I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply.
However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.
>I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply.
They have the option to distinguish "minimum/required" vs "nice to have", though.
> I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation.
As someone who has written and hired technical talent - this is absolutely true.
> so many quite good candidates won't apply.
I agree with your sentiment but generally disagree in practice. The reality is I get 100's of applications that are nowhere near qualified for positions I've listed. We're talking like recent grads applying for a VP of E-commerce (~10 years exp on the spec).
Having many unqualified applicants is unrelated to how many good 50-75% candidates self-select against applying. It’s likely entirely different groups exhibiting the inverse effects of Dunning-Kruger.
Applying for a job costs time and effort. All other things being equal, I will prefer to apply to a job posting where I meet more of the requirements than one that is a looser match.
Adding requirements that aren't actually requirements is a good way to get your posting sorted to the end of my applications queue indefinitely, or ignored entirely. I will apply to the closest matches first, and stop when I pass a time threshold. If your process costs me more than an hour, and I only tick off 50% of your listed requirements anyway, I'm probably never going to apply.
There are all kinds of new postings, added daily, that will jump ahead of yours in my queue. So if I am searching while holding a job, I only apply to postings with the very highest estimated payoff, which are the very close matches.
So, single point of anecdatum: I will self-select against applying. The threshold for matches depends on how motivated I am to change jobs. About now, I will even ignore 100% matches, if they don't have a salary range listed, and an easy application process.
I don't blame you and I agree with you. My point is that this is not how the market works.
You argument is like asking for women to stop being so demanding about all of the qualities they want in a man. Sure you can take a stand against that and say "I'm only going to meet women who match my exact profile and seek those who have realistic set of expectations". This is just simply not how it works and anyone who has individualistically "taken a stand" ends up losing out and just goes back to market norms.
In other words - a noble effort, but discrediting human behavior in aggregate won't get you very far.
What argument? This is what I actually do. I read job postings sometimes, and if a posting looks like it might involve too much bullshit to be worth the effort to apply, I forget about it forever. If the posting is crap, I don't apply. It's not my problem to contact the company and tell them why their advertisement failed to draw my interest.
This strategy works perfectly fine when I already have a decent job and wouldn't be averse to trading up, if the opportunity is right. If nothing seems good right now, I can still go to work. There will probably be more opportunities in the future.
But even when I need to find new work now, or run out of money to pay bills, I still shove the lowest estimated payout/effort prospects to the back of the queue. There is nothing any individual company could do to change my behavior. I will always pick the ripest fruit whenever I get hungry. I will always avoid wasting my own time with snipe hunts and wild goose chases.
Your dating analogy crumbles in a lot of very reasonable cases. Job hunting is only superficially like dating. Getting hired is not very much like getting married, unless you are in a cult featuring polygamy/polyandry for the leader (and maybe their top disciples), with chastity and celibacy for everyone else.
But in some sense, it is apt. If your profile says you're looking for someone who is:
- rich
- pretty
- single (never married)
- faithful
- sane
- attentive to my every need
- definitely not an axe-murderer
- also not a con artist
- has a garish tramp-stamp tattoo featuring Yosemite Sam
- minimum height 190cm; maximum weight 100kg
You are still going to get pinged by chat-bots and the desperately thirsty, but anyone fitting your bill has probably already overfilled their queue with prospects that are only asking for:
- able to cook dried pasta correctly
- not a *complete* asshole
And that's because those other people have requirements, too.
It's not a bad point to be proven, but it's not "simply how it works". You can get along just fine without dating absolute nutters. And you can get hired without responding to unrealistic, overreaching job postings.
Go ahead and take that stand. The only thing you are missing out on is the very worst the world has to offer. Have reasonable standards, and uphold them. It's okay. If you can't find anyone who actually meets your standards, it's probably because their signal is currently being overwhelmed by the noise. You won't ever be able to find them if you just set a dumb filter just above the noise floor.
If a company wants five years of experience in a two-year-old technology, add them to your blacklist for a year, and just let them hire as many liars as they can find. If they're all working somewhere else, they're less likely to apply to be your co-workers. And that company certainly won't be paying 2.5x as much for 5 years experience as the market rate for 2.
And that's what's missing from the article. It focuses on the amount of overlap between candidate and job description, and completely ignores whether the posting itself is offering a reasonable compensation for the mythical candidate it wants. How many times have you seen "WANTED: full-spectrum engineer with 10 years of experience who is an expert in all levels of multiple technology stacks; 6-month contract-to-hire $60k/year, relocation required"? That isn't even hyperbole. It's cherry-picked and amalgamated from the worst postings I have ever seen, but it is not an exaggeration.
Those dating profiles with the unrealistic expectations are all about what the person wants, and nothing about what is offered in return. You're never going to get a partnership between equals from someone like that. You can certainly get to be the cult leader's consort/concubine, but you're usually better off with someone who actually values you as an individual.
I think it is more like recognizing that all the qualities women say they demand in a man are indicative of their unrealistic expectations so they're a waste of your time.
But then there's that research that shows that on average, men will apply to a job if they meet less than half of of the requirements, so if you don't overspecify you'll be flooded with crap applications.
Of course, then you get the research that women will apply only if they meet >90%, so the overspeccing contributes to gender imbalances.
I think the population of those who apply when they shouldn't, and those who don't apply when they should, are probably different populations. In some cases, you want the population of people who are overconfident, or able to "fake it 'til you make it". But in many cases, you want the population who respect the project requirements as being real, and those might be the same people who treat the job requirements as being real. So, in at least some cases, you have created an anti-filter that will let through unsatisfactory candidates, but keep out satisfactory ones.
And there's the danger that by having your requirements too tight you've inadvertently created a asshole filter[1].
>An asshole filter happens when you publicly promulgate a straitened contact boundary and then don't enforce it; or worse, reward the people who transgress it.
> e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator"
Yeah, this is where bias and other cruft comes creeping in. "Passionate about software development" usually means, "our PM sucks, but he's the CEO's nephew, so you're going to work late to meet deadlines".
I got a lot of traction in my early days simply ignoring the requirements and asking myself if I could do the job.
Some skills can be picked up easily. Others are difficult to teach. You have a detail oriented position, you need a detail oriented person. If they’re sharp they can learn pretty much everything else.
Hell I’ve taken over internationalization coding because I understand how grammar works in two languages and an inkling of Japanese grammar. I couldn’t translate a UI to save my life but the hard part is stitching sane sentences together from data.
Shame on someone for writing unrealistic or unnecessary "requirements", but also shame on the engineer who doesn't even apply because of them.
I wonder how truly good a candidate is if they get discouraged so easily. Maybe a hidden requirement 1 is showing a willingness to try to punch above one's weight or displaying some self confidence during the application process. After all, what's really the difference between 4 years of development experience in X language vs 5?
I don't want to waste my own time on an activity I actively despise.
I am perfectly willing to apply to a posting with missing requirements, right up until I have to create an account to apply, chop up my resume into pieces, and paste the bits into form boxes. That's when I say, "screw this, it wasn't a close match anyway".
If the application process is "attach resume document to an email" then I might even spend some extra time on the cover email, explaining why am applying without being a 100% match for the requirements.
The difference is the expectation of a payoff. That application management system is going to automatically filter out mismatches, and making me do all the work to disqualify myself as a candidate. The email might get read by an actual person with an interest in the outcome.
Too many job requirements is a symptom of a bureaucratic hiring process, which is a symptom of a bureaucratic work environment. I've found cold-applying to these types of positions bares little fruit.
On the flip side, I don't mind an overly ambitious position description if a recruiter has reached out to me. I know I have an actual human on the other end, and they have enough sense to determine I might actually be a good fit.
I'm not sure if this is the best place to drop this anecdote, but I looked at a position where the responsibilities included working on the backend API and partner integrations, third party integrations, machine learning, internal tools and reporting, devops, and Postgres administration (including query optimization, horizontal partitioning, and reliability).
Since it was a small-ish company, I thought maybe this was just their generic "senior software engineer" posting. Nope. I asked them. They actually expected people to be able to work on all of those things. By my count, that's about 5 different teams that should be working on those things... except that this place has ~15 engineers. I self selected out of that process because, although I could certainly do the API and integrations stuff, if I'm the best person you've got to work on ML, your company is in bad shape.
I probably could have applied and gotten an interview anyway, maybe even gotten the job, but I know it wouldn't have been someplace I could do my best work. I'm very glad I'm not there.
I'll apply to a small company f I meet what seem like the most important of the requirementstc. . But it is a largedompany I assume that a large company filtered outjust by HR you don't meet 100% of the require. I've I used to but afterhaving never interview from ain those cases, 've stopped me.
Anecdotal, I didn't meet most of the requirements for my current gig, but I applied because they listed one framework I'd been using quite a bit. I ended up being getting hired and pretty much being the senior guy there.
However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.