Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers

I'm still receiving tons of mails and LinkedIn offers, even phone calls, and I haven't really seen much of a difference or decline. If anything, the compensation packages have only gone up, but the offers are as tone deaf as always.

I work at Apple and my team has been “hiring” for the last 2 years with no offers so far.

Why? Because even if you are a good candidate, hiring is not as easy as people think.

Among the many challengues we have I can list the following:

1. The people interested in your profile have minimal influence in the process,

2. There are people who are always chasing for the shiny new object (or person, in this case),

3. There is a sea of resumes in our hands, and we pick the best, but they want the world and lose them during negotiations, and the ones at the bottom of the list who really want the job, move on because the process to get to them takes too long (several months),

4. People over estimate their qualifications. Their abilities may be good, but they write over the top accomplishments in their resumes that are hard to believe, at least without proof, and they are the first ones to get rejected,

5. HR interferes too much in the process. They sometimes change the job requirements, sometimes ignore candidates that we explicitely tell them to follow up with, sometimes extend meaningless offers just to keep potentially good candidates in the hook (people with offers at other Big Co.), sometimes force candidates to accept offers without a signed paper, so on and so forth. Obviously, good candidates get fed up with this and decline/renege the offer, we lose them, and the people below them too because the negotiation took too long (3-5 months),

6. I really want to hire motivated individuals, and I know many people like me across different teams, but we lose motivation over time because of all the roadblocks, and the cycle(s) described above repeats.

The whole process is kind of silly. I have reviewed hundreds of resume from people who are doing amazing work at other companies, but we reject them for very small things. Only two of approximately 20 referrals got an offer, and I am 100% sure that all of those referrals are as good or better than me (facepalm).

I'm a business owner and hire SE roles on a regular clip. I'll share some things with you, the market is totally unpredictable right now. Even with some projected wins, we don't know what a new/mixed US Administration will mean. Investigations? Deadlock? New laws that impact us? We have record inflation for our career lifetimes and we seem to have entered a recession, but people still disagree on if we're in it and how long we'll last. My customers are all experiencing this, and while that emotion has slowed orders they have not stopped.

All of these things together as a business owner, going into holiday times; make me keep the mindset that hiring anyone right now for a non-essential position can probably wait until I can understand better what our company's financial picture is going to look like.

edit for typo

Not sure what you are doing. But for the few jobs I applied for I always got an offer. Maybe take a look at the jobs you are applying for and what you are putting in your resume?

Honestly, this doesn't sound much different than a year ago, five years ago, or ten years ago. Companies never seem to be serious about hiring: they go fishing but never reel anyone in, they ghost you after a few communications, they reject your application with automation, and even if you have an internal referral, the referrer is usually only able to do "Go apply through the normal funnel and if you get through the automation, I'll vouch for ya!"

I've got ~20 years in the industry, including startup-sized companies, medium sized companies and FAANGs. Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.

I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.