Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.
This doesn’t make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It’s a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.
Because all of the big corporations out there including Lockheed Martin write articles complaining about how they struggle to find qualified applicants.
The struggle i have is that a giant percentage of applicants want fully remote work, which I respect, but a lot of our work requires being hands on with hardware, so at best we’re hybrid. Oh, and it’s of course harder when I’m looking for something very specific. If I need someone with ten years of real time control software experience who has a software degree and hands on hardware experience, that’s for sure harder. The reason so many companies are having a harder time is that unemployment is low but salaries haven’t caught up. It’s not that no one wants to fill out the application form.
I understand but keep in mind they’ve been saying this long before Covid. Long before there were labor issues or expectations around remote work.
I remember reading lots of articles about this back in 2015-2016. I’m sure it’s worse now but it was never really great to begin with.
The issue really isn’t the application form as much as it is that the folks doing the hiring and interviewing.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background. They don’t know the right answers from the wrong answers. These are KIDS asking tech questions to seniors. So even if your answer is right you’ll still be marked wrong because the answer wasn’t equal to what was on their paper.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background.
That’s just crazy town, I can’t imagine doing that. I manage software engineers, and I did real time control software for a couple decades before I became a manager. Here’s roughly my process:
I get the matching resumes from HR - I try not to ask them to assess anything besides degree and very rough background.
I read through all the resumes I get looking for qualifications and red flags.
For the top three to six, I’ll set up a phone interview with me and our top technical person. But the questions there aren’t especially technical, they’re mostly to get the person talking, look for motivations and interests, make sure we understand the things on the resume, see how they communicate, and get a sense of how they’d mesh with the team. It’s also to answer every question they have as honestly and candidly as we can; I’d much rather find out that we’re not a good fit in a phone interview than later.
For any that do well on the phone screen and are still interested, I’ll set up in person interviews with one or two groups of my team. I make sure it includes people who have been here for decades, people who are mid career, and people who have only been here a couple years. I do that in part because I think they look for different things in the candidate, and partly so the candidate can get different perspectives on our work environment. I try not to have more than three of our people in an interview so it doesn’t feel like an inquisition. I’ll talk with the candidate for 30 minutes when they come in to let them know what to expect and to make sure they take the opportunity to ask questions, and then afterwards me and the top technical person will meet to see how it went, if there are any other questions, and to get our in-person sense of the candidate.
Then that’s, no other interviews in the vast majority of cases; I get feedback from the team and then make my best call. If none are good fits, I’ll repeat the whole process.
How you explained it I would say you’re doing it right. You truly are the exception. My apologies.
Unfortunately most of what I see in the corporate world is the opposite of that. Not every company is this way. The company I am working for today follows the same pattern that you utilize. With that said I got hired through a reference which is how it always goes here for hiring.
It seems the companies that I see this the most with are the ones spamming indeed and similar job posting sites. They aren’t very good at it which I guess is why they end up using these sites to begin with.
There seem to be more and more people who are just bad at their jobs these days. Part of that, from my vantage point, is companies expecting ever-increasing productivity with ever-decreasing resources.
In my early management days, when I wanted to hire someone, an HR person would come and meet with me to go ever exactly what I was looking for, what was critical, what was nice to have, etc. They’d post the position, but they’d also attend career fairs, connect with other agencies, etc. Then they would read through all the resumes and give me what they thought were the top candidates. And they didn’t do a bad job of it. For the ones that I didn’t like, they’d ask me to explain why so that they could get better.
Now it’s more and more self-service. Same with IT, and other areas too.
It feels like ever since 2008 companies have been in a slow grind to cut costs. It truly feels like the economy is going down the tubes and this is all just a sign of the current times.
It’s been a lot longer than that. Here, take a look at this graph comparing productivity to average worker salary. They were completely in sync up through the 70s, then in the 80s worker salary flattened while productivity kept on the same increasing rate. 1981 was when Reagan took office and we started with “trickle down economics.” Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that was supposed to “trickle down” to the worker. Conservatives still tout it today, but it’s never done anything other than make rich people richer and screw the economy.
The problem is that those two lines are continuing on their respective paths, and businesses are expected to grow their productivity at that rate while keeping costs (including salaries) down. So we get squeezed to do more and more with less and less.
Not sure why you think I have trouble getting good talent.
This doesn’t make my life easier. I still get a mess of resumes that I have to read through and rank, then go through the interview process. It’s a lot of work. But I do get good results generally.
Because all of the big corporations out there including Lockheed Martin write articles complaining about how they struggle to find qualified applicants.
The struggle i have is that a giant percentage of applicants want fully remote work, which I respect, but a lot of our work requires being hands on with hardware, so at best we’re hybrid. Oh, and it’s of course harder when I’m looking for something very specific. If I need someone with ten years of real time control software experience who has a software degree and hands on hardware experience, that’s for sure harder. The reason so many companies are having a harder time is that unemployment is low but salaries haven’t caught up. It’s not that no one wants to fill out the application form.
I understand but keep in mind they’ve been saying this long before Covid. Long before there were labor issues or expectations around remote work.
I remember reading lots of articles about this back in 2015-2016. I’m sure it’s worse now but it was never really great to begin with.
The issue really isn’t the application form as much as it is that the folks doing the hiring and interviewing.
I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve been in where the interviewer was clearly not technical but asked questions around your technical background. They don’t know the right answers from the wrong answers. These are KIDS asking tech questions to seniors. So even if your answer is right you’ll still be marked wrong because the answer wasn’t equal to what was on their paper.
It’s infuriating.
That’s just crazy town, I can’t imagine doing that. I manage software engineers, and I did real time control software for a couple decades before I became a manager. Here’s roughly my process:
Then that’s, no other interviews in the vast majority of cases; I get feedback from the team and then make my best call. If none are good fits, I’ll repeat the whole process.
How you explained it I would say you’re doing it right. You truly are the exception. My apologies.
Unfortunately most of what I see in the corporate world is the opposite of that. Not every company is this way. The company I am working for today follows the same pattern that you utilize. With that said I got hired through a reference which is how it always goes here for hiring.
It seems the companies that I see this the most with are the ones spamming indeed and similar job posting sites. They aren’t very good at it which I guess is why they end up using these sites to begin with.
There seem to be more and more people who are just bad at their jobs these days. Part of that, from my vantage point, is companies expecting ever-increasing productivity with ever-decreasing resources.
In my early management days, when I wanted to hire someone, an HR person would come and meet with me to go ever exactly what I was looking for, what was critical, what was nice to have, etc. They’d post the position, but they’d also attend career fairs, connect with other agencies, etc. Then they would read through all the resumes and give me what they thought were the top candidates. And they didn’t do a bad job of it. For the ones that I didn’t like, they’d ask me to explain why so that they could get better.
Now it’s more and more self-service. Same with IT, and other areas too.
At what point do you think things changed?
It feels like ever since 2008 companies have been in a slow grind to cut costs. It truly feels like the economy is going down the tubes and this is all just a sign of the current times.
Things definitely accelerated since Covid.
It’s been a lot longer than that. Here, take a look at this graph comparing productivity to average worker salary. They were completely in sync up through the 70s, then in the 80s worker salary flattened while productivity kept on the same increasing rate. 1981 was when Reagan took office and we started with “trickle down economics.” Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that was supposed to “trickle down” to the worker. Conservatives still tout it today, but it’s never done anything other than make rich people richer and screw the economy.
The problem is that those two lines are continuing on their respective paths, and businesses are expected to grow their productivity at that rate while keeping costs (including salaries) down. So we get squeezed to do more and more with less and less.