Just to weigh in on the flip side of this from a hiring perspective, if it's clear to me that someone has done zero research on my particular company, has no knowledge about what it is we do, and has no articulate explanation of why this particular job is a good fit for them, then I pass on the candidate instantly. I don't know if the shotgun a resume with a cut-and-paste cover letter approach works to some degree, but it at least doesn't work for me.
I know that applying to jobs is a pain in the ass, and that there are far too many bad actors on the hiring side (ie not giving a clear no and just ghosting applicants). But if you enter the application process making it clear you have done your research, you know what the company does, what the specific role is, and even better if you know something about the people on my side, who you want to work with and why, etc. then you are guaranteed an interview and you're starting a mile ahead of anyone just shotgunning in a resume. Yes, that takes a LOT longer than 2 minutes. But with that approach maybe you won't need to send in hundreds of applications.
> But with that approach maybe you won't need to send in hundreds of applications.
Unlikely. There's a reason so many people take the shotgun approach. The response rate from cold online applications is very, very low. The 'hiring funnel' is also very discouraging. Every additional step in the hiring process is a step in which you may never hear from a single company again for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with you. Are you going to spend a lot of time up front to send an application into the void and never hear anything back again?
"Bad actors on the hiring side" include companies posting job openings they have no intention of filling. There's an information asymmetry here and spamming resumes and stock cover letters is how I resolve that. I know the company is serious about hiring somebody if I make it past the first HR/recruiter phone screen to talk to an actual engineer. Then I invest some time, do my research, contact some of the company's engineers through twitter and linkedin, etc. The company gets bonus points if first contact is made by the actual hiring manager or someone even higher up the food chain.
I wish I could tell right away who's serious about hiring somebody and who isn't. I haven't found a way to tell from the job ad alone.
Why would you only consider only applicants who made research about your company before ? What kind of skill this task is proving you ?
If I'm right, you are trying to find people who have the rights skills and the ones who match the culture of the company, right ? Then not doing any research doesn't mean anything
I do the same, if the application process is longer than 2 minutes, I skip, if the cover letter is mandatory, I skip. But when I get an interview I prepare a lot.
Part of it is showing that you know how to be effective, in this case how to effectively get yourself hired. A huge part of any tech job is about how you approach problems, creative thinking, and figuring out the best way to make an impact -- much of which is not about actually writing code.
So it's about showing that you can take the viewpoint of someone other than yourself (in this case the person doing the hiring) and figure out how to be effective. Refusing to even write a paragraph explaining why you're the right person for a particular job is simply not an effective way to try to get a job. It shows naivete and a lack of understanding of the system involved, which makes me assume that you'll approach similar non-technical roadblocks, of which there will be millions, in the same ineffective way.
Well I was expecting this answer, so basically you only search for people who don't apply for a lot of positions and take a lot of time for each of them before applying.
Don't be surprised if the people you recruit lack the real skills needed by your company
Wait. Your reasoning is paradoxical in a Schrodinger-like manner. If yourself did not take into account the cover letter and assumed "research", the effective applicant suddenly becomes the one who did not waste time on that.
That sounds like ego-driven decision making. The assumed correlation between "time candidate spent reading our PR statements" and "odds she's a good fit" seems hard to justify.
It's an interest thing: if the applicant doesn't even know what type of product you make, then what happens when you bring them in for an interview and it turns out they just fundamentally don't care about your product? Either (a) they'll turn you down based on that _after_ learning more about your product during the interview, which has wasted both your times or (b) this will get glossed over, they'll work for you for a few months, and then search for a new job after discovering that working on your product gives them no fulfillment.
It's not an ego-driven "only consider the candidates who put in effort specifically to satisfy me" thing. It's more "there's a 50% chance that this applicant who did zero research wouldn't actually be happy in this line of work, whereas any applicant who spends ten minutes of research and then still applies has already decided that this line of work is probably a good fit for them."
Does this justify it for you? Or do you still feel that asking candidates to know generally what your company makes beforehand is unreasonable?
This sounds entirely reasonable, and honestly I'd say puts you ahead of many applicants out of the gate. The rest of the discussion on this thread turned into a debate about whether it's reasonable to expect a level of background research and effort on the part of the applicant or not. But it doesn't sound like that's what you were really arguing against, so we all just went off on a tangent :) I can easily get behind the idea that the actual submission platform/software should make it easy to apply.
Interesting, what would make you work with a company to help you find candidates? What do current companies fk up on when trying to place candidates with you?
>> If it takes me more than 2 minutes to apply for your position, I’m going to skip the whole thing
This is such a pain, it’s 2017 and I have job sites who want a Word document resume, plain text resume, then in the middle of filling out a web form with my work history I just closed the browser window because I don’t think I really wanted to work at a place like that anyway.
My favourite are job sites where you have to create an account and the account has ridiculous minimum password requirements. Example: "Your password must be at least eight characters long and must include at least one letter (A–Z, a–z), one digit (0–9) and one special character (e.g., !"§$%)."
That's downright a scam. I've applied once to a JPMorgan dev team. The verbose application process required me to "register" to some "applicants network". Alas, the registration form had the infamous "I accept the terms of service AND allow you to send spam to the email address you've just forced me to provide" bundled checkbox.
Granted that was the end of my attempts to work there.
I completely agree with you, these companies are not showing enough interest to make the life of applicants better, it is highly probably the same with their employees
And I skip when they ask for a cover letter (or send a blank pdf page)
This has to be one of the childish and laziest things I've read in a long time. Seriously, who can't spend 10 minutes writing up a cover letter? If you can't even manage that, how the hell are you going to do your job properly? You're not!
Job hunting works both ways. If the company has put in the time to write up a decent enough job listing to make you interested, then you damn well do your side and don't waste their time (yes, this may be a shock to you, but sending a crappy email without a cover letter wastes someones elses time).
Thanks but the current world is that job hunting doesn't work both ways. People in tech have probably no problem finding a job whereas most tech companies have problem recruiting.
And yes if I don't spend 10 minutes writing a cover letter for your company I'm not able to do my job properly, you probably find the easiest way to find if someone is going to do his job properly. Well done !
I'm guessing from your posts here that you're either very naive and/or too young to have been in a hiring role.
Yes, it does indeed work both ways. Just because you don't understand this doesn't make you in any way correct.
I'm not really sure what your second paragraph means. Are you saying you job hunt while at work? That's not a professional thing to be doing. In any case, writing a cover letter is very easy, so being unable to do that probably means you need to work on your communication skills. Heck, with the amount of posts you've stuck onto HN today alone, you could have knocked up a short cover letter that would suit 90% of technical job applications, so this can't be a time problem for you.
If it takes me more than 2 minutes to apply for your position, I’m going to skip the whole thing
If you make me retype everything that’s on my resume, I’m going to pass
My ideal application is attach resume, put basic info like Email and name if not automatically scraped and submit