undefined | Better HN

0 pointstrod12347mo ago0 comments

That's some real stupid thinking.

At its most basic, this is a cult of qualification which no longer provides real value, it fails for a number of reasons I won't get into here.

When you disqualify arbitrarily, and can't find anyone because of that, its your fault for disqualifying everyone, not the market's fault for not having the ballerina that doesn't exist.

Want a programmer in a language thats only 10 years old with 15 years of direct experience? You aren't going to find it even when the creator of that language applies.

You pay to have the work done. That is the only legitimate requirement for hiring someone and remaining employed, and you can't go and change the requirements later when they show they can do more. Doesn't matter if they moonlight, are overemployed etc. That view to disqualify such people are in fact monopolistic practices designed to disenfranchise wages that are already low and distorted because of money-printing, they are not red-flags.

Its like the flawed type of thinking that "We need someone to do this work, but this guy is so overqualified he'll leave first chance; so we won't hire anyone".

You hire to have a job done. You don't get to be an arbitrary slave master. The moment you lose sight of this is the moment you ignore your immediate needs, and drive your company on a path towards failure, and if its a consolidated large company, that failure and bad decisionmaking will impact a lot more people because of the centralization/concentration.

Financial engineering can decouple the need for immediate action, but the tradeoff is that the risk of not doing things you should have done becomes far greater to your long-term sustainability, and its completely invisible. There is no place for deception and coercion in the hiring process. If the job doesn't exist, don't jam communication channels. Jamming channels is tortuous interference.

0 comments

codegeek7mo ago

The point is that when you have 100 Resumes to sort through for 1 role, you will have to use process of elimination. In 2025, with AI/scams/bots/moonlighters, Linkedin Profile is a good way to sort through. I am not saying having Linkedin is the only thing that matters but when there is so much noise, you need to stand out especially as a real human.

trod1234OP7mo ago

Sure, there is naturally a sieving process in any hiring, and the issue of AI/scams/bots is simple to solve because it was solved before AI was around before people got lazy. Fraud and misrepresentation isn't a new thing or even "being unsolve-able except in just one way, your chosen route".

The answer is simple...

Require that they come in and show up physically to the office to verify their CV/application/Driver's License, and at that time since there will be cost on the business side, also cross-check if they fit other open positions you have, or if they are interested in hearing about other positions (the answer will almost certainly be yes). Rapidly promoting from within naturally bubbles the competent to positions without a lot of external risk like what you've described.

This is how you build a resilient pipeline of talent, and vet the soft skills people who would be good at the job that you'll never find through an interview except by moonshot chance. When you structure it from the get-go to exclude excessively and use bad indicators, you have bad data in and get bad outcomes out.

> LinkedIn Profile is a good way to sort through.

Its not, there are plenty of fake LinkedIn Profiles. You can't stand out as a real human when you have pigeonholed everyone into a circular peg and set the sieve requirements to a square peg. Forcing people to all go through a online centralized portal, even when they show up in person, is what promotes these perverse incentives. Not rocket science.

As a business you can do a lot to solve problems, and there's no way you can stand out as a human among the noise of digital artifacts where bots mimic real humans in the same digital environment. Go physical.

I've friends who are executives that do hiring, their main complaints were we've tried to hire people for X positions, and our top 10 candidates were all fake, we spent months on this with numerous interviews (cost) and have to start all over from scratch.

I pointed out the answer is rather stupid simple. Go old school verify the inputs are real at the beginning of the process, not at the end after you sunk all those costs. That's what they've been doing since then and it works.

Finding the right talent is a cost you have to pay that you can't push off on other businesses through use of products or services where that business may lie/misrepresent because each business is different, and if you depend upon that one pipeline for talent they can and will eventually cause issues where you can't find talent.

The attitude you seem to have mirrors the same things I see in people who simply don't want to pay the cost to get competent people, and by extension don't want to actually be in business.

Also, conditions worsen when you spoil an entire labor pool over decades through bad management in consolidated hands, it gets harder and costlier to find qualified labor. Its the nature of ponzi; costs go up unti outflows exceed inflows.

If you don't get ahead of the labor crunch, it will crush you, and most competent people given the adverse circumstances in hiring are now retraining resulting in brain-drain, a hollowing out and watering down of the competency in the labor pool. What happens when you can't find qualified people at any cost because your practices drove them to other sectors. They won't come back because they wrote it off as a bad investment. Its psychologically sticky.

People always have a choice, even when others try to make it so they don't.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse