241–250 of 254 posts
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Having many unqualified applicants is unrelated to how many good 50-75% candidates self-select against applying. It’s likely entirely different groups exhibiting the inverse effects of Dunning-Kruger.
> how many good 50-75% candidates self-select against applying Got some data to back that up?
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This has little to do with SV.
I've worked in SV and elsewhere and the push to hire disproportionate numbers of women in tech roles in definitely stronger in SV. For example, at my company 27% of our tech workforce is women, as compared to an industry average of 20% (figures are from our head of diversity). Despite already having an overrepresentation, we continue to enagage in discriminatory hiring policies that favor women and we've bumped our t…
I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. You're comparing your number to the current standard which is often considered insufficient.
But I think we'll probably have to agree to disagree on that point, because this isn't the subject of the thread.
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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.
Go ahead and take that stand. The only thing you are missing out on is the very worst the world has to offer. Have reasonable standards, and uphold them. It's okay. If you can't find anyone who actually meets your standards, it's probably because their signal is currently being overwhelmed by the noise. You won't ever be able to find them if you just set a dumb filter just above the noise floor.
If a company wants five years of experience in a two-year-old technology, add them to your blacklist for a year, and just let them hire as many liars as they can find. If they're all working somewhere else, they're less likely to apply to be your co-workers. And that company certainly won't be paying 2.5x as much for 5 years experience as the market rate for 2.
And that's what's missing from the article. It focuses on the amount of overlap between candidate and job description, and completely ignores whether the posting itself is offering a reasonable compensation for the mythical candidate it wants. How many times have you seen "WANTED: full-spectrum engineer with 10 years of experience who is an expert in all levels of multiple technology stacks; 6-month contract-to-hire $60k/year, relocation required"? That isn't even hyperbole. It's cherry-picked and amalgamated from the worst postings I have ever seen, but it is not an exaggeration.
Those dating profiles with the unrealistic expectations are all about what the person wants, and nothing about what is offered in return. You're never going to get a partnership between equals from someone like that. You can certainly get to be the cult leader's consort/concubine, but you're usually better off with someone who actually values you as an individual.
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HR has one other job that you might not realize: make sure that your hiring/interview process is legally fair. You better not interview in such a way to make it impossible for some types of otherwise qualified people to pass (female, black...) while others find it easy (males, white...).
Ha! Often times they do that poorly as well. My boss at a company I worked for recently wanted to hire a guy that is living in Poland but is self-employed in the UK. The HR said to him, literally, "we can't hire him because we don't know the implications of working with someone incorporated out-of-country". Yeah, not like it was their job to find out. That would be hard, could cut into their water cooler gossip time,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked in SV and elsewhere and the push to hire disproportionate numbers of women in tech roles in definitely stronger in SV. For example, at my company 27% of our tech workforce is women, as compared to an industry average of 20% (figures are from our head of diversity). Despite already having an overrepresentation, we continue to enagage in discriminatory hiring policies that favor women and we've bumped our t…
I work well outside of SV and the push for greater diversity is a large endeavour in most industries (I've worked in many). I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. You're comparing your number to the current standard which is often considered insufficient. But I think we'll probably have to agree to disagre…
An above average representation is the definition of an overrepresentation. I'm not sure why you are attempting to state otherwise. Whether you desire a larger representation of women in tech as a whole does not alter the objective fact that a company with a share of women in tech roles larger than the tech industry average has an overrepresentation of women in tech roles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work well outside of SV and the push for greater diversity is a large endeavour in most industries (I've worked in many). I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. You're comparing your number to the current standard which is often considered insufficient. But I think we'll probably have to agree to disagre…
> I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. An above average representation is the definition of an overrepresentation. I'm not sure why you are attempting to state otherwise. Whether you desire a larger representation of women in tech as a whole does not alter the objective fact that a company with a share o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really disagree with your wording, and the slant you're taking with calling an above average representation in your company as an overrepresentation. An above average representation is the definition of an overrepresentation. I'm not sure why you are attempting to state otherwise. Whether you desire a larger representation of women in tech as a whole does not alter the objective fact that a company with a share o…
The statement that the current representation of women in [this wasn't exclusively about tech, but you continue to represent it as such] tech is somehow a natural constant, rather than having been possibly influenced by any number of factors. I mean, you can't objectively use the current representation of women in [tech/other] as a baseline for what you're arguing. It has bias inherent—one that you're using to argue…
In case this was missed in my original comment, my company does have explicitly discriminatory hiring policies that favor women over men (as well as favoring certain races). To call my company's hiring policies discriminatory is indeed an objective statement - regardless of whether you wish to call my company's representation of women an overrepresentation.
To clarify, my original point is that while many companies apply discrimination to balance out underrepresentations, it is quite aggressive to continue to apply discriminatory hiring policies even when the favored demographic is already overrepresented by a significant margin. I have rarely seen companies outside of SV go to the these lengths.
0. Merriam Webster defines overrepresentation as, "having representatives in a proportion higher than the average", https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/overrepresented
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> 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 kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong. I've applied to jobs that required a long and tedious hiring process and in the end unfortunatley I didn't get hired, but I also had nice HR drones contacting me to prov…
Frankly, I don't want the interviewer's feedback. There's a lot of superstition in hiring people because of how much luck is involved, meaning that there's a good chance that the reason they decided not to hire you is completely meaningless.
That's great, but others do want it and also find any feedback to be very helpful.
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The statement that the current representation of women in [this wasn't exclusively about tech, but you continue to represent it as such] tech is somehow a natural constant, rather than having been possibly influenced by any number of factors. I mean, you can't objectively use the current representation of women in [tech/other] as a baseline for what you're arguing. It has bias inherent—one that you're using to argue…
Whether or not the percentage of women in tech is influenced by other factors was never stated in my comment, why you seem to think I am denying this is the case is a mystery to me. Regardless of said factors, this does not alter the fact that having a portion of tech workers greater than tech as a whole constitutes an overrepresentation. This is the literal definition of an overrepresentation.[0] To claim otherwise…
I was stating that your figure on the current representation of women in the industry may not be an objective representation but may be the result of many factors, and is not useful as a baseline for beginning to even determine what is over- or under-representative. Therefore, it can't be objectively considered.
But, that's all for me on this subject for now. All the best...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether or not the percentage of women in tech is influenced by other factors was never stated in my comment, why you seem to think I am denying this is the case is a mystery to me. Regardless of said factors, this does not alter the fact that having a portion of tech workers greater than tech as a whole constitutes an overrepresentation. This is the literal definition of an overrepresentation.[0] To claim otherwise…
I think you missed my point. I was stating that your figure on the current representation of women in the industry may not be an objective representation but may be the result of many factors, and is not useful as a baseline for beginning to even determine what is over- or under-representative. Therefore, it can't be objectively considered. But, that's all for me on this subject for now. All the best...