Ask HN: For those trying to hire how hard is it to find people currently?

Seems like hiring has been broken forever. Even with the plethora of job sites like LinkedIn it doesn't seem any better. Someone who can come up with a better way of matching up candidates with hiring managers could do really well, but apparently the problem is quite hard since there's been a lot of attempts but not much success.

>Tech people reporting that it's hard to find a new gig right now and hiring managers reporting that it's hard to find people right now.

It's hard to find people with the desired skills at their offered price point. Simple as.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this is a question of credentials.

I don’t know any experienced people with solid skills who also have degrees who have been having difficulty.

I know one good one, but without a relevant degree who is struggling. I also know lots of boot camp/recent grads in iffy masters programs who aren’t getting anywhere.

I am aware of a few hiring processes that are just inundated with people who don’t have a relevant degree that keep restarting as a result.

So it may simply be that standards rose more than actual availability in the market did.

It doesn't help when salary is rarely disclosed on the adverts, so those only casually looking won't want to invest any time into the process - only to learn the salary is not within their expectations. It's a complete waste of time for everybody involved.

You expose some meat(job ad), soon there are 10,000 flies on it(applicants), so out comes the Raid(screen) - the harder you spray, the less flies, but you want a superior fly(applicant) - what to do? Less Raid? Then evolution selects flies immune to Raid. In online search and online work you soon hire apparent good flies and a few months shows they lack buzz, = costs/time wasted. For small companies, friends of friends etc does work, but the IBM's and Meta's need swarms. You can either do detailed online tech screening with your capable people using their time, or hire a specialist company with(or who have a retained pool of expertise) to do the deep search. Twas ever thus = probationary periods etc.

There is no labor shortage.

I'm working at crypto startup that grows fast right now. There is enough candidates, but we can't find anyone good. We aim for seniors and we pay a nice price IMO.

Current "seniors" are much worse than 2016's "middles". I'd not mind hiring a "middle", but people seem so unmotivated right now to work and learn. It's more about the attitude than skills.

Also funny stats: For 15 candidates interviewed we even got "scammed" thrice (fake CVs, one was basically copy-paste from other people, stolen code presented as their own). We hired one person so far.

For freelancers, I am occasionally seeing extremely low hourly rates (linkedin), targeted at (I assume) Latin America. i.e. $15-$20 is the lowest, but sometimes $35ph. (Pretty shocking, but if it works out for everyone, good luck to them). I know companies that are only hiring from that region, where previously they were hiring Americans.

Generally, I'm seeing hourly rates 40%-60% lower than a year ago (for senior roles). It's pretty crappy.

Even when I apply to them (with those rates), 95% of the time, I don't get a response. (This has been talked about a few times in other threads, mainly to do with cover letters).

Are all these layoff I keep hearing about, really screwing things up to this extent? I'm confused on wtf is going on.

A couple weeks ago we put a advert out on Indeed and also listed it here on HN. Initially we didn't have any further qualifications beyond the job post, which did indeed go into details on the job and requesting a cover letter.

After spending a couple days of 2-3 hours each on reviewing resumes that were "only ok", we started adding additional hoops for getting resumes in, and also tried to put in a gatekeeper to really urge applicants to write cover letters. After that the rate has dropped to bearable, but we still maybe get one out of 10 applications with a cover.

So, if you are applying to a job right now, I'd say that rather than optimizing your process for getting a lot of jobs applied for, spend some more time and apply for jobs that you're well suited for, and then make a cover letter that explains why.

I've been very lucky, I've not had to apply for many jobs. But when I have, I always wrote a specific cover letter AND customized my resume to the job advert.

But, yeah, we're having a hard time finding full-stack people that can hit the ground running with Java and Vue.

As someone casually looking for a better fit as an infrastructure person, it can be disparaging for some of these portals to keep stats on interesting jobs. I'll open up an email advertisement, to see that sometimes >10,000 people have applied for this single role. I'll chuckle and close that tab - I am not a lottery player and I will not drop my resume into an applicant pool twice as large as my town.

I would say my personal cutoff is about 25, whether these statistics are trustworthy or not.

Most so-called opportunities feel like scams anymore.

Navigating the current job market hardly seems worth the risk, considering I've already got a stable, fairly well-paying job.

My observation is that there were recent (2022/2023) layoffs that have now flooded the job market in tech with lots of unfortunately mediocre candidates. Therefore, it is both challenging to hire and challenging to find a job. I don’t think it’s that there’s any lack of good tools to use to find candidates. And great engineers are still just as hard to find, as companies are very reluctant to fire top performers even in mass layoff rounds that affect the rest of their division.

I think the “hard on both sides” nature of tech hiring is the desired end result of the “hiring industry” (indeed, freelance recruiters, leetcode, HR bureaucracy, etc.) the incentives are just like any other intermediary: make their services ubiquitous, unavoidable, and in constant need.

These services, like most others, sell something that cannot be bought. Namely, high quality candidates delivered to the hiring managers door. But in reality the incentives are more similar to Tinder than they are to a matchamker. Get everyone on both sides in a pay-to-play whirlpool and provide just enough value to seem useful.

In many industries hiring is still done primarily in-person through real-world network referrals. Maybe you tell yourself that these jobs are more fungible so the extra steps aren’t as necessary, but I think that as developers we underestimate our own fungibility.

We've had two positions open on my team for months. Filling them has been a struggle. There's no lack of applicants, but none of them have the needed kind/amount of experience.

Pay isn't the issue. I think there's three reasons why this is the case: we need genuine senior-level people, web/internet stack technology experience isn't relevant, and there's a requirement to work in the office. I mention that second one because the vast majority of applicants we get are Java/C#/etc. programmers and we need C/C++ ones.

Hopefully, the company will at least give a bit on the office requirement. I think if they did, we'd have filled these months ago.

I generally keep an eye on (web dev) job ads. What follows is all anecdotal, but such is the nature of the question.

Once the talk of possible recession started (earlier this year), postings fell off. Also salary range seemed to have dipped. As in the hiring company was looking for more for less. It appear many were fishing for better talent, recently downsized and desperate of steady income. Sure, such people exist. But when you sense it from a job ad, it's not a good look.

Since the beginning of Sept (read: end of Summer) it feels like things have picked up, and there's less bottom feeding. I've been getting interviews steady enough but in nearly all cases in the first five to ten minutes I find myself thinking, "Why am I here?" The point is, I often feel companies post ads but the ad doesn't actually refect their needs, or they are for some reason confused about their wants and needs. It's very annoying.

At my company we put engineers (instead of HR) in charge of job descriptions, resume review, and phone screens and saw a sharp increase in quality of candidates we interviewed.

For me, it’s still the remote thing. I’m a principal, couple decades of experience, I’m still seeing quite a few approaches on LinkedIn but almost all are wanting a few days a week / month in some “fantastic” office in some city. Nope.

I think it's just the after-effects of the layoffs working their way through the system. If you want to read something that makes you feel better, I'll give you a link... But more than that, I'll explain the meaning behind it that you might not pick up on unless you've worked around the press/PR industry.

The link: https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-boss-laid-off-staff-p...

The deeper story: Business Insider does not write these stories themselves. They just take articles basically "pre-written" by corporate PR/press flaks and reprint them... Maybe, maybe, _maybe_ they might reach out for a "pushback/response" quote and add "x,y,z refused to comment for this story" if they don't get a response within a couple hours. Or they might spend 5 minutes fact-checking something - but probably not: if it's a source they "trust" who gives them articles that make their life easier by feeding them stories people click on, why bite the hand that feeds?

So what? Well, this story was written by _AirBnB_, most likely at the behest of Chesky either directly or indirectly. And the narrative essentially reduces to "Brian Chesky cares about the people he laid off". Why would he pay people to create that narrative? I won't lead you all the way there, but suffice to say it's good sign.

Hiring pipeline have been extended to absurd lengths and now are extremely successful at achieving their true purpose: avoiding hiring anyone. There's no good reason for the current state other than pathological laziness and extreme fear of ever having a "bad" hire where bad means anyone who can't be productive their first day in the office with whatever weird frankenstack the company has implemented.

There's no shortage of intelligent people who could fulfill your company's needs but there is an extreme shortage of unicorns who will work for a junior/mid salary and be able to produce senior level work instantly. Everyone struggling to hire will deny all of this but they also will recognize it completely because it is the simple truth.

Blow up your pipeline, tell your HR department to buzz off with their navel gazing requirements that aren't job related, and most of all, tell your hiring managers to get over their fears and their laziness. The Earth won't spiral into the Sun if you have to train someone on your department's specific needs and should you hire someone who just never adapts, the universe won't snuff out of existence because they have to be let go and you have to look again. Companies have been hiring tech resources for longer than most of us have been alive (yes, even if you're from the mainframe era) and it's only recently that this madness has taken hold to a level that everyone is self paralyzing. Get over yourself, you and your company just aren't as important as your hiring process implies. Billions won't die from a famine if you hire someone who only understand half your stack and some of what they do understand is a dated version. They'll learn and if you treat them well (you do treat them well, right?) and don't do headcount reductions each time Wall Street feels a slight breeze, you can build up a competent team. Or you can continue the madness and profess endless confusion as to why you're unable to find anyone as smart as you to do the work you need done.

We finished a hiring process about 2 months ago, along with two other hires earlier in the year. As a hiring manager, 2023 has been brutal — 1,000:1 application to hire ratio (based on stats in Lever; no exaggeration).

I’ve made a point to try to be as open and as fair as possible in our hiring process. We list the salaries up-front in the job description. We create per-hire ”join our team” pages that share a lot more about the role, including the exact hiring process, links to docs with interview prompts, timelines, and who you’ll interview with. We don’t require any formal studies; we hire globally through an EOR; we don’t change salary based on where in the world. We’re also a non-profit with a compelling mission and interesting technical challenges. We want to hire people who bring different viewpoints and add stuff to our team, and where we can give them a good professional experience too.

A few observations on folks who are applying:

- About a third are just outright unqualified. For example, one of the roles needs folks with experience in Postgres at a medium level (triggers, plpgsql, replication, PostGIS, etc) and we’ll get applicants who’ve only used an ORM to work with Postgres). We have a few screening questions that literally confirm the required skills listed in the job posting and use these to auto-reject applicants. (Again, nothing unfair or tricky; just literally “have you used features like triggers or replication in Postgres?”)

- About half seem like good candidates from application but are obvious-no’s after either several-minute examination of application materials or a 20-30 minute call. (Generally failing a screening call because they’ve exaggerated on their resumes; haven’t read our “join our team” page that we ask them to read before our call; have red-flags in our call; etc.)

- The remaining ~15% are reasonable folks for us to do technical interviews, and it comes down to how much their experience lines up with the areas we need and how well we can asses their skills in interviews. (Two-way street, of course… lots of chances for them to ask us Qs!)

Where it’s been tough is filtering through the top of the funnel. In part: ChatGPT has really made a difference, in that many candidates are now using it along with much more sophisticated tools to track all their potential jobs. I think it’s _good_ in some ways, but previously we could use the ability to write well (resume, answering Qs like “why do you want to work at our company?”, communication in email) as a good proxy signal of overall effectiveness of communication. (For a fully distributed remote team that does its work via slack and GitHub, this is a relevant skill.) So we’re now having to do a _lot_ of extra work to try to be fair to everyone and keep bias as much as possible down. (I had to hire a contract recruiter to work with us - it used to be resume screening and initial calls were an average of 45 minutes a day; it went to 3 1/2 hours this year; as a CTO there’s no way I can spend that kind of time).

I don’t know what the solution is — it feels like a bit of an arms race. For every company that’s trying to run a good process, the extra application load is a real cost; for companies that aren’t particularly thoughtful, it makes it worse for the candidates.

I’d love to hear what others think about anything I’ve shared. What can we as hiring managers do to make it easier for you? And: what can we do to make it easier on us?

It's incredibly easy to find people, there's a huge surplus of talent and very few opportunities going. You can scoop up top engineers laid off from big tech companies for small change right now.

Finding people is easy.

Finding talented people is harder than before.

It was talented people who were not laid off (mostly, generalizing ofc).

So now we have a huge surplus of untalented, average developers applying for all the jobs en mass.

Signal to noise ratio is worst I’ve ever witnessed.

I interview ML engineers for our team. Juniors are relatively easy to hire. If you know some fundamentals and can do leetcode you’re in.

For seniors the bar is much higher because they will be expected to provide leadership and strategic guidance.

At my company, I feel the biggest issue is execs don't want to pay more to get good people and don't want to do anything to make it more attractive to work here.

The last person I hired was at the start of this year, and at the time our salary offer was around market average. For this role we (well the execs... I'm pro WFH but not my call) were asking people to be in the office four days a week and work non-standard office hours. Most of the applicants we got were living in cities far away and not willing to relocate - even though the job spec clearly stated this is an in-person role in this city.

One person we interviewed seemed like the only thing they were interested in was growing their Twitch subscriber count. Then we interviewed the person we ended up hiring, who I'm sad to say we only hired because they seemed the least bad - and by that point we were desperate for someone, and worried execs may cut our budget.

Oh and for anyone wondering, the role in question just needed standard frontend React skills. Nothing special.

Data point from Berlin/Amsterdam/Munich/Dublin/Madrid (plus EU remote in general): we've been hiring around 100+ seniors/leads/staffengs (backend/frontend engineers) in the past 9 months, and it's been quite easy. Healthy influx, no major delays.