Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it

Do you make a surgeon do four hour surgery?

It’s absolutely asinine that we accept this behavior in our industry. You’d be laughed at by every possible candidate in other industries.

"Draw the Jackass" tests are what you give folks that have no track record, and nothing to show you what they can do.

Speaking only for myself, I have a portfolio of over 40 open-source repos (single-origin -me), containing multiple build and deploy applications, SDKs, libraries, tests, hundreds of pages of documentation, dozens of blog posts, a decade of checkin history, and testimonials out the wazoo.

It is a mortal insult to ignore that (or, even worse, indicate that "I probably faked it"). If you want to hire people, then I suggest that you don't start by insulting them.

These are not people that you are doing a favor, by hiring them. These are people that are your equals -or better. I spent 25 years, interviewing and hiring senior-level engineers. I never gave one damn leetcode test. I did spend a great deal of time, drawing out their passion projects, enthusiasm, and personalities.

Some of them asked a string of technical questions, some did not. Where there were technical questions I enjoyed answering them, it felt like a fun conversation and was interactive with the interviewer, and I was surprised how easy I found them, so they didn't take long. Some did a screen share with me where we looked over some code and I explained what I was reading to them. All felt easy going. In my opinion, this made them skilled interviewers.

There have been a few times where I didn't even realise I was being interviewed. I thought we were just chatting about common ground in some field of interest. One was a chat in a pub that someone invited me to at short notice. And then a surprise offer appeared. The surprise offer has happened to me twice, and both were great opportunities I'd be a fool to decline.

Also, in recent years I noticed the best offers came from companies I had not sent a CV/résumé to (and therefore didn't have to tailor one, stress out over it etc). They were happy to go from my LinkedIn profile and other information they could find online, or asked me to send some specific info about my experience in an email (one or two paragraphs).

Due to this realisation, when I get messages from unknown recruiters asking cold, ", if interested send me your CV/résumé", I treat the request as a signal of a lower quality opportunity, and am unlikely to reply. It's probably better to wait for a serendipitous great opportunity, but I'm aware the market can change and luck is a factor, so I don't take this for granted.

So, between jobs, I spend the time on study, practice, skilling up, R&D on my own projects, etc so that "luck favours the prepared", then reaching out for conversations without a particular agenda. In practice the good opportunities end up being inbound, perhaps an indirect effect of my outreach rather than direct.

Not "applying". Job ads are a big turn off. High effort, low likelihood of good result.

To the Ask HN author: For someone who had experiences like me, your job ad is one in a sea of tens of thousands of job ads, and it's very easy to scroll past. It doesn't help you that some professional career advisors say the worst way for a candidate to get a great job is via job ads, and seniors have of course had more years to internalise this advice.

There are a small number of skilled recruiters and would-be employers who know how to reach out and almost blindside me into having been interviewed before I realise I have, and then I'm starting to be excited. They are removing obstacles and nudging me forward, usually into something I wouldn't have applied for, which is exciting if I like where it's going.

Those people stand out and win by removing much of the friction. (Like good sales.)

Another factor which you can change is formality.

Imposter syndrome or performance anxiety can affect applications. A person may be a very smart and experienced senior, confident they could make a big, positive difference at your company, but fear that they won't perform in the "right" way when hazed during test-heavy rituals, unless they refresh specific skills - something they don't have time to do, or even know which exact skills to be fresh on. Are you going to ask them C++17 trick questions when they've only been doing C kernel development recently? Who knows.

They imagine your take-home or interview tests will not be the kind of thing they've done recently, and that they'll face nit-picking, either by cocky yet wrong interviewers with a childish mindset, or seasoned people much smarter than themselves. Remember, the smartest people tend to doubt themselves. Tech's tendancy to cycle through frameworks, tech-du-jour and (mandatory but sometimes terrible) "best practices", and talk about it as though everyone "should" know adds to this anxiety.

That's friction too. They're probably in no hurry. Scroll down to the next ad. Close tab.

Informality is a way to break past that, lowering the stakes while getting the conversation started.

You can change this factor if you can find a way to strike up "friendly chats" with people outside any formal job process, and then mindfully guide the ones you like through your assessment process with care.

It seems beyond unreasonable that I couldn’t make use of that information in choosing who I will work with professionally.

To me, it’s a clear-cut freedom of association (and/or a freedom of speech) right.