech positions.
- madcaptenor 11y agoIs a "group panel interview" many interviewers and one interviewee, or the other way around?
- davidgerard 11y agoI thought the market would provide! Have they considered paying more?
- samstave 11y agoheh -- I know some people who interviewed for the Teespring DevOps lead position.... they said that teespring was trying to "interview like google, while being a tee shirt company" -- teespring keeps putting that posting up. Maybe they should realize their reqs for that position, or their actual interview process is a little disconnected from who they are...?