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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”

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?" European ones typically require both weak and strong classes be served equally, not in results, but in the manner and the matter.

I think you're confusing "weak and strong classes" with "protected and unprotected classes"

For example, national origin is a protected class and there was a case a few years ago where the EEOC got involved. It was a company owned by Indian-Americans(?) (might have been another nationality) who routinely turned down non-Indian-American job seekers (mostly whites) solely because they where non-Indian-American and they pretty much only hired other Indian-Americans and Indians. This was official policy.

So everyone's national origin is protected, no matter what it is. Everyone is in a protected class.

But say, people who have finger or face tattoos could be turned down for a job solely for having finger and face tattoos because people who have finger and face tattoos aren't a protected class.

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

#172
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted a 100% candidate. You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...

Great point. Having been on both sides of the hiring table, I can tell you that the candidate has no idea what we use to make decisions, because the candidate has no visibility into our internal issues. Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some ki…

Sounds like the typical big company with 10 managers above that position and none of them can't be arsed to make a real decision.

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

#173
post #104
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies. They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate, especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps (well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit). Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filte…

If HR has no idea what the job means, they also shouldn't be the one selecting candidates and conducting interviews.

HR doesn’t really conduct interviews beyond maybe a quick high level screen. They select candidates, but also only as a high level screen, it’s up to the engineering team to screen more deeply and do interviews.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the job positions all of FAANG have posted have been open for months, some for over a year. They are really hiring and have no problem paying market rate. That's a counterexample.

If a company is really hiring and paying market rate, what's the situation leading to positions open for over a year? Unicorn-hunting? I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither…

They are just being picky, and can afford to be picky. I’ve heard FAANG interview pass rates are pretty low, frustrating their recruiters to no end :).

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does hiring, I have a different interpretation. Let's say I'm a rails shop and I'm looking for mid to sr. level candidates and someone has 10 years of experience working on Java 1.4 spring based application. I think to myself "this is great, they are willing to do some grunt work but I need to know they haven't stagnated". It's the stagnation that leads to lower job offers. You need to convince me that…

> You need to convince me that you were a dedicated employee for 10 years (which you are), but you also need to show that you're willing to learn something completely different. Have you actually had examples where this wasn't the case? This seems like a common sentiment that I myself have thought, but I honestly can't think of a single instance where a candidate with good experience or knowledge wouldn't actually be…

I can't comment on every sector but it absolutely exists in the financial technology realm. Plenty of people working in tech don't view it as an evolving set of skills and it's common to have candidates come with 1 - 2 decades of experience despite ending their search for knowledge around java 3.

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

#176
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…

Looks to me like a Green Card job. They wanted the job for an internal candidate and so they crafted in a way that only that candidate would meet it. The law requires them to advertise in a public newspaper of record or some such thing. They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal can…

[deleted]

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?" European ones typically require both weak and strong classes be served equally, not in results, but in the manner and the matter.

> Does US anti-discrimination law really operate like "you have to serve the protected class whatever the consequences for unprotected ones?"

“Protected class” is something of a misleading piece of legal jargon; “class”, in it, means something closer to “axis of differentiation” than “group”. [0]

So, “black” is not a “protected class”, “race” is.

(This gets confusing because there is a related concept in Constitutional anti-discrimination jurisprudence of a suspect class, in which “class” does mean “group"; blacks are a suspect class—a group historically subject to discrimination, such that government actions which discriminate against them are subject to strict scrutiny—and whites are not, but both blacks and whites are protected by employment anti-discrimination law because race is a protected class.)

[0] There's a wrinkle in that “age over 40” is an asymetric “protected class” in employment anti-discrimination law.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the job positions all of FAANG have posted have been open for months, some for over a year. They are really hiring and have no problem paying market rate. That's a counterexample.

If a company is really hiring and paying market rate, what's the situation leading to positions open for over a year? Unicorn-hunting? I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither…

Maybe they're willing to hire in depth for those particular positions?

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

#179
post #85

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…

>>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. Unless Infosys employees code on computers bought to earth by aliens, for their business software requirements, I can't even imagine what the difference between code written at Google and Infosys could be. Its code, at the end of the day. The differences are in productivity and…

The typical differences between one implementation and another is:

Both implementations might work for the original use-case in the happy-path case. However as soon as the first unexpected error occurs, the bad implementation might break down. It might be a lot bigger in size than the better one and contain a lot of duplication. And it might not be extensible or maintainable, and have not (regression) tests. And of course the time it took to produce the codebases might have been very different.

Those are typical differences one sees between code that had been written at more professional software shops, and code that had been written elsewhere (e.g. by electrical engineers, students, non-engineers, etc.). However I have no idea how things look like at Google or Infosys, so I can't speak for those.

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

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the job positions all of FAANG have posted have been open for months, some for over a year. They are really hiring and have no problem paying market rate. That's a counterexample.

If a company is really hiring and paying market rate, what's the situation leading to positions open for over a year? Unicorn-hunting? I've been part of a hiring process that took a couple months (and by the end had management breathing down our necks to just hire -someone-), but that was because we were hiring into an out-of-the-way location that generally lacked the skills locally that we were looking for. Neither…

HR just leaves the same position open because it's not really a position, it's a category and they are too lazy to remove and add the same ad over and over.
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