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

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111–120 of 178 posts

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

#111
post #23
post #11

I would like to see someone quantify how many job listings are posted to meet H1-B requirements where there is no intent to hire. I've been hearing more and more stories of people trying to get interviews for jobs they see online only to find out the listing was to meet visa requirements for the person in the current role.

Job postings that are aiming to satisfy visa requirements are generally easy to identify. Here are some indicators: * They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online. * They will not be posted to the company's website. * They'll require a specific education level * They'll require experience that is oddly specific

Like this one: https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560

I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a H1-B told me what it really was.

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

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but the information is publicly available on glassdoor. A couple reasons why I didn't list comp: 1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area. 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work. Like the article hypothesizes, I thought we'd get 50-10…

Everyone is different, but I would always take a job posting more seriously if it listed at least a salary _range_. I at least know I'm not wasting my time going thorough the whole process only to learn that the comp package is way below what I would accept. Yea, there's always Glassdoor for that, but I'm not sure how much I trust that site's data.

Even when a CEO overhears a personal conversation and approaches to say they are looking for X, Y, and Z so I should contact the CTO directly, and here's his email, etc... I'm reticent to pursue the introduction. It's worse if such a person mentions beer and foosball.

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

#113
post #107

I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job" has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place. As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will ch…

The same is happening with real estate, people have started to post apartments "soon for sale" without any starting price or fixed bidding time, years before they are ready to move, just in case some crazy guy happens to drop by and put a bid that is higher than the actual market value. The cost of advertising to a wide audience has simply dropped so much that you can constantly keep fishing even though you don't hav…

The attention is not endless, though. Consumers will eventually respond with scepticism, I think.

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

#114
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here (although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a month.

Some recruiting sites (and recruiters) are pretty careless with the way they contact candidates too, though. I mention having done iOS related stuff on my resume, but I occasionally get an email or call from someone that is looking for a 1 man iOS development team lol. And they usually are offering a short term contract that pays much worse than my full time job does. It's funny because they get REALLY persistent abo…

Dear WWLink,

Please stop pissing away this once in a career opportunity!

-Recruiter McRecruiterson

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

#115
post #2

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation. I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positi…

Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but, strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).

A lot of companies want productivity NOW and aren't willing to tank the cost/risk of training someone junior. Also, some skills you can't/don't want to train into.

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

#116
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So compensation is not relevant to your point at all since you didn't list it. Or were you looking for mind readers? The low response rate makes sense in that case.

Fair enough, but the information is publicly available on glassdoor. A couple reasons why I didn't list comp: 1. I didn't want to get candidates purely motivated by the high cash comp in the area. 2. Cash comp isn't core to how the company markets itself to employees and its culture. The company prefers to sell itself on being an employee friendly place to work. Like the article hypothesizes, I thought we'd get 50-10…

Being employee friendly is a minimum requirement. Unless you're offering something truly extraordinary, it is probably going to be difficult to differentiate yourself in that regard.

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

#117
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, a lot of new grads don't know how little they actually know and expect the degree itself to qualify them for the job.

Sure, but this is not a relevant response to my comment unless you meant it as an insult.

It's entirely relevant. You're a recent grad. You haven't been landing your interviews. And he's giving you a plausible reason why.

Your interpretation of it being insulting doesn't preclude it from being true.

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

#119

* Employers overvalue experience, forgetting that a human is a fantastic machine and with appropriate training and management, most people will be able to do most jobs. * Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job * Education is poor: at all levels actual learning i…

"Employers overvalue experience"

Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most conservative and uncreative criteria possible.

The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week" technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be friction and failure and massive wastes of money.

There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment" type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.

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

#120
post #2

I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things entirely. It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that such is the situation. I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open positi…

> I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago, and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving. It is good to hire for attitude. You can always teach new team members new skills but it is next to impossible to change their attitudes. > After harassing HR at my company, Ah, yes. HR. Could they be part of the…

I know that when a certain global HVAC company brings in a new "fresh" class of salespeople, they bring them in all at once about 20 to 30 at a time. The will go through weeks of training. Some make it, some don't.

The majority, if not all, of the incoming (just of of college) class did not major or obtain a degree in anything sales related (business, management, accounting, marketing, etc.). Most of them graduated with mechanical engineering degrees. Why? Because it is easier to train and teach someone how to sell than it is to teach some the technical details (physics) of HVAC systems. It is also easier to sell when you know and understand the product you are selling. Most of the units sold are custom built for the particular building they are being used on/in.

Likewise, it is easier to train or teach someone a new programming language than it is to change or modify someone's attitude and personality.

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