
You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements” - pixelcort
https://talent.works/blog/2018/11/27/the-science-of-the-job-search-part-vii-you-only-need-50-of-job-requirements/
======
carlmr
I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the
job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they
can't hire anybody who doesn't have that.

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.

~~~
rhacker
It's one thing for engineers to "be the HR department" at small companies.
They are willing to let things slide because they know the candidate,
especially after interviewing them, that they can fill in the knowledge gaps
(well I don't know about the willing to move to china bit).

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?

~~~
chrisbennet
If I see a position that has been open for longer than a month, I assume they
are not serious about filling it. Either they aren't really hiring or they
don't want to pay the market rate.

~~~
souprock
That isn't right. We did hire, several times. More please!

I've been posting this for ages:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18358038)

We have well over a hundred people doing that sort of stuff.

This idea of "filling" a "position" is wrong. There is a need for competent
technical staff who can contribute to the team. We hire them as we find them.
There isn't a fixed number of slots to fill with warm bodies.

~~~
chrisbennet
Your ad is a “looking for people” type ad. The ads I skip are the ones with
fairly specific skills that haven’t been filled after a month.

------
paultopia
From the "methodology" section of this post:

 _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)

~~~
achompas
Very well put, I agree completely. The absence of controls in their model for
school, education, experience etc. means we cannot draw definitive conclusions
from their analysis.

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."

------
rossdavidh
I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were
the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were
a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is,
it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word
"required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply.

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.

~~~
dfxm12
_so many quite good candidates won 't apply._

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?

~~~
logfromblammo
I don't want to waste my own time on an activity I actively despise.

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.

------
mszcz
[https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01](https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01)

I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the
clueless gatekeepers.

~~~
wil421
Sometimes it isn’t even an HR person. A computer will scan your resume and if
you don’t match enough keywords a person won’t even read it.

~~~
pc86
This is bad too (in its current state of sophistication) but I still think
it's better than having some HR generalist with 6 months on the job and no
technical knowledge scanning resumes before anyone who knows what they're
doing gets to them.

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.

~~~
bluGill
HR has one other job that you might not realize: make sure that your
hiring/interview process is legally fair. You better not interview in such a
way to make it impossible for some types of otherwise qualified people to pass
(female, black...) while others find it easy (males, white...).

~~~
mszcz
Ha! Often times they do that poorly as well.

My boss at a company I worked for recently wanted to hire a guy that is living
in Poland but is self-employed in the UK. The HR said to him, literally, "we
can't hire him because we don't know the implications of working with someone
incorporated out-of-country". Yeah, not like it was their job to find out.
That would be hard, could cut into their water cooler gossip time, no way!

~~~
bluGill
I don't know the legal system in the UK, but my guess is that what you
describe is not illegal. I would agree HR is lazy for not to find out, but
they have still done their job with respect to my post since nothing illegal
happened.

------
scarejunba
Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements
are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these,
and the quality of the requirement.

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.

~~~
electricslpnsld
> And let’s be honest “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story
> from “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.

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'.

~~~
tazard
I read that a different way. I understood it as an ad from Company X which
lists '5 years of Python' as the requirement. Candidate 1 has 5 years of
Python at Google, and Candidate 2 has 5 years Python at InfoSys.

~~~
Double_a_92
Does the Google experience really teach one that much better? Or is it just
perception?

I mean, at the end you are just a little cogwheel in some big corporation
anyway. The python tasks you need to solve there are probably just as mundane
as everywhere else.

~~~
mpeg
It's the perception, I've personally been passed on for jobs I would have been
amazing at because I don't have any FAANG experience.

Startup founders looking for VC money want to be able to add "Team of ex-
Google, ..." to their pitch.

------
dexen
re-post of my earlier post:

> _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 first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in
the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a
different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away.

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

~~~
__s
Really well put from the corporate perspective

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)

~~~
dexen
Thanks for the anecdote, your company sounds like a pretty cool place to live
given its openness to learn at work.

> _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.

------
tombert
Heh, I think most autodidacts have discovered this independently. I'm a
Physics-Major dropout, and have managed to find jobs in big brand-name
companies that have "strict requirements" for a degree. Now, it's led to a
level of imposter syndrome (I've posted about it on HN before), but at the
same time, it demonstrates that these "requirements" are more "strong
preferences".

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.

~~~
linuxftw
> Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome

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.

~~~
tombert
I don't particularly worry about that stuff, honestly. It's more of a feeling
of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success when I didn't go through
the proper steps".

I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your statement
probably applies to individual contributor roles.

~~~
linuxftw
> I also don't have much interest in management/directing, though your
> statement probably applies to individual contributor roles.

Interest aside, being qualified for those types of roles would raise the bar
for salaries for individual contributors because both types of positions are
competing for the same finite labor pool.

> It's more of a feeling of "I don't feel like I deserve this level of success
> when I didn't go through the proper steps".

The question, IMO, is whether or not an employer will feel the same way about
you at some point in the future.

I think this applies to those who have a degree as well. Ivy league school vs
state school. #1 ranked school vs #2. It's all relative, I suppose.

------
GhostVII
It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the
job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to
gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a
better fit, regardless of job requirements.

~~~
Blackstone4
We are trying to hire at the moment and most of the resume we've received have
been from men.... we'd like to interview some women....one of the good resume
from a female is missing their email address.... in my book that would have
been an automatic no but...since we need female candidates we tried calling
them for an interview...

~~~
AnaniasAnanas
> since we need female candidates

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?

~~~
ska

       Why not just hire the most fit candidates regardless of their gender and be done with it?
    

Short answer, because you aren't actually capable of identifying them.

Longer: mostly because there is real value in team diversity, and it's almost
impossible to remove your decision biases without actively addressing them. So
if you identify a potential bias, it's not crazy to try and do something about
it and see how that works for you.

~~~
52-6F-62
There is a very real and pragmatic application for this very thing,
specifically in AI work as identified by Fei-Fei Li:

[https://www.wired.com/story/fei-fei-li-artificial-
intelligen...](https://www.wired.com/story/fei-fei-li-artificial-intelligence-
humanity/)

edit: my phrasing wasn't very clear. I mean for having a team from a diverse
makeup.

------
bradleyjg
I recently was involved in drafting a job posting that was extremely flexible.
For example it didn’t specify a particular programming language, just listed a
few and said “or other similar languages”.

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.

------
GuB-42
A recruiter once told me "we ask for God in person, hoping for a prophet, we
are happy when we get the followers".

~~~
stingraycharles
That's a good way to get the worse part of developers divided by their Dunnin-
Kruger score.

~~~
Lio
I think that Dunning-Kruger effect in interviews is a very real problem going
the other way too.

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.

------
scaleout1
Unfortunately in Bay Area and specially at FAANG you need 0% of job
"Requirements" on your resume as they will leetcode the shit out of you in the
interview without asking one relevant question pertaining to your resume or
even to the actual job. One of the reason given for this is that the stack
used at these companies is completely homegrown so your experience using
framework $X for $Y years has no relevance

------
zaidf
Someone I know applied for a designer AND front end dev position at a startup.
He went through multiple rounds plus a project. This describes my friend:

\- 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.

------
hocuspocus
Recently I've seen a lot more job ads with minimal technical requirements and
rather a focus on more generic skills.

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.

------
sxp62000
I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements
section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate
things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who
still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their
list of requirements.

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?"

------
gefh
This data is weirdly bucketed and the fit curve looks sketchy. I don't think
it's a robust finding and I don't trust it.

Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes
though.

------
BenjaminBlair
I find that very frustrating. When a person is looking for a job he or she is
stressed out already, and when reading all those huge qualification criteria
you sometimes really feel like a total loser, not knowing anything at all.
It's really important to still try and send a CV and go to an interview with a
positive attitude, willing to learn that is. But I'd really like to see some
reasonable hiring criteria, so you can know for sure that you have what
they're looking for.

------
codingdave
That does match up with my job search I just completed. I sent out 5 resumes,
got an interview on every one where I had a majority of the qualifications,
did not get called on the 2 that were more off-target.

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.

~~~
monsieurbanana
On the other hand, you keep doing what you're already doing.

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.

~~~
linuxftw
My strategy has been to take a new position that is a good fit for my current
skill set and allows me to grow in the direction I'd like to move. Coming from
the linux side of the house, I wanted to move more into software engineering.
Each job hop moved me into more and more software development-centric roles.

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.

------
proxygeek
Wondering if there is a corpus of "stop-phrases" like stop-words which will
include gems like "passionate about software development", "good
communicator", "truth-seeker" and the likes.

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.

------
bitwize
In my experience, unless you meet all of the requirements in the req, and
substantially exceed a few of them, you will probably be passed over for a
candidate with "more experience in technology X".

Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called
in to interview means next to nothing.

------
jkingsbery
"They're more what you'd call 'guidelines.'"

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
As someone who hires for technical roles, I tend to profile the roles into a 5
X 5 grid. 5 core areas of proficiency, 5 levels of proficiency. a proficiency
of 4 across the board is uncommon.

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.

------
TheAdamist
Unless HR prescreens all the applicants before they make it to staff, then you
need 200%, or 0%. Sometimes it's rather frustrating working for bigcorp.

------
rb808
The most interesting thing was 12% interview rate - is that normal? I was
discouraged when getting 20% rates, maybe I need to apply to more stuff.

~~~
manfredo
I think it's pretty dependent on your application strategy. Some people are
fairly R-selected in their strategy. Large number of applications, but little
customization of resumes for each job and no cover letter. Others are more k
selected, they'll write good cover letters and change up their resume to
better highlight relevant experience.

------
create_novelty
Most important job requirement - get a warm introduction to the HR / Hiring
Manager via an existing employee of the company!

------
mathattack
A lot of job descriptions are written overly precise to specifically include
or exclude internal candidates.

------
pacuna
Could be, but what if the requirements you're missing are supposedly essential
for the job? Some jobs say you need to know X programming language. What if
you're a good programmer but haven't worked with that particular language?
Should you bother to apply?

~~~
midasz
I did, and it worked out fine for me. However the languages are a bit similar.
I went from C# to Java. I was upfront with it, and showed my eagerness to
learn and develop.

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.

------
MattHeard
My last job hunt resulted in a 12% success rate of getting an interview, which
matches well with this data.

------
austincheney
You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first
filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have
to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial
filter.

~~~
sethammons
Aside from personal experience, can you point to any data on this, and maybe
go into some more detail?

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.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
By the 5th time you see the question, you're fuming so you shout, "YES! I
ANGER EASILY!!!!"

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.

~~~
adetrest
Firing based on test results sounds illegal. Same reason why employers can't
give iq tests to candidates anymore IIRC.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I assume that you're in USA as you don't say, what law prohibits it? Any
insight on the rationale?

Presumably it is not illegal to require a particular educational level or
particular certificate pass which are likely to be close proxies for an "IQ"
test result?

~~~
adetrest
Not in the US myself, but this is a US discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772897)

While technically not always illegal, giving an IQ test is a minefield for HR
and that's why almost everyone avoids it. It all boils down to whether it is
required for the job or not, and whether it would discriminate against someone
who could otherwise do the job but fail the test.

