Searching for new employees is incredibly inexpensive == I now know you don't do any interviewing or hiring.
Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.
If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.
If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.
The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.
>1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
Yes and 25 years experience doesn't make them one either, especially if it is the same 25 years.
You could find a 2.5 jr with the skills required.
I mean if they started their own start up they could be designing and landing features with no oversight within 18 months.
>The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes.
Yes it's better to have actually engineers do the initial review. They understand the job, will see through the BS and scale better. The more people you hire, the more resumes you can review.
$1.5k is a significant expense for your organization?
A $250 ad listing is a lot for your organization?
I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.
You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?
How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.
I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.
Reading the original post it seems to say 1.5K plus "tons of eng time", I'd imagine that it's the opportunity cost of the engineering time that ends up being by far the most expensive part in this and that the 1.5k figure was just the other fixed costs.
"Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark." Just curious what your thought process is to arrive at these numbers?
This should have been obvious, but buttresses my thesis: we do more than one ad. Run rate order of $140k for 2019. obviously $2k is not a significant expense, but that's per position per interview. So we pay that well more than once.
Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!.
We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.
Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.
The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.
If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.
If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.
The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.