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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”

#221

Post by rossdavidh »

alistairSH wrote: post #107
rossdavidh wrote: post #68

I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30…

We typically list a few must-haves and a slightly longer list of nice-to-haves.

A much preferable strategy.

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

#222

Post by rossdavidh »

paultopia wrote: post #186

From the "methodology" section of this post: First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors. This is.…

All true, but I think even more fundamentally, they treat all requirements as of equal importance, and reported based on the % of requirements met. The requirement to, for example, know at least one programming language, is different than the requirement to have experience with a particular IDE. Someone who does not have the latter requirement is probably much more likely to nonetheless get a callback, than someone who has no programming experience, even though each might be one "requirement".

Secondly, the people applying who have <100% of the requirements, know this, and are trying to guess if they meet all of the _actually_ required criteria. The ones who apply anyway, and get an interview, might be doing a better job at guessing which "requirements" are real.

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

#223

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

huehehue wrote: post #149
_pmf_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually better, since in this case there's reason to the madness, which cannot be said for the typical second order ignorant HR person.

Maybe. How intelligent are the resume scanners? Just a few years ago, I shotgunned my resume to a bunch of big companies and experienced something like: Resume: "Ported XYZ from Angular to React, built a Rails app" Response: "Sorry, we need someone with JavaScript and Ruby experience" I think it's best to have two resumes, one that's more or less a big list of keywords, and another that you can show actual humans.

I have a resume that contains a block on the left 33% of the page with the following:

\subsection{Technology Fluencies} Java \textbullet{} Python \textbullet{} PHP \textbullet{} Ruby on Rails \\ Javascript \textbullet{} NodeJS \textbullet{} ReactJS / Native \\ SQL \textbullet{} SQLite \textbullet{} MySQL \textbullet{} DB2 \textbullet{} Redis \\ Postgres \textbullet{} Bitcoin / Blockchain \textbullet{} REST \\ ActionCable / WebSocket \textbullet{} JSON \textbullet{} XML \\ ElasticSearch \textbullet{} JWT \textbullet{} JUnit \textbullet{} Jest \\ TestNG \textbullet{} Selenium \textbullet{} Robot \textbullet{} Maven \textbullet{} Ant \\ ESXi \textbullet{} Docker \textbullet{} Flynn \textbullet{} Dokku \textbullet{} Heroku \\ Analytics 360 \textbullet{} Google Tag Manager \\ Salesforce DMP \textbullet{} Github \textbullet{} Git \textbullet{} SVN \\ JIRA \textbullet{} Vagrant \textbullet{} Ansible \textbullet{} Perforce \\

\subsection{Additional Fluencies} Amazon Web Services \textbullet{} Agile Dev. \\ TDD \textbullet{ }SDLC \textbullet{} SaaS \textbullet{} IaaS \textbullet{} PaaS \\

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

#224

Post by pmiller2 »

wtracy wrote: post #199
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of all places, Facebook had a pretty clearly non-technical person screen me over the phone. Apparently they gave her a list of questions and answers. The questions were structured so that none of the answers were open-ended. ("What is the OSI seven layer model? What is a Unix signal?") So, yeah, I'm not sure I would call it a real interview, but sometimes HR does get called upon to screen candidates.

I had a very similar experience with LinkedIn a couple years ago.

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

#225

Post by sxp62000 »

I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their list of requirements.

If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"

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

#226

Post by chrisbennet »

souprock wrote: post #214
chrisbennet wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they don't want to pay the market rate.

That isn't right. We did hire, several times. More please! I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038 We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff. This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.

Your ad is a “looking for people” type ad. The ads I skip are the ones with fairly specific skills that haven’t been filled after a month.

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

#227

Post by dsr_ »

lettergram wrote: post #37
scarejunba wrote: post #4

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…

We actually tried to be fairly explicit in what you will be doing for our team: https://www.themuse.com/jobs/capitalone/machine-learning-sof... We even set the requirements to match what we felt could do the job. The roll has actually been fairly difficult to fill though. Recruiting decks I have seen actually suggest creating more requirements and being vague in an attempt to lure more applicants. After this experien…

No, the problem is that you are looking for a unicorn in the first half of the requirements, then subverting it by asking for someone with only one year of experience in three things, then double-subverting it by suggesting that you want an academic who has nonetheless designed microservices and done machine learning. And it doesn't really help that you're in a large stodgy bank.

Let me rewrite this into two different job openings:

1. Junior Machine Learning Software Engineer

   Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience /
   At least 1 year working with statistics, mathematics or engineering programming /
   At least 1 year programming in Python and one or more of Ruby, R, Matlab, C++, Scala or Java /
   At least 1 year of experience working on full stack solutions
2. Machine Learning Software Architect

    Master's Degree or PhD /
    At least 2 years of experience with cloud software design using microservices / 
    At least 2 years of experience with machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, Pytorch or Keras /
    Demonstrated original research in this or related area
Do you see how different those two are? But you set up the ad to switch between them.

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

#228

Post by turtlecloud »

logfromblammo wrote: post #159
mbesto wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame you and I agree with you. My point is that this is not how the market works. You argument is like asking for women to stop being so demanding about all of the qualities they want in a man. Sure you can take a stand against that and say "I'm only going to meet women who match my exact profile and seek those who have realistic set of expectations". This is just simply not how it works and anyone who has i…

What argument? This is what I actually do. I read job postings sometimes, and if a posting looks like it might involve too much bullshit to be worth the effort to apply, I forget about it forever. If the posting is crap, I don't apply. It's not my problem to contact the company and tell them why their advertisement failed to draw my interest. This strategy works perfectly fine when I already have a decent job and wou…

Ummm you just proved his point. Most startups are like cults lol. Hiring is exactly like dating with the hiring manager as the crazy cult leader.

Like so many hiring managers have veto’d a hire due to a perceived slight / offense.

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

#229

Post by anitil »

souprock wrote: post #214
chrisbennet wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they don't want to pay the market rate.

That isn't right. We did hire, several times. More please! I've been posting this for ages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038 We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff. This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them. There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.

Looks like you do some interesting work! If I was a US citizen you'd be hearing from me.

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

#230

Post by turtlecloud »

bluGill wrote: post #80
Lio wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are a visionary beyond our times.
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