Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs?

HR don't want to hold out for a unicorn. They couldn't give two hoots about your skill. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to evaluate it. HR are simply brokers.

It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market".

Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process).

The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to.

The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR.

The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity.

Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions).

(1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete.

The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.

iOS developers are hugely in demand these days. And while others have questioned your tactics during the job posting phase, I'm willing to bet you've put as little thought into the phase before that as well. Are you blogging, speaking at conferences and meet ups or putting out open source projects? You need to be putting significant effort into making your engineering brand mean something to the candidates you're trying to reach so that in the brief moment when they're deciding whether to send you their resume, you've given them some reason to believe that you're an above average place to work.

It amazes me that in a field that preaches understanding the customer to build a product that resonates, we haven't bothered to look at the hiring process the same way. And it should be even easier to do considering our target market is made up of people very similar to ourselves. When I started hiring, I didn't have much success until I started to look at what type of ads resonated with me and the ways that I went about looking for work. I spent weeks going through job postings collecting ones that I felt I'd apply to if I didn't have a job and then started to look for themes.

One theme I found was that they didn't follow the 3-part format with a description of the company, description of the skills desired and description of the likely tasks of the position. And not one of them included the bit about "working closely with the product manager"...there's no surer sign of uninteresting work than that cliché.

But biggest theme I found was that I had heard of and formed a positive impression about the companies posting the ads I was interested in. A good example of a relatively small company that I feel has done a good job with this is Segment.io. They've discussed their transition from primarily NodeJS to Go very publicly as well as a few other technical topics which led me to investigate their Github repository a few months before. So when I saw one of their ads, it immediately registered as one I would have applied to if I needed work.

And lastly, I realized that I haven't found a job from a job posting in over a decade. It's really a pretty crappy way to connect with employers. Every job I've gotten since the downturn has been the result of either a referral from a former coworker or a pre-existing connection that I've made with others from the technical community. I realized during the downturn that if something like that happened again, I wanted to be prepared, so I started building connections that I could reach out to to find work. Those connections are such a better way to find work since it's essentially like sending a proxy you trust through the interview process to weed out the companies that aren't worth working for. And those connections are also a great way to bring find great people to bring into any work quality work environment.

Hiring is hard for people who aren't willing to put in the effort or want to see it as a process that you only put effort into during the hiring phase. It gets significantly easier when you view it as a continual process to position yourself (or, more accurately, whoever is your employer at the time) as an appealing place for your ideal candidates to work. Put yourself in their shoes and design your hiring process in the customer-centric process you're probably already using for your actual produce and you'll be a lot more successful.

Despite agreeing a lot with your sentiments, I don't exactly agree with what you said. Agreed that fair compensation is crucial. Agreed that sensible hours are important. Agreed that too many places fail to give these to their employees.

However, I've known lots of companies who offer good compensation and good work-life balance, but still think it's important to be "employee-friendly". Again, agreed that there can be conflicts of interest, especially in a non-cooperative model. But still, happy employees tend to be more useful employees. It can be useful to hire people whose motivation isn't solely limited to the compensation.

Great point. One corollary is that with the increase in volume (and churn) of places to post a job, single openings & fuaxpenings are likely to be double/triple/N counted.

I wonder if part of it (besides keeping positions open just to see what is out there) is that companies can use job openings as analytic data. you find information that re-affirms how much you should be paying employees, expectations of employee turn over, and more interestingly what the competition is doing.

I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you dont get in no matter how good you think it went.