291–300 of 469 posts
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified…
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified…
It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important. Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview. So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’…
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I think a lot of people simply don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have a job. There are many psychological needs that jobs often provide for you that you have to sort out yourself when you don't have traditional employement. This is a problem you face through unemployement, but also self-employment and early retirement. At least in part, it's not so much not having a job as not having daily structu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
> We don't have money even for retirement funding We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
An acquaintance of mine—he was the owner's/CEO's deputy at a place I worked—now runs a team-coaching-turned-recruitment business. I saw a question from him on social media the other day, something along the lines of: "Some businesses in the industry are receiving over 5,000 applications for advertised roles. How do you effectively screen that many applications?" I didn’t respond, of course—I have neither credentials nor experience, nor any real relationship with this guy—but I formed an opinion nonetheless.
My intuition was simply: you don’t. If your candidate pool’s fitness function is normally distributed, you’d likely get approximately the same quality of candidates from a randomly selected 50 out of 5,000. The distribution will be practically the same, and the maximum will be indistinguishable from the true maximum in any practical sense. As I recently explored—prompted by some statistical curiosity—this, of course, is modulated by the mean and standard deviation of the distribution. A higher standard deviation calls for a larger subset, while a higher mean dramatically shrinks the number needed to screen.
But I also think nobody really knows their "true" fitness function, much less its distribution across the applicant pool—simply because businesses have no means or resources to actually measure or research this aspect. That doesn’t stop them from pretending they do.
I also felt the urge to respond with some snark: maybe they don’t really understand their own business, at least the placement/recruitment aspect of it. If they’re recruiting mid-echelon personnel—software devs, BAs, testers, other office roles—it makes sense to publish an ad and gather applications. But it doesn’t make sense to expect that pool to include extraordinary candidates from a fitness perspective. Sure, we’re all extraordinary in some sense, but in roles like these, businesses are simply not in a position to materially benefit from that extraordinarity. Nor are they able to detect it during hiring—and I don’t even mean that as snark; it’s just the nature of things.
In a natural distribution, the second-best candidate is not materially better than the top-best, and the third is almost like the second, and so on. Businesses that set their hiring threshold—whether explicitly calculated or intuition-based—too high will simply go out of business, because in this echelon you need to rely on mass hiring. Relatively speaking, of course, but you still need to be able to fill multiple positions with readily available candidates.
So, the question posed by my ex-coworker doesn’t make sense. But as I see it, it doesn’t make sense even for hiring in the top echelon—C-suites and so-called "rock stars." The strategy for top-echelon hiring is well established. It’s widely used in business, show business, and sports alike, where "fitness" follows a power-law distribution. It’s called "scouting" or "headhunting". You don’t throw a job ad over the fence and wait for a torrent of applications. You meticulously maintain a rolodex of potential candidates, watch their careers, court and dine them, and try to snatch them when they’re poised to make a move—or even just before it becomes obvious.
You don’t wait for them to apply to you—you apply to them. You don’t ask "Why do you want to work for our company?"—you shower them with perks and sign-on bonuses if they show even a hint of hesitation. The "agents" in this echelon work for candidates, often on retainer—not the other way around. It’s a completely different world, where you’re never in a position to screen a pool of 5,000 in hopes of finding an extraordinaire. In that world, hiring the second-best can have a humongous negative impact on company performance compared to hiring the top-best. For better or worse, that’s reality.
So I found my guy’s question quite unsettling—an indicator that yet another "recruiter" doesn’t really understand what they’re recruiting for.
I was able to fish out a useful metaphor from the LLM-generated word soup: "talent brokers vs gatekeepers." Over the last decade, recruitment agencies and internal departments have been universally rebranded as "talent acquisition." That rebranding feels disturbingly phony and hollow. Now I know why. Despite pretending to be "talent brokers"—scouting for talent—the reality hasn’t changed. They’re still the same old "gatekeepers", applying selectivity to boatloads of "talent" that come to them.
As industries and their associated keyword-spaces have grown dramatically—and AI tools have proliferated—such selectivity has become increasingly diluted. In my opinion, it’s now indistinguishable from random picks, yet still cloaked in the illusion of validity. For someone like me, swimming deep in the muck of the mid-echelon and with no ambition whatsoever to strive for oxygen-deprived heights of top echelon, it’s deeply disturbing.
I have no idea why governments refuse to deal with matchmaking the unemployed and employers. It would be at least as productive as highways, but a hell of a lot cheaper.
https://edd.ca.gov/en/jobs_and_training/Job_Seeker_Informati...
https://www.worksourceoregon.org/jobseekers
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified…
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become. We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified. The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified…
Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position. Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly. Why do they even bother?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People living in hotels, temporary trailers (in some places even tiny homes count), living with a friend temporarily, etc are all homeless. You're right. But is a 30-year-old who moves back in with their parents "homeless"? And yeah, the paycheck-to-paycheck stat blows my mind. Somehow the standard American experience has become the latest model iPhone (financed), a new car (financed), a rented home, 4-5 meals out…
A phone for internet access is basically mandatory now if you want to work, and depending on where you live so is a car.
Last time I was unemployed for an extended period I thought I would put my skills to good use by hunting for bugs and contributing fixes to open source projects. Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love. That's when I learned to stop working for free.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.