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Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

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Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#331
post #326

POST THE SALARY. Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment. Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs. They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an…

I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

what else are people motivated by?

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#332
post #21

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

The thing with 4hr technical assignments is that you're saying no to anyone with kids, which I'm going to venture applies to more senior people than juniors. I used to do these assignment. Now I simply don't sorry. My schedule is 6:30 AM wake up with youngest daughter, to let wife sleep in (she takes care of her all night) 9:00 AM hand off youngest daughter to wife, who takes both girls the rest of the day. I go to m…

FAANG type interviews are all day affairs with 5+hr of interview and breaks in between. Senior or not. I don't see anyone getting hired in 1 hr.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#333
post #326

POST THE SALARY. Senior people are senior because of their work experience, which they gain from steady employment. Almost by definition you are looking to entice busy, employed people away from their current jobs. They don’t have the time or inclination to trawl through job ad after job ad. Where your competition will ask for 15 years of experience and then only after hours of calls and meetings reluctantly make an…

I've tried to advocate for this at my organization and been told that we don't want people primarily motivated by money...

You can motivate juniors by things other than money: experience, gaining industry contacts, and filling a resume so that they can move on to…

… more senior roles with actual money on offer instead of intangibles.

You’re trying to hire senior staff the same way as junior staff.

This won’t work.

PS: I’m starting to suspect why you’re losing your juniors as soon as they get some experience…

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#334
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree. People with 10+ years, a good network and decent resume pop their head up above the parapet and get instantly mobbed with offers. They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. No-one good is going to do a takehome just so the hiring team can rub their beards and feel superior while they pick over the code. That approach worked a few years ago, in today's recruitment bear market you don't pick the candidates,…

> They're on the market 2 weeks, tops. My last search lasted 9 days from when I put out the signal to having interviewed (for 3 companies) and negotiated an offer and submitted my resignation and 2 weeks notice.

> My last search lasted 9 days

i think you did disservice to yourself by optimizing for minimizing downtime between jobs. You should've played the field longer and gone for the highest bidder. I am 100% sure you are not getting paid your worth because no FAANG type company finishes the process in 1 week.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#335
post #21

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

Conversely, to some extent I can't specify, if someone senior does applies to a "regular" job, it might mean their former coworkers don't want to work with them...

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#336
It sounds like you may be looking for a very narrow band of skills. Awkwardly, people who are into systems administration were often there _because_ they didn't have to write code and people who were into coding were often there _because_ they didn't have to do systems administration.

DevOps as a concept is only about 10 years old, and a lot fewer people were doing it towards the start. There just aren't that many really senior people out there.

My recommendation would be to think about specific skills you would like to add to the team, rather than a generic skill level, and see if you can get creative about filling those. If you need platform expertise, can you pull from defense contractors & teach them the social norms of your company on the fly? If you need someone who can lead culture building, does that have to be the same person who has the deep platform expertise?

If you really need all the things in one person, you need some reason why they'd want to work for you instead of Google. Which usually means either paying through the nose, or offering something about the culture that appeals to a niche audience. Having a particular point of view can be a winning strategy, rather than trying to appeal to everyone all at once.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#337
If you want good people pay them and respect them. It's crazy how you have to explain humanity to people in the tech industry.

If you are good at what you do then there are two reasons you will do it. 1. You are paid well 2. You are respected

Don't be annoying about doctors appointments or time off, if they do their job just let them do it. Don't make them come into an office they don't want to be in, don't make them be in meetings that have nothing to do with them and could have been an email. It's really crazy simple, just think what you would want and then treat people the same.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#338

"Take-home technical assignment (~4h)" I've got 20 plus years of tech, I've been out of college since 1997 and you want to give a 4 hour homework assignment. If get you want to get a feel for someone's ability but this is more easily done by stating a problem during one of the interviews and asking the person "How would you approach this?" Listing for how they anticipate problems and tradeoffs.

Yeah, but as a counterpoint: your years of experience are not indicative of your skill, just that you can meet some arbitrarily low bar for a long time.

The take-home technical assignment is to determine what, if anything, you actually learned in your 20+ years in tech.

A depressingly large number of people with that level of experience have not learned anything meaningful.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#339
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversations allow smooth talkers to run a snow job on you. Having a work sample test provides a best-in-class hiring filter.

If the hiring manager cannot distinguish a smooth talker for a senior role position, maybe the hiring manager is the problem. There is nothing a work sample can provide what a conversation cannot show for a senior role.

Okay so now we're hiring a hiring manager and a developer, great.

...or maybe people in this thread just don't like having to prove they know things in an industry where a lot of people don't know things.

Re: Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

#340
post #21

> Take-home technical assignment (~4h) or similar at candidate's choosing If I can get a similarly-paying job at a place that doesn't do this, I'll skip you. Many seniors ( actual seniors, not 3-years-of-experience seniors) have a network and can say "hey I'm looking" and instantly have multiple options that won't have them do more than talk to the team and manager for an hour or two. If that.

I've found that for the biggest numbers people expect me to memorize a bunch of bullshit from year three of MIT's CS program, so if anything I think this is better than most.

If a company doesn't bother to check how well I'm going to do the job, it makes me worried about what sort of smooth-talking incompetents I'm going to get stuck working with down the line.

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