
Why is it taking longer and longer to fill open jobs? - jrs235
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8815561/job-vacancy-duration
======
resoluteteeth
I think another interpretation is that it's become easier for companies to
keep jobs "open" and collecting applicants without really having to put in
effort to find people. Or, to put it another way, the idea of an "open job"
has become meaningless, if it was ever meaningful in the first place.

As a metaphor, we can imagine many people wanting to buy apples, but not being
willing to pay the 1$ the supermarket will charge. They could create an "apple
opening", posting on an apple selling site looking for people who are willing
to sell them apples with certain qualities for a given price that depends on
the individual, for example 5 cents. Then, we could poll consumers to see how
many have apple openings. Perhaps we could find millions of such unfilled
openings, but would this tell us anything about trends in the quality of
apples or actual apple consumption?

~~~
hebdo
A relevant read: Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html)

~~~
arenaninja
I finished reading the article, and only then realized that it's from 15 years
ago. Incredibly relevant still, and in my experience companies still pinch
pennies when hiring developers

------
alister
> What's changed over the past fifteen years is that the internet has
> dramatically decreased the cost of identify in an open job listing and
> sending in an application. The stack of resumes you need to read through in
> order to start scheduling interviews has just gotten longer. The easier you
> make it to apply for jobs, the slower the hiring process becomes.

The above explanation of why it now takes employers longer to fill open jobs
isn't convincing. Perhaps it would make sense if you received:

(a) 10,000 resumes for a single opening (but that doesn't happen)

(b) 50 resumes from 50 different Nobel laureates and you were torn trying to
decide which one is best (but that doesn't happen either)

My experience is that if you got 5 resumes pre-Internet, you'd get 50 post-
Internet. But the additional screening is negligible. I found that I can
immediately reject 45 of the 50 resumes after looking at them for a minute
each because so many of the resumes are unqualified.

You might say that that is 45 minutes lost, but even a single interview will
take longer than that. It's insignificant to the overall hiring process.

Maybe what really happens is that in large HR-driven companies, the HR
department forces the hiring manager to interview many more incompetent or
unqualified people because they got so many resumes to choose from.

~~~
GreenPlastic
Posted a senior iOS dev position to Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor where the
company is paying 25%(maybe 40% if you include RSUs) above market here
(although we don't put comp in the job listing) and only got 3 applicants in a
month.

~~~
GreenPlastic
Can't post the exact description but the jist of it was:

Strong understanding of objective C and iOS SDK Swift experience a plus
Passion for design / UX Proven track record of quality apps in app store

That's literally all I had under qualifications.

~~~
memracom
Did you try to get all the Apple details out of your posting and replace them
with Android ones?

What difference does it make whether they built an iOS app if they are a
mobile app developer?

Also, why not look for a web app developer specializing in front end. Same
skills, just a few minor technical details are different.

I think a lot of employers do not understand what the word "skill" actually
means. Generally skills increase with years of experience and if you take
someone at the right level and throw a new platform at them, they will spend a
week on reading and tutorials and then dive into a prototype of the app they
need to build.

After all, Google hires Apple and Microsoft engineers, then expects them to
build stuff on the Google internal platform. And they DO!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There are big, big differences between the native iOS programming model, the
native Android programming model, and the web programming model.

They're not just "a few minor technical details." The toolchains are
different, the UI design details are different, the event model is different,
the model/backend details are different, and there are significant conceptual
differences.

I would be astonished if someone could move from web dev to iOS dev in a week
with no previous experience. A good coder can probably bolt together a twinky
do-nothing hello world app that quickly from a cold start, but they'll be a
long way short of what's needed for a solid commercial-grade app with useful
features.

~~~
deciplex
Perhaps the reason everyone thinks there is a shortage of developers, is that
'to iOS dev in a week' is somehow an acceptable metric to determine if someone
is a good hire or not.

I can not fathom the mindset that goes into the line of thought "yeah he's
clearly a great developer - sadly he is currently working from framework X and
we would need him to work from framework Y". I can only hope that such an
attitude leaves a company more likely to go out of business (and I suspect it
does).

A strong engineer with a proven track record building enterprise-level
applications is not going to become a shit-hot iOS developer in a week.
However he will be just as likely to bring in 10x his salary in value to your
company in his first year, as nearly anyone else you hire. But most hiring
managers will probably not bother to promote such an applicant to even a phone
screen, since it would take too much time out of everyone's daily 'where are
all the iOS devs' bitch session on HN or proggit or whatever.

------
PythonicAlpha
One of the problems IMHO is, that employers get more and more demanding.

There is this joke, that fits very good: "If Carpenters Were Hired Like
Programmers" [1]

In former days, the readiness to take people and train them on the job was
much higher. In Germany this is a really ugly trend. The licence for truck
drivers is very, very costly but the earnings of the drivers are very low. In
former days the transportation companies educated their own drivers. Today,
they don't. They just expect, that the drivers somehow have to have the
education and come from somewhere. What is the result: The state is in more
and more cases educating unemployed people that they can become truck drivers.
They pay tax money, that the transporting companies don't have to pay for it
...

I don't think, that a "free market" has to mean that more and more costs have
to been taken over by the state, but that is, what is happening.

Today, when you apply for a job, they search for exactly those skills needed.
They are not ready to train you on the job or take people that have to do a
lot of learning on the job. And also in Germany: They are not ready to take
people above a specific age.

[1]
[http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...](http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I've read that joke before. It's great. It should be re-posted every time one
of these "jobs" discussions comes up on HN. It very clearly summarizes what's
wrong with the hiring process.

------
Animats
Here's a famous recruiting ad for "Super programmers" from Autodesk, in
1986.[1] It includes two things you seldom see today. First, there's no list
of narrow technical skills:

 _" Relevant experience is nice, but if you're as good a person as we want,
you'll be able to pick it up in a week or two."_

And finally:

 _" We'll pay you more than anybody else in the industry."_

That worked. Autodesk ended up owning the CAD industry and the animation
industry.

If your company is complaining that it can't find programmers, try that.

[1]
[https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html](https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_43.html)

~~~
fsckin
It'd be awesome if AutoDesk unleashed some super programmers on their online
store and subscription management portal. Both are an absolutely abismal
experience.

------
dba7dba
It seems no one is mentoring anyone in professional setting anymore.
Stackoverflow.com is nice but sometimes face2face mentoring can't be beat.

And no company seems willing to offer 'apprenticeship'. You are working on a
hard problem with latest methodologies and tools? Then it's very likely you
won't find anyone out there who has the experience in the methodologies and
tools. You just can't hold out looking for the perfect candidate. You are not
google or apple. So just give up and hire the best you can find in the pool.
Don't wait till you find the ONE. Again, you are not google or apple.

The other problem I think is HR department itself. How many small/mid HR
departments keep track of hiring process like SEO metrics are kept/measured?
Do they know which manager seems to hire the most duds? AFAIK, HR department
is the least automated piece of a tech company. I can tell because they are
still scheduling interviews using emails.

And lastly, please take a look at your Job desc/requirement. Is it real or are
you just copying/pasting from some other job postings?

~~~
mpdehaan2
Pretty much most job positions want a pony. It's the old "10 years experience
in J2EE" thing, when a technology doesn't really take that long to learn, or a
group of technologies that someone uses, that are impossibly incommon in
combination.

People want developers in Foo, not Bar, when Foo and Bar are basically the
same.

I prefer hiring smart people that can learn, and that are good to work with,
but I do feel people don't believe that as much when there are are a lot of
people on the market.

It's somewhat similar to how it's hard to get an employer to fund a conference
trip, classes, books, and all of those kinds of things.

And because you can't really move and grow at work, I think that's also why
people change jobs more, we're in a very creative professional that desires
knowledge - and the system really wants us to hire someone who already knows X
or has built X before, and crank out more of the same many times.

------
colechristensen
* Employers overvalue experience, forgetting that a human is a fantastic machine and with appropriate training and management, most people will be able to do most jobs.

* Communication is hard: both writing resumes and job descriptions – it becomes this strange difficult-to-play game that both sides engage in often having little to nothing to do with the actual job

* Education is poor: at all levels actual learning is not emphasized. Especially learning how to do things. From preschool to graduate school, the game of education far surpasses actual learning. Students aren't interested in learning and teachers are only interested in grades and tests.

~~~
VLM
"Employers overvalue experience"

Only at hiring time. One of the execs reads a journalist article in a trade
rag about any random fad and "we" need to have it implemented yesterday. Which
is not a problem because successful employees are really good at OTJ training
and learn by experimentation. Unfortunately no one has told HR that, and they
think they're hiring for tax audit avoidance accountants in the most
conservative and uncreative criteria possible.

The ideal candidate has 20 years of experience in a field 10 years old (that
only takes 6 weeks to learn of course), in other words focused entirely on the
past. The ideal employee on the other hand is an expert at learning "6 week"
technologies and making them produce once they're hired. There's going to be
friction and failure and massive wastes of money.

There is also the extremely low social status issue. It would be possible to
micro-specify (nano-specify?) any management or executive job, but they're not
going to put up with it, as an industry, so instead we get "good judgment"
type of hiring criteria. The reason why programmers have incredibly low social
status is the oversupply (nationwide, anyway) requires them to be talked down
to or replaced by someone who will tolerate being talked down to. The
extremely low social status permeates the rest of the field too, call center
like work environments, crazy disrespectful deadlines, poor management
techniques (most modern fads, really), so its not going to be as simple as
some sort of union saying "no" to disrespectful job advertisements.

------
ChuckMcM
Historically long lead times to hiring has been a leading indicator of wages
rising. The mechanism is pretty well understood.

Employer A decides that if they can get an employee at a low wage, they would
hire another employee and they create an advertisement for the opening. If the
economy has moved up, they don't fill it and it remains open.

Meanwhile employer B loses an essential employee for some reason and they go
out and actively try to recruit a replacement (generally from other employers
in the same industry / space) They find employer A's top performer and offer
them a raise to come work for B (which A takes because they have had really
poor wage increases over the last 5 years)

Now Employer A has a problem, they are down a key employee and they had an
"opening" already so they are in danger of losing income if they don't replace
their employee. In order to do that they raise what they are willing to pay
the "right" person who walks in the door. And they may try to recruit out of
other employers.

"Nice to fill" job openings are an indicator that the business is profitable
enough to add labor, which means that the labor it is employing is at or above
the productivity rate needed to succeed or expand. In that environment some
firms will seek to grow more aggressively than others and that will result in
opportunities to be employed at the entry level.

That is a good indicator for folks who are coming into the workforce. How the
rest of the economy responds will be interesting indeed.

------
th0ma5
I think this misinterprets something deliberately, and misses some things
entirely.

It mentions that wages have been stagnant as proof that it isn't that people
aren't applying for jobs that have low pay, but only uses wage statistics as
evidence for that, which doesn't really indicate one way or the other that
such is the situation.

I think the thing it really misses is the increased conceptualization of open
positions that makes it so about the only person in the entire world qualified
for a job the way it is posted is either the person that had the job
previously, or the exact skills of some other team member.

I assisted in hiring a technical person at a previous job over a decade ago,
and after finding no one with the skills we wound up just hiring the most
enthusiastic person, and they wound up over achieving.

After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my
manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and
they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone
else just like me.

I've read other studies drawing parallels to online dating and in the face of
abundance you keep holding out for something better.

Either people have to do the hard work to generalize the description of the
kinds of skills they are looking for that doesn't wind up into yet another set
of impossibilities, or the entire hiring process needs a complete reset in
some other way. While we're at it we should probably throw degree requirements
out the window, and the silly hiring puzzles everyone has been upset about.

~~~
ryandrake
Extreme pickiness. Every hiring manager is convinced that they must only hire
A+++ players or their business is doomed. They'd rather a position go un-
filled for 6 months than take a risk on someone simply hungry and
enthusiastic. Companies are holding out for that unicorn employee (but,
strangely enough, not offering unicorn salaries).

~~~
dba7dba
They need to wake up. They are not google or apple.

~~~
Buzzzz
Sometimes I wonder if even Apple and Google are Apple and Google :)

------
gizi
I am busy already. I already have a job that I like. So, I am not even
remotely looking at what other jobs are around, because at the moment I
consider that to be a distraction, a waste of time. Now you can generalize
this: you can safely assume that anybody who is even just remotely good at
what he does, is already busy. He already has a job and he is not interested
in your job advert. In other words, above a certain treshold of skill level
that is not even that high, you must approach the candidate, because the
candidate will not approach you. Besides the fact that he considers your
approach to be a distraction (he does not need it right now) the most
important question on his lips will be: How much more are you offering than I
am getting now already?

~~~
vonmoltke
This attitude is so wring, and hearing it so many times has contributed to my
perceptions of myself as a shit engineer.

There are plenty of good engineers like myself who are at times actively or
semi-actively looking for a job. I'm in Dallas, and I have a lot of hot
keywords associated with myself that are not my core competency. What that
means is over 90% of the jobs I get approached about are inappropriate,
sometimes wildly. I only get approached by the highly active recruiters, since
so many seem to have limited geographical areas and I am not in a position to
network with non-recruiting people. These recruiters frequently misinterpret
or misunderstand my background.

Thus, I am forced to actively apply to openings if I want something new.
Hearing things like this gives me the impression that I will be viewed as
inferior just because I had to stoop to the level of applying like the rest of
the plebs.

------
caseyf7
I would like to see someone quantify how many job listings are posted to meet
H1-B requirements where there is no intent to hire. I've been hearing more and
more stories of people trying to get interviews for jobs they see online only
to find out the listing was to meet visa requirements for the person in the
current role.

~~~
arkem
Job postings that are aiming to satisfy visa requirements are generally easy
to identify.

Here are some indicators:

* They're usually listed in a Sunday newspaper rather than online.

* They will not be posted to the company's website.

* They'll require a specific education level

* They'll require experience that is oddly specific

~~~
mrspeaker
Like this one:
[https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560](https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/525650833174978560)

I thought it was the most hilarious thing I'd ever seen until a co-worker on a
H1-B told me what it really was.

~~~
walshemj
Obviously spelling is not one of the skills required "stored proceeds" :-)

------
Animats
How often do you see "Help Wanted - Will Train"?

~~~
icelancer
A lot by smart employers. When I ran a data science team, we hired mostly
physicists and math majors who had only secondary knowledge of CS. Best
bargains on the market and they don't come with baggage.

Now I work in sports science. I try to hire brilliant people who have never
played the sports in question. Still very, very hard.

~~~
eropple
I occasionally, casually interview for sports gigs (NBA, NHL) and I see it the
other way - the needs are not that technically difficult, but the folks doing
the hiring are rarely qualified to be doing the interviewing and most are very
cheap relative to market so an established, skilled person is infeasible for
them. Literally everyone I've met in the industry is super nice, though, and
I've made many friends in the process.

~~~
icelancer
Oh, working for teams directly is often a joke. Many MLB clubs are not,
though. One club is packed with PhDs in their sports science department. They
are an exception. The brunt of the great work is being done in private
practice.

------
spacko
Maybe HR tends to complicate the process to expand its power and justify its
existence.

There is this "law" that proclaims this is what happens in bureaucratic
organisations - hierarchies tend to be grown for that purpose.

~~~
analog31
Parkinson's Law -- an amusing read, even if quaint. The same book also gave
rise to the contemporary term "bikeshedding."

~~~
spacko
Parkinson's Law states that work is expanded to fill the available time. The
law I refer to is that the time itself with work to be filled is expanded -
for the purpose of requiring more human and non-human resources - which again
requires expanding the hierarchy - which expands the power of those who cause
this process (as the newly hired people will be added below those "managers").

~~~
analog31
Quite true. I should have italicized _Parkinson 's Law_, the book. Parkinson
spends a number of short chapters discussing the expansion of hierarchies,
with historical examples.

------
sopooneo
Because it seems there are many people commenting who might know: is it heard
of for a potential employee to negotiate compensation also in terms of amount
of paid time off? And if so, has anyone ever heard of a US dev getting
European levels of vacation? Like eight weeks?

Because that is my ideal, and I would be willing to give up a lot to get that
sort of thing. I need stability, but live pretty frugally, so I would only be
interested in an otherwise traditional full-time position. Any input greatly
appreciated.

~~~
dhd415
I've heard of people negotiating 4 or 4.5-day work weeks for 80% or 90% of the
position's full-time salary. In the few cases where I've seen that happen,
someone in the company had prior work experience with the candidate and knew
that they would be worth bringing in even on a part-time basis.

------
memracom
Don't well written cover letters help employers quickly evaluate a large
number of applications?

And don't complain that you don't get them along with the resumes. 1) Ask for
a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job. 2) Discard
applications that don't include them. 3) Resist the urge to look through the
resumes anyway.

And if you directly ask for a cover letter, and you get anm application that
doesn't have one, send the applicant a form letter that says. "This is a form
letter. Apparently you do not care about finding a job because you failed to
follow the instructions in the job posting. We have deleted your
application/email. If you still want to be considered for the job, apply again
WITH A COVER LETTER that explains why you are the right fit for the job".

If Employers want Job Applicants to do the right thing, then they need to be
proactive and teach. Nobody else trains job applicants how to apply for a job,
how to help the employer see quickly that you deserve to get an interview.

~~~
slyall
> Ask for a cover letter explaining why you are a fit for the job

How does this help anything. Plenty of these out there which the applicant can
attached to the application.

"I am very enthusiastic to leverage my [INSERT HERE] skills to help [COMPANY]
transform the [WHATEVER] industry "

~~~
raverbashing
This

99% of cover letters will just be, self-importance exaggeration, prospective
employer excessive praise, etc.

~~~
tomjen3
And resumes are not?

I am a decent programmer but not exceptional, but when you read my resume you
will see that I am a child prodigy - and that is done without any lying at all
just selective highlighting facts.

~~~
vonmoltke
Mine isn't. Maybe that's my problem. :P

~~~
hodwik
That's your problem.

------
autokad
I wonder if part of it (besides keeping positions open just to see what is out
there) is that companies can use job openings as analytic data. you find
information that re-affirms how much you should be paying employees,
expectations of employee turn over, and more interestingly what the
competition is doing.

I mean, imagine I am google, I fain interest in a job posting to get some
facebook employees to apply. I even give them an interview. between the
resume, cover letter, and interview I might be able to get lots of information
on what projects facebook is working on and then just turn down the candidate
after 3 interviews and say: google is quirky, if one person dont like you, you
dont get in no matter how good you think it went.

------
njloof
What's also missing is that most resumes are culled mechanically by grepping
for keywords. Nobody reads every resume they receive. That's why they ask for
digital documents -- and then ask you to submit them _again_ in plain text
elsewhere on the form.

------
d4nt
My theory is that people are shopping around for better employers and better
cultural fit, and that it's not just a question of taking the highest offer
any more. That would explain why wages are not rising.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
If the problem would be just employees "shopping around" that would _not_
explain, why wages are not rising. If they would shop around, wages would also
rise, even when they are only marginal interested in wages ... (show me 3
employees that are not interested in wages)

~~~
hodwik
Tech wages are very inflated as is, expecting them to rise is pretty silly.

When I was looking for my current job, I forgot to even ask about wages. So
maybe what they gave me in pay is "flat" from five years ago, but it's still
twice what any of my friends my age are making, while they have degrees and I
do not.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
I was only reacting on the argument was made by the OP, that is not logical in
my opinion.

I do not know about tech wages in the US. In Germany, the tech wages are not
inflated, at least not in my opinion. The normal tech wages have risen maybe
3-5% per year the last few years in Germany (I don't call this inflated) and
the years before it was even less.

In the same time, the wages for top-managers have risen maybe 10-15% per year
and are since decades incredible high above the wages of "tech wages" (the
difference is climbing and climbing). I call _that_ inflated.

Your statement of course is more logical than that of the OP.

~~~
hodwik
Developer wages in the US average around €62k, about 20 higher than in
Germany, while the US has roughly 30% lower cost of living.

Also, in Germany you're at a 40% income tax rate at €43k, while in the US at
€62k you're only taxed at 25%.

Sure, that 40% income tax rate gets you universal healthcare, while in the US
we're paying ~6,339.71 Euros a year to insure a family of four. But I think
even accounting that, wages are much higher in the US.

------
gcb0
by that graph, hiring:openings is finally at 1.0.

that actually sounds perfect, and it seems inflated before. when it was over
1.5

so, what's the problem?

------
jrs235
This might explain it too:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ByFCtZfCcAAg_A3.jpg:large)

------
thrillgore
I mean, the solution is simple to fix right? Raise the wages for these
positions.

~~~
hodwik
It's not about wages being too small, it's about offices not being pleasant
places to work.

I have never heard a programmer complain about not enough pay. They do,
however, complain about incompetent bosses, not enough vacation, and having to
deal with non-programmers.

------
known
interview != quiz

------
anti-shill
it's not--it's just propaganda...I never trust any stats promulgated or hyped
by the gov't, the media, corporations or nonprofit foundations. They all have
an agenda, and agenda that portends no good for the average american.

