
Seen that job listing for a while, its no coincidence - sonabinu
http://www.wsj.com/articles/seen-that-job-listing-for-a-while-its-no-coincidence-1434667304
======
mjbellantoni
Hiring velocity is one area where small companies can use their agility to
advantage when competing against larger companies for talent. As a hiring
manager, I always endeavor to make this process as streamlined as possible.

A couple of anecdotes:

I was able to hire an outstanding candidate simply because I got them through
the process and extended them an offer. Our competition was a reasonably high-
profile company in the area. In the end he joined us because after more than a
week, the other company was unable to execute their paperwork to get an offer
generated.

More recently, I saw a very big name West Coast company (think
Google/Facebook/Uber) lose out on a great person because they had a third
party do a reference check. In the time it took for that check to happen, the
job seeker had lots of time to re-consider the offer and instead ended up
working for a smaller company on the East Coast which kept in touch and was
able to move blindingly fast.

~~~
k__
Sounds strange to me.

If I want to work at a big company, I would only consider small companies if
the big ones don't want me and not if the big ones just want me a month later.

~~~
notahacker
If you want to work at a company offering more responsibility and/or more
money, you consider the company that's offered it to you more favourably than
the bigger company that says they like you very much and will decide if you're
good enough after a week or two. Especially if you suspect that reflects how
the respective companies will respond to any future requests you might wish to
make if working for them.

If you only want to work at a big company, you probably don't interview with
the smaller company in the first place.

------
pjc50
Some long-term job listings, especially the vague ones, are dummies put there
by recruitment firms who are keen to get you on their books.

~~~
arethuza
Another tiresome tactic that recruitment firms use is to leave up ads for
roles that were actually filled months ago - either to attract CVs and/or make
them look busier than they actually are.

Edit: There's probably a book waiting to be written on the dodgy tactics of
recruitment firms. Mind you, I became a bit less harsh on individual
recruiters when I was in an office that shared a floor of a building with a
recruitment firm and got to see how they treated their staff. They were too
cheap to hire meeting rooms when they were doing staff reviews so we regularly
had people getting complete bollockings in the shared kitchen area - which
isn't much fun to witness and a pretty ghastly way to treat your own staff.

~~~
fecak
I've been recruiting for almost 20 years and have been considering writing a
book about various tactics. My blog regularly exposes some of the recruiter
tricks and strategies on topics from counteroffers to candidate control. If I
become convinced there would be even modest demand, I'd write it.

~~~
arethuza
I love this book "exposing" management consulting:

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-
Consul...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rip-off-Scandalous-Management-Consulting-
Machine/dp/1872188060)

I'd like to read an equivalent for recruiters and as more people encounter
recruiters than management consultants I expect the audience would be much
larger!

~~~
fecak
My comment got a few upvotes, so perhaps there is more interest in this topic
than I originally thought. I wrote an ebook "Job Tips For Geeks: The Job
Search" a couple years ago that included a few tips on working with
recruiters, but that wasn't the focus. I'll give it some thought, thanks for
the insight.

------
auxym
As a fresh grad interviewing for (real, non-internship) jobs for the first
time, I'm really surprised at how long the hiring process is. The article
mentions 23 days average. I'm currently interviewing for a BigCo where I
already had done an internship, so they knew me. After I contacted my former
supervisor, it took him 2 weeks of wrestling bureaucracy to open a position,
then HR insists on collecting CVs for 4 weeks, after which I got a phone
screen. HR lady told me she would be phone screening for 2 weeks before
passing on the CVs to the hiring manager who would contact people for in
person interviews.

I'm finally scheduled for an interview next week. But really, 60 days before
even interviewing a candidate they already have experience with? I'm surprised
they even manage to hire people before they are extended another offer. But
then again, this is not programming.

~~~
jackgavigan
HR are a major problem in many large companies.

Oftentimes, they're lazy (outsourcing most of their job to expensive
recruiters and agencies), obstructive (creating all manner of stupid,
bureaucratic, red-tape hoops you have to jump through before they'll approve
whatever it is you're trying to do), and add zero value to the actual process
of recruiting an employee.

My hat of HR know no limit.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Sounds like they are working on job security in the same way a developer does
when he make undocumented code only he can understand. Considering how many
developers actually think like that, it shouldn't be surprising to see this in
HR as well.

Some places where I've worked at, if you fail to hire (say you select a
candidate and they get a better offer), you have to start all over at square
1. Square 1 being justifying to HR why you need the position (a multi-week
process).

------
airza
Business-oriented publications and companies that are hiring always seem to
carefully avoid the easy way to fix long hiring times: Increase wages.

~~~
pjc50
The long hiring times seem not to be due to lack of applicants, but due to
internal hiring politics and process. Rising conservativism about making a
"bad hire", perhaps.

~~~
airza
You can't discount the role of applicant volume in that, though; if you have a
20 day hiring process with one person going through it at a time, the odds of
it taking 40-60 days are a lot better than if you have 2-3 going through at
once.

~~~
pjc50
Those are unrealistically low applicant volume numbers, surely?

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10949825/Employers-r...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/10949825/Employers-
receive-39-applications-for-every-graduate-job.html)

~~~
airza
It's not clear to me how many of those applicants would actually be valid for
the job, so i'm not sure. The companies that i've worked at which had stagnant
wages had barely 1 candidate per position most of the time, so i've seen it
somewhere at least.

------
s_dev
I personally have little confidence in job postings that I've seen available
for at least three months. Similarly with apartments rentals - in a market
where developers and apartments are high in demand I usually see it as a red
flag if a job or apartment has been available for three or more months. It
begs the questions - why didn't others take it?

I never considered that the average interview process is getting longer.

~~~
vkjv
This fails to take into consideration a growing team. We have had a single job
listing open well over a year, but that single listing at one point
represented 7 open positions.

It's interesting to see this possible view. We might be better off posting
duplicates to make this nuance more obvious.

~~~
jerf
Even just an annotation "This post represents multiple open positions" might
be good. It also directly sends a message you want to send ("we're growing and
hiring lots!"), instead of implicitly by number of listings, which might be
missed by a candidate doing searches.

------
mayukh
some long-term job listings come from: > the larger companies are for roles
where there is constant churn (or growth) and they need to keep the pipeline
of active candidates warm > As mentioned already, spammy recruiters looking to
collect cv's

Also: > Companies are in-undated with applications and really can't separate
the wheat from the chaff. They have thousands of resumes for one or two job
openings because its so easy now to apply online and click submit. Perversely
the harder they make it to apply online, causes those most in need of a job to
jump through hoops to fill out a complete application

Tried hiring help on a local jobs board I was swamped and astounded with
volume and eagerness of the responses. Ended up going with someone who was
recommended by a friend as I didn't have the resources to process and filter
the applications

------
iamthepieman
the article mentions 27 days as the average time from job candidate to actual
employee. This seems like a very reasonable amount of time for anything that
is not traditionally high turnover like retail, certain service industries
etc.

I like to give at least 3 weeks notice simply because it usually takes that
long to transfer all my projects and responsibilities. That only leaves 6 days
for the active screening and interviewing process.

The article seems to be covering very general employment and job statistics so
most likely the 27 day average vacancy is quite high for service and retail
positions and fairly low for tech positions.

~~~
Siecje
What if you are not working?

~~~
pjc50
Obviously nobody will hire people who's _unemployed_.

/possible sarcasm

------
aidos
23% of interviews have a drug test. What's the incentive behind that?

~~~
bediger4000
To avoid having to actually do some real human thinking. Fail a "drug" test,
you can just treat those people as scum, not worth your time, disgusting
pariahs. You don't have to look at them as human, and actually use your wits
to decide.

People who, for example, smoke marijuana, will fail a drug test. Will they
miss work because they're hungover from a Big Weekend? No, mostly not. Will
some straight arrow call in sick because he or she got sick on Sunday evening?
Yes. We know this. But to avoid having to cope with ambiguity or grey areas or
hard decisions, we just let a "drug" test do it all.

~~~
poikniok
I am confused by your point. Would you rather sick people come into work and
get even more people sick?

~~~
bediger4000
My point is that potheads probably don't call in "sick" from a weekend bender
hangover, but we know alcoholics do. We test for marijuana use, we don't test
for alcohol use. We know for a fact that even a teetotalling, cautious person
calls in real sick every once in a while. So the reason for drug testing being
"to avoid absences" is logically inconsistent.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its incomplete; still useful if we assert that potheads will miss work.

~~~
bediger4000
Stipulated. But experience with co-workers tells me that drinkers miss more
than potheads work, and can have catastrophic life collapses. "Drug" tests
don't often test for alcohol consumption. So, I still think that "drug" tests
aren't in place for that particular reason.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Arguable. I personally don't think any invasive test is warranted. Measure my
performance; all else is irrelevant.

------
gumby
> “The jobs disappearing from the economy are routine, really simple jobs. The
> kind of jobs that are booming are jobs that take lots of judgment and
> creativity. They’re harder to hire for and so it takes longer.”

Funny they ended with this. It makes some sense. The inverse is true too (for
a truck driver, one can do more investigation to see if she has a safe &
trustworthy background for instance) but certainly it takes more work to hire
a developer than a retail salesperson.

------
njloof
Seems like the kind of story you see just before a call to expand the H1-B
program. I've worked with many fine H1-Bs but its purpose is to fill a need
you can't fill locally, not to get someone to take a job that is underpriced.

------
samstave
heh -- I know some people who interviewed for the Teespring DevOps lead
position.... they said that teespring was trying to "interview like google,
while being a tee shirt company" \-- teespring keeps putting that posting up.

Maybe they should realize their reqs for that position, or their actual
interview process is a little disconnected from who they are...?

------
madcaptenor
Is a "group panel interview" many interviewers and one interviewee, or the
other way around?

------
davidgerard
I thought the market would provide! Have they considered paying more?

