I think the most important part of your research is that there is a myth that you have to hire young people who like playing video games. You reap what you sow when those are your hiring goals. Many talented senior developers are completely turned off by that type of ad.
The real reason you can't hire developers....
31–40 of 271 posts
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#32If you complete phone screens on 1 out of every 10 inquiries you send, you are doing very well in my opinion. If those phone screens do not turn into full interviews or offers, that is a statement on how they went, not on company responsiveness. Frankly, I don't think your stats show a lack of response at all. I think they are very reasonable, as some level of non-responsiveness is natural, when you account for the f…
But even a summarily dismissive response is better than silence (click 'reply', paste in "Sorry, your cover letter doesn't indicate a good fit", click 'send').
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#333. Weird extra steps
It is not really that weird. Puzzles or math problems are just a faster and highly probable measure of one's aptitude not just for the silly puzzle but how sharp you are even in business decisions. The mind has to be sharp. Trust me this is as important as knowing if you did multi-threaded cluster based algorithm blah blah.
Puzzles as a selection criteria - there will be false positives but too few false negatives.
Recently I was hiring for an online marketing position where being sharp with math actually matters, a lot. The candidate of 2 yr experience refused to take a screening test on aptitude. Very well, rejected as we have no data points of how sharp he was.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#34I think part of the problem you've identified is that many companies are constantly in "resume trawling mode" even if they have no intention of hiring immediately.
HR people like to keep lots of resumes on file, the fresher the better, so that when they're tasked with filling a seat immediately, they're not starting from zero.
The fact that this practice sucks for the job-seeker is of little concern; they've optimized their process according to their own needs.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#35A lot of comments here miss the point.
80% did not respond at all . They did not acknowledge his contact attempt in any way whatsoever. Not a canned response confirming contact, nothing. Nothing.
I'm willing to bet very heavily on this representing complete incompetence at the organizations contacted.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#36If you complete phone screens on 1 out of every 10 inquiries you send, you are doing very well in my opinion. If those phone screens do not turn into full interviews or offers, that is a statement on how they went, not on company responsiveness. Frankly, I don't think your stats show a lack of response at all. I think they are very reasonable, as some level of non-responsiveness is natural, when you account for the f…
While I agree with the author that there does seem to be people just wasting time in the market, I did have the same reaction as you to the phone screen numbers. 8 out of 10 of my phone screens convert into an offer. There is a very human element at the point of a phone screen and maybe that has something to do with the numbers. If the author was just doing an experiment and not truly interested in the position, it may have show through in the phone screen or there could have been other issues with it. It seems weird to me to get to the phone interview and just waste time.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#37Most companies are going to put it right in the bin at 115K. Not sure if you understand that.
why? That's a pretty basic level salary for a senior developer.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#38Most companies are going to put it right in the bin at 115K. Not sure if you understand that.
I think 115K for a quality, senior engineer is not unreasonable (even for a remote job). I received an offer for a pure-telecommute job (which I declined) for slightly above that figure a month ago.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#39Specifically in response to the time gaps: it's true that time gaps are bad, but keep in mind these are startups, which means they're juggling about twenty thousand different things at the same time. I think in that domain in particular, some slack may be in order as compared to a 20,000-strong corporation with a dedicated HR department. Re: weird extra steps: the idea isn't that they're cool. The idea is that if you…
It's not the be-all end-all, but it seems like a decent first-pass filter.
It is really not, I have been round and round about this with every organization that I have been in that does these. The only thing it displays is the persons ability to answer trivia and solve puzzles. These are not the characteristics of a great developer, the characteristics of a great developer are simplicity, creativity and rapidly adaptation.
You would be better off handing them a paint brush and a canvas and using that as a measure of their creativity. If that seems like a weird concept, then you start to get a picture of how far off these trivia puzzles are, they are literally of no value, not only that they can filter out the best candidates and worse yet they make a company seem like a bunch of elitist that think they are smarter than the average bear.
Re: The real reason you can't hire developers....
#40I want to add something from my own experience.
One particular company I was interested in had few puzzles on their website. I once worked the whole weekend to solve them as good as I can. Spent lot of time writing a custom cover letter, resume and attached the C++ solutions to the puzzles.
Its been several months and I am still waiting for the damn reply!