Ask HN: Recruiters, how bad is the hiring market for candidates?
With so many layoffs happening simultaneously right now, and so many companies with hiring freezes, layoffs planned, or other prohibitive measures taken, I can imagine that the amount of candidates applying for any one role must be a lot.
Tech Recruiters: Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?
Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?
How intense is the competition presently for roles?
Without going into too much detail, I’m about to enter the job market, and I’m terrified
56 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadFirst things first, take a deep breath and realize it will all work out one way or another. The worst thing you can do right now is lock up, so put together a plan and just put one foot in front of the other.
Right now, start talking to everyone you can, leverage your personal network and hit up everyone you can to see if they have open gigs. That guy that you worked with 10 years back, hit them up. Ask them if they know anyone who is hiring and if they can intro you to them. The person you met at a conference last year, hit them up too.
If you are getting laid off, just think of your new job as finding something new, gaining new skills to be more marketable and connecting with as many people as you can.
As someone who is looking at the moment, straight up, it isn’t a great time to be looking for something new, but you will find something eventually, even if it’s just a placeholder until the market comes back around.
You're getting a highly biased view of what is really going on in the job market because some high profile Tech companies laid off people. Their leaders are not liked so everybody has an opinion about it.
I've been at companies in the past that had huge layoffs, but they were boring companies that nobody cares to talk about on HN or Social Media. If Cisco, Oracle, Siemens, Coca-Cola and a bunch of boring companies laid off 50K+ people over the course of a year the news would not care and nobody would realize a ton of people just landed in the job market.
Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.
I didn't say the market is fine. I said it's not as bad as one might think based on social media.
I lived through the .com crises and the mortgage bubble. People in my neighborhood were getting laid off across industries and jobs. People in my family and extended network were getting laid off. If you didn't get laid off, you'd know people who got laid off. Most of my career has been large boring companies and a lot of people I know work for large boring companies. My org in my company has slowed hiring, but still has openings for "critical" jobs.
That's absolutely not my experience at all right now. I know people who are jumping jobs and getting large pay bumps. Granted, some of that is slowing, but it's not like 2000 when the only response you'd get on a job site was somebody from an insurance company asking you to be an "entrepreneur" by becoming an insurance agent.
That's subjective.
What if you want to work for a large unicorn or FAANG? Yea, the job market is pretty bad right now then.
I could imagine it's harder on early in stage career people, because that first job can be harder to get. My resume helps I'm sure.
> Have you noticed that more people are applying for the same roles?
Seeing a slight increase in qualified candidates, not much of a change in unqualified candidates. By unqualified, I mean, as an example, a fresh bootcamp grad applying to a Staff level position.
> Do you have less roles to recruit for than before?
Have the same amount. Had a hiring plan, still have it, still working on finishing it up for the year.
> How intense is the competition presently for roles?
Not very. We're on a glide path to meet our hiring plan for the year without the pipeline being dry or being over-full. We're able to consider candidates individually without needing to hire anyone just to make the numbers, or reject people simply because we have too many applicants. If you're a good fit we make an offer.
I graduated into the Great Recession. This is nothing like that. You’ll probably be able to get in at the entry level for whatever you’re going into professionally (or better).
I do know the fear of entering the market. Heck, also the fear of graduating into the workaday world in my early twenties with not really anything other than a degree. So I’d say be on the lookout for an entry point into whatever. If you’re going into tech then Help Desk/Service Desk work is a standard starting point. Programming, making sure you have a portfolio on GitHub and do your leetcode prep. I don’t know your exact point. But that first job can last as little as 6 months, even less, or even more. But once you’re hired you’re “off the ground” and that’s the key.
[1] https://ira.asee.org/national-benchmark-reports/workforce201...
HN is very in touch with a segment of the tech sector that has seen a huge downturn. If you’re asking about positions where you’ll be making 300k in 5 years as a software engineer, I would say you’ve come to the right place and you’re probably right that those positions are even harder to come by than they were before the downturn. (I don’t really know, though. I’m just a code monkey at a normal company.)
Regarding putting food on the table and living an extremely comfortable life as a software engineer, don’t worry lol. I’d imagine the average hired competent programmer is starting at the same thing as they were before the downturn (that is to say Amazon, Meta, Twitter, etc. haven’t had a statistically significant effect on the job market). Anecdotally, my fintech company is ramping up hiring tech right now. Take a deep breath and relax, you’re in a very safe industry. (Unless you’ll only be satisfied by 300k and up, in which case I have no idea what’s going on and can’t really relate anyway.) Most if not every company has software to build; you might not be the core value generation, but the pay is still way above what new hires are making outside of software.
There's a lot of panic in the job market because everyone follows what happens FAANG + Twitter, and a disproportionate amount of engineers want to work in the top 10 tech companies. You will always find work in the top 500 companies in my opinion.
I believe a more important factor is that the sw engineering job market is still a seller's market. Many large and well-known tech companies still struggle to compete with the tech giants. Even if several of them have frozen hiring.
It is difficult for me to agree with the very popular notion these days that the epoch of employee's choice is now over. Perhaps for FAANG and a few more exceptions. But I have been referring tens of very skilled engineers to my company and I often heard they have accepted other offers. From my perspective, employers must still compete for good talent. Maybe even entry-level talent, although maybe not so much.
Could it be because the top 10 tech companies pay well?
I know I could easily find jobs which pay 150k. But why should I do that if I can put in some effort and get a 250k job?
If you look at the larger trend, unemployment is really low and current trend of bringing back manufacturing from abroad guaranty that there will be jobs to fill in the near future. Things should also get better next year. Results will have been published and the energy market should get back to normal. Don’t worry too much.
Here in EU, my employer is struggling since early this year to recruit enough talents, as no one will accept an offer without full-remote or at least 95% remote contract, even if the pay is pretty good(adjusted recently with inflation) and they just live next door to office. Times like these are probably safe in non-sexy non-unicorn corporations and ancient businesses which are not into hip online businesses. :]
These company acronyms are getting out of control, is this twitter|tesla, apple|amazon, meta|microsoft, alphabet|adobe, netflix, google?
I have a few inferences here. There's a lot of talent in the pool right now, but A. They're being scooped up by more attractive companies B. They're not feeling desperate enough to work at a boring company. Both of those would indicate that people are still hiring, and they're hiring for desirable roles.
There's a lot of gloom and doom at the big tech companies right now, but it doesn't appear to reflect the state of the entire industry.
In summary, +200k jobs are scarce (FAANG companies), 75~100k and 50~74.9k have steadily job supply.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
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