doertedev.io

On NATO applying

Posted on 2024-09-03

A short explanation of what’s happening

  • An overly entitled executive is shocked a candidate didn’t spend hours of research before joining the interview
  • They go to LinkedIn (of course) and post how they’re tired of their entire generation (what the fuck??!?) of entitled brats
  • They cause enough attention to be directed away from what people should be doing
  • Hundred streamers smell money and create videos on how the executive is delusional at best and a scumbag at worst
  • Rinse repeat often enough that HR departements need to coin a phrase for this “problem” -> “NATO applying”

What the?

This year I’ve finally heard people coining a phrase for it: NATO standing for “not attached to the outcome”. Before I go into my thoughts on why and how this happens let me give you a list of points that I’m trying to make:

  • Hiring is broken
  • This always happened
  • This will always happen
  • My assumptions why we only hear about this now

This always happened

Okay so now let me ask you two questions up front:

  • If you’re a woodworking company - do you expect the applicant for an apprenticeship position to come to you with astonishing amounts of paperwork or a personally delivered letter sealed in wax?
  • If you’re a bank - do you expect someone randomly stumbling by in bathing shorts and flip flops applying for a global leadership position with nothing but a PDF on a USB-Stick?

I hope you’re already seeing where this is going: if you answered any of the abovementioned questions with yes then stop reading and do something else. For the rest of you I say: the further you reduce down the salary expected for a position being filled, the less expectations you bring towards applicants. If we follow this chain of thought then it should be pretty obvious that a burger flipper applies to more than one company. More on that later.

So yes, even in our industry: This always was the case. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re a young founder or a bigcorp hiring manager: Chances are that you’ll have an applicant in front of you that has to pay bills and you’re not paying above the golden threshold where employees start to give their heart and soul and do overhours like cracy. Well, there are factors that influence this:

  • The candidate REALLY resonates with your company and loves everything it (or more specifically the team) does
  • They’re short on funds and really could use the money
  • You’re paying ~150%+ market average, give out huge bonus- or safe and valuable stock option packages
  • You’re looking for someone highly specialized who only has a handful of potential employers

So if neither of the above is true then you’re not the golden cow you think you are then don’t expect people to do extra work for a chance to earn you money like drafting (and really thinking through) a cover letter or even having an answer to “why do you want to work for this company”. Just like the candidate typed a search phrase in the LinkedIn search bar and your position showed up in the results, the candidate knows they’re one of many applicants.

This will always happen

As an applicant you’re being shown with many rounds of interviews, take home assignments, whiteboard sessions, uploading files and then having to fucking having to fill in their contents into separate text fields again, and other mumbo jumbo that the company invests heavily into finding out if you’re really the person they’re looking for (many people only see it from the applicant’s perspective, but please also consider the other side and what they could do within that timeframe instead: ship).

So we have: shitty job ads, unprepared candidates, hiring managers asking wide range of questsions to figure out if they have an impostor in front of them, spending huge amounts of money in hourly wages to jump through hoops… Sounds horrible. But doing the same thing again and again and waiting for a better outcome is, according to Einstein, the definition of insanity.

Why we only hear this now

We don’t. It is just that a lot more people are involved into finding people, the hiring process and HR as a whole. Also throw in the whole “People & Culture” departements (which is an antipattern to hire for imo because a culture must evolve and can’t be hired). Maybe social media has enough following and LinkedIn has rotten to the point where malicious hiring managers + executives cause enough streamer outrage. Maybe we had enough scandals at big corporations (like huge game studios) firing entire sections of line managers for bad behavior. Maybe the outcry of delusional hiring managers + executives get’s more coverage in the press. But this isn’t new and as long as we don’t change anything about the ground rules of hiring tech workers we can’t expect the applicants to change either.

Summary

The industry has marginalized the people away from the process to a point where the person more and more realizes how little they matter. Sure, you apply and want to trade most of your living hours for being able to pay bills. But let’s just take the tooling alone from a hiring manager position: You log into a tool (e.g. greenhouse) where you see swathes of PDFs (people offering their time), don’t neccessarily like what you see, can click a button and a candidate get’s a rejection right in their email inbox. So it’s a fair assumption to think: if I can reject a candidate with the click of a button then I’m not the only company who has their CV in the PDF graveyard. Now there are of course these special cases where someone wants to bump their career trajectory, their title, wants to REALLY solve a problem (we technicians can be stubborn) or someone has a - what was the phrase in doctor house? “Rubik’s Cube complex”?

Just like the average hiring manager won’t have the time to do many hours of research on the average applying developer interviewing for the average developer position, there’s a 90% chance the opposite ain’t true either. Candidates can take shortcuts and, for example in my case, ping CTOs on social media and ask them for what are their biggest problems they need solved in open positions, skipping half of the copy & paste bullshit of the interview process.

So what now?

When applicants think the interview process is more or less the same than with many other companies they interviewed with then they can’t be the ones to blame. Maybe listing the amount of research you expect people to do about your company before applying then they factor this into the amount of hoops to jump through per amount of salary that we technicians graph out on our mental “meh” scale. Oh, right, many don’t even publicly list the salary range of a position. Well, too bad. If you expect highly motivated people to come prepared and stay with you: you need to invest. Heavily. And not just with money.

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