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You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

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Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#81

Post by AnaniasAnanas »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #56
GhostVII wrote: post #39

It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a better fit, regardless of job requirements.

We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling them for an interview...

> since we need female candidates

May I ask why? Why does it matter if the candidate is male or female? Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#82

Post by 0x14c1de72 »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #56
GhostVII wrote: post #39

It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a better fit, regardless of job requirements.

We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling them for an interview...

>since we need female candidates

Yikes

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#83

Post by sethammons »

austincheney wrote: post #77
sethammons wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from personal experience, can you point to any data on this, and maybe go into some more detail? When I think of personality tests, I think of quack science. "Do you get angry a lot?", "Is it easy for you to get angry?", "Would you say it is difficult to make you angry?, and four other similar questions in a 200 question quiz. They ask the same thing multiple ways to try to know if you are an person categorizab…

I have only seen this in practice once at a little hedge fund called Bridgewater. It sounds like you are making assumptions of what you think the testing is without any frame of reference. Also, anger is an emotion opposed to a personality designation.

ok, and? We've also seen "how many pingpong balls can fill a school bus" from the likes of Google. They eventually learned it was not a good filter. If a personality test truly is better, I want to know because I'm involved with hiring at my company.

What qualifies Bridgewater's take on this? How have they leveraged it and to what effect? Correlation, causation, all that jazz too - if I want to be taller, I should obviously play basketball.

[edit] you edited your response as I posted mine :) Yes, I'm assuming what a personality test is because you've given us very little to go on. Give us more. Honestly, if it is better, I'm sure others want more than "this practice is good." We want to know how, what, and why.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#84

Post by turingcompeteme »

carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

> I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would find a better candidate

So I get where you are coming from, but not having the 1/20 requirement is a much easier excuse than explaining why they don't want someone who thinks it's ok to do this.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#85

Post by kamaal »

scarejunba wrote: post #4

Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement. And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys. To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to…

>>And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.

Unless Infosys employees code on computers bought to earth by aliens, for their business software requirements, I can't even imagine what the difference between code written at Google and Infosys could be. Its code, at the end of the day. The differences are in productivity and quality of projects at hand.

You would also be a little surprised to learn given the narrow profit margins at places like Infosys, the productivity demands are way higher compared to any web company you will ever work at. That includes Google. There are places at Infosys, where your average joe is doing 3x - 5x more work, both volume and quality wise than Google.

Google is a classic example of Gate keeping through leet code style interview proxy. People getting in feel they are indulging in some highly intellectual activity and are a part of some special club. So they are above homo sapiens.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#86

Post by JustSomeNobody »

rossdavidh wrote: post #68

I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30…

> e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator"

Yeah, this is where bias and other cruft comes creeping in. "Passionate about software development" usually means, "our PM sucks, but he's the CEO's nephew, so you're going to work late to meet deadlines".

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#87

Post by elcomet »

carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

Your numbers don't match your %. 20% is 1/5 and 30% is around 1/3.

Also I think you can drop the English requirement as most people willing to go to China will speak English (it is certainly not independent).

With this corrected, we get around 0.5 which still means it is unlikely they find someone.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#88

Post by cimmanom »

carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

Or it could be that that was the one criterion that was non-negotiable. Often there are one or two that are "must haves" and the rest are just wants. If you meet the must-haves, you only have to hit a couple of the wants in order to get an interview; but if you miss them, forget it.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#89

Post by cimmanom »

rossdavidh wrote: post #68

I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply. However, typically, I see 20-30…

But then there's that research that shows that on average, men will apply to a job if they meet less than half of of the requirements, so if you don't overspecify you'll be flooded with crap applications.

Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.

Re: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

#90

Post by rhacker »

carlmr wrote: post #47

I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that. They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate…

It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies. They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate, especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps (well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit).

Contrast that with a large company with a specific HR department that is in charge of taking a job requirement sheet and finding and filtering candidates. These people have no idea what any of these technologies are, so for them it's a liability on their ass if they let people through that don't satisfy the "requirements". Managers, when you write up "requirements" and that is being sent to an HR department, keep in mind you might want to move some of those to a "nice to have" category.

That being said, there ARE competent, non-technical HR departments that do understand technical hiring.

Edit: Ohh... I wanted to add too, it's nice being in a startup where you really don't just "leave it up for a year". In a startup each and every candidate is literally needed when it's posted. It's kinda crazy and shows just how much larger companies hire just to hire if they can just sit on positions for a long time. Are they really "needed" if the position can go unfilled for an entire year?

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