Hiring is broken

Posted on 2024-08-28

Current state of affairs

Companies treat hiring for, say, a software engineer pretty much like a plate being filled on a buffet to find out as much as possible about the candidate. The buffet has a lot to offer: personal traits, hobbies, family situation, algorithmic experience, conflict resolving abilities, problem abstraction, communication abilities, nonsense like drug tests… And companies randomly mix and match until the plate is just full enough and call it a process.

Never have I found the one company that not only writes down EXACTLY what they are looking for, rather the opposite is the case: in technical interviews they ask a wide range of questions from garbage collection to algorithms to make sure that candidates have a wide enough range of knowledge so they could imagine themselves having an easy way to integrate them into their technical staff or the specific team.

Let me just throw in the fact that when VCs hold their pockets more tightly like they do right now we can see the effects even more clearly. Less positions being opened means the amount of hoops hiring managers expect candidates to jump through grows and that people think twice before sending in their PDFs. When everything in a job ad smells like someone is REALLY searching for top seniority and industry experience then people tend to not send in their CVs even though they might be a good fit.

The problem with job ads

The most depressing thing is the fact that the “what we expect of you” / “what we are looking for” section is the most obvious case of time wasted since it’s really just the same in every job ad for every company. Great use of a potential candidate’s time to have them see what traits every company looks for in a candidate. Applicants know that they can’t pull any valuable informations out of this. Every now and then you see the oddball “you feel responsible for customer success as an engineer” or “you back up your decisions and opinions with data” which are essential in my opinion but the rest is pretty much all the same.

Is it a good use of your time to write down that you’re looking for someone who’s curious by nature? Do you neccessarily need to waste CPU cycles on people’s devices to have them read that someone needs to be conscientious to be a software engineer? Do you need to melt the glaciers to have visitors of your career page know that a SRE in your company has to participate in an on-call rotation? Oh and my favourite: “You care deeply about what you do”.

Nice to see that you collect people’s github accounts in a separate text input field but we all know that 1% of applicant’s accounts even get looked at.

Please think twice what you put in your job ad because techies are clever and know the tricks. What tricks you ask? Let me just list the most obvious on the top of my head:

Flat hierarchies: no space for promotion (might even hint towards epic battles for salary raises)
High pace: flock without a herder
A company that lists paying their employees regular and on time has not much else to offer
When a job ad disappears and opens the next week with the exact same content then that hints towards high turnover
…

Time = Money

It’s that simple: If I’m looking for $skillset but I’m not writing that into the job ad then I’m to blame for every single minute of talking to candidates that turn out to be a bad fit for a position. Not only in interviews but also reading PDFs of candidates. There is so much work in the backlog that could’ve been reduced meanwhile.

But who is to blame

On one hand you need to give it to the applicant to say “your job ad was just copy & paste from 90% of all other job ads with a tiny pinch of this gig focuses on $tech”. You can throw a bachelors or masters degree into the list of requirements but because applicants know that only a veeery small percentage of jobs technically require the CS degree people will apply anyways (rightfully so).

On the other hand, I also have to say that “HR Filter interviews” are the place for candidates to grill the HR people about what the expectations are when the job ad failed to communicate this and talking to these people reveals that rarely anyone takes up that chance. Does that mean people dont give a damn? That’d be catastrophic because then we’d have to admit that neither the companies writing the job ad nor the applicants give any damn about what the process entails which is a horrific situation in a job that focuses on telling computers what to do based on a list of technical requirements.

A cure for the problem

I applied to hundreds of companies in my life - all hiring managers say their company, the position in the team they’re trying to fill or employees of their company in general are special but nothing’s special about their interview processes. In fact, when I prepare for an interview then I pretty much expect them all to be kind of the same.

If we focus on the process alone we need to admit that people spend an astonishing amount of time talking to each other yet not having a clear set of expectations towards what each person brings to the table. So taking all of these things into consideration you’ll land at the conclusion that we need to start writing down more, with less words, without copypasta that’s the same everywhere.

Good luck, you’ll need it.