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The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

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Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#131

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

oblio wrote: post #124
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions. so useless skill that says nothing about your actual fit for the job was changed for automatic half-skill that still says nothing about your actual fit for the job oh no, where are my tears?

It's astonishing how many people working in tech don't realize the impact of automation in this regard. This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews. Now the same people filtering CVs have to wade through so much crap that it's almost imp…

> Very likely, waiting for you in line in front of the unemployment office, 10 years from now.

so nothing's changed?

> This basically kills any "cold job application". Now it's all back to references and nepotism. I've gotten almost all my past jobs by applying to a job I liked, someone figuring out my CV was decent and then passing interviews.

and my argument is that THERE WERE NO COLD APPLICATIONS

even you yourself say - you had to pass interviews. Everything is decided by the direct contact with the candidate

now everything will simply skip directly to that stage of skill checks, instead of playing cat-and-mouse game of phrasing, misphrasing and outright lies

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#133

Post by maccard »

vkou wrote: post #125
maccard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have 100 candidates though - you likely have 90 applicants that just fail to meet the basic criteria. I hire for games and every single job posting we make for programmers we get about 10% of applicants who have literally never programmed before, even for lead level roles .

Well, these days you'll have 1000 candidates, you drop the 900 that fail to meet the basic criteria, and you're left with 100 that you can't immediately tell are frauds.

I’ve been hiring for remote game programmer jobs. We got 300 applicants in 6 weeks for the last one.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#134

Post by ghaff »

gopher_space wrote: post #76
maccard wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve worked with places that have had HR bungle the hiring and places that haven’t. The only difference is whether it’s HR or Engineering bungling the hiring. Writing a job description that actually matches what you want is hard work. Sifting through 300 applicants that don’t meet the requirements or lie on the application form is hard work. Doing 10 30 minute intro calls is hard work. Desigining “standard” questions…

> And then getting the group to stop saying “we want to speak to more people” is harder than any of the previous steps. FOMO will keep them doing this in perpetuity until you find a way to make them feel the pain.

Eh. I've been on hiring committees and have been sort of eh and then they're the one. Let's do it.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#135

Post by watwut »

vkou wrote: post #80
zulux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We ask for something stupid like "3 years of Pascal experience." If the resume has it, it goes straight to the trash unless it has specific real-world Pascal experience.

You'll also filter out people smart enough to know that this is a bullshit keyword matching game and the only way to win it is to put the keywords on their resume. Because they assume that the job posting was written by a non-technical idiot, and 95% of the time, they'd be correct, and they are just playing the game as the game expects to be played. Look. If you're looking for 100% integrity and honesty from everyone…

Everyone hates on HR here, but I did found them quite good in companies I worked for. They were not the ones who judged technical skills or even picked people. They scheduled interviews and such.

The worst hiring nonsense I have seen came from engineers. Stuff like giving people weird puzzles, rejecting or accepting people on random factoids, "beer test", demanding uber senior experience for an unglamorous boring take jira close jira position. And above all, believing that every good engineer is my copy. It takes an engineer to reject a guy because he reads different blog, has different opinion on programming languages company does not uses anyway.

I heard a hiring manager, an engineer, say that he knows whether he wants the guy or not in first 10 second. It is clear in that first sentence from vibes. I genuinely it is people like him who make hiring process into crap.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#136

Post by maccard »

atoav wrote: post #114
maccard wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring manager here - the last job I posted was open for 6 weeks. We waited 2 weeks for initial applications, and it took 4 weeks to schedule interviews with our shortlist and get to an offer, including a very unfortunate 2 week holiday from someone that allowed us down. We got 350 applications for it. We listed in the JD that remote was ok but needed to be in specific countries for us to hire. I’d guess 90% of the a…

I once casted volunteer actors for short movies. It costed me literally nothing to write: "Deadline for application is $DATE, you will hear from us within X days. You will either get a rejection or an invitation to a casting on $CASTINGDATE1 or $CASTINGDATE2." And on the casting I personally guaranteed for a date when they will get a result. Rejections included feedback that helped candidates understand our decision…

The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop.

But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone else” but it’s at least closure. We used to provide a few templates until someone demanded (including multiple emails to the hiring manager directly) looking for more information after we had send them a “sorry but we didn’t think your skills were a good match to the role”. It’s not perfect but at least everyone gets an answer from me.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#137

Post by maccard »

ghaff wrote: post #128
maccard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation. Totally, and I’d never say “hey I think you might be a fit, let’s try it out for 3 months”. But if we interview someone I’m just doing my best to try and figure out do they ge…

Yeah, probationary periods are one thing. But, if I leave a job and, especially if I relocate, I want a pretty good implicit guarantee however informal that, absent a real mis-meeting of the minds I'm not going to be on the streets in three months.

Yeah id never actually hire like that in real life. People’s lives are at play, and it’s more important that we don’t wreck someone’s life IMO.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#138

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

cocoto wrote: post #36

I'm responsible for hiring junior C++ developers in a small company (first role). Let met tell you that almost all candidates are stating "medium" level in C++ in their resume but don't even know how to work with pointers or references, they don't even have the level of someone studying the language for half a day. And I don't even think it's related to AI. Whatever the reason, it's very easy to assert a candidate co…

We had a process where C or C++ competence was acceptable and they would need to do some simple list creation tasks without STL. One guy was adamant about using C++ despite being assured C would be fine. It didn't look good when he new'ed an array and forgot to delete[] it when free() would have been mistake proof.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#139

Post by ghaff »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #20
ungreased0675 wrote: post #3

Good hiring almost certainly has to be a significant competitive advantage. It makes me wonder why so many otherwise successful companies let HR bungle the hiring process.

The best hiring is generally expected to happen through referrals, so there's not a ton of pressure to improve the public application pipeline beyond the minimum required to keep it functional.

One problem with referrals is that referral bonuses tend to encourage referring people they barely know and never really worked with. But actual networking often works.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#140

Post by ghaff »

bartread wrote: post #129
cloche wrote: post #117

I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. This used to be the norm before COVID and it would solve most of these issues. It's also ironic that the authors are from Microsoft/Amazon and Meta which have very structured interviews that tend to be about just hitting the right keywords during the interview itself. None of these places even really care about what you've done…

> I don't understand why tech companies are so reluctant to go back to in-person interviews. Tech companies probably aren’t that reluctant, but I’d bet a lot of job applicants are.

I do understand there are job applicants who don't want to travel and/or don't want to do an in-person interview. But . I also do think that (mostly) post-COVID I mostly want to meet with a candidate in person.
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