On Hiring and Getting Hired
I hang out in a few different programming and technology Slack communities, and in many of them people are posting non-stop about how difficult it is to get hired right now.
I don't envy the position. Looking for a new role right now seems like it's the toughest the market has been in a very long time.
Hiring budgets have shrunk. More great candidates are on the market than ever.
I also see a lot of folks complaining about the hiring processes, and I'll grant that most of them are totally broken. And they seem to only get more broken when conditions shift to favor employers.
But I want to offer a few thoughts from the side of the hiring manager that's trying (and probably failing on more than one occasion) to do right by candidates. (Although not currently hiring.)
These all deserve a song played on the world's smallest violin, but I'm not sharing them so you feel bad for hiring managers. I want to share these so that you can understand what the challenges they are facing are, and you can use that understanding to better stand out.
Assuming a lack of total dysfunction
All of the following assumes these folks aren't at a totally 100% broken organization.
They might be. But that's not useful for you to try to plan for, because if they do, nothing you do will matter. So we'll proceed with that assumption.
But know that it might not be valid.
The crushing weight of massive volume
They put up a job posting. If this is a remote position they probably got a minimum of 50 applications. Doesn't matter if they put this up organically on social media, paid on LinkedIn, free on Indeed, or any other job board combination.
This is from experience, for a no name company, for a role. And this is for a niche technology and targeted role.
If you go more general like DBA or SysAdmin/Cloud Engineer/whatever you'll get easily 300+ applications over the course of a week. This was again from experience, and during a time when the market wasn't as tight.
Most of these resumes don't stand out
Before we jump into how you can improve, one more note about the hiring manager's place here. They're now wading through a ton of resumes and probably 30% of them spam from candidates that are totally unrelated to the position, meaning not just unrelated technology stacks, but no overlap in skillset at all.
Finally, some number of the resumes, if they aren't outright fabrications are exaggerated to the point of being fabricated, which comes up when you ask basic questions about the technology in question.
Assuming they aren't spam though, most of them are made up of lines like this:
Wrote some $LANGUAGE code. Maybe some tests if I was feeling ambitious.
Likely true, as a line item on your resume, but doesn't help you stand out in a sea of 50 other resumes.
Instead tell me how you connected this back to delivering value for the customer (or a customer if not your end user, or paying user or whatever) in terms of outcomes:
Reduced latency by 20% using $FRAMEWORK
or
Increased test coverage
is better, but tell me why that matters to users. Also give me an idea of where it was before.
Was lead on new feature that resulted in 20% increase in active users, and 8% additional revenue
or
Increased test coverage 18% in critical areas leading to reduced delivery time of new features by 24% and/or reduced defect rate by 8%
is even better.
If you make these kinds of improvements you'll stand out a lot more.
Getting harassed by bad recruiters
As soon as you put up a job post as a hiring manager you will suddenly get a flood of emails and LinkedIn messages offering candidates.
Imagine the exact same spam you're getting as a candidate, just selling individuals that aren't a fit for what you're looking for, just like you're likely getting Java jobs as a JavaScript engineer, etc.
Some of these recruiters and their candidates are great. (These recruiters are worth their weight in gold - and are often the ones that are active in the same communities posting about the difficulty of getting hired.)
Many are not.
Most are immediately offering a limitless bench of React and Java candidates, leading me to the conclusion that these recruiters aren't even trying.
Not because I believe programmers can't learn new tech, or that I won't hire those folks (I believe they can learn and I've hired from both technologies for Elixir before), but because they don't even offer to me that these folks are willing to learn my tech stack, or that the recruiter is aware of the technology stack mismatch.
Insisting on calls
You may also be wondering why hiring mangers, or recruiters working with them, insist on phone screening.
Folks really do really weird things when interviewing. I wish the following were made up, but I've actually witnessed live folks blatantly asking a friend on the video call either for an answer to a situational question I just asked or for someone to explain to them what I just asked, via Slack.
To be clear, I'm not saying that a call is necessarily always useful.
Some recruiters will ask to do it when delivering bad news to humanize it, and then have no feedback, which sucks, but is also something I'll talk through a bit later.
Some awful recruiters have activity metrics they need to hit, which includes connects which are calls with potential recruits.
So, there may or may not be a valid reason for the call.
Optimizing for their best unfair
Assuming they have actually put some thought into their hiring process and are actually trying to learn from it, they are probably doing some sort of technical assessment.
Not withstanding the next section on feedback, they also deserve to give you feedback on this stage, regardless of whether you advanced or not, because you did some actual technical work, and if it's lacking in any way, you deserve to know why.
Spoiler, related to the next section though: it may not be lacking. It probably is perfectly adequate. You may have just been edged out.
But their technical assessment also ought to be judging you as close to the actual work you'll be doing, in the way you'll be doing it.
We pair as our technical assessment. I have for a long time. This is gonna make many folks uneasy, but it's also representative of how we work much of the time. So if it filters you out, it's working, even if you're otherwise an awesome software developer.
Lack of Real Feedback
Most hiring managers I know, at least good ones, want to give you feedback. And specifically they want to give you good feedback.
They probably don't have any weird legal team issues saying they can't give you feedback. Some places do, but many, many don't.
They also probably are struggling with what to write.
Because while everybody says they want to hire the best people (they essentially do) they are satisficing. Just trying to meet a good enough need before having to wade through another 50 additional resumes, phone screens, technical interviews, and culture interviews.
And at the end of the day they're going to be comparing two candidates that are probably very close.
If you're reading this, and honest with yourself, you probably did easily vault the bar of all the requirements to do the job. You probably would have done it really well.
But they only have one position open, and have two essentially identical candidates, they have to go on something. It could be the salary range you gave them, or it could be vibes. (It's probably at least some part vibes.)
But saying all things are equal for the purposes of this post, you both want the same salary, and neither of you did significantly better on the interviews and skill assessments, so for many organizations, even those with clear hiring rubrics, it comes down to vibes.
And in that case, what do you want/expect the hiring manager to say? Other than:
You just got edged out by another candidate that we felt slightly better about.
You both honestly could have gotten the job, and if we needed more than one hire, or this individual hadn't also applied, you probably would have gotten the job.
This one sucks for both parties, but I also haven't seen a better way to address it.
Conclusion
All of this sucks to be honest, for both parties, but hopefully you're now a bit better equipped to understand the situation for the hiring manager, and do your best to position yourself to get hired accordingly.
And if it doesn't work out, hopefully it feels a little less personal.
Good luck out there.