Why it's hard to get hired despite glowing jobs reports

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/us-job-market-white-collar-workers-f453f0b5

by erehweb • 2 years ago

50 98 2 years ago

not hard at all if you want to work at chipotle

the govt bean counters do not care about job quality...to them, a job is a job and if you took it you must be happy with it

DonHopkins• 2 years ago

You're suffering from Chipotle Derangement Syndrome.

hollywood_court• 2 years ago

I've been actively seeking a new role and trying to jump ship for about four months now. It's definitely been a lot more difficult than I imagined.

There isn't a large tech industry in my area so it's difficult to network or leverage my local connections. I was fortunate to land my current role simply because the CEO found me on LinkedIn and offered me the position. However, I now realize now that he likely had no one apply for this position at all given the pay and benefits.

But I'm still glad I found this role as it is my first official software development job after years of freelancing. I'm hoping to use this role to help me transition into a better compensated job with a more legit company.

delduca2• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240503055730/https://www.wsj.c...

karaterobot• 2 years ago

The linked archive is also paywalled, and archive.is can't seem to grab it. Maybe the WSJ has won this round of the arms race.

ambicapter• 2 years ago

If you're trying to bypass the paywall, this doesn't work.

Bluescreenbuddy• 2 years ago

Sadly paywalled as well

delduca2• 2 years ago

About ten years ago, only one or two interviews were required to get a job, without any tests.

Nowadays, there are 4 to 6 rounds plus 2 technical challenges... Do they think they are Google? But they don't pay like Google.

spyspy3• 2 years ago

It’s insane how uniformly bad every interview is these days. Everyone follows the same recruiter->leetcode->5ish “in person” interview process.

If someone asks me to “design twitter” or about a time I disagreed with my coworker one more time…

Seriously considering the woodworking route.

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

If someone asks me to “design twitter” or about a time I disagreed with my coworker one more time

The number of adults with completely dysfunctional conflict-resolution skills is actually mind boggling.

VirusNewbie2• 2 years ago

I didn't end up working there, but I thought Netflix absolutely nailed it when it came to good interviews. They were quick to schedule them, the people were smart and intelligent, and all their questions were top notch.

I had three coding interviews, and they all involved very practical, challenging problems that I hadn't ever seen before. The system design ones was a good back and forth, it didn't feel confrontational or textobok.

I highly recommend people looking for a job to at least give it a shot there.

John23832• 2 years ago

Nowadays, there are 4 to 6 rounds plus 2 technical challenges... Do they think they are Google? But they don't pay like Google.

That's the biggest thing. Companies want you to lie prostrate in front of them for comparatively mediocre pay.

The people doing the interviews at most companies are often terrible too... so what is all of this ceremony for?

I'm lucky to have a job at the moment, but I have looked around. I can honestly say I was not impressed by any of the big companies I talked too. The startups were in cash holding mode at the time, so I didn't really look in that direction.

jimbob452• 2 years ago

Well you need at least a phone screen and a final interview. Ideally you’d meet with the team in there somewhere.

And then for tests, you’d want a FizzBuzz (doable in one minute or less) before the phone screen and then something more substantive before the final interview.

2 interviews/2 tests seems to be the minimum.

OkayPhysicist• 2 years ago

My CS degree should be more than adequate to show I can FizzBuzz.

asow923• 2 years ago

I've had the exact opposite experience. Ten years ago I had to go through all sorts of multi-round coding tests, and in my last two jobs it's only been one or just a high level technical discussion.

spyspy3• 2 years ago

...are you hiring?

letharion• 2 years ago

I was looking at a big tech company recently. They list well over a 100 open positions. I reach out to a friend who works there. He says some very nice things about me to his manager, who asks for my CV. Been six weeks and I haven't heard a word. I might apply again through the regular formal channels, but I would have thought that a strong recommendation was worth more.

I'm not really complaining, I'm in a fairly good spot myself, but for others out there in this situation, you're not alone.

tetris112• 2 years ago

Same. Family friend is in high up position. Passed my CV on to the data team. They said positive encouraging things, and he said that he'd soon be in contact for the next steps.

It's been over a month. I can believe that family friend would be forced to say something positive about my CV, but not that he'd give me false hope.

My interpretation: companies aren't hiring, they're covertly laying off staff whilst projecting growth to the market. Or, they are hiring, but the current teams are worried about the security of their own jobs as AI is now making everyone worried.

Paul-Craft10• 2 years ago

I'm not saying your family friend has done this, but I've seen people "refer" others to their company, then deliberately tank the candidacy because they didn't believe in the candidate's skills.

tibbar• 2 years ago

I recently ran a hiring pipeline for a senior/staff SWE. There were around a thousand applicants. What you have to understand is that there is a strong timing component to these pipelines: Hiring managers and recruiters screen hundreds of resumes to find people they want to talk to, resulting in maybe dozens of phones screens, followed by additional interview rounds for a handful of people who did really well.

So what happens if you send in your resume when we're already evaluating a bunch of people? Well, we may not have the bandwidth to interview you while we see if our current batch of candidates pan out. But also if your resume is good we probably won't reject you, either, while we wait to see if we can actually close a candidate.

It's entirely possible that we DO reach out to you after 2 months if we fail to make a hire on the current batch of candidates, or if our offers are rejected. Believe it or not, your resume is still right there in the tracker, and if there's no response yet, it could just be because it takes a really long time to go through this hiring process for everyone involved and there's no reason to reject you outright.

erehweb2• 2 years ago

This is completely understandable, but I wonder why companies don't just say this - it would be a lot better than ghosting.

sys_64738• 2 years ago

Most places are on a hiring freeze but there are exceptions at the SVP level. Often this is what is being looked for is that excellent candidate.

cynicalsecurity3• 2 years ago

This is not true. It's very easy to get a job if your salary expectations are not too high. It's only hard to get a high paying job.

nicklecompte2• 2 years ago

From the article:

  Meikeisha Scott-Parker, out of work as a project manager since January, recently cleared a second-round interview and believed an offer was imminent. But she didn't get the job because she was overqualified and too expensive, a recruiter told her.

  A few days later, she saw the same position reposted with an advertised wage that was $10 an hour less than originally listed. She figures the company either trimmed its budget or concluded that it could find adequate help at a bargain price.

  "The truth is, had they asked me, I might have taken $10 less because of the situation that I'm in," Scott-Parker says. "The market is so slow right now."

Paul-Craft10• 2 years ago

Right. But, Ms. Parker also can't really go back to the company and say that. They'd justify not hiring her because she was "desperate." There's really no way to win on the candidate side here.

cynicalsecurity3• 2 years ago

Project manager / the market is so slow.

I'm not a project manager and I can't stop recruiters contacting me. Project management is not the whole IT market. It's a small niche to say the least.

renlo2• 2 years ago

non paywalled, found on Reddit: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/why-it-s-hard-to-g...

haskellandchill2• 2 years ago

I'm kind of glad it's a dumpster fire right now. If I got a job like I had in the past I wouldn't have decided to go down a different path. I'm going back to school to complete premed requirements and apply to medical school next year. I'm working as a medical assistant and training for EMT. I'm much happier than I would be as a web developer. There are tech jobs that would have interested me but I'd still rather be a doctor anyway, not that that is guaranteed. I did some open source Rust and learned some AI but you really have to show devotion through unpaid work to secure those positions, or get lucky.

nicklecompte2• 2 years ago

What bothers her most is the way some employers seem to relish being able to string candidates along. One flew her in for several hours of face-to-face interviews and never followed up.

I am sure a lot - maybe most! - of this "ghosting" really is just rudeness and/or abusing power. But in my anecdotal experience I was always way too busy to do my normal duties along with handling a hiring process, and I ended up stringing candidates along without intending to - in fact I felt terrible about it! Some managers accommodate the work of hiring by taking other stuff off your plate. Other managers dump too much of the hiring process onto you, even if you're already coding for 60 hours a week (my last job really sucked).

That said, note the extremely important caveat tucked at the very end:

More than three-quarters of the reported job gains in the last month were concentrated in four sectors: government, healthcare, construction, and leisure and hospitality. Jobs in tech, finance, law, and accounting were essentially flat or slightly down.

Paul-Craft10• 2 years ago

If you're involved in a hiring process, that is part of your regular duties. If the sum total of the things you need to get done can't be done in a reasonable amount of time each week, then it's your job to push back. Working 20 and 30 hours a week of overtime to get things done is just a recipe for inefficiency, burnout, and health problems.

sircastor• 2 years ago

If hiring activities are in your job description, then they’re part your duties. Otherwise they’re someone else foisting their responsibility onto you. This sort of doing is not uncommon. Your job might be a 40-50 hour/week deal, but management will ask more. And they’ll do it to get the work for free.

I will note that salaried positions often are arbitrary on the time commitment.

durandal1• 2 years ago

Jobs in tech, finance, law, and accounting were essentially flat or slightly down.

If you want a to know the true state of the software engineering job market, I think sites like hnhiringtrends [1] illustrate the situation nicely.

[1] https://www.hnhiringtrends.com

tombert5• 2 years ago

Tough to say if I have a "glowing" history, but I do have experience a few big companies that I think looks good.

One time, when I was applying to work for a newspaper [1] as a software engineer. The recruiter was pretty sure I'd get an interview so he actually fast tracked me to do some stupid personality quiz and compliance crap, which took about three hours. The next day, I get a call from the recruiter and he tells me that I was passed over because my resume "looked too much like a manager's resume, no hands on coding experience".

Now, that is very bizarre, because I've never really been a manager. I was an adjunct professor for two semesters, but for the last 13 years I've been a pretty vanilla software engineer, and my resume pretty much exclusively tried to highlight my work with .NET and Java and Node.js and Kafka. In fact, people have told me that my resume was "too technical" and that I need to speak at higher levels and get out of the weeds.

The recruiter was confused too for the same reason, and then I realized something: the hiring manager probably never actually read the resume. I believe that they already knew who they wanted to hire for the position, but for bureaucratic or legal reasons, they had to make it look like they were trying to find the "best person for the job", and put out feelers for people, and they were just kind of ambivalent about wasting my time. It really bothered me, but there's not much I can do about it.

2023 was probably the worst year of my life. I got laid off twice, and spent about six months applying to jobs. I never really got used to waking up to twenty rejections every morning so every day I would feel kind of depressed until I went to sleep. I hated the faux politeness that I display during Zoom interviews. I hated logging into LinkedIn every day, applying to 100 jobs. I hated messaging all my contacts to ask if they know anyone hiring. I hated feeling desperate. It was tough, and I don't wish it on anyone.

I have a really decent job now and I consider myself very grateful and lucky to have it. It's a really tough market right now, and anyone who's stuck competing in it has my sympathies.

[1] Not going to say the name but it's definitely one you've heard of and probably have read.

ryandrake3• 2 years ago

The recruiter was confused too for the same reason, and then I realized something: the hiring manager probably never actually read the resume. I believe that they already knew who they wanted to hire for the position

My gut feeling is this happens all the time, more often than we can possibly imagine. They're just "seems" to be so much nepotism and hire-my-buddyism. But of course we can't prove it. When you get rejected for a reason there is no legal requirement that the reason makes sense, is true, or that they even tell you the reason. It just cannot be one of a few very specific enumerated reasons (which usually can't be proven anyway, so a pointless rule), and that's it.

tombert5• 2 years ago

Yeah, and I'm not in a protected demographic [1], so rejections can be completely no-cause for me and there's not really anything I can do about it.

It wouldn't have bothered me as much if I hadn't wasted my time with the idiotic personality test they made me take that took way too much time. If they weren't going to hire me, that's fine, I'm not entitled to a job from this company, but I think they should just be courteous and minimize how much time is wasted. When recruiters call me for a job I don't want, I try as soon as possible to say something like "I'm not interested, I don't really want to waste your time, so I'm going to hang up now". It might come off as rude, but at least I cannot be accused of leading anyone on.

[1] I guess outside of maybe religion since I'm an atheist? That never really comes up during interview though, and I very much doubt that's ever been the reason I'm rejected.

temporarely3• 2 years ago

In 3 decades in this disappointing field every single interaction with a recruiter has been an utter waste of time.

tombert5• 2 years ago

I have said a lot of nasty things about recruiters in the past (I’ve accused their job of being creative was of hitting FWD in Outlook), and I generally do not like dealing with them, but I dunno, sometimes they’re helpful.

On very rare occasions they will know if I am actually a good fit for a job because they’ll take the time to actually learn a bit about CS. Those recruiters I generally like.

twosignum3• 2 years ago

It appears that economy is in widespread recession. Hundreds of thousands have lost jobs. Job reports are getting revised after every few months.

I saw a tweet that showed we had a net job loss when revised reports are accounted for. I see thousands of videos on TikTok saying people are struggling.

Many job gains are in low-wage category.

I don't know what is going on. We have a business but people have stopped buying for the most part in last 6 months.

Anyone else see your business or startup struggling to close deals in last 6 months?

Hope it doesn't last longer. Slow bleeding is worse than hard recession.

JumpCrisscross4• 2 years ago

saw a tweet that showed we had a net job loss when revised reports are accounted for

This is false [1].

Anyone else see your business or startup struggling to close deals in last 6 months?

VCs are raising record-breaking funds again [2].

[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

[2] https://www.altassets.net/private-equity-news/by-pe-sector/v...

twosignum3• 2 years ago

That started this month. But, job loss after revised job reports are not false. I can't find the tweet right now, but it had extreme detail analysis how we are losing jobs.

VC raising funds have nothing to do with ecomony. It is rich people moving money among each other. If you believe in trickle down, then perhaps part of these record breaking funds will flow to rich and connected founders.

For everyone else, there is a big struggle.

wbl• 2 years ago

People are always losing jobs and getting new ones. Where people struggle is with rate exposure and some industries and big ticket items like housing.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

Is this an American thing? From my European pov, the market seems not as hysterically good as during the early covid years, but pretty solid nonetheless if you have some experience.

Yoric2• 2 years ago

I'm in France. ~18 months ago, my entire team was laid off. I have lucked out on some previous jobs, so I have a very good resume. It took me a few months to find a new position, and that's after 100+ interviews and some serious ghosting from interviewers.

In other words, I didn't experience anything as bad as what is described, but still, a far cry from the situation 3, 5 or 10 years ago.

noashavit• 2 years ago

I can't believe the candidate ghosting is a thing now

joquarky• 2 years ago

This whole process is now beyond ridiculous and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

In 1998, I was hired after one interview where we talked for about 10 minutes, then I was asked to sit down at a computer and demonstrate that I could use vi and knew how to get a query string from environment variables in C.

I stayed there for 24 years, hit major burnout when I was forced into more social roles, took some time off, and now I have no idea how to effectively navigate this Kafkaesque hiring process.

hobobaggins• 2 years ago

Why It's Hard to Get Hired Despite Glowing Jobs Reports

.. perhaps because jobs numbers are now partisan and politicized, and no longer reflect reality.

bitcoin_anon• 2 years ago

I wonder how much of this is:

- Company lists position - Company interviews citizens. - Company claims it can’t find any qualified citizens - Company hires immigrants, paying them less

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

I’m guessing a lot of people here are nearer to 40 than 30.

Tell us how many 40-somethings you rec’d when they were on the other side of the desk.

sotix• 2 years ago

Jobs in tech, finance, law, and accounting were essentially flat or slightly down.

As a software engineer with a CPA, it’s been brutal. I was laid off in January and have received zero interviews in 100 applications. I’ve received 3 responses, which led to an initial conversation and then being ghosted. I’ve received about 10 rejections. The rest have had no response.

haskellandchill2• 2 years ago

It's not much better if you get responses. My problem was companies will schedule me for interviews so I do 100 applications have 60 phone screens, then 40 technical interviews, then 30 seconds stages/homeworks, 10 final rounds and maybe 4 calls with the VP/CTO and still nothing. It's a full time job for months with no payoff.

wakawaka285• 2 years ago

Because jobs reports and unemployment stats are dishonestly generated, of course. I can't read this because of the paywall, but I'm sure it's a gaslighting article.

usedcarbon• 2 years ago

Our society turns a blind eye to HR incompetence; even to enter HR requires very basic credentials. The ghosting nonsense, or pointless job searches, creates work hours for those HR teams, but does nothing for the ignored candidates

LoulouMonkey• 2 years ago

My workmates and I got laid off by our employer (a FAANG company) last summer and I spent 4 months looking for a job (in Ireland). I started using a simple spreadsheet to keep track of all the jobs you apply for: company name, job title, salary, url, outcome (ghosted / rejected / interview).

Over those 4 months I applied for a total of 87 roles for data scientist / analytics engineer. Outcome:

- Ghosted: 49.4% - Rejected: 34.5% - Role cancelled: 3.4% - Interview: 12.6%

That breakdown was consistent across all my former workmates (between 50 to 100 applications before signing a contract), which is largely due to mass layoffs / high competition in the tech sector

Being ghosted is the norm (more on that later)

Avoid recruitment agencies at all cost. Here, they will ghost you for the jobs you apply for, and will then start contacting you for roles you're overqualified for (internships, etc..)

What we realised after a while, from chatting with folks who work in the recruitment field is that if you start getting loads of templated rejection email a few days / weeks after applying for roles, this means that nobody ever read your resume.

Each role we apply for usually receive 100+ applications, and that the recruiter who posted the role is also hiring for a network engineer, a janitor, two junior data analysts, a marketing consultant, a senior project manager, etc..

In other words, they're going to receive several hundreds of resumes, and they won't be able to read all of them. Actually, they'll only read 10 resumes for each role, as is the norm in modern HR.

It seems that most recruiters these days use ATS software to do all of the work for them. Here in Ireland the top ones are "Lever ATS" or "Recruiterbox ATS". Depending on the keywords that the recruiter enters, each resume gets a score. The recruiter then proceeds to open the top 10 applications only, and clicks on a button that sends a templated rejection email to all the unfortunate candidates that didn't make the cut.

Though recruiters usually try and become experts in a specific area ("I'm a tech recruiter", "I'm a recruiter that specialises in finance"), they actually know very little about the jobs that they hire for.

The truth is, 99% of the time, the reason why we get rejected isn't because we're not a good fit for the role. It's because we failed to pass the ATS software filtering process.

nojvek• 2 years ago

Applied for Meta through a referral in 2023. Got ghosted.

Which is weird because recruiters reached out for both Meta and Google in 2021 and I passed their interview then. I took a job at a startup instead. Not sure if good or bad decision since both Meta and Google had mass layoffs.

So even if you cleared 2021 bar, 2023 results in being ghosted.

It’s a pretty absurd market. Unless you’re one of the few ML/AI scientists, it’s pretty rough out there.

Why it's hard to get hired despite glowing jobs reports

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