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You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

talent.works

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Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#71

Post by sillyquiet »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #55
sureaboutthis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the "looking for experts in X" followed by "with one to two years experience". And then I see my neighbor who is an expert in X, can code rings around anybody, but can't find a job after his company shut down. His only fault is he's 60.

At 60 you just got a few more years to work until you have to retire. It takes 2-3 years to really get comfortable with some bigger code base... So if you are looking for some longterm employee (if such a thing even exists), it's not worth it.

Since they're over 40, it may not be worth it but it's also almost certainly illegal. Assuming the employer is in the U.S. and has over 20 employees.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#72

Post by Uberphallus »

bluGill wrote: post #57
24gttghh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?

Or more likely fake postings to show investors they are a successful company that is hiring.

Internal hire doesn't show investors much, also there was an interview which is pointless for fake postings.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#73

Post by codingdave »

That does match up with my job search I just completed. I sent out 5 resumes, got an interview on every one where I had a majority of the qualifications, did not get called on the 2 that were more off-target.

But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead.

The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#74

Post by BenjaminBlair »

I find that very frustrating. When a person is looking for a job he or she is stressed out already, and when reading all those huge qualification criteria you sometimes really feel like a total loser, not knowing anything at all. It's really important to still try and send a CV and go to an interview with a positive attitude, willing to learn that is. But I'd really like to see some reasonable hiring criteria, so you can know for sure that you have what they're looking for.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#75

Post by Double_a_92 »

throwawaymath wrote: post #66
Double_a_92 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 60 you just got a few more years to work until you have to retire. It takes 2-3 years to really get comfortable with some bigger code base... So if you are looking for some longterm employee (if such a thing even exists), it's not worth it.

I disagree, unless you and I have radically different definitions of what "comfortable" means. If I'm hiring an engineer with the seniority I'd expect them to have at 20, 30 or 40 years in industry then I want them to ramp up inside of a year. I'm not going to expect them to be completely self-sufficient within a month. But they should be capable of implementing performant solutions to nontrivial problems with autono…

I meant comfortable as in knowing exactly how to solve something, instead of first having to read and debug through (legacy) code for 1-2 days everytime you touch some new area of the application.

For me personally the worst unsecurity is not knowing where to put new code, without messing up some architectural separation that I'm not aware of.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#76

Post by yardie »

kamarg wrote: post #65
carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

Seems to me that this was a job put together with a specific person in mind and somehow that didn't work out and they just didn't know what to do after that. Seen this same scenario play out before at multiple companies.

This is most likely the reason. One of the requirements for an H2B visa is that an in-country hire isn't possible. And you make that impossible by asking for impossible requirements. You may have seen these as experience requirements in 5+ years technology that has only existed for 2-3 years.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#77

Post by austincheney »

sethammons wrote: post #9
austincheney wrote: post #5

You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.

Aside from personal experience, can you point to any data on this, and maybe go into some more detail? When I think of personality tests, I think of quack science. "Do you get angry a lot?", "Is it easy for you to get angry?", "Would you say it is difficult to make you angry?, and four other similar questions in a 200 question quiz. They ask the same thing multiple ways to try to know if you are an person categorizab…

I have only seen this in practice once at a little hedge fund called Bridgewater. It sounds like you are making assumptions of what you think the testing is without any frame of reference.

Also, anger is an emotion opposed to a personality designation.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#78

Post by Lio »

stingraycharles wrote: post #28
GuB-42 wrote: post #25

A recruiter once told me "we ask for God in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the followers".

That's a good way to get the worse part of developers divided by their Dunnin-Kruger score.

I think that Dunning-Kruger effect in interviews is a very real problem going the other way too.

I worry that the questions that I only ask questions of candidates that I think are important and that I already know the answer too.

If you're looking for good hires you're going to want people who know stuff you don't and finding that out is tricky because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#79

Post by mpeg »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #60
tazard wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read that a different way. I understood it as an ad from Company X which lists '5 years of Python' as the requirement. Candidate 1 has 5 years of Python at Google, and Candidate 2 has 5 years Python at InfoSys.

Does the Google experience really teach one that much better? Or is it just perception? I mean, at the end you are just a little cogwheel in some big corporation anyway. The python tasks you need to solve there are probably just as mundane as everywhere else.

It's the perception, I've personally been passed on for jobs I would have been amazing at because I don't have any FAANG experience.

Startup founders looking for VC money want to be able to add "Team of ex-Google, ..." to their pitch.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#80

Post by bluGill »

Lio wrote: post #54
austincheney wrote: post #5

You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.

This sounds like the old joke "avoid employing unlucky people by throwing away half the CVs you receive". What is the optimum personality type to employ for a specific role anyway? You might hire based the idea that you want people who won't "rock the boat" and just end up with a group that are shy of giving you bad news.

Most companies could save a lot of money and have similar results just by taking a random resume, verifying that the person can legally work the position and hiring them - don't even read the resume, much interview. If you cannot show your hiring process produces better than the above why are you doing it.
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