Ask HN: Why is applying for jobs such a pain?

What sort of work and where specifically are you in Europe? For instance if you are in London and have some skills from the last 10 years and work experience I would think getting contracts or permanent would be fairly straightforward.

If you can build up a contact network you'll have a greater chance of finding something interesting with people you like. This is where LinkedIn comes in handy.

Yes you may have to wait a long time if you are focussed on a particular company or work area.

So far it felt as i would choose my job. It was always easy and straight forward. I also have several friends that see it similar. I honestly have no idea what is broken, so i wouldn't be a help fixing it. If you dont like the hustle of doing this yourself, there are several agencies that do exactly that for you (usually even better). Europe too btw, Switzerland tho

> Why does every HR department re-invent the wheel?

HR must justify its importance and value by making things hard.

It's frequently observed that HR is the bottleneck in the process. If line managers (as they often do with smaller, more nimble companies) took on the actual responsibility for recruiting & hiring-- you would find process much more amenable. Avoid HR, focus your job search efforts on speaking with the senior executive(s) who you can help.

If you're applying through a company's website / job portal, you've already lost the game.

You need to network and get your foot in the door through a personal reference.

Try angel list and hired.com (although I don't know if they service the EU).

The problem is you're waiting for an advert to be released before you apply to a job.

If a job is being advertised on a job board or by a recruiter that is a signal that they are out of options and struggling to hire.

Paid advertising is the last port of call when trying to find candidates. Good companies get sent speculative applications directly - even before there is an open post.

Jobs are then advertised internally, existing staff speak to their network and make direct recommendations as soon as it goes external.

If they have to, companies often advertise (for free) on industry specific sites to cut straight to those people with the right skills (like the Jobs page here).

If that fails then it makes its way down to the general pool of jobs. That opens companies up to a huge volume of applications which makes filtering the best candidates out a very difficult task so it frequently gets poorly automated.

Start looking higher up the chain. Circumventing this process is actually part of the application.

Think about who you want to work for and apply before they are looking.

Because hiring is akin to dating and therefore it suffers from the same problems:

1) It's mostly about subjective impressions and often weird ideas of what a suitable date/candidate must be. There are no official rule books or guidelines about how to proceed. It's not about hard skills and efficiency, it very much revolves around soft skills, presentation abilities and invisible chemistry.

2) More often than not both parties in dating/hiring aren't serious about conducting a transaction and getting to a serious business. It's about meeting new people, hanging out, checking the pulse of the job market but no more. Misrepresenting oneself, one's abilities/features and intentions is the norm with both dates/candidates(companies), which leads to a lot of frustration and bad feelings, keeping the success rate of activities in the both fields rather low.

Different industries, similar problems. And for the both of them no technological/software solution in sight.

P.S. See how "candi-date" is linguistically just a particular case or subset of "date". Just another validation of the point.

I don't know about mobile-first and I am not sure it really matters in the jobhunting space. But I'd suggest looking at StackOverflow Jobs for a developer oriented resource:

https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?t=c&r=home

I'm convinced that most companies have the application processes they have because it gives them the candidates they want. The reason the application process at some companies is so one-sided, non-transparent and makes you jump through arbitrary and ever changing hoops is because that's a skill they value. Most likely, that's going to be a daily requirement of the job.

Startup companies want to think they're hiring the best and brightest, so they follow the interview practices of companies or people they think are the best and the brightest. People who can pass those interviews are the candidates they want because, in their minds at least, they're Google quality programmers.

job hunting is not fair game, you can't wait for the job to come on a newspaper or job website to apply for it. many times it happens that the job is posted for policy purposes but the hiring is already done in the background. this sounds unfair, but it is the truth. job is something that helps you get on with your life and places the food on your table. so its only common sense that people who are already in power of recruitment would give the job to someone they already know and call in the favor afterwards, instead of posting it publicly and hiring a complete stranger.

I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago. Due to a lot of the reasons you listed my advice for developers is to reach out to senior developer/leads/architects/managers/cto's at companies they are interested in working for.

I work with 85% of the bigger name tech companies in Chicago and they don't always have their roles posted online. Most of then have urgent roles with no roles posted online because they rarely get any good resumes from it and instead rely on recruiters.

Cold email/linkedin message someone at the company you may be interested in working for and I bet they would at least get back to you. At least you wont have to fill out a job application.