

Ask HN: Is hiring ripe for disruption? - brandonmcane

First it was classified ads, then monster.com, then LinkedIn making job openings more accessible.  Do you think the market is ready for something new?  When it comes to finding a job and hiring&#x2F;screening candidates, it seems like the process is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient.  Is this a market that would be grounded in where they are or is there an opening for a creative way to disrupt the status quo?
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curtis
I was going to say: Can you get recruiters out of the process altogether?

But after thinking about it, I think recruiters have an important part to play
in the current process, but it's not as a filter. Rather they are just a
really expensive polling mechanism: Are you looking for a job now? Are you
looking for a job now? Are you looking for a job now? ...

Like all polling mechanisms, if there's too much polling, it puts a heavy load
on the system.

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rprospero
As someone who is in the job market right now, hiring is ridiculously broken.
Anecdote time:

During a recent job interview, the interviewer mentioned that there was
another position in the organization for which I would be qualified. The
position had been open for over a year and the department head was desperate
for any half-way qualified candidate.

Furthermore, when I say that I was qualified for the position, that was an
understatement. I am literally the only person on the face of the earth that
has experience in their domain who isn't already employed. I also exceeded all
of the requirements from their job ad (e.g. they wanted a BS and I have a
PhD).

So, I sent a nice cover-letter and resume explaining my experience and
expressing interest in their project (it was a pretty neat project). Three
days later, HR rejected my application without so much as an e-mail. They
still haven't found anyone for the post.

I've been seeing this time and again. Hiring isn't about finding good people,
it's about rejecting bad people. We'd rather reject 100 qualified employees
than risk letting one knucklehead in.

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notahacker
That example sounds less like an example of the job _market_ being broken and
more the organization at that particular firm being broken. It's difficult to
disrupt that, other than to be a different firm in the same market.

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grumps
There's a lot of issues in finding job and/or finding someone to hire. It
feels like trying to tackle the whole problem is a bit brutal.

Here are some areas that I find irritating;

\- Finding companies that I want to work for, other than well known companies.
Indeed sucks, I don't trust it.

-Terrible job descriptions i.e. this recent one I saw for a technical project manager: "Expert in python, php, ruby on rails, and Java Spring. 10 yrs exper required and we will pay up to 55K"

-Getting resumes to speak to the position, keyword loading, properly listing skills, achievements, etc,

-Disorganized contact with recruitment teams. ie. I had an amazing phone conversation with a hiring manager, at the end he asked which of his two positions I was interested in. A week later recruiter turns me down for one the positions.

-Complete lack of knowledge from recruiters: ie. We use a framework you haven't used before, I'm not sure you can make that switch.

-Location - I'm looking to leave my current location and have targeted a city, I'm getting turned down because I don't live there.

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taurath
Hear hear.

Its a seller's market for programmers, but the traditional recruiter style
means you don't hear a single thing about a company until you're on the phone
with them (and they're trying to figure out whether you're competent).
Requirements lists are NOT the way to engage people who are just looking for
better opportunities (but don't necessarily need a new job).

Also regarding how recruiters handle things... about half of recruiters just
want to match your resume bullet points to a list. They ignore important
things like domain knowledge and the ability of a coder to learn new things.
Oh, you have 5 years in .net, rails and HTML/CSS, but you haven't used their
lightweight CSS framework yet? Sorry, we're looking for someone that matches
better. I have yet to meet a recruiter that has any idea how much time and
effort it takes to learn any particular technology over some other. Learning
and being able to apply the fundamentals of OO programming takes a heck of a
lot longer than swapping from C# to Java, or from Backbone to Angular.

