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

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

#21

Post by AnimalMuppet »

One more piece of the problem: There are headhunters who have low probability of success, and try to make it up on volume. They find your resume, and they find a job opening, and they say "Oh, hey, this guy does something technical, and that job needs something technical. Let's try it!" No, 40 years in embedded software does not make me a good candidate for a VHDL job that wants 5 years of experience. Stop wasting my time with your incompetence. (That sounds harsh, but a competent headhunter should know better than that.)

The way I did it was, over the years I built a curated list of headhunters that I respected. They weren't just low-effort people - they really knew what they were doing. When I was ready for a new job, I broke out the list. Half of the names on it weren't valid any more, but one of the ones that was came through for me.

I'm not sure that scales, though...

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

#22

Post by mberning »

Beijinger wrote: post #2

The job market has collapsed. You need to know someboody. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I have interviewed dozens of people for fairly specialized roles and the number of people with an impressive looking resume that end up being pretenders is probably greater than 90%. I would much rather interview and hire someone that another trusted party can vouch for. I understand that everyone wants to grow in their career, stretch themself, market themself well, etc. but there is a lot of blatant lying and cheating going on in the labor market nowadays.

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

#23

Post by uoaei »

the_arun wrote: post #10

From jobseeker point : We need better interview process. I don’t understand leetcode style of interviews when we have ChatGPT to generate code. Even OpenAI has tough coding rounds.

ChatGPT isn't very good for knowing how well or correctly code will run

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

#24

Post by CoastalCoder »

I was laid off over a year ago, and I should finally be starting a new job in a few weeks once the paperwork clears.

I think the following factors contributed to my long unemployment:

(1) At first, lousy market for remote jobs. Big layoffs from major tech companies made it an employer's market.

(2) Rusty interview skills. I wasn't at all ready for Leetcode-type tests, and I hadn't realized that I suck at live coding tests in general. Practice helped somewhat.

(3) Delays from testing the market to determine the new pay rate for my skillset. I.e., for a while I didn't apply to any jobs that paid well below my previous comp.

(4) Indecision about my technical focus area. I was doing DL compilers, which didn't really excite me. I wanted to break into traditional compilers. But I also worked on other skills to apply to specific job openings I'd found. In retrospect, I'd have been more successful just picking one focus area and going deep on learning just that.

I'm also a little over 50, so maybe there was some ageism at play, I don't know.

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

#25

Post by pjkundert »

Hire (and work) only in High Trust environments.

Until this general expectation is restored in "western civilization", you'll need to apply ideological filters to where you seek employees, and where you are willing to work as an employee.

Some in society may find this ... undesirable. However, one may ask whether these are the same people who wish to enjoy the benefits of High Trust environments, without the corresponding obligations.

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

#26

Post by sigmoid10 »

Phelinofist wrote: post #7

I haven't looked for a new job for the last ~3y, but before that it was always the difference in pay that resulted in me and a potential employer not shaking hands eventually. Ofc, that is not universal as some companies pay a proper amount, but most of them just don't. So no shit they have difficulties finding people. That explains both sides, as people do not accept offers that are (too) low. There also a million o…

On top of that, we've had around 20-25% inflation since pre-Covid times in the US and the EU. And that's just the CPI, which underestimates inflation for most people. So if you made ~80k before Covid and don't make 100k+ today, you salary has effectively decreased.

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

#27

Post by tootie »

Assuming you're talking about the tech market in particular my observation is that 2020-2022 was an absolutely wild aberration of runaway compensation driven by low interest rates and VC frenzy. In 2024 there are lots of well-paying line of business tech jobs asking for on-site time that seem like a prison sentence by comparison. Even though they are still high-paying and low stress compared to average workers. Basically, we've got a job market that is very good by any historical comparison, but market expectations are now completely unrealistic.

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

#28

Post by mbrumlow »

Employers don’t want job seekers, they want people who can do the job.

What I am finding of late is most people are woefully under prepared and under skilled.

In the other hand everybody has a degree and wants six figures because of it.

The job market is tight, but not fucked. When tight it does not have the stomach to employee warm bodies.

The fix is lowerred expectations from job seekers and the long term fix is schools need to become hard again and stop being a product.

We need weed out classes, the goal is not to graduate as many as we can, it’s to educate. Maybe if they hard class was hard, it was hard for a reason, and dumbing it down so people don’t drop the class is only doing them a disservice when it comes to the work force which will demand results, not attendance.

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

#29

Post by jstummbillig »

the_arun wrote: post #10

From jobseeker point : We need better interview process. I don’t understand leetcode style of interviews when we have ChatGPT to generate code. Even OpenAI has tough coding rounds.

Yes, but nobody is lobbying for worse interview processes and if anyone has an incentive to make it better, it's employers (for whom it is disproportionally more expensive).

People love to poke fun at it, but employers are not trying to make it bad. It's just a hard problem.

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

#30

Post by RandomWorker »

Networking. We need more speed dating with employers and networking opportunities. Every job I ever had came through meeting with people. If every employee would be encouraged to meet with other people once a week it could scale. Maybe you would quickly lose people as well, also a risk.
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