
Ask HN: What is broken with job hiring processes? - calderarrow
It seems like the job recruitment is convoluted and difficult for both job-posters and job-seekers, but nothing has been done about it. Why?
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winternett
(US East Coast)

1\. Recruiters are scraping the same job boards applicants use.

2\. Salary Surveys are always wrong, and many go underpaid because they don't
know how to negotiate.

3\. Companies write contracts poorly, with little consideration for things
that keep employees engaged and on a contract.

4\. There are way too many technology stacks, too many people focus on saying
theirs is the best rather than accurately evaluating solutions based on
available skills and right fit to the business need.

5\. Way too many inexperienced and untrained people in management positions. I
can't tell you how often I've heard IT managers say that they're "Not really a
technical person". Stop hiring your unqualified friends.

6\. Government has no idea about tech either. They need to be educated in
order to protect consumers, employees, and the economy from bad tech.

7\. Not enough consumer protection enforcement. When companies do bad things
the consequences should set an example for everyone else, not just be 10% of
the profit as a penalty.

8\. Employees need better vacation, and more options for flexible work days.
40 hour weeks are a lot, the standard for industry leave is usually 15 days a
year now. The entire stat of Virginia has an "At Will" employment policy. No
wonder why really productive projects suffer from attrition and buron out. You
only get out of that trap if you have the power to negotiate, but companies
need to create better policies and stick to them for all employees.

9\. Recruiters need to educate themselves on technology. Stop lying to
candidates about positions, you should know the difference between Angular and
Python. You should also always be up front about where the work location is,
and stop sending me text messages you vultures... Email works just fine.

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quaquaqua1
I would argue that two major factors are really affecting the market on both
sides-- one is that cost of living in many places is extremely high, and the
other is that businesses are demanding people with deep understanding of
complex technology from day 1.

Decades ago, cost of living was lower, and apprenticeships or "learning on the
job" was tolerated.

These days the landlord wants 30k a year, and the employer wants to pay
bargain basement for "10+ years of reactjs experience" :)

------
tmm84
My comment is going to cover some of the answers given by others but here is
my view of the situation.

Management/HR: 1\. They don't know programming (to them it's magic). 2\. They
are afraid of paying for people who are less than rockstar. If they can't keep
up with the Googles and Facebooks then they can't succeed they hear. 3\.
Technology/market has been moving faster than developers can develop. Need it
yesterday is the theme management dances to and they don't care about paying
you 30 hours of overtime if they can get something to market this week instead
2 weeks later under a relaxed deadline. 4\. All computers work like Star Trek
because Siri can tell them the weather according to their logic.

Programmers: 1\. Starting your own framework or library just to
advertise/divide the mindshare of other programmers instead of collaborating.
2\. Not knowing how to interview candidates correctly (talk about programming?
nah, just come up with a programming whiteboard then nickpick them to death to
find one good enough to play sidekick.). 3\. Working for less/putting in too
many hours. Working for less brings the profession down and putting in too
many hours reinforces the idea that only good programmers put in loads of
overtime.

Of course this isn't 100% spot on for every company, market and country but it
is what I see most of the time.

------
croh
This is just one of the many side-effects of money-oriented society. People
work to earn money. Not because they love work.

1\. Business owner just want paying customers, they don't care about product.

2\. Your tech-lead/manager/solution-architect has stop coding for last 15
years (or never did it). So s/he choose the most hyped stack (or js-framework-
of-week). Now to justify his decision, he needs team with that skill or he put
blame on HR

3\. HR doesn't understand damn thing neither they care for HUMANS. Their job
is finding RESOURCE. So they just look for keywords in resume and contact each
and every single candidate having keywords in resume.

4\. Candidate deeply hate computer science fundamentals. And believe that
being hacker is cool and can learn lot of money/girl/boys/fame. So he tries to
show off himself by somehow adding hyped keywords in resume ( or most of time
copy-pasting resume).

Now after all this, if product succeeds believe me amigo, you're very lucky or
someone just robbed by your product.

~~~
krasicki
1\. is not always true nor is it germane to the question at hand.

2\. is a highly unlikely scenario. Ecosystems are complex beasts at face
value. Generally speaking the decision-makers stick close to the trajectory of
their comfort zones. You've packed a lot of opinionated assumptions here that
I'll pass on biting.

3\. HR has dissolved in the past decade or so. You are lucky if there is a
HUMAN aspect to HR (it can be, far too often, a keyword parsing exercise) AND
when there is a HUMAN involved it may be someone poorly paid from an
outsourcing country that has NO IDEA of what the two puzzle pieces should look
like to match them.

4.) Candidates are more likely to never have encountered computer science,
software, design, or tooling fundamentals. Non-exposure is different from
belligerence.

Job descriptions are often riddled with 50 to 100 keyword requirements - full-
stack can always be trumped by entire global ecosystem requirements. So why is
it surprising that candidates must list EVERYTHING they've encountered?

Given that sweeping employer wishlist survey of technology, it is then cruel
and unusual to expect candidates to be able to 'test' well against those
oceans of domain knowledge. And let's be honest. Candidates are tested against
a mountain of brain-teasing trivia and nuances gleaned from innumerable web
resources dedicated to "weeding out" \- cough - unqualified candidates.

We need to get back to hiring based on mutual interest, mutual technology
skillsets, and behavioral stability. If a candidate has everything then they
won't grow in the job - bad fit. If they express interest in your direction -
you have a candidate worth considering.

Limit the total number of interviews to seven - no bullshit, pare down to
three, pick your best. Give it six months. Rinse and repeat if necessary.

~~~
non-entity
> Candidates are more likely to never have encountered computer science

I remember reading a comment somewhere a while back that said something along
the lines of "computer science has been mostly completed since the 80s".

Now, I'm not sure how true that is, and I'm smart enough not to believe it
literally, but I do understand the sentiment.

------
qualsiasi
(Europe / Tech)

1\. HR is not tech-savy and most of the time does look for distinguished
engineers at the price of an intern

2\. Salary is always on the low side, and salary range is almost never
included in the job posting

3\. Companies are not considering their employees an asset, but a liability

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JSeymourATL
> for both job-posters and job-seekers...

Chiefly, that Hiring Managers & Executives are almost completely divorced from
the actual process of identifying, assessing, and attracting people.

They leave this grunt work to Human Resource Flunkies and Recruiter Bozos
(wrongly believing that's HR job).

Yet, executives who get this right-- take an intensely methodical, personal,
hands-on approach.

THE ELUSIVE FORMULA FOR GREAT HIRING > [https://mastersofscale.com/#/aneel-
bhusri-the-elusive-formul...](https://mastersofscale.com/#/aneel-bhusri-the-
elusive-formula-for-great-hiring)

------
theriddlr
Non-technical people doing the hiring. Keyword bingo and thinking Java and
JavaScript are the same thing. The endless search for a unicorn or Goldilocks
hiring (not unqualified, but not too good either). HR lacking EQ when they
reject with weak white lies – this reflects badly on the company when the
candidate is more qualified in the future.

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lkiernan
Job-posters lie, job-seekers lie.

------
tempsdlfkjs
1\. Wanting to hire people that can scale to millions of users when you only
have less than 10,000 users

2\. Agism

------
isaaafc
For software engineering, whiteboard tests/leetcode questions.

