You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

re-post of my earlier post:

>I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements].

It's not companies, it's the individuals.

Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:

  - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
  - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires

The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away.

The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.

Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.

It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".

Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results.

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[1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down

Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement.

And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.

To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.

Really well put from the corporate perspective

I'll give a perspective from a small company: boss is doing hiring, asks what tech we use, try to explain that I don't care if they know React, if they've used Vue/Angular/FooBar4Ui2038, good enough. Then some explanation that we should put specific tech to attract people with that specifically, & we can select for people who have tangent experience. In the end we hired some guy with experience with Ruby on Rails (we don't use any Ruby, PHP/C#/Nodejs)

It's been my experience that the worst hires are fakers who for whatever reasons do not consider themselves able to point to real capabilities, therefore they tailor their resumes to say they have done all of that stuff you are asking for and maybe a bunch more stuff.

The ones who won't - perhaps because they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job, and perhaps it's these folks you actually want to hire.

> And let’s be honest “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.

I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.