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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

#271

Post by iteria »

voidUpdate wrote: post #88

I got my first job out of university about 2 years or so ago, and it was immensely frustrating. I must have applied to easily over a hundred postings on linkedin, the vast majority of which never replied to me to even acknowledge that they'd received my application. Only two ever replied to me, one of which was my current employer. What would have been very nice was a brief explanation of why I wasn't chosen, what ma…

There's too many applicants for that. You're getting canned responses because a human probably never even saw your resume. The other issue is that there is a small amount of people are _extremely_ unstable. Giving them any kind of feedback encourages them to harrass the company and employees. It's like 1% of applicants, but when you're dealing with this many people it means you are guaranteed to run into someone like this, so it's often policy not to give specific feedback.

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

#272

Post by g9yuayon »

tlb wrote: post #8

It's not any kind of paradox. Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while…

> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring.

Any study on why there would be this kind of mismatch in the tech industry? I'd imagine that tech industry is the most transparently competitive and least regulated sector so there should be a reasonable balance between the supply of skills and the demand. In addition, there are so much resource that teaches people all kinds of tech skills, so people should be able to move from one skill set to another if really needed.

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

#273

Post by g9yuayon »

banannaise wrote: post #63
tlb wrote: post #8

It's not any kind of paradox. Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while…

Structural unemployment happens when the perceived skills of the workforce don't match the perceived needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. A lot of engineers will tell you that companies are often expecting both too much (precise types of experience) and the wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge...), which leads them to pass over perfectly qualifie…

> wrong things (leetcode-type challenges, unnecessarily specific knowledge..

I'm curious about the dynamics of this. If leetcoding or requiring some specific knowledge is too much for candidates, those employers will not be able to find enough talent, so they will be forced to lower their standards and the mismatch should be gone, right? Case in point, I'd venture to guess that no more than 10% of the tech workers truly understand AI or stats or machine learning or basic college-level maths, yet magically millions of ML engineers or data scientists have popped up in the past few years just because the market had such high demand.

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

#274

Post by seabass-labrax »

em-bee wrote: post #253
pseudocomposer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.

to qualify, unions may have solved this problem in the US. in europe, which has a stronger apprentice culture, unions don't have any role here. (i am not saying this to criticize the comment but just to point out one of the many differences between unions in the US and europe) the problem with apprentice programs is that they lag behind the changes in the industry. when i was in school there were none for software de…

The 'guilds' seem to have a similar purpose here in Britain, namely that of providing legally-required accreditation programmes. However, these are only for certain trades, and I put guilds in scarequotes because they aren't as exclusive as the mediaeval form.

Re. universities, it was widely quoted a few years ago that more people graduated with a bachelors in photography during that year than there were practising photographers!

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

#275

Post by duxup »

paulcole wrote: post #234
duxup wrote: post #13

I don't understand the hiring people industry. The questions thrown at me are trivia, if I knew the answer, or not, it doesn't mean anything. People are looking for weird specifics for things that ... really don't need it. The job inevitably doesn't even rely on those specifics. I'll learn whatever anyone wants, I like doing that ... no honestly I do. Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / fo…

> Can I just talk to the folks I'll potentially be working with / for right away? No? Why? No! As many applicants as possible should be rejected before we start interrupting these people's days. You might be a great candidate but what about the other 10 doofuses who aren't? Do they all get to talk to the folks they'll potentially be working with/for right away?

I'm not convinced that any filtering is doing any good.

I see doofuses hired regardless.

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

#276

Post by kasey_junk »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #266
tptacek wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were that the case, several of the largest employers in the country should be getting routinely sued for hiring discrimination. They are not.

Ok, so what several largest employers are you talking about? If this is pubic knowledge as you allege then there is no need to be obtuse. And again, that list of employers that publicly brag about continued administering of IQ tests would be rather helpful to your case and would allow me to substantively check your assertion. I don't understand why in good faith you would not want to share this information. You canno…

Procter & Gamble famously uses “cognitive assessments” for hundreds of thousands of applicants per year.

There are test prep firms for it much like you’d find for the mcat or gre.

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

#277

Post by mock-possum »

GenerWork wrote: post #37

You forgot the middlemen: recruiters. I have yet to find more than 2 or 3 recruiters who actually know the space that they're working in, don't make unrealistic demands, and have basic empathy for the job seeker. As an example of this, I was messaged by a recruiter last week asking if I was interested in a potential position, and when I asked him about the position, he asked if I was willing to send over not only my…

Yeah I’ve been realizing part of the reason finding work was easier 10 years ago was I had two solid local recruiters I could lean on - agencies headquarters in my city, focused on tech talent, with whom I’d had continuous relationships with when I was contracting.

I don’t have anything like that now, and I’m not sure how to get it back again, because all the local talent agencies I used to work with are no longer operating.

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

#279

Post by lolinder »

alephnerd wrote: post #242
pseudocomposer wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions have historically solved this problem. Non-union accreditation programs don’t seem to have the same effect, though in some industries they do have a positive effect on salary.

It would only make it harder for new grads, as unions aim to help their constituents increase salaries, which means paying non-union hires waaaaaay less. Look at the Automotive Engineering industry in Ohio/Penn/Mich for example - a union contract engineer will earn a decent amount, but the majority of new hiring is non-union.

I'm relatively uninformed here, but isn't part of the union's job to propagate itself and ensure that there aren't non-union hires in the same industry and location?

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

#280

Post by nerder92 »

At my startup we’ve recently started hiring for a Founding Engineer with Mobile Development skills (Flutter) and some backend.

It seems impossible to find a right candidate for us and we are indeed looking at an agency for now even if I was fairly against it as a CTO.

It’s most likely a numbers game, but it’s hard to find coders that also have some kind of founders attitude.

Either people who are founders are indeed building something themselves or you get 9-5ers who think they can do startups while having 0 stamina/drive.

This is hard

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