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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

#701

Post by pcthrowaway »

s0rce wrote: post #326
jiggawatts wrote: post #314

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...

A job posting without a salary is like a Tinder profile without a picture.

The description is nice, but it's not what grabs your attention

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

#702

Post by packetlost »

Having been in the same boat, the take-home problem is... too much. If you show you don't respect the time of your candidates (4 hours of unpaid work is not respecting someone's time), they're not going to be interested. I would try to keep any sort of technical white-board interview or take-home problem small enough that it can be done in under an hour, 15 minutes for a truly experienced engineer.

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

#703

Post by SamuelAdams »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #455
PheonixPharts wrote: post #174

> Benefits and salary are good (though salary isn't posted in the ad) Care to put a range on the value of "good"? My experience when searching is that any company claiming "salaries are good" probably isn't even worth my time talking to. Occasionally I'll reply to recruiters if the role looks interesting but it's not uncommon that they can't even match my base, let alone my TC (and I don't even have that great of a T…

> If you want senior devs to apply post that your total comp is somewhere in the 300k-400k range. Even that's too low for senior folks with the skillset that OP is looking for, particularly if he wants the senior engineer to be mentoring and uplifting the rest of the team. Those skills can easily get $500k+ TC.

Can you point to these jobs that pay 500k+?

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

#704

Post by relaxing »

jgaa wrote: post #613
corrral wrote: 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.

Offering someone you don't know a senior position without some kind of insight into their level of competence is just a lottery. I've screened a number of very senior developers with impressive CV's applying for senior C++ positions. When I look at their code, usually it just sucks. More often than not it's just plain old C code with C++ dressing. For example, using pthreads in stead of C++11 std::thread, and mostly…

Or you could just ask them "What's your library of choice for threading?"

Sidenote: Senior people have been burned by the years where the STL was inconsistently implemented and horribly bloated and inefficient. That doesn't mean they won't quickly learn to love modern C++, especially if they're joining a codebase with good examples to follow.

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

#705

Post by 37gi3beuc »

kstenerud wrote: post #538

This is not directed at you, but rather at the poor hiring practices that have permeated the software industry for too long. We've been gaslighted into accepting abusive hiring practices, and it has to stop. When you're hiring an accountant, do you give them 4h take-home assignments? How about hours of interviews with your accounting team to suss out their accounting skills and critique their style? I mean, how DO yo…

I think one solution to this problem might be to actually introduce licensing as a proof of the required skills in our profession (or in specific specialized areas at least)

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

#706

Post by 2rsf »

WatchDog wrote: post #491
anon291 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. When i do interviews in-person (even if virtual) , I get the benefit of meeting my future colleagues and learning more about the company. It's much more a two-way benefit, versus an assignment where only one party (the company) gets any information from the other (me). > When I worked for a technology analyst company, we would ask for writing samples--which most potential hires would already have. But, i…

> The equivalent in tech is asking for a portfolio, which I have an ample amount of on github. I'm more than happy to hand this over to potential employers for them to gauge my work. I don't have a very large open source portfolio, but I it's probably bigger than 95% of the people I work with, I don't think my open source work is particularly representative of my abilities. Companies want to have a somewhat standardi…

So maybe allow flexibility in the assignment? let the candidate choose between previous work, home assignment or on site?

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

#707

Post by ubercore »

yieldcrv wrote: post #376
ubercore wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently did a 6 hour take-home, but was given an expectation of around 2 weeks to accomplish it, with flexibility for more if I needed it. I thought it was pretty fair compared to a never-ending round of tech interviews.

My experience with that is: 0) time doing the project is tracked, sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish. dinging you for "points" for going over the time allotment and that the other candidates are: 1) doing way extra things that took way more than 6 hours 2) are not doing those extra things from scratch because they've been playing this game for a while and that 3)…

That's too bad, in this case I had a particularly good experience. I handed in a tarball, not a repo, so they didn't track time. No idea what other candidates did, but I got specific and positive feedback on the code submitted. The task was pretty carefully thought out and presented to not lean too heavily on specific patterns or techniques. All of your experiences do sound particularly frustrating, I wouldn't be too excited with them either!

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

#708

Post by corrral »

grepfru_it wrote: post #694
electrondood wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, these are called technical interviews, and they usually take an entire day. I spend at least a two weeks studying for these before every job search. If I have 4 jobs in my pipeline that assign me 4 hours of homework each, that's 16 hours of bullshit I have to slog through in addition to my study time, prep work, and a solid week or two of whiteboarding. This doesn't include the recruiter's technical trivia scre…

If no thanks then why complain about 4 hours each? You are going to pick and choose the interviews you are going to do so what exactly is the problem if you say no any or all of them?

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

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

#710

Post by erin_at_summery »

Looks like you're only focusing on technical skills in your recruiting process. New research (link below) shows "soft skills" such as values are more important, especially for senior positions. My company quantifies applicant values such as empathy, agility, & disruption and measures alignment with org culture. Reach out if you want more info.

HBR article: https://hbr.org/2022/06/the-c-suite-skills-that-matter-most

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