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61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

talent.works

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Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#231

Is this because it has become too easy to apply for jobs? Should there be a stronger barrier to even apply to something (ie. take this automated test to apply...)?

> Should there be a stronger barrier

The job board should say something like "to apply for this job, please show up at our next hiring event on XYZ date".

Thoughts?

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#232
Isn't this just useless management trying to be cheap?

In a company I worked for, I saw a LinkedIn ad for an intern with experience in a lot of specific tech that would have been more intermediate to senior level. For around a tenth of what I was being paid. I know in that case it was the company owners trying to be cheap and not having much clue about IT.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#233

The buried lede here seems to be "In real life, folks need to apply to 150-250 jobs to get a job". I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market? The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this…

There's a distribution there that needs to be mentioned, because most job applications are submitted by unqualified applicants.

My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out.

Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number.

So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring.

But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#234
post #214
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen senior engineers with 1.5 years of experience and totally confident (in startup). And my lifelong experience is that such pepole have pretty good careers, better then humble more self aware people.

How did they get to be seniors in their companies? They didn't give the title to themselves, so someone must value their skills. Is having the title mutually exclusive to being humble or self aware?

Paying someone more costs money, giving them a title is free.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#235
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entry Level ought to be 'willing to train', Junior, some experience, Senior, 8+ years of experience. Sadly title inflation is also a thing.

I think part of the problem is the titles themselves... "Senior" implies "Highly Experienced" meaning "lots of years of experience". Whereas it's completely possible for a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer" within their specific domain and be as valuable, respected, listened-to, etc. as a "Senior Engineer". It doesn't happen often, but it happens. If we had titles more like "Apprentice",…

I'm starting to think that the French Compagnons should add software developers to their list of professions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnons_du_Tour_de_France if you don't know what it is.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#236
Best way to get a job is through networking with people, I had a year of unemployment and after sending out hundreds of applications I ended up getting asked by a friend to do some work for him instead.

In a matter of fact all jobs I had, have basically been thanks to people I know who worked at those companies.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a recruiter for 8 years, and maybe 1 in 100 applications turned into a hire. I suspect a big factor is the barrier to entry for applying has been lowered. Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant. An increase in applications makes sifting through those applications increasingly burdensome, and tools have not really made mentally parsing a resume e…

I was also a recruiter for a while and when hiring I am always amazed at the absolute dismal amount of effort given when people apply for good jobs. Hiring is hard, someone with the right skill set will have a terrible mentality, hiring for the mentality is extremely tricky and can lead you down the road of groupthink if you're not careful. I'm still amazed how entirely incompetent people rise to managerial levels on…

If you have to apply to 250+ jobs just to get one, you can't invest much effort into each application.

I've been a part-time developer for three years (and worked full-time on top of that), and I'm looking for a full-time position. I gave up on tech after applying to 500+ jobs and getting three interviews and zero offers. The closest I got was a consulting outfit in a small city in the Inland North, where one of the interviewers got hostile about my major (philosophy) and eventually rejected me over it.

But even now that I'm only applying for positions that just need warm bodies with degrees, my ratio of applications to phone screens is upwards of twenty to one, and every phone screen I've gotten in the last month has rescheduled last-minute on me, sometimes more than once. And I have to put up with shit like getting rejected at the door because the interviewer doesn't like my [perfectly ordinary and unremarkable] shoes.

How in the world am I supposed to find the time to put effort into applying for hundreds of jobs?

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a recruiter for 8 years, and maybe 1 in 100 applications turned into a hire. I suspect a big factor is the barrier to entry for applying has been lowered. Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant. An increase in applications makes sifting through those applications increasingly burdensome, and tools have not really made mentally parsing a resume e…

There seems to be a pretty simple solution to this - you blacklist the obviously unacceptable. Not the ones you 'don't like' - the ones that don't even make sense. That process of filtering out folks using the blacklist should be automated and the blacklist should be public. I wonder if that'd make recruiting jobs almost pointless in a large number of cases however. It sure would make one think twice about spam-apply…

This is not only a PR disaster waiting to happen but probably illegal in most jurisdictions.

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#239
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing her point. She isn't saying that all passionate people are affluent white males. My interpretation is that passion in a swe job description is code for affluent white male. I think she has a point, individuals who have time for passion projects, self study, or other endeavors are privileged. Many of them are white, male, and affluent.

I think the problem is that she falls in the same error as the companies she's criticizing - she conflates passion with external signals like "spending a lot of time on personal projects". At first she uses quotes around "passionate", which seems to distinguish the two, but then she fully conflates them. Inevitably, she will rile up those of us who were passioned about tech despite not having the means to dedicate ou…

  she conflates passion with external signals like
  "spending a lot of time on personal projects"
Job interviewers fear being mislead by people telling them what they want to hear, so they will often look for provable actions and demonstrable knowledge, rather than claims.

If someone tells me they're passionate about embedded electronics, I'll ask what they've worked with - arduino? raspberry pi? esp8266? atmel? pic? mbed? - and what they've done with it.

If they haven't used any of them, or they've barely used them, are they really passionate?

Re: 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience

#240
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Yes. Any job with entry level requirements will get 20-100 applications on craigslist in seattle (my experience). More or less applications on more or less popular platforms 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. 3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and in…

>2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of…

> 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go,

This is what you put in a job advert when you want to hire your mate who matches that description but feel obliged to publicly tender the job instead.

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