It seems to me the whole problem amounts to companies deciding to redefine the word "entry", then acting all disappointed when no one else uses that definition.
"Entry" means "to enter the workforce". It means you have pre-work experience such as a specific degree, speak a certain language, etc.
If you advertise an "entry level web development" job and I just boot camped for that, I am qualified and will apply.
If you want "Junior Developer", say so.
(Comment by someone that this is a gimmick to reduce salary sounds pretty right on.)
I think part of the problem is the titles themselves...
"Senior" implies "Highly Experienced" meaning "lots of years of experience".
Whereas it's completely possible for a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer" within their specific domain and be as valuable, respected, listened-to, etc. as a "Senior Engineer". It doesn't happen often, but it happens.
If we had titles more like "Apprentice", "Journeyman", and "Master" Software Engineer, then we wouldn't have this issue. Someone could be a Journeyman after 2 years or 4 depending on how rapidly they progressed through their "apprenticeship" phase, and to "Master" as soon as they had completed sufficiently complex work to have completed a "masterpiece" equivalent.
As a qualifier, it is a demotion from “Developer” alone. A Junior Developer is less than all the other ordinary, plain old general Developer roles.
It’s basically a paid intern role.
The only people who would ever accept such a title are kids who don’t mind being marked, appropos of nothing, before first impressions are made, as a lesser subordinate, untrusted with serious decisions.
When a recruiter, hiring manager or HR contact offers a Junior role, it means you get paid less.
In a world where business cards and email signatures serve as pretext for introductions, you see a title with Junior in it, and it reeks of green college grads.
The buried lede here seems to be "In real life, folks need to apply to 150-250 jobs to get a job".
I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market?
The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this is possible.
I was a recruiter for 8 years, and maybe 1 in 100 applications turned into a hire. I suspect a big factor is the barrier to entry for applying has been lowered.
Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant. An increase in applications makes sifting through those applications increasingly burdensome, and tools have not really made mentally parsing a resume easier, so mental energy gets sucked up trying to filter more content. The more energy you burn, the more tired you are. The less energy you have, the less you can focus on the applicants, and you start responding to fewer applications. Fewer recruiter responses to an application means job seekers need to send more applications. Repeat.
The barrier is lower for applying, but as many other posters saying, there is simply just interest in quick ROI and zero willingness to think long term.
I recruited for several years for my companies too. First thing I noticed, there is huge variability in CV for each country. When I receive a CV from an indian person (from India), I don't know if I should expect 100% lies or what, even from qualified seniors. On the other end, I could put my hand on coal if the same CV was written by most germans. Which is bad, because the CV or cover letter become essentially useless as a metric.
To reduce the number of applications we introduced simple tests to submit along with the CV. It does wonders, but I personally hate it. As a senior dev, I keep asking: would I apply to my current application? I have to answer that no, I wouldn't. I have plenty of public projects to investigate my abilities if needed, and I do expect some minimal amount in investment from both parties when hiring.
We also raised the requirements from applicants ridiculously, essentially expecting them to work on core features from tomorrow. Again, completely unrealistic. And again, by our own wording, I would be afraid to apply. We are definitely selecting over-confident candidates (or desperate).
And it's sadly also true that the industry has no apprentice jobs anymore, although there is plenty of need. There are some career paths where I would jump ships despite my lack of expertise to follow my interests. Starting from zero doesn't stop me, but there are simply no opportunities: junior jobs are not really junior anymore. They are simply paid less.
I was also a recruiter for a while and when hiring I am always amazed at the absolute dismal amount of effort given when people apply for good jobs. Hiring is hard, someone with the right skill set will have a terrible mentality, hiring for the mentality is extremely tricky and can lead you down the road of groupthink if you're not careful. I'm still amazed how entirely incompetent people rise to managerial levels on who they know but its very, very hard to break into even with a modicum of talent.
You're spot on with that ratio and, as you say, it can become utterly draining. Depending on the number of applicants I'm getting, I developed a way of dealing with the problem that works well for software engineers:
FOR LOTS OF APPLICANTS
Send every single applicant a nice, warm email with a link to a coding assessment[1]. Doesn't have to be anything particularly in-depth: just something that requires an hour or two's work from the candidate.
Result: all the people who put slapdash applications together will self-select out at this stage (you won't even hear back from them) and you don't have to send rejections. This will probably eliminate 95% of candidates right out of the gate for you, and when you have 500 applicants in a single month this is going to make your job a lot easier. You'll be left with 25 people who are genuinely interested and, depending on what you're looking for, you might have 10 that are worth interviewing.
IMPORTANT: for the relatively small number you reject at the assessment stage, you should send them some real, and reasonably detailed, feedback as to why. This will generally take around half an hour per applicant. People don't do this out of fear of getting into an argument with the candidate (and, of course, because they don't have time): in practice this seldom happens, and can be diffused quickly when it does. Most candidates appreciate the feedback and, key point, you won't start dehumanising applicants and turning yourself into a worse human being.
FOR FEW APPLICANTS
If you're not doing an up-front assessment, which we don't at the moment because we're a relatively unknown company so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply, send everyone a nice email inviting them to a 20-30 minute telescreen.
Your email should lay out the format of the telescreen: we'll spend some time finding out more about your experience, and do a screenshare (or Google Doc share) on a short programming task.
Result: all the lazy or uninterested applicants will again opt out, doing most of your work for you.
KEY POINTS
- In both cases you can focus your finite time and energy on the better candidates, rather than on sifting out the worst.
- You can give every applicant a more positive experience overall (think how many times you've heard the complaint, "I applied for X job and the company never even got back to me"). You also avoid ever having to send out those crappy two-line pro forma rejection emails that just about everyone hates.
- It'll keep you more positive and energetic because you're not spending loads of time having to be critical and negative about swathes of applications, and the people you do end up interacting with, you actually have the time to invest in ensuring that they have a positive experience, whether you offer them the job or not. This is hugely important because I think, of all the jobs I've done - and, granted, this does depend somewhat on your personality and temperament - recruitment is the one with the greatest capacity to turn you into the kind of person you wouldn't like very much (I realised it was happening for me when I did a long secondment in recruitment for a previous employer).
- By giving everyone a positive experience you'll gain a better reputation for your company, which should translate into attracting better candidates. Certainly, the other way, word travels, and if you offer a ghastly candidate experience people will be put off applying. If you're Google you can get away with it because so many great people want to work for you regardless of how drawn-out and overwrought the process is, so it doesn't matter that some great people will be put off because of the process (still I don't recommend it, and I question the value of all the hoop-jumping). If nobody's heard of you, making the process straightforward and pleasant is the way to go.
[1] This might sound cynical but you can totally automate this process, and if you're getting that many applicants it's probably worthwhile: just make sure the emails go out within business hours, and that there's at least a few hours lag between an application being submitted and the email response going out, so it feels like it's from a human being. Also, and this goes without saying: use the applicant's name. Lots of ATS's don't (or didn't) have APIs, but since you'll only need to target (say) Firefox, browser automation with something like Selenium can work really well here.
> Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant.
They all look the same.
There is now way to tell if a position is any more than remotely relevant, because job postings are all the same.
If you want a group (prospective employees) to sift itself (only apply to jobs they want or are qualified for), you should make a concerted effort to give them the information needed to do that. Unfortunately, no one really does.
Recruiting sucks, so let's focus on making it better, rather than just complaining about the userbase.
There seems to be a pretty simple solution to this - you blacklist the obviously unacceptable.
Not the ones you 'don't like' - the ones that don't even make sense.
That process of filtering out folks using the blacklist should be automated and the blacklist should be public.
I wonder if that'd make recruiting jobs almost pointless in a large number of cases however. It sure would make one think twice about spam-applying, knowing you might get blacklisted for spam.
1) Yes. Any job with entry level requirements will get 20-100 applications on craigslist in seattle (my experience). More or less applications on more or less popular platforms
2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)
> 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
>2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
I don't ignore requirements or fudge them, but I do interpret them based on what they want done.
If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable.
But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position.
Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
These numbers vary dramatically by location and specialty, e.g. a Marketing Assistant in Chicago has very different prospects (and expected # applications to job offer) vs. a Software Engineer in SF vs. an HR specialist in Ohio.
We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications:
I'm currently trying to hire cloud solution architects, including in Bangalore. I have had >2000 applicants for the role. About 15 made it through resume & phone screens. I have found 1 so far that could make it through onsite interviews. This is just one data point from the opposite POV: especially in tech, it's extremely hard to find qualified people at the time and place you need them, especially if you need specialists.
This is because recruiters are lazy. In my bunch of years I found exactly 2 non-lazy third party recruiters.
Thus actually manually finding the company you want to work with and then sending the resume and cover letter directly has a decent chance of success if you're not a hack or fake.
The trouble is, they so not like to give out salary brackets.
In the U.S. at least, in order to continue receiving unemployment in many states, you need to apply for a certain number of jobs to show that you are "actively looking" for a job. These leads to many applicants to entry level jobs who are applying for a result other than getting hired. Indeed, many applicants of this type have no intention of ever even answering the phone/email if you try to contact them. Though some will just so they can say to the unemployment office that they "Have an interview next week."
I've similarly always struggled to make sense of these kinds of claims, because in my life so far I was offered a job every time I applied, so I'm wondering if I'm either living in an area where the job market is much less competitive or if I'm aiming too low. It's out of the question that I'm some kind of hotshot, on the contrary my CV is a mess and I dropped out ouf college.
I think its a mix of different perspectives. Theres people like you and myself who hear all this about applying to hundreds of jobs and it sounds absurd. For you it sounds like this is because you got lucky enough to not even need to look. Then theres those who apply to hundreds of jobs and then wonder why they don't get many responses.
Something to note there is, how much attention is being paid to each listing. For the jobs you've applied and gotten, you probably were a really great fit.
Having reached a point of being on the other side, looking for people to hire, I think there are really warped perceptions all around. If your hiring, you aren't swamped with great candidates but with resumes. Basically, most resumes go in the trash, but because most of them are hollow, there was nothing there to start. If you're actually skilled and can demonstrate it in any way then its far easier to find a job. I think most of the people who apply to 200+ jobs to get one either are not skilled or don't know how to demonstrate that they are.
Congratulations but you’re probably an outlier. I’ve applied to hundreds of companies throughout my career (~20 years), probably an average of around 40 applications per job switch. I’ve applied to some companies multiple times, sometimes right after getting the rejection. Most people I know are in the same boat. Tech companies are so picky and there is so much inherent variance in hiring. It’s a numbers game.
From my personal experience in the entry level job market, I have never successfully gotten a job offer to anything I applied to. Only have my current job because a friend recommended me.
Same - I've interviewed exactly twice, and gotten both jobs. This isn't to say I've only had two jobs but all advancements/movements stemmed from those two jobs I interviewed for (the second after moving cities and being out of my original network).
This has led me to actually be nervous about the prospect of having to interview, because was my success a fluke? Or had I found great fits for jobs? Both interviews I remember getting in to quite technical but off the topic conversations with the interviewer so I presume that was the success bit?
My ratio for applications to offers, over 20 years and 7 jobs, is less than two. My last job search lasted 12 hours, from start of search, to signing a contract. I've explained to people in the past that I'm extremely selective about applying. I only apply to jobs I think I would love, where I can clearly communicate why I'd be a great hire. I'm sensitive to early red flags, and avoid job descriptions that don't make sense or have contradictory reqs. I also have only worked in Boston and Seattle, two of the very hottest markets.
If you're applying to that many jobs, you're not being deliberate in the search. I've found all of my post-highschool jobs either from people in my network advertising something, or recruiters reaching out to me.
When I was in highschool I did not understand that it was really about who you know (I was homeschooled, so I didn't have a school network to reach out to for jobs), and went applying for typical highschool retail/fast food jobs willy nilly and never got an offer. It's because I was lacking someone who could "intro" me in to the organization. Now I can't really imagine trying to apply for a job cold.
There's a distribution there that needs to be mentioned, because most job applications are submitted by unqualified applicants.
My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out.
Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number.
So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring.
But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.
Until very recently I was frontend lead for a fairly large UK site, and one of the best hires I ever made was a 32 year old former-recruiter with no commercial programming experience, and no CS background.
However it was far from plain sailing. We had mutual friends and whilst chatting in a pub, and they won me over with their passion and enthusiasm for what I discovered was their dream job.
I brought them on as a jr, into a small talented team with measures in place to ensure there was the opportunity to learn on the job and appropriate tasks to work on, but it quickly became apparent they were out of their depth. I worked on mentoring in work and and pointed them in the direction of stuff they might look at outside of work to dodge the bullet.
My work started to suffer because I was spending so much time mentoring, fixing code that had become irrevocably tangled and trying to manage a very stressed & frustrated jr dev.
Eventually I had no choice but to move them into a different team where the work was less technically demanding and more html/css focused, with a small salary cut. Everybody was disappointed with the situation but the alternative was letting them go.
Three years later, that dev rejoined the core engineering team a more experienced developer, passion intact, and having learned their trade in a lower pressure environment, comfortable they could handle the role. I'm incredibly proud of them for the way they handled the situation and am absolutely confident this time will be a success.
That said, it'll probably be the last time I hire a dev with zero development experience. As an investment in an individual it's incredibly worthwhile, but despite the happy ending, the whole experience was fairly disastrous.
To me, this is very different than someone who has graduated with a CS degree or self-taught with a portfolio of open source contributions/personal projects.
An understanding of basic concepts obtained in the ways described above is very different from 0 experience. And on paper to a recruiter, what I've listed above counts as 0 real-world business experience.
edit: it is nice to hear this situation worked out for you though!
There's a huge difference in no work experience and no experience at all.
Hiring college grads without a lot of real world experience gives you the opportunity to mentor and train in good methodologies that I find older developers will refuse to implement without incessant fighting.
It is more work initially but the long run payoff has been fantastic in my experience. When you manage based on yearly expectations that are attainable life is so much more enjoyable.
The biggest key is management and upper management buy-in. Sadly that's exponentially more difficult to get when most places see IT as a sunk-cost instead of an opportunity to deliver more efficient workflows internally and externally.
I'm on the fence about working with developers that don't have college degrees. The gaps in their skill-set frequently causes issues no matter how much experience they've had.
I'm curious to hear what kinds of skill gaps you see and the severity of issues they bring, and if there are common knowledge gaps or it's more random.
Hey guys, I'm the author of this post! (And also happen to be TalentWorks CEO.) A friend sent me this link, I'm happy to answer any Qs.
Also, we're hiring. :) If you're sick of spending all your hard-earned education and experience to help Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. increase ad CTR by 0.001%, we're working on some pretty cool technical problems. Just email me at kushal@talent.works.
Hmmmm... what have you got for someone with no experience?
j/k, but I am curious how much time you think is average for a job search in terms of both hours spent and days/weeks before finding something. You talk about "time and stubbornness" but I'm interested just how much time and how much stubbornness. I realize this varies widely by industry, but I would expect there's some sort of white collar average.
We're actually hiring for no-experience positions too! (TBH, some of my best hires were no-experience, high-potential fresh grads who've turned into powerhouses.) I don't suppose you want to be a Marketing Assistant? ;)
To your specific Q, yes, it does vary dramatically by location and specialty. In fact, we did an analysis about exactly that a few months ago! Even for white-collar positions, it ranges from ~14 weeks (software engineers) to ~90 days (HR specialists) to >>90 days (mechanical engineers):
When you dig in, even specialties that take the same time have very different reasons. For instance, mechanical engineers see a pretty high interview callback rate to job applications, it's just that there aren't _enough_ mechanical engineer job openings out there! OTOH, there are tons of HR specialist job openings but you need to apply to a million jobs to even get one reply.
You need to demonstrate that no candidates with skills are available to get a visa waiver. It’s called compliance advertising. There’s a whole industry of body shops that do this stuff and collude on rates. The folks they hire are the foot soldiers of banks and government.
It's not limited to visa-cheating; in certain industries, you have to advertise the position even if you already know who you're going to hire. Look at the backpages of publications like The Economist - do you really think huge companies will find a CEO or Senior Executive with a magazine ad? Of course not.
3+ years doesn't mean 3+ years "in a job". That makes no sense. (Well, maybe for some companies it does, but you don't want to work there anyways). For some reason people can never get over that.
It means 3+ years with a technology. It means don't walk in the door out of a Java college having used nothing else and apply to work on a Triple A game written in C++. It means don't show up after a weekend html course and apply for a job using Node/React. And before you say "well that isn't me for so and so reason", it happens ALL the time to employers.
An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch. It means that you are at least capable enough to work on small or easy problems and features and an employer or other devs can coach you along the way and you'll know what they are saying to you.
Bull. I've been using Python since high school, but very few employers I've ever spoken to were willing to actually label me as having any years of experience in Python.
Did you have anything to show for your work since high school? Any projects online? Github codebase?
I know a Github profile shouldn't necessarily be required to count as experience. But if your only experience is non-work related then you're probably going to want to back it up with something tangible.
You need to be able to convince an employer that your experience is valid, that you can work on their critical code base without destroying their customer base and income stream. If you can't demonstrate your experience through results that you've achieved, that's the same as having zero years of python experience.
Their statements aren’t unique to tech. 3+ years of experience were not restricted to three years -with a technology-. I saw the same shit back when I was doing healthcare QI, and there is no tech to speak of there.
In fact, they stated nothing to suggest they were looking at tech firms specifically. You seem to be reading into this what you want to see.
You're imagining reasonable behavior, but that's demonstrably not what's going on. We've all seen job ads that request more years of experience in a technology than the technology has existed.
These are just number made up on the spot by people who can't be bothered to think about it.
> That's all it means (to any reasonable employer).
There's the rub. Early in my career when I had little working experience this CONSTANTLY bit me. It didn't matter that I did consulting on the side or that I worked with the technology or even that I went to school and used the technology there.
In my experience almost all of non-tech companies and maybe half-ish of the tech companies would require the experience be on the job at a company.
Now I don't know how indicative my experience is. I don't know if this type of information is tracked anywhere.
As an aside I'll never forget the one company I applied for who was looking for a developer with 5+ years experience in using .Net Framework... in 2003.
Speaking as someone currently in that position (developer with two years of experience) my personal experiences seem to align quite well with the data they collected.
When companies say 'entry-level', they seem to be referring to around 2-3 years of working experience. Not just college + internships, but actual professional experience. It's an extremely silly market to be in right now if you're a fresh grad.
All this talk about passion or numbers aside, I've had the opportunity to experience things from the other side and see how many senior-level developers with 10+ years of experience couldn't write an if-statement in their choice of language to save their lives, or even elaborate on basic design choices/decisions.
Can you please elaborate? Honestly, I'm interested to hear how anyone with such a low level of technical skill managed to get anyone to believe they were anything more than a junior. It also interests me because recently I've had a number of recruiters try to convince me that I'm a senior just because I've been programming for a living for 12 years. I'm honest enough with myself to admit that although I've used several languages during that time the jobs were all similar, freelance/sole developer CRUD jobs which didn't really challenge me so there was no continuouse progression technically. Sometimes testing was an afterthought so on that basis I wouldn't even qualify as mid-level. The thing is that "senior" means something completely different to a recruiter and maybe also to a manager?
The reason why they were able to seem like they were senior was because they had the work history. Even though their technical skills were lacking, the sheer amount of development history automatically made them a potential candidate worth interviewing.
Once you have guaranteed interviews, from there it's just a matter of finding a company with the most lax interviews or one where you can fake it the easiest. At least that's my best guess; I don't fully understand how someone can work for a company for over a decade yet can't understand basic OOP or fizzbuzz-level challenges. It became a serious issue at my company because most of the senior-level candidates we got were utterly useless.
Over here the labels are 'junior', 'medior' and 'senior'.
They are primarily used as a pay-scale indicator. It's not that recruiters are dumb and looking for fresh graduates with 3 years of industrial work experience, it is that they are looking for people with 3 years of experience that will accept working in the 'junior' pay-scale knowing that it will be 2-3 years before they move up to the 'medior' payscale.
Many/most companies in the IT industry fail to have a decent technical 'ladder', so upping the 'label' once every two years while basically not changing the job is way of pretending that your developers are having a 'career'.
Traditional 'entry level' does not exist at most places as the bulk of companies don't want to pay for the training/mentoring phase. Too much overhead given the projected short career span.
In the UK, I've noticed more companies moving to Entry -> Junior -> Mid-level -> Senior.
To me, this makes sense, as it allows easier access for people re-training or coming in outside of school without a degree. Graduates come into junior roles due to their degree, whereas school leavers or those that have re-trained spend some time as an entry-level developer.
I've worked with a few entry-level developers, and they've worked their way up through companies to land senior-level roles in a few years. Sure, it took them a bit longer than a university graduate, but there was a route into the industry for them. It was a bog-standard job (agency dev for clients) but when opportunities are few and far between it's a great way to get passionate people in.
Readit News
"Entry" means "to enter the workforce". It means you have pre-work experience such as a specific degree, speak a certain language, etc.
If you advertise an "entry level web development" job and I just boot camped for that, I am qualified and will apply.
If you want "Junior Developer", say so.
(Comment by someone that this is a gimmick to reduce salary sounds pretty right on.)
Sadly title inflation is also a thing.
"Senior" implies "Highly Experienced" meaning "lots of years of experience".
Whereas it's completely possible for a person with 3-4 years of experience to be a "Very Good Engineer" within their specific domain and be as valuable, respected, listened-to, etc. as a "Senior Engineer". It doesn't happen often, but it happens.
If we had titles more like "Apprentice", "Journeyman", and "Master" Software Engineer, then we wouldn't have this issue. Someone could be a Journeyman after 2 years or 4 depending on how rapidly they progressed through their "apprenticeship" phase, and to "Master" as soon as they had completed sufficiently complex work to have completed a "masterpiece" equivalent.
In the Bay Area culture, 3 years is enough time to jump jobs once:
And my lifelong experience is that such pepole have pretty good careers, better then humble more self aware people.
As a qualifier, it is a demotion from “Developer” alone. A Junior Developer is less than all the other ordinary, plain old general Developer roles.
It’s basically a paid intern role.
The only people who would ever accept such a title are kids who don’t mind being marked, appropos of nothing, before first impressions are made, as a lesser subordinate, untrusted with serious decisions.
When a recruiter, hiring manager or HR contact offers a Junior role, it means you get paid less.
In a world where business cards and email signatures serve as pretext for introductions, you see a title with Junior in it, and it reeks of green college grads.
I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market?
The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this is possible.
I recruited for several years for my companies too. First thing I noticed, there is huge variability in CV for each country. When I receive a CV from an indian person (from India), I don't know if I should expect 100% lies or what, even from qualified seniors. On the other end, I could put my hand on coal if the same CV was written by most germans. Which is bad, because the CV or cover letter become essentially useless as a metric.
To reduce the number of applications we introduced simple tests to submit along with the CV. It does wonders, but I personally hate it. As a senior dev, I keep asking: would I apply to my current application? I have to answer that no, I wouldn't. I have plenty of public projects to investigate my abilities if needed, and I do expect some minimal amount in investment from both parties when hiring.
We also raised the requirements from applicants ridiculously, essentially expecting them to work on core features from tomorrow. Again, completely unrealistic. And again, by our own wording, I would be afraid to apply. We are definitely selecting over-confident candidates (or desperate).
And it's sadly also true that the industry has no apprentice jobs anymore, although there is plenty of need. There are some career paths where I would jump ships despite my lack of expertise to follow my interests. Starting from zero doesn't stop me, but there are simply no opportunities: junior jobs are not really junior anymore. They are simply paid less.
FOR LOTS OF APPLICANTS
Send every single applicant a nice, warm email with a link to a coding assessment[1]. Doesn't have to be anything particularly in-depth: just something that requires an hour or two's work from the candidate.
Result: all the people who put slapdash applications together will self-select out at this stage (you won't even hear back from them) and you don't have to send rejections. This will probably eliminate 95% of candidates right out of the gate for you, and when you have 500 applicants in a single month this is going to make your job a lot easier. You'll be left with 25 people who are genuinely interested and, depending on what you're looking for, you might have 10 that are worth interviewing.
IMPORTANT: for the relatively small number you reject at the assessment stage, you should send them some real, and reasonably detailed, feedback as to why. This will generally take around half an hour per applicant. People don't do this out of fear of getting into an argument with the candidate (and, of course, because they don't have time): in practice this seldom happens, and can be diffused quickly when it does. Most candidates appreciate the feedback and, key point, you won't start dehumanising applicants and turning yourself into a worse human being.
FOR FEW APPLICANTS
If you're not doing an up-front assessment, which we don't at the moment because we're a relatively unknown company so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply, send everyone a nice email inviting them to a 20-30 minute telescreen.
Your email should lay out the format of the telescreen: we'll spend some time finding out more about your experience, and do a screenshare (or Google Doc share) on a short programming task.
Result: all the lazy or uninterested applicants will again opt out, doing most of your work for you.
KEY POINTS
- In both cases you can focus your finite time and energy on the better candidates, rather than on sifting out the worst.
- You can give every applicant a more positive experience overall (think how many times you've heard the complaint, "I applied for X job and the company never even got back to me"). You also avoid ever having to send out those crappy two-line pro forma rejection emails that just about everyone hates.
- It'll keep you more positive and energetic because you're not spending loads of time having to be critical and negative about swathes of applications, and the people you do end up interacting with, you actually have the time to invest in ensuring that they have a positive experience, whether you offer them the job or not. This is hugely important because I think, of all the jobs I've done - and, granted, this does depend somewhat on your personality and temperament - recruitment is the one with the greatest capacity to turn you into the kind of person you wouldn't like very much (I realised it was happening for me when I did a long secondment in recruitment for a previous employer).
- By giving everyone a positive experience you'll gain a better reputation for your company, which should translate into attracting better candidates. Certainly, the other way, word travels, and if you offer a ghastly candidate experience people will be put off applying. If you're Google you can get away with it because so many great people want to work for you regardless of how drawn-out and overwrought the process is, so it doesn't matter that some great people will be put off because of the process (still I don't recommend it, and I question the value of all the hoop-jumping). If nobody's heard of you, making the process straightforward and pleasant is the way to go.
[1] This might sound cynical but you can totally automate this process, and if you're getting that many applicants it's probably worthwhile: just make sure the emails go out within business hours, and that there's at least a few hours lag between an application being submitted and the email response going out, so it feels like it's from a human being. Also, and this goes without saying: use the applicant's name. Lots of ATS's don't (or didn't) have APIs, but since you'll only need to target (say) Firefox, browser automation with something like Selenium can work really well here.
They all look the same.
There is now way to tell if a position is any more than remotely relevant, because job postings are all the same.
If you want a group (prospective employees) to sift itself (only apply to jobs they want or are qualified for), you should make a concerted effort to give them the information needed to do that. Unfortunately, no one really does.
Recruiting sucks, so let's focus on making it better, rather than just complaining about the userbase.
Not the ones you 'don't like' - the ones that don't even make sense.
That process of filtering out folks using the blacklist should be automated and the blacklist should be public.
I wonder if that'd make recruiting jobs almost pointless in a large number of cases however. It sure would make one think twice about spam-applying, knowing you might get blacklisted for spam.
2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview.
3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)
I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
Can I not work in tech without being passionate?
If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable.
But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position.
Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications:
https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...
The trouble is, they so not like to give out salary brackets.
Something to note there is, how much attention is being paid to each listing. For the jobs you've applied and gotten, you probably were a really great fit.
Having reached a point of being on the other side, looking for people to hire, I think there are really warped perceptions all around. If your hiring, you aren't swamped with great candidates but with resumes. Basically, most resumes go in the trash, but because most of them are hollow, there was nothing there to start. If you're actually skilled and can demonstrate it in any way then its far easier to find a job. I think most of the people who apply to 200+ jobs to get one either are not skilled or don't know how to demonstrate that they are.
This has led me to actually be nervous about the prospect of having to interview, because was my success a fluke? Or had I found great fits for jobs? Both interviews I remember getting in to quite technical but off the topic conversations with the interviewer so I presume that was the success bit?
I'm at ~700 jobs and only had 1 offer that was pretty bad. (Optics and/or Bio-tech)
When I was in highschool I did not understand that it was really about who you know (I was homeschooled, so I didn't have a school network to reach out to for jobs), and went applying for typical highschool retail/fast food jobs willy nilly and never got an offer. It's because I was lacking someone who could "intro" me in to the organization. Now I can't really imagine trying to apply for a job cold.
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My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out.
Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number.
So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring.
But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.
Until very recently I was frontend lead for a fairly large UK site, and one of the best hires I ever made was a 32 year old former-recruiter with no commercial programming experience, and no CS background.
However it was far from plain sailing. We had mutual friends and whilst chatting in a pub, and they won me over with their passion and enthusiasm for what I discovered was their dream job.
I brought them on as a jr, into a small talented team with measures in place to ensure there was the opportunity to learn on the job and appropriate tasks to work on, but it quickly became apparent they were out of their depth. I worked on mentoring in work and and pointed them in the direction of stuff they might look at outside of work to dodge the bullet.
My work started to suffer because I was spending so much time mentoring, fixing code that had become irrevocably tangled and trying to manage a very stressed & frustrated jr dev.
Eventually I had no choice but to move them into a different team where the work was less technically demanding and more html/css focused, with a small salary cut. Everybody was disappointed with the situation but the alternative was letting them go.
Three years later, that dev rejoined the core engineering team a more experienced developer, passion intact, and having learned their trade in a lower pressure environment, comfortable they could handle the role. I'm incredibly proud of them for the way they handled the situation and am absolutely confident this time will be a success.
That said, it'll probably be the last time I hire a dev with zero development experience. As an investment in an individual it's incredibly worthwhile, but despite the happy ending, the whole experience was fairly disastrous.
An understanding of basic concepts obtained in the ways described above is very different from 0 experience. And on paper to a recruiter, what I've listed above counts as 0 real-world business experience.
edit: it is nice to hear this situation worked out for you though!
Hiring college grads without a lot of real world experience gives you the opportunity to mentor and train in good methodologies that I find older developers will refuse to implement without incessant fighting.
It is more work initially but the long run payoff has been fantastic in my experience. When you manage based on yearly expectations that are attainable life is so much more enjoyable.
The biggest key is management and upper management buy-in. Sadly that's exponentially more difficult to get when most places see IT as a sunk-cost instead of an opportunity to deliver more efficient workflows internally and externally.
I'm on the fence about working with developers that don't have college degrees. The gaps in their skill-set frequently causes issues no matter how much experience they've had.
Also, we're hiring. :) If you're sick of spending all your hard-earned education and experience to help Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. increase ad CTR by 0.001%, we're working on some pretty cool technical problems. Just email me at kushal@talent.works.
j/k, but I am curious how much time you think is average for a job search in terms of both hours spent and days/weeks before finding something. You talk about "time and stubbornness" but I'm interested just how much time and how much stubbornness. I realize this varies widely by industry, but I would expect there's some sort of white collar average.
To your specific Q, yes, it does vary dramatically by location and specialty. In fact, we did an analysis about exactly that a few months ago! Even for white-collar positions, it ranges from ~14 weeks (software engineers) to ~90 days (HR specialists) to >>90 days (mechanical engineers):
https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...
When you dig in, even specialties that take the same time have very different reasons. For instance, mechanical engineers see a pretty high interview callback rate to job applications, it's just that there aren't _enough_ mechanical engineer job openings out there! OTOH, there are tons of HR specialist job openings but you need to apply to a million jobs to even get one reply.
You need to demonstrate that no candidates with skills are available to get a visa waiver. It’s called compliance advertising. There’s a whole industry of body shops that do this stuff and collude on rates. The folks they hire are the foot soldiers of banks and government.
It means 3+ years with a technology. It means don't walk in the door out of a Java college having used nothing else and apply to work on a Triple A game written in C++. It means don't show up after a weekend html course and apply for a job using Node/React. And before you say "well that isn't me for so and so reason", it happens ALL the time to employers.
An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch. It means that you are at least capable enough to work on small or easy problems and features and an employer or other devs can coach you along the way and you'll know what they are saying to you.
That's all it means (to any reasonable employer).
I know a Github profile shouldn't necessarily be required to count as experience. But if your only experience is non-work related then you're probably going to want to back it up with something tangible.
In fact, they stated nothing to suggest they were looking at tech firms specifically. You seem to be reading into this what you want to see.
> An entry level position does not mean you get to learn on the job from scratch or near scratch.
These are just number made up on the spot by people who can't be bothered to think about it.
When a job lists a requirement for 2-3 years experience, it means 2-3 years of industry experience.
I don't have 10 years of Python experience because I started coding when I was a teenager.
I learned more about programming in Ruby from 6 months on the job than I learned about Python from 3 years of using it at university.
There's the rub. Early in my career when I had little working experience this CONSTANTLY bit me. It didn't matter that I did consulting on the side or that I worked with the technology or even that I went to school and used the technology there.
In my experience almost all of non-tech companies and maybe half-ish of the tech companies would require the experience be on the job at a company.
Now I don't know how indicative my experience is. I don't know if this type of information is tracked anywhere.
As an aside I'll never forget the one company I applied for who was looking for a developer with 5+ years experience in using .Net Framework... in 2003.
When companies say 'entry-level', they seem to be referring to around 2-3 years of working experience. Not just college + internships, but actual professional experience. It's an extremely silly market to be in right now if you're a fresh grad.
All this talk about passion or numbers aside, I've had the opportunity to experience things from the other side and see how many senior-level developers with 10+ years of experience couldn't write an if-statement in their choice of language to save their lives, or even elaborate on basic design choices/decisions.
Once you have guaranteed interviews, from there it's just a matter of finding a company with the most lax interviews or one where you can fake it the easiest. At least that's my best guess; I don't fully understand how someone can work for a company for over a decade yet can't understand basic OOP or fizzbuzz-level challenges. It became a serious issue at my company because most of the senior-level candidates we got were utterly useless.
They are primarily used as a pay-scale indicator. It's not that recruiters are dumb and looking for fresh graduates with 3 years of industrial work experience, it is that they are looking for people with 3 years of experience that will accept working in the 'junior' pay-scale knowing that it will be 2-3 years before they move up to the 'medior' payscale.
Many/most companies in the IT industry fail to have a decent technical 'ladder', so upping the 'label' once every two years while basically not changing the job is way of pretending that your developers are having a 'career'.
Traditional 'entry level' does not exist at most places as the bulk of companies don't want to pay for the training/mentoring phase. Too much overhead given the projected short career span.
To me, this makes sense, as it allows easier access for people re-training or coming in outside of school without a degree. Graduates come into junior roles due to their degree, whereas school leavers or those that have re-trained spend some time as an entry-level developer.
I've worked with a few entry-level developers, and they've worked their way up through companies to land senior-level roles in a few years. Sure, it took them a bit longer than a university graduate, but there was a route into the industry for them. It was a bog-standard job (agency dev for clients) but when opportunities are few and far between it's a great way to get passionate people in.