Are you a hiring manager/recruiter in tech? In this Circus Funhouse Mirror tech economy, how do candidates even get an interview?
I've been a hiring manager before across a few jobs. But, then, I was receiving maybe 50 resumes to screen a week with my recruiter. Y'all are, what, at a few factors to an order of magnitude more than that?
Are your recruiters now pre-filtering resumes before you see them? What is being used to determine whether a candidate gets an interview now?
What I'm seeing:
- Referrals almost never matter: I've gotten two interviews through my network after dozens of applications—and I'm fairly well networked.
- Experience at other well-known Tech companies doesn't get an interview
- Having the right skill set, based on the job description doesn't get an interview.
From the outside, it seems like a coin flip.
Meanwhile, I have LinkedIn's AI advisor routinely giving me flavors of "yes, you're definitely their kind of candidate" yet no responses after weeks followed by the occasional casual rejection email.
So what's happening behind the scenes? How do resumes get on your radar? How do you work from the deluge to hiring a human?
Sincerely,
A very experienced engineer and manager who is rather fed up with what seems like a collection of pseudo-random number generator contemporary hiring processes.
EDIT: I should have also included recruiters in the title of my ask.
So I can't speak to tech hiring in general, but I've screened an absurd number of applicants for UX/UI positions for web over the years, and I'd say 95% of them don't get more than 30 seconds of consideration. What gets people through the initial screening with us is a demonstration that the person can build their own website.
I basically work my way down this list, tossing any applicants who didn't meet each point:
Only at that point do I start actually looking at their talent in UX/UI as demonstrated by the site and the work they're showcasing in it. It's at that point I trust that if they create a new UI for something they have adequate background knowledge on its level of difficulty or feasibility.
Think of it like this: I'm hiring people to design beautiful wedding cakes--but I need to know they've actually tried baking things at some point and have some understanding of what an oven is and how batter and frosting work, otherwise they're going to drive the bakers insane. They don't have to be good at baking--I don't actually need them to bake--they just need to convince me they're familiar enough with how cakes work to actually design cakes.
Very few candidates make it through that, and at that point I still haven't even read their resumes. Only at this point do I even start looking at where they've worked, their education and certifications, etc., and honestly that stuff doesn't matter too much. It will determine the salary range HR eventually offers them, but rarely do I put much weight into any of it when choosing who to interview. Resumes and LinkedIn I've found are mostly just a measure of how much a candidate can puff themselves up and cosplay, and unless they're just atrocious tend to be an unreliable signal.
What if these people just do their job? Not everyone’s work is their hobby.
I get that, but in these situations I'm sitting down to stacks of 100+ candidates with practically indistinguishable resumes. I can't possibly interview them all, and I can't believe everything they write. I routinely receive fake portfolios where multiple unrelated candidates all claimed to have worked in the same position for the same fictional company leading the same imaginary project (perhaps they went through the same bootcamp?).
Almost all of them provide a personal/portfolio website. I simply screen for which people used the skills they're claiming on their resumes while creating it. Call it a lesson learned from situations where someone claims on their resume to know HTML, then you ask them in the interview what tag makes a link and they have no idea.
This. I've basically left the field now because I refuse to fill my personal life with the same crap my professional life requires. Until or unless there is some correction to this bs, I probably won't be back. Life's too short to be doing nothing but trying to impress strangers into giving me a shot at slaving for them and making them rich.
I feel like "slaving" is not the right word. Human trafficking exists, but I haven't heard of programmers being treated as badly as some immigrant workers.
Some contracting firms that rely on immigrant workers on restricted visas might be borderline?
When I don't control my own priorities, can be interrupted at any time to change priorities, own nothing I make, and must freely give my personal time to make myself marketable in a profession I'm already successful in, harsh words are appropriate. References to slavery are not appropriate, but I wasn't thinking of slavery when using the term in a vernacular sense to mean "working hard for someone else's gain." Point taken.
In fact the terminology of wage slave dates back to the transition from mercantilism to what we'd now be calling capitalism. The first wave of early protesters saw what was coming, the demands that would be placed on the workers, the loss of freedoms that amounted to indentured servitude.
In fact before the party swap the Republican Party of old (circa 1870s) openly opposed "slavery and wage slavery". From their perspective they saw only minor differences between someone using economic forces to sell you versus using economic forces to force you to rent yourself.
This thought process finds it roots even with some of Thomas Jefferson's writings and Lincoln even notably provided minor support for the concept that laborers who spend their lives waging were comparable to slaves. He was of the belief that both methods of work were wrongly subordinating labor to capital.
Here's a kicker for you, in fact some of the pro slavery Southerners actually argued that wage slavery was worse than chattel slavery (George Fitzhugh notably amongst them).
So this isn't to diminish what we recognize as chattel slavery nor the abuses of modern forms of servitude but to maybe help you recontextualize the historical manifestation of wage work as it was and has been seen by people involved in these things since the beginning of it's emergence.
Yes, there’s a lot of historical context. But I still think describing the work that software developers do in very abstract, negative terms like “renting yourself” or lumping all “wage work” together is missing some important distinctions. Well-paid white-collar work, probably in an air-conditioned room and maybe even working from home, isn’t the same as picking vegetables or working in a mine.
Maybe we shouldn’t use abstract language that obscures such distinctions?
Your suck doesn't make my suck suck any less. The yoke of capitalism is upon us all and the same distinctions would have been made at the same time as well in history.
"It's not like you were stolen from your home land. Don't use that term."
This isn't the first time around. People were well aware of working in a covered building versus working in a field when these terms were created. It's just a matter of degrees now.
I for one will continue to use these terms, making the historical case for the continued use of them. I recognize a categorical distinction between types of labor but at the end of the day, it is a person who if they don't comply will be subject to the punishment of the system.
It is also a person who has a multitude of health (both physical and mental) consequences tied to their occupation. Is the bad back from picking vegetables in a field morally different from the bad back garnered from an office worker? Is the carpal tunnel from a flower picker in Colombia morally different from that of a programmer? Is the stress induced hypotension in a warehouse worker different from that of a IT Security Specialist? All of these people have been put upon by the managerial and corporate/capitalistic forces of the world. They all will suffer consequences if they rebel against them.
Some will suffer sooner, faster but all will and do suffer. Stratifying these ails of our world keeps the masses locked into psychological silos that prevent class solidarity at the end of the day. The suffering of the office worker is the same suffer of the field worker and they should see each other as allies in this fight.
Rhetoric that undermines this I will always oppose.
I agree somewhat. The slave part comes from the fact that a few people own most of the means of production. Objectively I have a very comfortable life, even better than most of the owning class if you consider my flexible expectations. But because generally I’m working to make someone else rich and because I need to work longer than the owning class I think we should have terminology to describe that power dynamic.
Now, I could try to become an owner myself. If I do that I could only do so ethically, by creating a socialist co-op. Maybe I’ll pull it off one day.
I've been thinking about how to talk about "means of production," that old Marxist jargon. It seems most of the time when this is discussed in the abstract, it's either implicitly assuming an isolated island economy, or not thinking much about trade at all?
All real island economies, or at least those that have the technologies we take for granted, have a critical dependency on trade. Even if a government of workers were to entirely control the local means of production and all local governance issues were fixed, they don't control the rest of the world. Much of the production they depend on would still happen elsewhere. They're going to have to trade for it, and that requires negotiation. They don't unilaterally set the terms. In an interdependent world, truly owning the total means of production is impossible, because it implies self-sufficiency.
Assuming that self-sufficiency is a romantic pipe dream, we can divide up our island economy's concerns into local fairness, local productivity (both for domestic consumption and trade goods), and getting better terms for trade.
I think the same is true at a smaller scale, too. Sure, by planting a garden, cooking for yourself, fixing things yourself, and other work that we do at home, we control a small part of our means of production. At the organization level, a company controls the means of production for its outputs, whatever it sells, but not for its inputs.
It seems like the biggest change in terms about the "means of production" recently is people working from home. It doesn't apply for all workers and not everyone is happy about this, but it seems like it's a change that's persisting, despite management being unhappy about it.
I see it much more simply. If you work somewhere are you an owner of the business? Does someone get to own 100% of something just because they got there first? This is an issue with land - draw a line around some dirt before anyone else gets there, shoot people that question you, and you own it. Never mind that you might end up charging people to use the land to grow crops while you sit on your ass. Never mind that your descendants, who did literally nothing for this land, will own it by default. Apparently that's your right. I'd argue for land use over land ownership.
The same issues exist with businesses. Business owners, at least for small to medium sized businesses, work hard and often work hard alone for years before seeing success. But if it's been 10 years and you have 100 employees and you own 100% of the business doesn't that seem wrong? You're not doing 100% of the work. You have an outsized proportion of the work done by your hands. Maybe 2% with everyone else at an average of 0.99%. But it's clearly not just. And why should the first person in this company get to decide when it's sold, to whom, and under what terms? They're just a tiny minority of the company.
So workers need to truly own the businesses they work at. What's ironic is that the capitalist hellscape of Silicon Valley is closer to that socialist dream than pretty much anywhere else. Employees get equity as a standard, early employees getting 1-3%. It's still lopsided in the founders and VC's favor, but it's a massive upgrade.
I don't control language and ultimately that is language people went with long before the internet was a thing. I can't control it anymore than I can control the lack of a gender neutral singular pronoun (a distinct one). Meanwhile dictionary.com decided to add "Enshittification" and "Bussin" to the official verbage.
It's English, nothing particular makes sense and hyperbole is aplenty.
Fwiw, dictionaries are intended to document how words are used, not prescribe some sort of "official" standard -- especially in the case of English, which doesn't have any academy trying to create an official standard in the first place. So words like these being added to dictionaries is a good thing, because that's what they're for.
I won't deny that I'm a bit of a bitter old man about it. But I don't actually blame the dictionary. It just reflects society, and society doesn't seem interested in resolving actual problems with the language as opposed to developing new slang for already existing slang.
The people who develop new slang tend not to be the ones with the most power to change society, and "cracking down" on slang tends to actually be a way the powerful oppress the weak more than anything.
Them just saying words enough to be recognized by the dictionary shows how much power they truly have if they put their minds to it. It's such shame that usually isn't the case for so many reasons (some indeed manufactured by the elite).
Yes, but we can still choose what language we use ourselves. You don't have to use trendy memes.
Also, recently there have been some partial successes in changing what language people use, because there were widespread objections to certain words. It's not exactly up to you and me, but it does change.
I don't. "trendy memes" are why I'm here and not on Reddit.
I understand it's passe here, but to be frank I'm so resilient to the sewers I still need to wade through that I'm not necessarily going to call out one instance here, against a public figure during a issue made political by said figure.
Then they won’t get the job if OP is the hiring manager. It is what it is.
If only employers were honest and said "this is what we REALLY want out of a candidate". We shouldn't have to guess if an "entry level position" requires 3 years of experience, if a web dev job wants to see a website you made instead of years of experience (or vice versa), or position in fact already has an internal candidate in mind but posts it just incase a unicorn drops in. There shouldn't be a list of "requirements" that are in fact nice to haves, or requirements that aren't even listed to begin with.
The entire process is opaque, and no one seems interested in fixing it. Then candidates wonder why they get ghosted and why employers wonder why "there's no good talent anymore".
There are a lot of different companies. This isn’t a general requirement of being a web developer. But the field in general is not like most others. Can you imagine 3M requiring chemists have a hobby lab at home and a portfolio of work that shows a genuine interest in chemistry? It would be ridiculous.
But programming is a rare field that is technical, a true field of engineering, but also filled with people that are passionate hobbyists. I’ve worked with plenty of people and the ones that do it outside of work are usually the best ones by far. Not that the people that just do it as a job are bad. The best front end guy I ever worked with wouldn’t ever bother to write code as a hobby. But hobby work is still a strong signal. So in the context of the OP, it’s a good response for how to filter out most of the massive pile of resumes you’ll receive.
If applications outright said this was a requirement, I wouldn't mind. But as is it just gives them unnecessary noise because OP's requirements are 99$% not on the job app. Maybe just as some "optional" (which it clearly isn't) portfolio link.
I wasn't entirely clear, but an online portfolio, X years experience, and proficiency with HTML and CSS are part of the required section (plus the usual UX/UI discipline requirements), and experience with CSS preprocessors is stated as preferred. That screening method wasn't used on anything entry-level.
well if you explicitly list it and candidates ignore that, I understand. I'm in a completely different domain where you can make your own video game but are passed up because studios want "shipped (AAA) titles" as their benchmark for roles (past entry level), so it's just a different approach to hiring.
Either way, this market sucks for entry level and seniors alike. All those dang "5YOE" meme postings I finally reached over the pandemic, then they suddenly shifted to 10 YOE. I'm just so tired at this point.
Geography for the most part. We are not a fully remote workplace and when we put up a job posting we tend to get hundreds of applicants a day. I filter this list out by geography (who is in the same city, who is close enough to commute). From there I look at resumes and look almsot exclusively at previous work history. If you have worked in similar environments (manufacturing) or with similar tools (e-commerce, .NET, node.js, AWS), and have pushed code into production to be used by other humans, then I will set up a phone screen.
The phone screen is done by our HR manager. The biggest question they ask is Salary Expectations. If you are in our budget, you move into the next round which is a phone chat with me. If you impress me enough in that phone chat we bring you in for a technical interview and have the team ask a few questions.
Edit: I should mention that I'm also in Canada, but it seems like the industry is pretty similar up here.
If the first question you ask is how much a person wants to be paid, why don't you put the salary you are willing to pay on the listing and stop wasting yours and theirs time? If it's below what they want, then they won't apply and you no longer need to screen for it. You know everyone is willing to work for the amount on the listing.
Because it's not an amount the companies that do this are proud of paying, and also there are so many candidates that companies hope they snag a good one recently demoralized enough to lowball themselves.
Yeah, I meant it as a rhetorical question. I have no sympathy for a company complaining about having to ask how much a candidates wants as a first question when the solution is obvious. They don't want to pay the market rate then complain it's difficult to find candidates.
You make a good point, and I have pushed for this a lot, but our parent company's corporate policy is to not be transparent about the budget. It makes no sense at all but a lot of decisions they make that we need to follow are like that. We are at their mercy, unfortunately.
Man, I knew this was the reality of the situation but it's still disheartening to actually read it.
I worked in Canada for a few years. Left a year back for reasons. Now I'm trying to see about jerbs before going back, but I'm pretty sure all my applications are ignored because I'm applying from overseas.
Similar experience reaching out to career resources too—they won't help you unless your boots are on the ground. Again though, I understand why this is the case.
I have valid PR for a bit so I can re-enter unrestricted, but it still has an expiry date. At the same time, I don't want to return immediately without the certainty of a job because that would mean burning through my savings.
I run the AI team/department at an early stage startup. I've hired 2 employees in the last 5 months and am looking to hire a platform engineer/MLOps/DevOps/Data Engineer type person next month. I'll talk more about that below.
Absolutely. I've stopped bothering with actually reading any applications from LinkedIn jobs but I do use LinkedIn to get colleagues of colleagues to reach out to me. I get 600+ applicants with 5+ page resumes and maybe 2-3% of them are even a remotely good fit. I have better things to do with my time than sift through that morass.
I'm a first time manager at an early stage company doing some extremely specialized work. I care about breadth of experience rather than depth. An ideal candidate has done at least 1 or 2 career pivots, has 10+ years of experience, and at least tangential experience in any of the several hyper-specialized fields we're operating in. They're definitely not a jerk- I hope to be working with them until our equity is good enough to retire on. An ideal candidate also has some metrics to back up their success- things like "increased X by Y%" rather than "did X."
My first ML Engineer, for example, was definitely not the strongest at ML nor at Software but their Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and 2 years of digital hardware design meant they could work closely with the hardware team and do data capture experiments on their own when needed rather than tie up the only other person who was previously capable of doing that. This was recently validated because these skills are now critical to de-risking the next generation of our hardware design. Their 5 years of experience in industry, their graduate degree, and their postdoc meant they've probably had at least one awful manager and know how to manage up.
This next candidate will be somewhere on a continuum between Platform Engineer and Data Engineer and MLOps Engineer. Where is anyone's guess- I'm flexible- but these early round startup roles always need people comfortable with wearing a lot of hats.
Well this is depressing… unemployed tech worker checking in, having just moved from a tech mecca to a place with nearly zero tech economy. All my hunting has been for remote work through LinkedIn, and it feels impossible to actually get a foot in the door. I’ve got a great resume and track record but I’m a whisper in a packed arena. Starting to get a little worried, I’ve been applying for about 5 months and haven’t gotten further than one hiring manager interview. I’ve been in the industry for over 15 years and I’ve never had this much trouble getting seen.
You might have better luck checking smaller field-specific job aggregators like HigherEdJobs or looking at standalone job boards for organizations that are large but made up of smaller campuses, like healthcare systems. A lot of times those jobs never make it to LinkedIn since they get enough interested applicants without doing so, but the candidate pool will almost always be drastically smaller as a result.
Also look for stuff within a couple hours' drive that allows remote. Remote positions always get absolutely inundated with applications, but even if the team is fully remote it does usually jump out to them that you're within range that you might be able to meet up for annual stuff or actually meet your coworkers when you happen to pass through. I don't know that it factors much into the hiring decision, but it can get the person reviewing the applications to pay a little extra attention.
Good luck out there.
Also look at Wellfound for startups.
Sadly not the case with games, and I've check 5+ job boards a day in addition to linkedIn. Layoffs are still happening as we speak so I guess the market is just crap for the time being
A relative of mine moved from games to more general programming after more than ten years.
Sometimes you have to pivot
I'll do what I need to in the short term (which for now still involves making games, even if it's only in a part time capacity). This circus just motivated me to seed my endgame indie seeds while I still have my youth.
Sadly these times also annihilated my savings, so in some ways I'm doing a soft reboot on my career in my 30's after what I spent my 20's preparing for. So annoying.
If I may ask, what part of the country and what part of tech? You may have more luck off LinkedIn looking at more traditional places. Chemical plants, manufacturing facilities, and warehouses employ technology professionals as well, but I tend to see those listings pop up on Indeed and Monster.
And if you’ve kept your nose clean, there’s always ClearanceJobs. Cleared roles are always hiring.
Add to that, there are a lot of brain dead people working in the cleared space. When it's hard to get into a field because the clearance requirements are so high, contractors manage to sneak in people who are at best net zero contributors who effectively convert hours of butt in seat into contractor dollars. It's sad but true. In that valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Speaking as someone who fled that world decades ago.
I’ve found most cleared folks are generally good, but I do work for a DOE contractor, which is very different than DoD and the IC.
Yeah. I did DoD and IC. Non-trivial number of oxygen thieves.
At what I would consider a large, but not giant, tech company. I think our recruiters aren't doing the best at sourcing because the market seems to be overflowing but we don't end up with very many candidates and the compensation isn't bad. For us if you cold-apply online, have at least a couple years experience out of college (or something else interesting on your resume), and have experience with a well typed language then you're all but guaranteed to get an interview.
But I will say in previous experience even at small companies before COVID I'd have recruiters pre-filtering resumes, just not aggressively.
Huh! Yes, I'd suggest that either the comp isn't as good as you think, your sourcers are marketing the roles all wrong, or your recruiters filter way too much.
It's almost certainly the second option. But maybe other companies are making the same mistakes and finding roles like that (decent jobs that are badly marketed) could be a new avenue for your search.
Good luck!
Ironically, roles like that, by nature, are hard to find!
I suspect you underestimate the scale layoffs that have gone on over the last year in texh. I think like 50,000 people? More? There are just a lot of folks out there hunting.
I don't underestimate it. It's far more than 100,000. I forgot a sentence. Let me amend.
Update: post better now? 😉 I a sentence two.
Edit: 363k between 2023 and 2024
Edit 2: FWIW, this is what "Circus Funhouse Mirror" was supposed to imply. Stupid metaphors! 🙄😂