Its true too of jobs. Everyone sees when someone gets a job but its much harder to know if someone effortlessly switched or spent years failing interviews every week. My last job hunt took 6 months and had dozens of failures. I'm still not sure if its normal or I'm below average quality.
I’ve had the same experience. For every job I’ve landed (all of 2 spanning 8+ years) I spent 6+ months applying to hundreds and hundreds jobs and failing interviews until I landed something. It’s certainly not the optimal way to be getting jobs - most people network better, I imagine. But if you are not good at networking it’s a long process.
I sometimes think companies spend too much time assessing candidates. I just spent months interviewing with a two companies. Each company had me doing a hour zoom call nearly every week with someone new until eventually rejecting me. I’d reckon if the person seems reasonably competent in the first 1-2 interviews, has work artifacts in the public domain (academic papers, patents, etc),and has a background closely aligning with the posting then just taking the risk is probably a better use of everyone’s time. Truly wild out there trying to convince people you know something.
I agree with you. I was rejected from a company in January after spending upwards of 40 hours on the process. 9-10 on the actual interview, talking to people, Zoom calls that blew through the scheduled times, and the rest on their code challenge/assessment. I could feel my motivation and even desire for the job tanking dramatically by the end of my 3rd 3-hour-long zoom call with their team. I didn't even want to do the code challenge at that point.
On the flip side, the jobs I've held where the interview process is more centered around my past work, discussions about approach to teamwork & software development, and extracurriculars/interests have never failed to lead to something more enjoyable and long-term. The fastest way, in my experience, to destroy a candidate's interest in your company is to demoralize and dehumanize them by dragging out the process for weeks (I am "still waiting" to hear back on a job I applied for in December... if they end up getting back to me at this point, I just can't see myself wanting to continue the conversation.)
I'm not sure what field you're in but if you're reasonably competent, being transparent and honest with what gaps there are in your knowledge can be an attractive trait for a candidate. Someone who's forthcoming about things they're unsure about is someone you can train faster because they recognize that they don't know everything...and that trait keeps them open to learning and open to better solutions too. Sometimes people want to hear that you struggle with the same things.
All of this probably goes out the window in hyper-competitive fields but in my field for example (software engineering) where there's a labor shortage, I've found this to be the case anywhere outside of the companies that just want to test how well you remember your Computer Science degree.
This seems like the norm in the US, whereas it was quite easy to get a job with a company in a more lax jurisdiction. I wonder to what degree it correlates with employee protections (if there is a strong correlation, one would expect French companies to have the most demanding interviews, since it is almost impossible to fire someone).
The interviews are harder or more abstract and longer in California. It feels like no one is sure why they are hiring so they prolong the hiring process as a safeguard.
Yet, California has had plenty of people moving in to the state from elsewhere, enough to cause an acute housing problem in some areas. Something feels off in your analysis.
Speaking from someone not in California but who has remotely interviewed with companies across the globe.
No one does 4, 5, 6 interviews if they know what they want and are worried about losing them. No one is worried because the candidate pool is so large and the position doesn't really need to be filled.
> one would expect French companies to have the most demanding interviews, since it is almost impossible to fire someone).
In my experience, it's not that hard. You have up to six months to fire the new hire for whatever reason you like. They can also leave during this time, of course, but people have a tendency not to.
> If you get rejected somewhere and then accepted somewhere slightly lesser, you know you pushed yourself as high as you could go.
No, you still don't know even that. For every person reading this comment, there exists at least one job "lesser" than their current one where, if they were to apply to today, they would get rejected (and not just on the basis that they're overqualified).
Your statement imputes way too much rationality and efficiency into society—a sort of just-world hypothesis applied to the narrow domain of the job market and those who hold the keys into any given organization. Organizations are made of people, and people can be dumb and irrational. The kinds of people who have the final say on whether to reject or hire aren't exempt from this. The decision to reject can be as uninformed and arbitrary as it is logically sound.
The same principle applies to successful hires, too. In fact, that's the reason why it's possible to get rejected even for jobs where the application process should result in a hire. Companies hire people, find them to be worse than expected, but keep them around anyway because, while the powers that be definitely wouldn't go back in time if the opportunity to do so were available and hire that person all over again just the same, it's still too much work (or it's perceived to be too much work—again, people do not make optimal decisions) to get rid of them. Good candidates who get rejected are a casualty of organizations hedging their bets to try to prevent this from happening too much to them.
Or you had some "in" at your current job that you may not have somewhere else.
I've done fine at my last two long-term jobs but I also very much got them because I knew very higher ups who answered an email right away.
It actually encourages me that a lot about the hiring system is pretty random. Otherwise the big tech employers would just skim the cream except for people who really don't want to work for those employers. As it is, there's enough randomness that lots of good people end up at other companies.
I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption, even if the ordering is strictly personal (some people would take a job with better work-life balance instead of the better paying one, some would make a different choice, same thing with technology stacks etc.).
The second premise also seems to be true, though I would phrase it in a descriptive rather than prescriptive manners - the choices you make regarding job offers reveal your preferences ("the ordering of jobs").
Having no "job ordering" would result in people taking jobs based on a coin flip, wouldn't it?
This isn't true at all in my opinion. Hiring criteria are so vague, subjective, and interpersonal fit is also very subjective, that failure isn't a direct indication of one's ceiling.
Another thing about being rejected from a job is that you may have made a good impression but were not a good fit for the role you interviewed for. When a better-fitted role comes up, the company might ask you to come back and interview for that one.
If you had never tried, the company wouldn’t know about you and this kind of reconsideration wouldn’t happen. So at least rejection gets you on their radar.
I once applied for a job and received a slightly jarring letter saying they were going to delete their record of my application. But when I read it more carefully, it turned out to be referring to another application I had made years earlier for a completely different job at the same company. They did hire me for the new job, but certainly not because they'd rummaged through their piles of old CVs and decided to initiate contact with that one special snowflake who might somehow still be sitting next to the phone holding his breath for years.
I've had it happen a few times. Most recently a company told me at the time that they were impressed but it would've been a waste of my time and skillset to take the role they were hiring for (VP at BigCo). About a year later they reached out with a generous offer for a role they had created specifically for me, which genuinely was a better fit.
I've been on the other side of that conversation as well. It usually happens when someone really impresses and stands out but doesn't actually match what the role requires. If you have a limited hiring budget, you can't always squeeze in a person you'd love to hire in addition to someone that fills the critical role. Smart companies will invent a role for great talent, if they can make the budget work, but that often takes a lot of time to put together.
I was talking to a friend last week who got hired this way (initial rejection, then a position opened up that seemed a better fit). It does happen, I guess.
In my experience from the hiring side we never call back people but very often shuffle promising candidates between different roles. Like we are interviewing people because we need a Foo-guru and one candidate is kinda meh in Foo but shows promise as a Baz-person then we for sure let both the person and our recruiters and the Baz team know. And our team receives similar referals from other teams in the company too.
Very Jr role. Hiring manager had a very specific role that the recruiter got me on. Rejected, but during the interview pushed me to the next round of a lesser role in his team.
Recruiter was pretty amazed at the turn around since it closed so quickly.
It's a hard job and everyone at my level is a skill a notch or two up and much younger. But we do what we can to stay fit in the industry when peers are much more experienced and sharp. I got my foot in the door. It will take a lot of effort to shake off the sunk cost of training and replacement of me so I am here to get paid to learn and soak up what I can. Definitely high work load and high turnover either upwards or outwards for better opportunities
So if they have a budget, especially if they are a vendor with a paying client who needs a minimum level assigned consultant headcount type of metrics, I am good enough and my soft skills push me through.
Previous job (hired 5-6 years ago) I actually asked to be considered for the level above the one I originally applied to as they pulled me in for interviews. They hired me that week for the tech role as they likely had worse matches until I showed up.
You can't have a full strategy around it. But when you see a possible opportunity you snipe for it. Take the minimum amount of effort and just enough to set you apart and it might just be enough. It's a draw attention to yourself and make it feel like they won't find a better candidate. Play the fog of uncertainty every desperate employer has. Desperation can come from Recruiter delaying the first round because busy with a more important leadership fill, or low recruiter count in general, bad recruiter giving bad leads, etc.
Similar opportunities to me is sometimes just being the first result in a employer's search. engine.
Not in my case. My company hasn't allowed me to settle into a steady type of work/language/stack. I used to be an expert in other systems/tech, but they outsourced and downsized those. So now I'm always working on different languages/systems/etc. I'm basically an entry level with 10 years experience and an MS who gets a bad rating because I'm slow.
I can relate, although I have fewer years of experience. I've switched from one sub software industry to another. My past experience is not valued or at least doesn't count as much. Which I understand. Small and medium companies want a person who knows their stack and who needs only a few weeks to adjust to the company but not someone who needs a full month or so of study to learn their stack. There isn't a lot of demand for generalists in my experience, which again is understandable.
I guess my point is that one has to think carefully about their career path and what they want to do beyond "Write code and build stuff".
That's the thing. I think they purposely make people a jack of all trades so it's more difficult to leave (everyone wants an expert). I don't really have any options to leave (put in a few resumes, had an interview, but my location sucks for decent IT jobs).
Landing software jobs is hard when you go "up" in company quality/pay and "easier" when you move laterally or lower. If you were looking for step ups in your career it's reasonable to expect many failures.
Overtime I've developed the rule that if I'm not failing at least half my interviews, then I'm not really pushing myself.
It's pretty common. Interviewing is a messed up process.
I recently interviewed at a company, did really well, so much so that when they rejected me, the recruiter reached out to say, flat out, "you did really well; the hiring committee spent an hour debating between you and another candidate before finally going with that other candidate". Fair enough. I applied for other roles, got into one of those, that recruiter saw the notes from the prior interview and went "why the heck didn't we hire this person?!" got me to talk to the hiring manager...who was like "nah".
It really is getting pretty much universal thumbs up, and with a large panel that is statistically hard to do.
>and with a large panel that is statistically hard to do.
This. And with a large panel come lots of different biases where some random shit could work against you like having the wrong accent or looks.
I once was in an interview where it consisted of a 6 people Teams call with one dialing in from their car. Got rejected despite answering all their questions correctly.
I guess it depends, 6 months is actually not too bad. Weather dozens of rejections are normal or not depends on industry and region, and the jobs you apply to.
I had everything, from one application to get a job up to 8 (last time before my current job). Usually I did spend closer to 8 months than 6 to get there so. From experience, for whatever reason, I tend to be on the low end of applications. So I think around a dozen applications and 6 months seems kind of average, IMHO.
