Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

I'm in management, senior to executive level with a preference towards data / ai. I'm also a contributor and committer to some Apache projects and maintain a popular one myself. I've got a background in financial services.

I was laid off last year during the major tech layoffs and I had a few interim management jobs since. Nothing permanent yet though and I see myself as a missionary not a mercenary so 'just' contracting doesn't fulfill me.

What I've noticed that where there used to be just a few applicants there are now many. This is confirmed by other job seekers. Jobs posted are also sometimes fake. Just window dressing so to say. I've gotten offers from within my own domain of less than half I was earning. For a NGOs I could consider that but for high tech or finance that's stuff I cannot take seriously.

I noticed I need to work on my positioning and network harder. I did not have to apply for a job in 15 years so I am a but rusty in that respect.

What I think is happing in the industry is that the macro economic developments are still quite uncertain and companies haven't figured out their strategies yet. So they stick to what they know.

I think this has less to do with assessment issues in trainability and is rather an economic thought: I don't have to train the employee that has already been trained by my competition. You can see a similar effect in companies pushing more and more training to academic institutions, expecting them to produce full fledged developers from day one (at least it's the case here in europe).

>"it's not any kind of paradox"

It is a paradox, because it is a market where people basically only do one salaried job at a time, meaning they have a fixed 40-60 hours to sell and it shouldn't take long to sell it if they want to move on to another job. (Here "selling" means you've been hired for your next job, since you just took the 40 hours you had available every week starting next month and sold it for money.)

Within reason, people can be retrained to adjacent jobs or basically could do exactly what an employer wants within a low number of weeks. People know what kind of jobs they're capable of or it can be tested for quickly.

Instead there are candidates who spend a year both training themselves and applying for jobs unsuccessfully, while employers spend MORE than the same amount of time on that, if you add up the amount of time recruiters are putting in on behalf of employers and HR puts in and employers put into interviews. It is a market failure for people to want to work, for employers to want to hire them, for them to be able to do the work, but for them not to actually be doing the work. It would be kind of like if people were desperate for any of either tomatoes, carrots, wheat, rice, potatoes, or really anything, whatever they get is fine for them since they can look up recipes for that and make it with a tiny investment of time (this is the demand side), so they are putting in ads for "Want any of: rice, carrots, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes" and willing to pay for it! Just put up a hundred ads, a hundred unfilled jobs. On the supply side meanwhile you have a farmer who owns all the necessary land (hours in the day) and has ALL the equipment (a computer, Internet, transportation, clothes, anything anyone needs to start working) and is really willing to produce anything and can do so on that arable land! There are no capital requirements. Great. So we have the demand side taken care of, people want quite a few different types of food and supply side taken care of, the farmer is willing to farm just about anything. But, for some reason, what ends up happening isn't that the fields are filled, it's that there are farmers spending all day every day selling and nobody is buying. And instead of saying, here try this sample, and it's fine, you have a weird request for "What exactly had grown on these fields since the beginning of time" (this is called a resume) and then you have buyers inundated with answers to their bizarre requests for "what has grown on these fields since the beginning of time" but the buyers still aren't getting the food and the fields are empty, the farmers are trying unsuccessfully to sell all day and the buyers are somehow inundated with sales pitches but aren't actually buying anything, while burning time on putting up advertisements of all the food they want to buy.

Why is this happening? How can people not be working but want to work, when they can train into being productive workers within a few weeks and are more than willing to do so?

It would be like if shoppers spent days at a time at farmer's markets going from stand to stand and buying nothing, and farmers spent days at a time standing at the farmer's market with buyer after buyer asking them questions about the history of their land and not buying any damn potatoes. It's a potato lady you want it or not? If not step aside so someone who actually wants it can see it.

p.s. half of the farmers are asking other farmers to endorse them on linkedin. Buyers ignore this noise completely.

The job market is highly dysfunctional.

Companies are risk adverse.

The goal isn't necessarily to hire the best candidate, but rather the least risky one. Often one gets a large set of resumes and most of them are clearly unqualified for the position and then upon interviewing many others are also unqualified.

The tools to mitigate that risk are things that qualified candidates are adverse to (see the "say no to take homes") and can often find a position through their networks of knowing who has a job open.

A person at the company attesting to "my friend John who I worked with before is looking for a job" which in turn drastically reduces the risk of hiring since this is a person who an employee has worked with before. It doesn't always mean a "hire right now" but if company policies allow for it, it can move a person to a short list.

With risky hires who turn out to not be qualified, the cost of the hire can be much worse than not hiring anyone in that spot. I have worked with people who have generated negative value and spent a good bit of the next year cleaning up things scattered through the codebase.

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ROI

It often takes about a year for a new hire to become a positive contributor. The next year the balance of the slow down of work, training, etc... it then balances out.

There are few candidates who can hit the job running. Most people take that year to become productive.

When a candidate is hired and leaves within that time, this costs the company money. At some point the company is going to hire people who don't need training (see problem with testing and take home). Even then, it's often cheaper to not hire someone.

And so the "we want someone with all these skills since we're not going to train a random person on Oracle PL/SQL only to have them leave in 9 months."

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Expectations

Most companies can't spend Big Tech money on salaries. And it is life changing amounts to move to it and furthermore, once you have a lifestyle associated with living in Big Tech compensation, it can be hard to leave - the golden handcuffs are real.

If you're working for a big tech company in the 10% of compensation, going somewhere else to work at the median is a big hit. This limits the pool where a person considers.

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Shotgun resumes

If you get multiples of the number of people who can reasonably be considered, one of the first / easy passes is to remove resumes that haven't shown an indication that they've read the posting. This also means removing resumes from the candidate pool that appear to be technology packing their resume (more than 1 page per decade of experience, "worked with: list 20 technologies here" on each position.

This tends to remove people who are more risky to hire from the pool.

The part from the OP:

    As first step, you start with the companies you like/know with being a bit more selective on the jobs but after some point you basically apply all somewhat related jobs and then want to see what happens after. (which only increase the complexity of the problem)

Once you start sending the same resume to everyone the rate of people looking at your resume drops off significantly since it doesn't resemble the position that is being applied for or have any reason why they are applying there... meaning that even if they do get hired, this is a position that they're looking to start searching for a new position on day one and as an employer, you're better off not hiring someone.

Probably the case, but the iterated version of this is far worse: imagine the process is optimized so that qualified candidates are made offers 25% of the time (vs 100% ideally) and unqualified are made offers 1% of the time (va 0% ideally).

This isn’t a single round N-choose-1 game; the unqualified candidates don’t dematerialize, but rather keep applying and may even engage with automation tools to apply to hundreds of roles every day. So, they become wildly over-represented in the applicant pool for any given role.