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 for this position.
The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers.
EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.
You sure about that? Maybe they wanted an easy way to tell people no. Maybe that 1/20 requirement was very heavily weighted compared to the other 19. Maybe they didn't really want to hire anyone at all or wanted to hire a specific person, but had to make a job posting for political/legal/policy reasons...
Most of our decisions (especially to pass) have nothing to do with the candidate. And they have no way to know, so instead they over-analyze their resume or what was said during the interview to try to extract some kind of clue. Which is 99% wrong.
Some examples to give you an idea:
- we like you, you did well at the interview. But we have one position open right now, and Joe, who is the star engineer at our competitor, is making signs that he'd be willing to finally join us. We have been courting him for two years. So we put your application on hold, until Joe makes a move. Nothing you can do, and we sure won't tell you, in case Joe doesn't jump ship, and then we call you back as if nothing had happened.
- we like you, but we are about to close a new contract in the middle of Texas. If that contract closes, we'll need to hire someone ASAP there, instead of here. So while technically the position we have is here, we are waiting just a bit to see if the contract closes and if we need to shift our hiring. We should know this week, so no point in telling you anything. One week later, it turns out the contract is not signed yet, but it looks really close. Let's wait another week, we should know for sure by then... A month goes by...
etc.
Of course, it's also plausible that they just never took the posting down.
Either way -- in tech (and for some reason more so than in other industries) -- when it comes to hiring, it's head games all up and down. And generally to an extent far more than can really be called "necessary".
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?
I would add be more general if possible. Someone with 5 years of postgres sql will pick up sql server pretty quickly. So maybe just: Relational Database experience. Somebody who has used 5 different ui frameworks will pick up the whichever you use pretty quickly. So perhaps: Web UI development. Etc.
I have a feeling this isn't any different at a startup.
They can only really reject you for lack of qualifications for such a job ad by law so that's probably what happened. If it was open for a while, they probably have a few internal candidates they needed it for.
I know of at least one person at a fairly well known UK company that had to undergo the same waiting process.
Generally if the position is ultra-specific compared to their other postings, it's for someone they have in mind.
Fake job openings to keep HR people busy?
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.
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.
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 be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.
Sadly, many talented tech candidates early in their careers tend to interpret job descriptions far too literally and self-select themselves out of good opportunities. These same candidates also rely too much on responding to impersonal web-based job-postings rather than working through their networks of contacts, or just putting themselves out there and reaching out to real people.
Two decades of OpenGL experience?, sorry we are looking for someone with Vulkan experience. Two years of OpenGL experience? when can you come in?
People need legal reasons to say no. In a bureaucracy, that means that administrative types come up with objective measures to identify the perfect candidate, or to defend against less than honorable or completely fake people who simply lie about their skills. I have seen every level of bullshit, from a guy who told me he dealt with conflict at his last job by taking a swing at his boss to situation where three different people impersonated a candidate. Sometimes institutions come up with unique ways to handle that.
In reality, the meaning varies depending on the bureaucracy and how stringent oversight is. If someone is going to get an audit finding for hiring someone with 4 years, 11 months of experience, they care. Usually people choose to see what they see. Another reason for the laundry list is that editing is impossible. In a big company, the recruiter in Timbuktu has a phalanx of bureaucrats between the job req and the hiring manager. It's easier to have a mandatory requirement for 15 years of Windows 95 experience and add Python as an optional skill than to re-write.
I don't think I've ever seen an ad from Google that spells out years of experience in any given technology. Their requirements are incredibly terse, usually along the lines of 'BS/BA in Computer Science or equivalent, experience in some programming language'.
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.
Both implementations might work for the original use-case in the happy-path case. However as soon as the first unexpected error occurs, the bad implementation might break down. It might be a lot bigger in size than the better one and contain a lot of duplication. And it might not be extensible or maintainable, and have not (regression) tests. And of course the time it took to produce the codebases might have been very different.
Those are typical differences one sees between code that had been written at more professional software shops, and code that had been written elsewhere (e.g. by electrical engineers, students, non-engineers, etc.). However I have no idea how things look like at Google or Infosys, so I can't speak for those.
I did that for the company I work at (Wire) and it worked really well! We got 50 Haskellers, some extremely qualified.
A lot of them had commented in how they specifically liked the job ad, so I'll post it here: https://medium.com/@neongreen/wire-is-hiring-a-haskell-devel...
Yep the Infosys guy has experience of being airdropped into unfamiliar companies in foreign countries, getting up to speed with business requirements and technical constraints and producing something reasonable in three months.
The Google guy probably spent five years writing Yet Another Messager App.
https://www.themuse.com/jobs/capitalone/machine-learning-sof...
We even set the requirements to match what we felt could do the job. The roll has actually been fairly difficult to fill though. Recruiting decks I have seen actually suggest creating more requirements and being vague in an attempt to lure more applicants. After this experience, they are probably correct. Lure them in then explain more after they meet the team (i.e. get them excited)
Let me rewrite this into two different job openings:
1. Junior Machine Learning Software Engineer
Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience /
At least 1 year working with statistics, mathematics or engineering programming /
At least 1 year programming in Python and one or more of Ruby, R, Matlab, C++, Scala or Java /
At least 1 year of experience working on full stack solutions
Master's Degree or PhD /
At least 2 years of experience with cloud software design using microservices /
At least 2 years of experience with machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, Pytorch or Keras /
Demonstrated original research in this or related area
What it does is that it biases hiring process against self-aware or humble without right network to tell them to exaggerate.
However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.
They have the option to distinguish "minimum/required" vs "nice to have", though.
As someone who has written and hired technical talent - this is absolutely true.
> so many quite good candidates won't apply.
I agree with your sentiment but generally disagree in practice. The reality is I get 100's of applications that are nowhere near qualified for positions I've listed. We're talking like recent grads applying for a VP of E-commerce (~10 years exp on the spec).
Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.
>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.
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".
I.e., it means literally nothing.
Some skills can be picked up easily. Others are difficult to teach. You have a detail oriented position, you need a detail oriented person. If they’re sharp they can learn pretty much everything else.
Hell I’ve taken over internationalization coding because I understand how grammar works in two languages and an inkling of Japanese grammar. I couldn’t translate a UI to save my life but the hard part is stitching sane sentences together from data.
Shame on someone for writing unrealistic or unnecessary "requirements", but also shame on the engineer who doesn't even apply because of them.
I wonder how truly good a candidate is if they get discouraged so easily. Maybe a hidden requirement 1 is showing a willingness to try to punch above one's weight or displaying some self confidence during the application process. After all, what's really the difference between 4 years of development experience in X language vs 5?
I am perfectly willing to apply to a posting with missing requirements, right up until I have to create an account to apply, chop up my resume into pieces, and paste the bits into form boxes. That's when I say, "screw this, it wasn't a close match anyway".
If the application process is "attach resume document to an email" then I might even spend some extra time on the cover email, explaining why am applying without being a 100% match for the requirements.
The difference is the expectation of a payoff. That application management system is going to automatically filter out mismatches, and making me do all the work to disqualify myself as a candidate. The email might get read by an actual person with an interest in the outcome.
On the flip side, I don't mind an overly ambitious position description if a recruiter has reached out to me. I know I have an actual human on the other end, and they have enough sense to determine I might actually be a good fit.
Since it was a small-ish company, I thought maybe this was just their generic "senior software engineer" posting. Nope. I asked them. They actually expected people to be able to work on all of those things. By my count, that's about 5 different teams that should be working on those things... except that this place has ~15 engineers. I self selected out of that process because, although I could certainly do the API and integrations stuff, if I'm the best person you've got to work on ML, your company is in bad shape.
I probably could have applied and gotten an interview anyway, maybe even gotten the job, but I know it wouldn't have been someplace I could do my best work. I'm very glad I'm not there.
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 categorizable as x, y, and/or z, and anyone sensible will put the socially desired response.
An interesting take on this is CultureAmp's surveys, where they determine your working style and can rate how well you might work with different colleagues. I work great with someone I scored a 98 with. Turns out I also work great with a person I scored a 4 with. So, while fun, it seems all bunk.
Ahem... Sorry.
I worked at a place that was bought out and the new team immediately made everyone take a battery of these style tests. A few days later they did a mass firing based on the results. I survived long enough to find work elsewhere.
Also, anger is an emotion opposed to a personality designation.
What is the optimum personality type to employ for a specific role anyway? You might hire based the idea that you want people who won't "rock the boat" and just end up with a group that are shy of giving you bad news.
Competence is hard to assess without having to ask hard open technical questions. The alternative I hope you are not seriously proposing, going with gut feelings or "personality tests", is actually the epitome of surrendering to bias. Don't do it, resist.
I used to really like the MBTI-type stuff, but honestly think it's kinda nonsense now. You need a diverse team to be the best imho.
Tech is a great example, where software engineering positions are very competitive and most of the applicants are men. This would pull down the numbers for men in general, making it seem like they need to fill more of the requirements for a job than women, when in reality they are just applying for more competitive jobs more often.
It would be more instructive to compare the numbers for the same type of job in order to see what the bias really is.
I don't understand why, if you have a bunch of resumes, do you seem to be holding out for some female applicants. Why not just interview the ones that seem like the best options and choose the best person for the job, regardless of their gender and how many qualified female candidates you have (or don't have)? You don't control who applies to the position.
Also, why would a missing email be an automatic no if they included another way to reach them using a standard method of communication? Or are you saying that they included no way of reaching them and you had to somehow locate a phone number for this person?
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?
I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.
At least if you know your resume will be scanned by a computer before-hand you can optimize for that. It's hard to optimize for a person with no skill-set.
The place I've worked with the best HR department realized that they didn't have any legitimate role in determining whether someone was fit for a job, only whether or not they were fit for the company. So they'd handle the background checks, the reference checks, etc, usually after the phone screen and before the on-site interview. But they didn't have any say in who got the job other than vetoing candidates with company-wide disqualifying features.
He told me the HR lady would like to see my abitur certification (sth like a high school diploma) ... I am 34 years old for christ's sake. I seriously considered not applying. Ah - and according to the recruiter an asset of mine is not being older than 40 - what?
In short - a lot of HR people are causing serious damage to companies and the industry in my opinion.
>I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements].
It's not companies, it's the individuals.
Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:
- she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
- she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires
The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.
Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.
It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".
Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results.
--
[1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down
I'll give a perspective from a small company: boss is doing hiring, asks what tech we use, try to explain that I don't care if they know React, if they've used Vue/Angular/FooBar4Ui2038, good enough. Then some explanation that we should put specific tech to attract people with that specifically, & we can select for people who have tangent experience. In the end we hired some guy with experience with Ruby on Rails (we don't use any Ruby, PHP/C#/Nodejs)
>from the corporate perspective
Aside of a brief stint at 15k-large corporation years ago, my customers tend to be small & medium sized businesses (10...100 employees). They seem to suffer from the "corporate-like" cookie-cutter hiring practices just as well.
The ones who won't - perhaps because they respect their personal qualifications enough to expect that they will get hired somewhere just might decide not to apply for the job, and perhaps it's these folks you actually want to hire.
From my experience people judge the company both by the hard facts, and also by the feel (impression, emotions) the first contact conveys - usually an ad, or word-of-mouth information. Potential employees will skip over word-of-mouth offers and ads that don't convey the kind of workplace they imagine themselves at.
While we may abhor stereotypes, there's often a kernel of truth to them; different professions attract predominantly different characters. The first contact better be tailored to either the prevailing character - or perhaps to the long tail, depending on the current state of jobs marketplace.
Point in case, first contact for sales associate ought to be much different - literally "make mad money, meet demanding sales targets, enjoy strong coffee & fast growth!" than for a highly skilled production worker - "good morning, consider joining team of experienced people like yourself; we offer efficient organization, well-supplied workspace and regular working hours, discounted meals and parking space.".
First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors.
This is... not plausible. Effectively, they're trying to infer causality here, not merely do prediction. That has to be the case, because this is presented as useful advice---to go ahead and apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications. But when you're trying to infer causality you're doing social science, not data science, and that means you need to worry about omitted variables.
Here's an example: what if less qualified people who nonetheless apply are more confident. And what if that confidence is associated with other good things that show up on resumes, like attending prestigious schools, having had prestigious prior jobs, having a record of success in some other fashion, or even just doing things like paying careful attention to formatting?
This is why social scientists use tried and true techniques like old fashioned OLS regression with control variables rather than throw everything into a random forest and see if the hypothesized association standing on its own predicts things.
(Insert remark about how companies should be hiring data science people with science backgrounds rather than just pure cs backgrounds here)
Another commenter also pointed out the fit curve. Note the wide prediction intervals starting at ~40% and frequency of points across all charts. It's hard to draw conclusions above that cutoff, since outcomes vary significantly and high-matchers are scarce. This may also be a failure of the "proprietary" qualification-extracting algorithms.
Most applicants also seemingly interview at a <10% rate, and the data in general looks fishy. I know they sampled from ~6,300 applications, but the joint distribution of matches & interviews seems bimodal: either you barely match and barely interview, or you greatly match and interview far more often.
Weird, weird post. It should be titled "we rarely see > 50% match in job requirements, which either says something about applicants or our proprietary algorithms."
Secondly, the people applying who have <100% of the requirements, know this, and are trying to guess if they meet all of the _actually_ required criteria. The ones who apply anyway, and get an interview, might be doing a better job at guessing which "requirements" are real.
I worry that the questions that I only ask questions of candidates that I think are important and that I already know the answer too.
If you're looking for good hires you're going to want people who know stuff you don't and finding that out is tricky because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Sadly, it does seem like the research-oriented jobs aren't BSing about their requirements; when I've tried to apply to MS Research and the like, they've always declined me due to lack of credentials, since the postings usually require at least a masters, preferably a PhD.
I challenge that what you're feeling is imposter syndrome in this case. I posit it's the realization that at the next economic downturn, should you find yourself out of work and the landscape for being hired is more competitive, you are at a strategic disadvantage.
Upward mobility into Director/VP roles is also quite limited without a degree, even though a degree in CompSci has little to do with running a business.
I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.
But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead.
The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.
I have a really high ratio of interview / job offers, but that's because I choose to apply for jobs where I had nearly 100% of the requirements.
I think this was a mistake. I should have taken more risks, try to apply for more challenging jobs that aren't completely in my comfort zone.
Fortunately for me, it's usually meant an increase in pay as well, though I didn't maximize pay at each hop. I could have been paid more at different firms I declined during each move, the position responsibilities were always key for me.
They did only give me a 1-year contract, and a stipulation to get some Oracle cert but did support me throughout. Now that I've shown them that I can adapt (be productive/billable, and got the certs done) they offered me a permanent contract (indefinite period of time).
So yes, bother to apply. But put the work in to show them you can adapt.
However the essence of the posting was clearly for a programmer. Significantly more than half the people that applied were not programmers. We saw some resumes from seemingly quite accomplished statisticians but we were not looking for a statistician (or “data scientist”).
So I think which 50% matters. If someone is a self starter and has great communication skills but can’t program she isn’t going to be hired as a programmer.
- super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product
- great designer with a few years of experience
- degree in CS from a reputed school
- picked up react recently
- few years of work experience doing design and coding
He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.
That's good but please, if you aren't Google or Facebook, don't take it to the other extreme. If I have no idea about your tech stack I'm not going to apply, and the same probably holds true for a lot of experienced developers.
If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"
Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes though.
It might be interesting to do a basic pre-processing of the JD to remove all such stop-phrases before evaluating the role being offered.
Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called in to interview means next to nothing.
If I can find a 5, 4, 4, 3, 2 of combination of that, I'm happy. That's about 70%. That sort of profile should also provide learning opportunities for the candidate and typical that is intrinsically motivating for technical types.