Just wondering since things seem to be kind of broken on both ends right now: Tech people reporting that it's hard to find a new gig right now and hiring managers reporting that it's hard to find people right now. (thoughts on why this seems to be even more broke than usual?)
Hiring pipeline have been extended to absurd lengths and now are extremely successful at achieving their true purpose: avoiding hiring anyone. There's no good reason for the current state other than pathological laziness and extreme fear of ever having a "bad" hire where bad means anyone who can't be productive their first day in the office with whatever weird frankenstack the company has implemented.
There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth.
Blow up your pipeline, tell your HR department to buzz off with their navel gazing requirements that aren't job related, and most of all, tell your hiring managers to get over their fears and their laziness. The Earth won't spiral into the Sun if you have to train someone on your department's specific needs and should you hire someone who just never adapts, the universe won't snuff out of existence because they have to be let go and you have to look again. Companies have been hiring tech resources for longer than most of us have been alive (yes, even if you're from the mainframe era) and it's only recently that this madness has taken hold to a level that everyone is self paralyzing. Get over yourself, you and your company just aren't as important as your hiring process implies. Billions won't die from a famine if you hire someone who only understand half your stack and some of what they do understand is a dated version. They'll learn and if you treat them well (you do treat them well, right?) and don't do headcount reductions each time Wall Street feels a slight breeze, you can build up a competent team. Or you can continue the madness and profess endless confusion as to why you're unable to find anyone as smart as you to do the work you need done.
> There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth.
Sometimes comments are so good on Hacker News I wish I could click a button and tip them. Companies that don’t deserve to have way too high of standards/requirements now.
If your HR department is not delivering you viable candidates, firing the entire HR department and repurposing their budget to hire a few engineers almost at random is, on average, going to deliver better value.
And, since the hires are funded by the ex-HR budget, they're basically free/zero risk.
A couple weeks ago we put a advert out on Indeed and also listed it here on HN. Initially we didn't have any further qualifications beyond the job post, which did indeed go into details on the job and requesting a cover letter.
After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover.
So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why.
I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.
But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.
This need for a cover letter is essentially asking candidates to tell you how much they love the company and how much they want the job.
Why is this important beyond making the company feel loved?
As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
Theres hundreds of companies out there employing who want your time but give nothing back.
I know next thing you'll ask for is a coding test and I’m not doing it. You can blame all the previous companies who wanted a coding test and it turned out to be just burning my time.
No cover letters, no coding tests, no 5 stage interview processes, no “you passed 4 interviews and failed the 5th cause everyone has veto”.
Cover letters that just say how much you love the company are pretty useless. Cover letters that provide additional information about why you're a good use of the company's interviewer's time are useful. I've submitted letters about, say, how I think one project on my resume is specifically applicable to a problem the company has. This both shows I researched the company, which is proof of investment from me, and provides some evidence that I should work at this particular company (or I could have done bad research and misunderstood the company and what it wants, in which case it will help them reject me and help me find my way to a company I'm more interested in)
The problem is that many job descriptions are too vague for me to be able to decide if I will be a good fit. The story I’d like to be able to tell is I did X at company X, I can do X+delta at company Y but your job description doesn’t give me any information about the thing you want me to accomplish. Simply put, it’s not a description of the job, it’s a description of your HR filters.
I’m not going to write a cover letter about how good of a fit I am for your job if you don’t give me enough information to understand what your job is. Most job descriptions are 90% useless. What I need to know is, what is the problem you need me to solve, and what resources will I have to solve it. If you as a recruiter do not know that, you’re not the right person to write a job description.
Exactly. Competent recruiters and hiring managers at companies that I actually considered working for even explicitly told me to not waste my time on the cover letter (which was optional for their applications), unless I am a PhD with a long list of publications and specialized experience that would be too much to explain on my resume (or any other non-traditional type of an applicant that cannot easily relay their relevant expertise on the resume, e.g., former air traffic controller who is trying to break into software dev; or maybe if you have tons of experience in their very specific obscure niche).
For all other scenarios, cover letters seem pointless and redundant at best, and “i wanna see how much you are willing to suck up to the company” at worst.
> This need for a cover letter is essentially asking candidates to tell you how much they love the company and how much they want the job.
No, and that is exactly the wrong sort of cover letter. A cover letter is a letter from the human applicant to the human hiring manager explaining why he feels that he is a good fit for the position. ‘But that’s the resumé!’ you might say. No, a resume is a list of relevant training, skills and previous employment. Although not traditionally machine-readable, a resumé is basically input into a process machine (we want someone who has been programming in Java for twenty years; this candidate has done it for 24; awesome). The cover letter is input to humans.
Humans whom you will potentially be working with, potentially for years. It seems reasonable for them to get an idea of your communication skills and empathy. Exercise that empathy: put your self in their shoes, and imagine what it is like to receive hundreds of resumés. What would you want to receive from a candidate? What would make your hiring decision easier or harder? Having figured that out, communicate it.
> As a job applicant I’m not going to invest a minute in your company until you’ve read my resume and expressed an interest.
It’s a free world. You don’t owe hiring companies anything. Of course, they don’t owe you anything, either. In a booming hiring market, you may find that you can easily find positions without investing in leads; in a softer market, you may find less success.
My cover letter has always been a 3 row 2 column chart. Column 1 is a job requirement/ideal candidate trait from the job post. Column 2 is an example of how I meet that requirement. I limit it to what seem to be the top 3 asks from the company.
The result is a quickly scannable, pretty direct and memorable cover letter.
In our case the job ad says: "Stand out from the crowd and help us get to know you better by including a cover letter. Share your tech interests, explain what drew you to our company, or tell us about any relevant experiences. We're keen to see signs that you've chosen us thoughtfully."
So we aren't looking for a love letter, ideally it'll at least demonstrate that you've read our job listing.
Because at this point I'm pretty sure that 90%+ of the applications we are getting haven't even looked at the job ad, they are just spamming their resume to everything.
They must be posting for a position that doesn’t get much traction. If you got 300 applicants like in more general roles, you can’t say someone will read 50 cover letters, no one has the time, and so sending cover letters for those is a waste of time.
> If you received a notice that your resume had been read, they liked it, and they wanted a cover letter before an interview, would you submit one?
No, because that would mean they didn’t specify that the cover letter would be required ahead of time, and I am not trying to waste my time.
How am I so certain that they didn’t specify it ahead of time? Because I wouldn’t apply in the first place if a cover letter was listed as a requirement on the initial application.
If I am feeling particularly petty or upset about that surprise ask for a cover letter later in the process, I will just ask ChatGPT to write the most generic and useless cover letter for me, and then send it over.
Maybe rather than a cover letter which seems too open ended and come with its own special kind of stress for some people, companies can just ask candidates to fill out a questionnaire that asks for approaches to specific situations that an employee will have to face in this situation?
I think that's a fine approach. It's not uncommon to see a bit of guidance on the cover letter request (calling it 'a paragraph telling us why you'd like to work here' and so on.)
> I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.
You're self selecting for people who happen to be as privileged as you are. Maybe that's what you want, but I'm not surprised it's been more difficult than you were expecting.
This speaks to OPs mention of "brokenness on both sides" where being able to write a cover letter and tailoring the resume to the job is considered "privileged"
Please note, I'm not disputing your comment at all. It's just that what used to be considered the norm (cover letter, etc) is just way too time-intensive by the wayside as applicants now have to mostly optimize for quantity of apps submitted.
If you don't NEED a new job ASAP then, yeah, you can do that, but for someone who's been laid off or unemployed for longer stretches, it's really just a numbers game most of the time.
Being lucky enough to always have the time to narrow your job search to a few employers and tailor your resume and cover letter to those few is a privileged position. Many people (like those who have been laid off, just out of college and have student loan debt, or are just in any general position where they need income quickly) have to play the numbers game and literally can’t afford to take this person’s advice.
The most effective route to get a job (sending the right application to the right position with a good cover letter) works better for both desperate and comfortable people.
Many smart people choose the right path even when they are broke and hopeless, it makes no sense to shift responsibility and call it privilege.
Sending less resumes to jobs that fits better the applicant CV with a tailored cover letter is the most effective route for both the applicants and the companies offering the jobs - but before all, the company also needs to put some effort creating a good job post.
I can sit there and spend significant time per application elegantly explaining how the details I've already put in my resume are relevant to the job description, only to have it never reach a human because a poorly designed parser didn't find a keyword or ML gave it 1 point under a set score threshold.
This is a Mexican standoff. You aren't willing to write a cover letter, because a machine might be reading it, and we are getting resumes that, on their own, are just a "maybe" along with 100+ other "maybes". On the other side, we have been inundated with "fire and forget" resumes that make it hard: why should we invest time in your resume when you haven't invested time in your application?
In our case, we have 3 out of 10 people at the company reviewing these resumes (CTO, senior sysadmin, full-stack dev). We are committing significant resources to reviewing applications.
If you are going to optimize for submitting to a machine that scores your application, don't be surprised that a human isn't reading your application.
I'm slogging through resumes now and thought back to your reply above...
Here's the thing: If you're willing to accept that your resume will be passed over in preference for people who wrote a cover letter, that's fine, but a curious position to be in if you are looking for a job...
I'm kind of surprised to hear that cover letters still matter. It seems like most of the places I've applied to recently don't even have an option for including a cover letter. Since most of this is driven by keywords anymore, I guess I figured the cover letter was kind of an anachronism. I suspect you're in a small to medium sized company?
It's rare for anyone to read cover letters. I put one in once in a while. Mostly I have ChatGPT write a draft and then I cut half of it and make some adjustments.
Even with the AI helping, it's more work than I usually want to do for something that is probably going to be ignored.
What criteria are you looking for in a cover letter?
I find the concept of cover letter completely disassociated of a candidate competency to do their job.
I can spend 1h to write a cover letter with perfect structure, good intention and really speaking my vision of me in the company, this won't show that I can do a leetcode medium or that my clipper code is well structured.
Cover letters convey the non-technical aspects of an applicant that can give an indication of how well they'd fit into a team. Why did they apply to us, specifically? What about the position or company do they find interesting? What skills/hobbies/etc. do they have (or want to highlight) that indicates an interest in the nature of the work? That sort of thing.
The resume/CV tells you the "what", the cover letter tells you the "why". Basically, the cover letter is the sales pitch.
If you don't provide one, that certainly doesn't eliminate you from consideration, but providing one can give an important edge.
Applied to you specifically because I haven’t heard from the other ones yet and what you posted sounds like something I can do to get money to pay my dues to the rest of the society. I don’t know you very well off of your “about us” and the job posting to tell you any more than that. I don’t know if the manager I’ll be working with is going to make my day great or dreadful.
I’d never write a cover letter to get a job somewhere. It seems like such an antiquated holdover practice to me. In fact, if it were required I’d actively avoid it, which sounds like the effect you were going for. Especially now that I work for one of the biggest and most sought after companies in my country and they didn’t get two craps about a cover letter.
Yea, sure, cover letter for some JoeSoft writing crud apps may be weird
but for fancier jobs I don't really see problem with cover letters where candidate can share something more human than CV's "i've did blabla" like passion, motivation, etc, etc.
And highly motivated employee may be way more valuable than more skilled employee
Is there any evidence that writing a cover letter means they will be a motivated employee? What motivates me is the problem that I am solving on the job. I am extremely motivated to solve that specific task. If you ask me to write a cover letter about myself, I have zero motivation to do that because the evaluation criteria are unclear and half the companies don’t read them to begin with.
When I’m evaluating candidates, the only useful thing about a cover letter is as a disqualifying factor. If I see they’re bad at writing, I’ll likely reject their resume as well. Being well-spoken isn’t a positive, though.
>Is there any evidence that writing a cover letter means they will be a motivated employee?
They're at least motivated enough to spend time writing a cover letter.
FWIW, I haven't written a cover letter since 1997, but if it was a company I was interested in, I would write one if I thought they would read it.
Also, consider some smart people haven't acquired the ability of talking on their feet yet, but might be able to show some desirability when given the chance to write. Thomas Jefferson was that way; he wrote beautifully but speeches, not so much.
> But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue
Why not get people who’ve worked with Java and other frontend frameworks, or Vue and other object oriented languages? In my first coding role I knew absolutely no C#, just some JS but I was contributing to the codebase within a week. Most of the particulars of your codebase will be particular to your codebase. Find people who’ve shown they can learn and give them a few weeks rather than take months to hire a person who has last worked with your particular stack.
We are open to that, but without getting many cover letters it's very hard to pick out the people who have the passion to learn new things, from the people happy with what they are doing. It's hard to tell the people who are doing Angular but interested in trying Vue from the people who find Angular a better fit for their Java sensibilities and don't want to do Vue.
That's interesting to hear, because my impression was that software/web development is a field full of people who are self-taught or at least very enthusiastic about learning new tech. I am personally pretty undogmatic when it comes to languages or tools and I assumed most developers who care about solving problems are the same way.
I think most people who are interested enough in applying will do the job. If you tell someone you use Vue, they will be using Vue, and they come in and refuse to learn Vue, just remove that person. Frankly, there’s not very much difference between them, and Vue has less of a learning curve than angular. I don’t really understand how highly hiring managers are fearful of a “bad hire”, especially when people are experienced and have good references.
> But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.
Why would anybody want to do that? This is actually a serious question. Why would you expect Java developers to want to write frontend JavaScript code? I have seen a lot of positions come up like this and the employer is always left cluelessly scratching their heads as to why hiring is so hard. Is this a problem of expectation management or poor empathy?
That was pretty close to my thought when I read this. I start out suspicious of the full stack requirement anyway. Basically it is asking for 1 developer to do the work of 3. Then, on top of that, they want a specific language that is not usually associated with full stack?
It seems like that they are having trouble finding people because what they want is less than optimal.
In my experience working in large Java shops for over a decade this is almost never true. Many Java developers are mortified by JavaScript and typically prefer Angular framework because it imposes a bloated OOP MVVM model that Java developers find more familiar. CSS is like fatal kryptonite (Superman poison) to most Java developers.
This could be why that employer is not happy with the quality of candidates. They are forcefully imposing Java with an iron fist and wondering why people aren’t thrilled to work fullstack like that, when most people are not thrilled to work fullstack like that.
Considering we have only gotten a handful of cover letters, we are having to go by the resume. So if your resume has no Vue and/or no Java, we're forced to read between the lines and guess that there's a reason. Not so much an iron fist, but 95+% of resumes don't convey any passion, so it's hard to say this guy has a passion that will translate to Vue+Java.
Sought after candidates is not how software hiring works. Maybe start ups flush with cash are an exception, but for everyone else hiring almost always is dominated by perceived compatibility more than anything else, even more than utility need.
That is because there are smart people in the world that can self educate and jump into new technology with minimal friction, but those people are rare. Most employers want employees as early as the position opens and they don’t want to invest in training. Java is super desirable to employers because many developers are taught Java in school, it’s single paradigm, and it’s terse OOP conventions force the vague shape of a uniform architectural style. Most developers only know enough to be hired and not enough to write original software, of any style, so employers have to account for these things as though everyone is a junior developer, least common denominator.
That line of thinking suggests lower expenses, ease of candidate selection, and a wider candidate pool. In reality it tends to result in a less qualified larger labor pool with greater insecurity. This is why everything on the JavaScript side is about giant frameworks and the software is super bloated, because putting text to screen is all that matters but nobody knows how the technology works without a framework.
I agree with this observation. I often assumed it would be an USP if I highlight that I want to understand how things work instead of blindly following paradigms and frameworks, but it seems that (a sense of) uniformity just comes with too many perceived advantages, like you said.
In our case, we're a small company that is likely to stay a small company: we have 10 people on the technology side, 4-5 are developers. It's hard to have someone siloed as just backend, but maybe we should consider that.
My friend Jacob Kaplan-Moss says "Hiring is probably the highest leverage activity a manager will engage in. If you hire well, that person could be on your team for 10 years and do an amazing amount of work. On the other hand if you screw it up, you can absolutely destroy a team."
Is a cover letter or a resume going to allow a manager the best chance at making a good hiring decision, WRT to finding a good fit for the project and team?
Clearly, you'll need more than just one or both of those, but as a first step, I'll take a cover letter that shows you give a damn over a fire and forget resume . If your only interaction with hiring is: "I'm willing to put in nothing more than the bare minimum", that's telling me something.
In many jobs, if you can't tailor your CV to the job, and can't write half a page rationale - you probably can't collect, evaluate and summarize business and technical requirements - ie: you can't do the tricky part of software engineering.
Sure, being fluent at the level of fizz-buzz in a relevant programming language is useful too - but honestly, that bar is lower.
I realize that people that can't code their way out of a wet paper bag (mysteriously) apply for programming jobs, and there's a low-pass filter needed for that as well - but a coding challenge isn't a substitute to check for (written) communication skills and basic reasoning.
> if you can't tailor your CV to the job, and can't write half a page rationale
There's "can't" and there's "won't." Programmers in demand won't spend the time, which leaves you with programmers who are desperate enough for work to jump through your hoops (unless you're FAANG or a unicorn). You're effectively filtering your candidate pool down to people you don't want to hire. Round and round we go.
Sure. But isn't what both sides should be aiming for a no-bullshit dialog where company explain what they need help doing, applicant explains that they can, how they can help get that done?
At some point the candidate needs to invest some time on communication with the specific employer - why waste everyone's time synchronously in first first interview, when it's better for both to waste that time asynchronously?
You've missed the point completely. What you're talking about only applies to programmers who apply for the job you have listed. The programmers a company wants to hire have options that don't require a cover letter. Why should they spend the time to write you a detailed cover letter when their other options don't have that requirement? They won't apply at all.
So, who applies to your open position? Programmers who don't have any other options and are desperate for a job. They probably won't pass your interview. You now have a sales funnel that is filtering out the candidates you want and only giving you the ones you don't want. Then you get to be yet another company that complains about how hard it is to find competent programmers.
The exception to all of the above is if you're one of the companies everybody wants to work at. Then you can require whatever you want and people will still apply.
> Why should they spend the time to write you a detailed cover letter
I'm not sure if I understand - there are candidates that want the position, but won't write a couple of (relevant) paragraphs? Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
> I'm not sure if I understand - there are candidates that want the position, but won't write a couple of (relevant) paragraphs?
If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> Surely then they don't have time to interview, negotiate compensation either?
They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense.
It sounds like you want to filter only for candidates who may or may not be particularly competent, but who are somewhat obsequious, at least during the hiring process. Maybe that works for your business.
I think we're at least partially talking past each other (quite probably we also disagree). Let's revisit:
> The programmers a company wants to hire have options that don't require a cover letter.
Ok. That sounds like they expect to be recuited - not needing to apply for a job?
Is there a small group of candidates that will read a job ad, be qualified, want the job enough to apply - but only willing to customize the email address they send their resume to?
Or are we talking about completely separate candidate pools here? Ones that read and respond to ads, and those that expect to be recruited?
> If it's just an open-ended "cover letter"? Then yes.
> They have time for substantive stuff, not nonsense
But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
Or does "cover letter" strongly imply "fawning, vapid, nonsense" to you?
What is the alternative? Having the first interview as first contact certainly seems like a waste of time?
(Not to mention writing skills being essential for remote work - which I hope is an option for most software positions these days)
> Is there a small group of candidates that will read a job ad, be qualified, want the job enough to apply - but only willing to customize the email address they send their resume to?
I think basically yes.
You raise a good point, though, about people who are really good just always getting recruited. Based on my small sample size, such people do still apply to jobs at startups they find interesting. So their pipeline is thus a mix of cold apps and recruiter activity and referrals.
> But it's not nonsense? It's a job application?
No, it's nonsense. A "cover letter" is a terrible prompt to elicit any meaningful information about a candidate, and implies negative things about the company asking for one. Among them: that the company is perfectly willing to have the candidate waste their own time writing one, so this symmetry of investment and time-saving rationale doesn't seem too convincing, IMO.
I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
You will still filter out good candidates who do not want or do not have time to answer any such questions, but I think those questions are far more fair and probative of the kinds of qualitative skills you are looking for than "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
> A "cover letter" is a terrible prompt to elicit any meaningful information about a candidate, and implies negative things about the company asking for one.
On the contrary, a cover letter is a powerful tool to elicit meaningful information about a candidate’s soft skills, in particular empathy (for the hiring manager) and communication, and refusal to provide one implies negative things about a candidate.
> I think if you want to assess writing skills, you should ask more focused questions, such as "What is the biggest thing you have built in x language", "What is your experience with y"
A good candidate does not need those prompts. Having read the job description, he has an idea of what the hiring manager wants, and he writes about it.
> "write me a thing to tell me how much you want this job"
That’s not a cover letter. I don’t care how much a candidate wants a job. To be honest, neediness is a turn off. I care how effective the candidate will be at the job, both technically and socially.
I feel that perhaps you and others think all a cover letter is, is ‘Company X is such a great place! I want to work at Company X so much! Please pick me!’ If so, then yeah, I 100% agree with you. That’s useless input to the hiring process. But that’s not what a cover letter is IMHO.
As mentioned elsewhere, I assert that a cover letter is the soft skills equivalent to the resumé. The resumé lists relevant skills, education/training and experience. Those are all good things, but they are in the nature of checking boxes. The cover letter is a soft-skills demonstration. It’s also an opportunity for a candidate who is borderline in one area to draw attention to the fact that he more than makes up for it in another.
Ok, in that case you don’t need a lengthy cover letter. The only thing it needs to say is “At my current company I did X. You need X to be done. Hire me and I will do it.” However very few job descriptions give the kind of info which would enable that.
The cover letter is a proxy for soft skills. I am pretty sure that I don’t want to hire a candidate who believes that soft skills are a waste of time. He might be brilliant, but he sounds terrible to supervise, work for or be supervised by.
I don’t think so. I don’t care if a writer uses spell check, grammar check or ChatGPT: good cover letter is a good cover letter, regardless of what tools the writer used to help.
> In any case, you have completely missed my point, right along with e12e.
What was it, then? That the best candidates consider cover letters nonsense? I disagree: I am asserting that a candidate who considers cover letters nonsense is ipso facto not among the best.
Maybe this is related to a misunderstanding about cover letters? They’re not about ‘I love your company!’ or ‘please please hire me!’; they are about ‘here’s why I believe that my skills, education and prior experience suit me for this opportunity.’ The resumé is what; the cover letter is why. The resumé is facts; the cover letter is judgement.
> In many jobs, if you can't tailor your CV to the job, and can't write half a page rationale - you probably can't collect, evaluate and summarize business and technical requirements - ie: you can't do the tricky part of software engineering.
It's not about can or cannot, it is about need and need not; you are by and large getting applications only from people who really need to apply to jobs even when there are these kinds of hurdles.
Because if it's not asking for a cover letter, you as an applicant are one of 160 low-effort resumes we've gotten this week. Do we build a ML to try to parse all these and then ask it to score everything? Because I hear a lot of people in this thread saying that's exactly what they hate about hiring.
> My boomer grandfather called and wants his cover letter back.
That’s not an argument, it’s an ageist ad hominem.
> why not ask for a five minute coding challenge instead of a cover letter
Why not both? There are two aspects to any hire: hard skills and soft skills. The hard skills are the things a resumé can relate and a coding challenge can demonstrate. But we do not hire automata (if we did, we might as well just use ChatGPT or Copilot); we hire human beings who will be working in teams with others, who will need to take input from other human beings and interpret it, try to figure out what is being unsaid but which should be said & so forth. Those soft skills are the hardest part of the job to hire for, and in many ways the hardest to develop.
The cover letter is a the equivalent of a five minute coding challenge for soft skills. ‘Put yourself in the hiring manager’s shoes. What would he like to read which make you stand out from the other candidates?’
For freelancers, I am occasionally seeing extremely low hourly rates (linkedin), targeted at (I assume) Latin America. i.e. $15-$20 is the lowest, but sometimes $35ph. (Pretty shocking, but if it works out for everyone, good luck to them). I know companies that are only hiring from that region, where previously they were hiring Americans.
Generally, I'm seeing hourly rates 40%-60% lower than a year ago (for senior roles). It's pretty crappy.
Even when I apply to them (with those rates), 95% of the time, I don't get a response. (This has been talked about a few times in other threads, mainly to do with cover letters).
Are all these layoff I keep hearing about, really screwing things up to this extent? I'm confused on wtf is going on.
Work from home advocates clearly didn’t think through the fact that there are extremely talented devs in LatAm in the same time zone as them that can live like royalty on half their salary.
Lol. Time zones differences are the least of an employers concerns if they're interested in hiring internationally. Taxes / liability / language differences are far more of an issue. This is why you see tons of positions that state "Remote US only".
I work with a number of employees in Eastern Europe and LatAm. Their English is fine and the taxes/liability stuff is all managed by the contracting company. Whenever they switch companies a new employee is swapped in by the company. It’s way easier than trying to find employees in southern CA.
I think the “hard on both sides” nature of tech hiring is the desired end result of the “hiring industry” (indeed, freelance recruiters, leetcode, HR bureaucracy, etc.) the incentives are just like any other intermediary: make their services ubiquitous, unavoidable, and in constant need.
These services, like most others, sell something that cannot be bought. Namely, high quality candidates delivered to the hiring managers door. But in reality the incentives are more similar to Tinder than they are to a matchamker. Get everyone on both sides in a pay-to-play whirlpool and provide just enough value to seem useful.
In many industries hiring is still done primarily in-person through real-world network referrals. Maybe you tell yourself that these jobs are more fungible so the extra steps aren’t as necessary, but I think that as developers we underestimate our own fungibility.
Having worked in the recruiting industry, these are the three top barriers to hiring:
1. The CEO/Board/Leaders ignore clear signals from candidates on what they want in a job (hybrid/remote being most common issue)
2. Hiring managers refused to learn the basics on how to attract & vet quality candidates. They are unreliable, capricious, and generally run hot/cold during the process
3. Recruiters have given up on addressing points #1 & #2, so they shovel candidates and jobs back and forth without expecting to be heard
Most intermediaries are in this position, they are trying to apply expertise on a business function to those who don’t share it. It’s very difficult to overcome, even when internal owners (like HR team members) know the gap and are advocating for an effective approach
We've had two positions open on my team for months. Filling them has been a struggle. There's no lack of applicants, but none of them have the needed kind/amount of experience.
Pay isn't the issue. I think there's three reasons why this is the case: we need genuine senior-level people, web/internet stack technology experience isn't relevant, and there's a requirement to work in the office. I mention that second one because the vast majority of applicants we get are Java/C#/etc. programmers and we need C/C++ ones.
Hopefully, the company will at least give a bit on the office requirement. I think if they did, we'd have filled these months ago.
Your team could (genuinely) benefit from attending Handmade [0] next month. Specifically hosting a job booth [1] - which can be done physically or virtually.
It's an indie conference for systems programmers (lots of assembly and C/C++ experts) and we have success stories of employers hiring people at Handmade. You'll notice some of last year's companies are even coming back this year.
Is there a reason you don’t think a good Java/C# developer willing to learn couldn’t learn C/C++. Especially with LLMs, I feel like which language(s) a developer is currently comfortable with is less of an issue.
I previously had no Python experience, but know how to code well in C# and JavaScript. Using a LLM, I was able to quickly get up to speed writing DevOps Python scripts because I understood basic programming concepts and terms.
No reason at all, and we don't rule out applicants because of language. But Java/etc programmers have a strong tendency to be specialized in a particular sort of programming that we don't do, and get very weak when they're not doing that. They need more training that we can afford in order to come up to speed.
But we absolutely interview the ones who seem like they'd be able to come up to speed. The pickings seem a bit slim, though.
We also aren't in SV, Seattle, or any of the other hot places people want to be. That's why I think the problem is more the office requirement than anything else.
The positions also aren't ML positions (we do use ML, but those positions are already well-covered.)
We ran into the same problem with Scala. I love the language but only about half the people we hired could pick it up (or were willing to put in the time to do so). Oh well, Python it is.
Another aspect: we aren't a pure computer tech company. We manufacture industrial equipment that uses a lot of tech. So I know that it wouldn't even occur to a lot of devs to apply.
That's why one of the pieces of advice I give to devs looking for work is to not restrict yourself to the obvious software houses. All sorts of types of businesses hire devs, and lots of them are doing cutting-edge, very interesting work.
I feel like with a lot of languages this is true - it's pretty easy to pick up Python if you know Ruby (and vice-versa) for example. But with C++... there's just so much complexity now and still so many footguns. Hiring C++ devs familiar with modern C++ (C++11 and beyond) is probably not easy. I've done a good bit of C++ in the past (prior to C++11) and I've done a bit of modern C++, but when a job ad lists C++17+ I'm really hesitant to apply. It's a whole different beast than it was 15 years ago.
> when a job ad lists C++17+ I'm really hesitant to apply.
While I've actively worked in many languages, C++ has been the bulk of my experience. And I am the same way. I can certainly work with C++17+, but I have learned that I dislike it strongly enough that I don't consider such jobs at all.
I like some aspects of C++17+ - the addition of functional programming, for example. But the standard library is now huge (more huge than before). I follow a C++ programming substack that puts out a daily dose of modern C++ and tbh it's just overwhelming after a while - how is anyone supposed to remember all of that?
As long as there are any people out there who meet your other requirements (seeking work or not), if you pay enough you can poach them from where they are.
I generally keep an eye on (web dev) job ads. What follows is all anecdotal, but such is the nature of the question.
Once the talk of possible recession started (earlier this year), postings fell off. Also salary range seemed to have dipped. As in the hiring company was looking for more for less. It appear many were fishing for better talent, recently downsized and desperate of steady income. Sure, such people exist. But when you sense it from a job ad, it's not a good look.
Since the beginning of Sept (read: end of Summer) it feels like things have picked up, and there's less bottom feeding. I've been getting interviews steady enough but in nearly all cases in the first five to ten minutes I find myself thinking, "Why am I here?" The point is, I often feel companies post ads but the ad doesn't actually refect their needs, or they are for some reason confused about their wants and needs. It's very annoying.
My observation is that there were recent (2022/2023) layoffs that have now flooded the job market in tech with lots of unfortunately mediocre candidates. Therefore, it is both challenging to hire and challenging to find a job. I don’t think it’s that there’s any lack of good tools to use to find candidates. And great engineers are still just as hard to find, as companies are very reluctant to fire top performers even in mass layoff rounds that affect the rest of their division.
It doesn't help when salary is rarely disclosed on the adverts, so those only casually looking won't want to invest any time into the process - only to learn the salary is not within their expectations. It's a complete waste of time for everybody involved.
Salary details are the first thing I look for in a job posting. If they don't exist, and the company isn't well-known enough to have a well-populated salaries page on levels.fyi, I just close the page and ignore the posting.
At my company we put engineers (instead of HR) in charge of job descriptions, resume review, and phone screens and saw a sharp increase in quality of candidates we interviewed.
Being an interviewing engineer on the hiring side of a recent round at our company -- my goodness, I forgot how bad HR could make the tech hiring process.
I personally referred two excellent colleagues from past gigs, and had HR waste 3 hours of their time before DQing them because they mismatched on a cultural index quiz of some sort. I was not notified. When I finally found out, I was super embarrassed, and it damaged my relationship with one of the two friends. Guess how many colleagues I will be referring to this company in the future?
Our best applicants seemed to take weeks to schedule first interviews with. By the time we got to them, they had secured other gigs.
Strangely, many of the mediocre and "you're kidding, right?" candidates were actually promoted to us by our HR crew, wasting our time. I assume because their calendar times were widely open and available to us.
We ended up hiring some decent people, but.. I like to think if there was some sort of Quality Score we could apply, our HR team's involvement cost us 30% on the quality of people we ultimately brought on.
I wish I understood why companies did this. Our CTO apparently did not want to "ruffle feathers" to push back on HR's process. My continued howls of frustration about the process and its ineptitude actually got ME reprimanded. Which sent me back to the "fine, they're good enough" mindset in my screenings. Which completes the cycle of mediocrity.
I (engineer) wrote a job description for a job, pretty much cutting all the bullshit. Got quite a few good applicants, ended up hiring a random guy without a degree that is now making himself a well known name in the Flutter community.
Just taking job descriptions as an example, the state of tech job descriptions is an absolute, unbelievable, dumpster fire of an embarrassment.
If you have blatant typos, incorrect/missing information, botched formatting (copy+pasted bullets from Word to Outlook to LinkedIn to the point the formatting is mush), etc, you are going to get candidates of similar quality. I'm sure these job descriptions are written by recruiters/managers who would reject outright a candidate with a similar quality resume.
There is a parody idea along the lines of: if candidates wrote resumes like recruiters/managers write job descriptions.
We do the same. We also have a sane application process (no long series of interviews, no leetcode, no crazy "competency tests", etc.) And the devs on the team that has the open position have the most influential say as to whether or not we make an offer.
I had an SF-based startup to which I applied administer an IQ test as part of their interview process
It was really dumb--we're talking literally like 20 questions of "which shape comes next in the sequence", the kind of test administered to children to determine whether they qualify for advanced placement
For me, it’s still the remote thing. I’m a principal, couple decades of experience, I’m still seeing quite a few approaches on LinkedIn but almost all are wanting a few days a week / month in some “fantastic” office in some city. Nope.
Seems like hiring has been broken forever. Even with the plethora of job sites like LinkedIn it doesn't seem any better. Someone who can come up with a better way of matching up candidates with hiring managers could do really well, but apparently the problem is quite hard since there's been a lot of attempts but not much success.
Someone on another thread here about hiring in the ML/AI space bemoaned the fact that they mostly get applications from people who have dabbled with ML/AI on the side and very few applicants who have actual ML/AI work experience. But it seems like the ML/AI space is still nascent and growing rapidly - you're not going to find a lot of available people with ML/AI work experience. Given that ML/AI is where a lot of current hiring is maybe that's the reason for the hiring disconnect? If so hiring managers are going to have to start looking at people who have an interest and have done some self-learning in the field.
It's another variation on the classic, "6 years experience with X required" where X is something that has only been publicly available for a year or less. Everybody wants candidates who can hit the ground running even when that's not practically possible.
This is just one example of the overall problem. In my view, hiring managers often are just going off a list of requirements and do not really know too much about the technology. They tend to reject anyone who does not use the exact terms they are looking for, even if they have a sufficient amount of experience. I'm thinking about people who worked in optimization for a long time before applying to machine learning jobs. Both fields have basically equivalent work, just with different techniques, and optimization is a lot older and more mature of a discipline. If hiring managers do not know that, they will skip over qualified candidates.
> If so hiring managers are going to have to start looking at people who have an interest and have done some self-learning in the field.
Or candidates who have just started working with ML/AI are going to have to accept lower pay as their cost of changing specialisation. Or, likely, both.
I think there really aren't very many job positions that try to hire candidates who have just started working with ML/AI for a lower pay, everyone wants 'all or nothing', exclusively trying to hire people who already did that specialization change somewhere else; many are willing to pay for experience, but they aren't willing to accept lack of it for less pay.
This is true in general. The average software developer is doing the jobs of three or four people when I started fifteen years ago. Ops, dev, DBA, storage (s3, ebs, etc).
The problem there is that a lot of people follow hypes because they think it's cool and/or earns them a lot of money. I've also seen it in job adverts though, at some point pretty much every software development job would have "crypto" and "IoT" sprinkled in the description. It's tiring. And it's insulting. And also, to the developers that actually look for that kind of thing without already being in that space, have some pride. It's a Java job, you aren't going to turn your home climate control hobby into a job through that one.
I used to work in the cleared space -- i.e., people with top-secret security clearance. My first job in this space was at AWS, where we probably had about 1/4 of the qualified, cleared talent pool in our space. It was almost possible to hire people with sufficient technical skill who also had clearance -- but it was equally hard to get people cleared, because we and Microsoft were pushing so many people through the pipeline that clearance decisions were often taking 2+ years. We would have people get hired, get a promotion, and leave all before getting their clearance decisions.
My team started taking a different approach: We started hiring people at the lowest level we could ("associate", below even entry-level engineer), with minimal tech skills, but with active clearance and some adjacent skills. STEM background, or tech writing, or just someone who was a hobbyist. I started interviewing people on troubleshooting -- someone told me a fantastic story about troubleshooting a comms issue while deployed in the middle east. The fix involved copious amounts of superglue on a ground-based satellite. Switch out the words, and you could easily have a story of a grizzled old sysadmin patching in production.
We actually ended up being pretty successful. Sure, a substantial portion of our hires were still misses -- but that was already true. Meanwhile, we hired some really talented people from this route, who I ended up trying to poach years after leaving AWS, and leaving the cleared space entirely, because they were just genuinely great engineers who needed to be given that chance.
tl;dr, I agree, and it's nearly always a good idea to look at expanding the talent base in some way or another if you're struggling. In many cases, it means hiring people who have potential, as long as you have sufficient numbers of senior staff to help get them up to speed.
Job seekers exaggerate their experience and skills.
Hiring managers exaggerate how great job is.
It is a problem with no technical solution.
Well you have leetcode to check tech proficiency but is leetcode grinding hire best hire for the company?
There is also bunch of problems like, company itself doesn’t know what they want. Job seekers on the other hand not knowing what position they exactly want.
Hiring (on both sides of the desk) is and always has been hard, it's true. Both the company and the applicant are taking a risk when they make the hiring decision. I think that a lot of companies get more focused than is wise on reducing that risk, and they harm themselves because of it.
In the end, that risk can never be reduced to zero, so you have to accept a certain amount of bad hires/employers. There must be a level of risk where, in the big picture, the maximum benefit lies, and that's what should be aimed for rather than trying to accomplish the impossible at any cost.
As someone casually looking for a better fit as an infrastructure person, it can be disparaging for some of these portals to keep stats on interesting jobs. I'll open up an email advertisement, to see that sometimes >10,000 people have applied for this single role. I'll chuckle and close that tab - I am not a lottery player and I will not drop my resume into an applicant pool twice as large as my town.
I would say my personal cutoff is about 25, whether these statistics are trustworthy or not.
Same. I saw a job on LinkedIn that had 1000+ applies yet it was asking for quite a few skills. I wonder if these numbers are being gamed somehow? Are they accurate? Are there bots involved?
I remember reading that the numbers include the applicants from previous times the same job opening was posted. That's why you get hundreds of applicants 3 hours after the job was listed.
At my company, I feel the biggest issue is execs don't want to pay more to get good people and don't want to do anything to make it more attractive to work here.
The last person I hired was at the start of this year, and at the time our salary offer was around market average. For this role we (well the execs... I'm pro WFH but not my call) were asking people to be in the office four days a week and work non-standard office hours. Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city.
One person we interviewed seemed like the only thing they were interested in was growing their Twitch subscriber count. Then we interviewed the person we ended up hiring, who I'm sad to say we only hired because they seemed the least bad - and by that point we were desperate for someone, and worried execs may cut our budget.
Oh and for anyone wondering, the role in question just needed standard frontend React skills. Nothing special.
> Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city.
The reason this might happen so often is that a job is incorrectly categorized on the job boards. I've last track of the number of jobs I've seen that are listed on a job board as Remote with that word prominently displayed on the post, but buried in the job description is some clarification that says something like "Candidates must be able to work 4 days a week in the office."
You expose some meat(job ad), soon there are 10,000 flies on it(applicants), so out comes the Raid(screen) - the harder you spray, the less flies, but you want a superior fly(applicant) - what to do? Less Raid? Then evolution selects flies immune to Raid. In online search and online work you soon hire apparent good flies and a few months shows they lack buzz, = costs/time wasted.
For small companies, friends of friends etc does work, but the IBM's and Meta's need swarms.
You can either do detailed online tech screening with your capable people using their time, or hire a specialist company with(or who have a retained pool of expertise) to do the deep search. Twas ever thus = probationary periods etc.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this is a question of credentials.
I don’t know any experienced people with solid skills who also have degrees who have been having difficulty.
I know one good one, but without a relevant degree who is struggling. I also know lots of boot camp/recent grads in iffy masters programs who aren’t getting anywhere.
I am aware of a few hiring processes that are just inundated with people who don’t have a relevant degree that keep restarting as a result.
So it may simply be that standards rose more than actual availability in the market did.
I definitely know talented people with plenty of experience and the expected degrees who were struggling to find jobs after being laid off. At this point I think all of them are placed now, but I don't know that means the market is better. Just that my specific limited sample has had sufficient time to find something.
Anecdotal but this is my experience as well. The majority of my friends with compsci bachelors/masters degrees have been gainfully employed for years. Those with 8 week code camps are unfortunately always going to be at a competitive disadvantage, particularly if it's their first job.
Does the job you're hiring for actually require sorting a list? If Kroger wants to hire a new CEO, they're unlikely to require candidates to walk up to the cash register and ring up customers even if it's a very basic skill for the industry.
Out of all the places I've worked, I think my favourite approach was Dropbox's: They ask these algo questions for new grads, because every new grad from a computer science program has been through these classes and it's an easy thing to index on.
But for experienced hires, nobody gets algorithms questions. Instead, you get practical questions -- depending on the role, things like writing an ID allocator, finding duplicate files across a filesystem, demonstrating understanding of concurrency, etc. No "implement this well-understood algorithm that you'll never implement again" questions.
I’ve never written a linked list after college and I’m a principal software engineer. Why would I waste my time when there are libraries written by dedicated, excellent engineers that have been used by millions of developers?
Data point from Berlin/Amsterdam/Munich/Dublin/Madrid (plus EU remote in general): we've been hiring around 100+ seniors/leads/staffengs (backend/frontend engineers) in the past 9 months, and it's been quite easy. Healthy influx, no major delays.
I'm working at crypto startup that grows fast right now. There is enough candidates, but we can't find anyone good. We aim for seniors and we pay a nice price IMO.
Current "seniors" are much worse than 2016's "middles". I'd not mind hiring a "middle", but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn. It's more about the attitude than skills.
Also funny stats: For 15 candidates interviewed we even got "scammed" thrice (fake CVs, one was basically copy-paste from other people, stolen code presented as their own). We hired one person so far.
I'm going to guess that pretty much everyone who wants to be in Crypto is by now. Others outside the field are going to be wary to enter it given the volatility and reputation issues of the industry.
>but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn
Hmm.. not been my experience and not for me specifically. My attitude to interviewing (when I was on that side of the fence), was to hire for (I hate to say it as it's subjective), by perceived IQ and their drive to learn/get stuff done. It usually worked out quite well for my hires.
ATM, I'm getting rejected for the most stupid f.things of not knowing some obscure dated framework/library. Not sure if interviewers realize this, but in a lot of cases, it's an evening hacking on a project to learn it. These things are not rocket science.
My thoughts is that there's so many candidates (or maybe posting bots?), that if all checkboxes are not ticked, they can discard them.
> My thoughts is that there's so many candidates (or maybe posting bots?), that if all checkboxes are not ticked, they can discard them.
About 25 years ago, friend used to have a bullshit detector skill in the job spec requirements. "Experience with: [real things], RFC 1149, [at least one more real thing]." Anyone who claimed experience in that one was automatically rejected. And yes, that was well before a Norwegian user group actually pulled "IP Over Avian Carriers" off in real life.
We finished a hiring process about 2 months ago, along with two other hires earlier in the year. As a hiring manager, 2023 has been brutal — 1,000:1 application to hire ratio (based on stats in Lever; no exaggeration).
I’ve made a point to try to be as open and as fair as possible in our hiring process. We list the salaries up-front in the job description. We create per-hire ”join our team” pages that share a lot more about the role, including the exact hiring process, links to docs with interview prompts, timelines, and who you’ll interview with. We don’t require any formal studies; we hire globally through an EOR; we don’t change salary based on where in the world. We’re also a non-profit with a compelling mission and interesting technical challenges. We want to hire people who bring different viewpoints and add stuff to our team, and where we can give them a good professional experience too.
A few observations on folks who are applying:
- About a third are just outright unqualified. For example, one of the roles needs folks with experience in Postgres at a medium level (triggers, plpgsql, replication, PostGIS, etc) and we’ll get applicants who’ve only used an ORM to work with Postgres). We have a few screening questions that literally confirm the required skills listed in the job posting and use these to auto-reject applicants. (Again, nothing unfair or tricky; just literally “have you used features like triggers or replication in Postgres?”)
- About half seem like good candidates from application but are obvious-no’s after either several-minute examination of application materials or a 20-30 minute call. (Generally failing a screening call because they’ve exaggerated on their resumes; haven’t read our “join our team” page that we ask them to read before our call; have red-flags in our call; etc.)
- The remaining ~15% are reasonable folks for us to do technical interviews, and it comes down to how much their experience lines up with the areas we need and how well we can asses their skills in interviews. (Two-way street, of course… lots of chances for them to ask us Qs!)
Where it’s been tough is filtering through the top of the funnel. In part: ChatGPT has really made a difference, in that many candidates are now using it along with much more sophisticated tools to track all their potential jobs. I think it’s _good_ in some ways, but previously we could use the ability to write well (resume, answering Qs like “why do you want to work at our company?”, communication in email) as a good proxy signal of overall effectiveness of communication. (For a fully distributed remote team that does its work via slack and GitHub, this is a relevant skill.) So we’re now having to do a _lot_ of extra work to try to be fair to everyone and keep bias as much as possible down. (I had to hire a contract recruiter to work with us - it used to be resume screening and initial calls were an average of 45 minutes a day; it went to 3 1/2 hours this year; as a CTO there’s no way I can spend that kind of time).
I don’t know what the solution is — it feels like a bit of an arms race. For every company that’s trying to run a good process, the extra application load is a real cost; for companies that aren’t particularly thoughtful, it makes it worse for the candidates.
I’d love to hear what others think about anything I’ve shared. What can we as hiring managers do to make it easier for you? And: what can we do to make it easier on us?
This mostly sounds good but I wonder if you'd make it better by dropping the strict postgres requirements.
I've never used postgres. I've worked with umpteen technologies over the years, including lots of gis, just never needed to use postgres yet. But I know it's out there and I'm confident if I needed to, it wouldn't take more than a few days to catch up.
Not a dig at you specifically but a lot of companies seem to look for specific tech experience rather than a track record of just learning whatever tech is needed.
I hear you! We’ve definitely had candidates we’ve talked with in the past who didn’t have experience with the tech stacks involved. In our case, we’re not suffering from a lack of qualified candidates (quite the opposite!), so we can afford to be more strict in requirements.
I remember a friend describing interviewing as a search problem. How long and how much resource is one willing to spend on a search? And then, adjust the hiring process (for employer) or job search process (for candidate) accordingly.
I think it's just the after-effects of the layoffs working their way through the system. If you want to read something that makes you feel better, I'll give you a link... But more than that, I'll explain the meaning behind it that you might not pick up on unless you've worked around the press/PR industry.
The deeper story: Business Insider does not write these stories themselves. They just take articles basically "pre-written" by corporate PR/press flaks and reprint them... Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ they might reach out for a "pushback/response" quote and add "x,y,z refused to comment for this story" if they don't get a response within a couple hours. Or they might spend 5 minutes fact-checking something - but probably not: if it's a source they "trust" who gives them articles that make their life easier by feeding them stories people click on, why bite the hand that feeds?
So what? Well, this story was written by _AirBnB_, most likely at the behest of Chesky either directly or indirectly. And the narrative essentially reduces to "Brian Chesky cares about the people he laid off". Why would he pay people to create that narrative? I won't lead you all the way there, but suffice to say it's good sign.
It's incredibly easy to find people, there's a huge surplus of talent and very few opportunities going. You can scoop up top engineers laid off from big tech companies for small change right now.
Ok, fair enough, "top" has been redefined in our field. PhD research scientists with decades of software dev experience are going cheap. It might not be the exact candidate you want, but they're not really mediocre. If it was any other field, decades of experience and a PhD would be considered a "top" player.
Companies thought they’d be able to get a discount on labor due to FAANG layoffs that mostly impacted non tech roles. There is no labor recession, so no discount to be found for senior talent, but companies are still tire kickers waiting for that undervalued unicorn to land in front of a hiring manager. Expectations take the elevator up and the stairs down.
My Linkedin feed was full of Google, Facebook, and Amazon non techs getting axed, I'll need to look through https://layoffs.fyi/ to see how accurate my statement is.
There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth.
Blow up your pipeline, tell your HR department to buzz off with their navel gazing requirements that aren't job related, and most of all, tell your hiring managers to get over their fears and their laziness. The Earth won't spiral into the Sun if you have to train someone on your department's specific needs and should you hire someone who just never adapts, the universe won't snuff out of existence because they have to be let go and you have to look again. Companies have been hiring tech resources for longer than most of us have been alive (yes, even if you're from the mainframe era) and it's only recently that this madness has taken hold to a level that everyone is self paralyzing. Get over yourself, you and your company just aren't as important as your hiring process implies. Billions won't die from a famine if you hire someone who only understand half your stack and some of what they do understand is a dated version. They'll learn and if you treat them well (you do treat them well, right?) and don't do headcount reductions each time Wall Street feels a slight breeze, you can build up a competent team. Or you can continue the madness and profess endless confusion as to why you're unable to find anyone as smart as you to do the work you need done.