5 ms·

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that peopl

by th0ma5 11y ago

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation. I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job previously, or the exact skills of some other team member. I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.

draugadrotten 11y ago
> I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes. > After harassing HR at my company, Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.
- jrs235 11y ago
  I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't. The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in. Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.
mc32 11y ago
In my experience what you say rings true; the job descriptions are such that its hard for a single person to hit all the reqs and if the company is underpaying, it's going to be hard filling that position. With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly. But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.
smil 11y ago
As a recent graduate for whom it took a year and a half and a move to a different country to find another job, I think I've developed job searcher's PTSD. Applied to lots of jobs I was very excited about, only to get degraded during interviews or not hearing back at all. I wouldn't dream of asking for a lateral move as that might make my boss think I don't like my current job, and as they can fire my with 48 hrs notice, which would cost me my week visa, I can't take any chances.
- GreenPlastic 11y ago
  In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.
  - smil 11y ago
    Sure, but this is not a relevant response to my comment unless you meant it as an insult.
    - GreenPlastic 11y ago
      Wasn't meant as an insult. Just have a lot of phone screens where people list 100 technologies on a resume and don't have a rudimentary understanding of any. The majority of candidates have never used source control or haven't spent the time to brush up on basic data structures questions.
      - Decade 11y ago
        That's because there are thousands of job openings and a ton of stuff to do. I don't have enough hours in a day to implement all the job seeker advice I've been given. Your adversarial approach to hiring doesn't help. You think of it as filtering out incompetents so you can concentrate on successful candidates. I think of it as shooting down candidates without giving them a chance to show what they can do. I suspect that your job requirements may be a bit unrealistic. Expert at Objective C and Swift and design with apps in the App Store? Chances are that person already has a happy job, probably working for Apple.
ryandrake 11y ago
Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).
- dba7dba 11y ago
  They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.
  - Buzzzz 11y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if even Apple and Google are Apple and Google :)
  - walshemj 11y ago
    so right I rember the boss of a supermarket chain complaining about quality of candidates some one needs to take them aside and say your a "jumped up grocer" you don't get to employ Oxbridge first's to work on the checkouts.
- memracom 11y ago
  It is a sign of incompetent management that they demand only A+++ players. A good manager would hire only B players, then train and mentor them. A really GREAT manager would hire only C players that have the right attitude, and still end up with the best team in the company. Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.
  - wyclif 11y ago
    I hear you on the A+++ player/unicorn/ninja/rockstar thing, but I wonder if the reason for resistance to mentoring and training is a bit more complicated: 1. Finding good mentors is hard, because companies (even large ones as opposed to startups) have cut back and folded several positions into one, all while wages are flat. That means nobody has time to mentor. Everybody's working insane hours at their primary responsibilities. Only the most well-funded startups do mentoring well. Most startups are "all hands on deck" with developers doing a lot of other functions essential to business that wouldn't normally be part of their job description. But these functions are "tyranny of the urgent" life support and there's no time for training. 2. Everybody on both sides of the table knows that the only real way to get a raise or change direction is to leave and get a new job. That's good for the employee who wants to be mobile and transferable, and good for the company that needs warm bodies and is growing, but it's terrible for training/mentoring and the people who want to think long-term.
hkmurakami 11y ago
>I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
- ryandrake 11y ago
  From that Wiki (interesting by the way, thank you): > 5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable. Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world! I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.
commandar 11y ago
>After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I so relate to this. I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position. My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job. I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.
- gcb0 11y ago
  A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then
  - pyre 11y ago
    At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
    - commandar 11y ago
      Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard. We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions. This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.
venomsnake 11y ago
> I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. Well it is Vox.com The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.

by th0ma5 11y ago

draugadrotten 11y ago

> I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes. > After harassing HR at my company, Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the problem.

jrs235 11y ago
I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't. The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in. Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.

mc32 11y ago

In my experience what you say rings true; the job descriptions are such that its hard for a single person to hit all the reqs and if the company is underpaying, it's going to be hard filling that position. With regard to internal hires, yes, the jobs are posted to meet some HR criteria and are merely a formality and thus get filled quickly. But.... This is in tech which accounts for a minute part of all jobs opps, so what applies to tech may not necessarily apply to non tech jobs.

smil 11y ago

As a recent graduate for whom it took a year and a half and a move to a different country to find another job, I think I've developed job searcher's PTSD. Applied to lots of jobs I was very excited about, only to get degraded during interviews or not hearing back at all. I wouldn't dream of asking for a lateral move as that might make my boss think I don't like my current job, and as they can fire my with 48 hrs notice, which would cost me my week visa, I can't take any chances.

GreenPlastic 11y ago
In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.
- smil 11y ago
  Sure, but this is not a relevant response to my comment unless you meant it as an insult.
  - GreenPlastic 11y ago
    Wasn't meant as an insult. Just have a lot of phone screens where people list 100 technologies on a resume and don't have a rudimentary understanding of any. The majority of candidates have never used source control or haven't spent the time to brush up on basic data structures questions.
    - Decade 11y ago
      That's because there are thousands of job openings and a ton of stuff to do. I don't have enough hours in a day to implement all the job seeker advice I've been given. Your adversarial approach to hiring doesn't help. You think of it as filtering out incompetents so you can concentrate on successful candidates. I think of it as shooting down candidates without giving them a chance to show what they can do. I suspect that your job requirements may be a bit unrealistic. Expert at Objective C and Swift and design with apps in the App Store? Chances are that person already has a happy job, probably working for Apple.

ryandrake 11y ago

Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).

dba7dba 11y ago
They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.
- Buzzzz 11y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if even Apple and Google are Apple and Google :)
- walshemj 11y ago
  so right I rember the boss of a supermarket chain complaining about quality of candidates some one needs to take them aside and say your a "jumped up grocer" you don't get to employ Oxbridge first's to work on the checkouts.
memracom 11y ago
It is a sign of incompetent management that they demand only A+++ players. A good manager would hire only B players, then train and mentor them. A really GREAT manager would hire only C players that have the right attitude, and still end up with the best team in the company. Before the MBA scourge hit the land, managers tended to hire the first B or C players that seemed to have the right aptitude and attitude. They would fire fast too, when they made mistakes. In the end they got long term productive employees and, I MUST point out, they did successfully build the modern world that we marvel at around us.
- wyclif 11y ago
  I hear you on the A+++ player/unicorn/ninja/rockstar thing, but I wonder if the reason for resistance to mentoring and training is a bit more complicated: 1. Finding good mentors is hard, because companies (even large ones as opposed to startups) have cut back and folded several positions into one, all while wages are flat. That means nobody has time to mentor. Everybody's working insane hours at their primary responsibilities. Only the most well-funded startups do mentoring well. Most startups are "all hands on deck" with developers doing a lot of other functions essential to business that wouldn't normally be part of their job description. But these functions are "tyranny of the urgent" life support and there's no time for training. 2. Everybody on both sides of the table knows that the only real way to get a raise or change direction is to leave and get a new job. That's good for the employee who wants to be mobile and transferable, and good for the company that needs warm bodies and is growing, but it's terrible for training/mentoring and the people who want to think long-term.

hkmurakami 11y ago

>I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of abundance you keep holding out for something better. Commonly referred to as the "secretary selection problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

ryandrake 11y ago
From that Wiki (interesting by the way, thank you): > 5. Immediately after an interview, the interviewed applicant is either accepted or rejected, and the decision is irrevocable. Many companies actually think this is the way things have to be done in the real world! I once worked somewhere they were trying to hire a software engineer with a very particular technical skill. They interviewed a few people and then interviewed Candidate X. He was very good, but not a "unicorn A++++ hire" so the company decided to hold out for a better candidate. 6 months pass, and none of the subsequent applicants were better than Candidate X, so they finally swallowed their pride and called him back. Luckily, he was still looking to change jobs and we got him, but that was 6 months we could have had another person powering our (then) 3 person team.

commandar 11y ago

>After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I so relate to this. I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position. My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job. I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.

gcb0 11y ago
A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then
- pyre 11y ago
  At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
  - commandar 11y ago
    Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

With my current employer, hiring the "most enthusiastic" people instead of the finding people with the necessary skills backfired hard. We're now stuck with serious inefficiencies in the organisation and people that under local labor protection laws are hard to get rid of and replace holding key positions. This may be easy to overcome in a larger organisation in which the underskilled enthusiasts are surrounded by more senior appropriately skilled coworkers, but in a smaller company it's a disaster.

venomsnake 11y ago

> I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. Well it is Vox.com The skills requirements are absurd. And for me they are a bit like a red flag - every job that has 3 pages of technical abbreviations is not worth applying for. Good jobs are always by personal contacts first.