28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
legitster · · focus · HN ↗
It's happened so many times. Apply for a job, within an hour get an email that says I am not qualified (not true), and then a week later the same job gets posted again.
I'm normally a pretty free-market guy, but it should be illegal. It's clear-cut fraud - they are advertising something that doesn't exist, specifically to game numbers. And what's more, governments report on these numbers as if they are real job opportunities in the economy.
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
Hiring has been crazy for years. It's worse with remote jobs because you get a firehose of applicants everywhere.
When I was doing a lot of hiring I tried to be as responsive as possible because you don't want to lose the best candidates. I would try to review applicants as fast as they came in. You have to understand that in that hour I might get 40 resumes. 1 or 2 are amazing, another 2-3 could be worth a look, and another 5 might have made the cut if I didn't just read those 2-5 much better resumes ahead of them.
If you met the listing qualifications but got rejected as not qualified, I would double check that your resume wasn't unclear about something. You would not believe how many times I've interviewed candidates who had some key experience that they forgot to include on the resume and didn't realize it was missing until it spontaneously came up in talking to them.
The simpler explanation is that a tired hiring manager was just clicking buttons to dismiss applicants who didn't make the cut.
legitster · · focus · HN ↗
That assumes that I am writing my resume for just your job posting. If I am just going to copy and paste the job requirement verbatim on my resume, doesn't that make your job screening applicants for actual experience much harder? Often times the difference is splitting hairs anyway ("we're looking for someone who paints brown houses").
But as a rule I don't customize my resume for every job posting anyway - if I have to apply to 70+ job listings to even hear back from even one of them, I would just frankly not have the time to do so.
Regardless, if my application is getting thrown out because my title is not quite right in a subtle way, or I reference Javascript but not Python, and no one is telling me - that's unfair on everybody. The company is going to skip over the best candidates for superficial reasons, because nobody is telling them their resume isn't perfect.
shagie · · focus · HN ↗
What can you do to increase the odds that you're in the top 10 (and preferably top 5)?
It's possible that a superficial reason was used to separate number 10 from number 11 ... and maybe number 11 would have been a great candidate and future employee. What I don't have is three weeks to do all day 9-5 1h long interviews for every candidate.
legitster · · focus · HN ↗
Regardless - it would be nothing to show some basic human decency and respect:
- Review them more often until you get the 5 quality candidates to interview (there's no way in hell you actually review all 100 resumes fully - quit sitting on them for weeks and weeks)
- Take down the posting after resumes are reviewed
- Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
- A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
- Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
None of these add any substantial time to the hiring process, but can go a long way to remember the human in a job market that's an absolutely brutal and soulless Leviathan right now.
shagie · · focus · HN ↗
After two weeks, the posting is taken down.
> - Submit a basic and honest response for the people who's resumes didn't make the consideration
If you have 200 resumes in the pool and 100 of them weren't passed on for additional consideration because they didn't meet the requirements (education, needing visa sponsorship, outside of the country, not following the instructions for the application), how long will that take?
Furthermore, in the litigious nation we live in, that information when provided honestly has tended to lead to lawsuits ("I wasn't considered because...").
> - A simple human note for the candidates who were considered but didn't make the interview
That's another 100 candidates. Three minutes each to write the email? That's three hours of someone's day. Again, this gets to the litigious situations. It only takes the allegation of bias to lead to a lawsuit - that costs way more than three hours of my day.
This is the public sector, we don't pay a lot - that's why it's only 200 applications. In the private sector it wouldn't be hard to multiply that number by 3 or 4.
> - Timely closer for the interviewed candidates who didn't get the job
This is something that we're good at. The people who were interviewed know by the end of the week. Job posting opening to the selection being made is four weeks.
legitster · · focus · HN ↗
I can understand the justification for all of the other choices. But it doesn't mean I have to like it. The whole process is degrading and dehumanizing, and it's something that has gotten much, much worse in the last decade.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗
Aurornis · · focus · HN ↗
It did not take long for one of them to try to turn it against me with threats. We would have easily won the case, but having a lawsuit hanging over my head and a target on my back as a liability for the company was not a good feeling.
I no longer give specific feedback.
johnnyanmac · · focus · HN ↗