Hate to say the obvious, but it's all about supply and demand. The field I was working in 30 years ago was "hot" and the hourly wage has dropped at least 5x since then.
Sure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
Throw into the mix any immigration concerns and you have a perfect cocktail for stress :)
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
"Sometimes the best way to search is… not to search." Last line of the article and man... it hits! All while applying and going through multiple interview processes, I was taking a break: traveling, fishing, and reading.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.
This essay just makes me feel so hopeless about our society. I don’t feel it’s right that employment has such weight in people’s lives that the search causes psychological damage.
I've been thinking about job searching lately, maybe a bit too much. I'm employed, so it is not any immediate concern for me, but one has to think ahead.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
> "You’ve spent several months sending out scores of carefully tailored resumes and cover letters for jobs you know you are fully qualified for and would excel at."
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
So for an (employed) developer like me, who is dreading the next job search, what's a "hot" profession I could train myself on so my experience in the job market over the next 15 years could be like it was in the salad days of 1996-2022?
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
Sometimes you just need to look locally. Chances are there are positions available close enough to your home that its worth the following effort. I have personally walked into places I was interested in working at and asked for an engineering manager. About 50% of the time, a manager comes out to meet me. I show interest, they show interest (generally, and even if they are not hiring). This has lead to much improved chances of getting an interview over just filling an application or email through a network. People like to see and get a feel for the people they might end up hiring. Face to face puts you ahead of the pack. This technique is critically underutilized. Obviously, if your only interested in remote positions, this won't work very well. If the org is big enough, you can try to locate a nearby satellite branch or office to find a person who can tap you in.
There are no jobs. I'm being stalked and fucked with in San Francisco. Constantly. Everyone here is insane and most people are sick. Life is pointless. I'm just waking up and doing something and then going to sleep in a shelter again.
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
@phoenixhaber, you're in a very dark place, no doubt about it, and it sounds like you've been there a long time. I've been in that dark place and I feel for you. Let me just assure you that dark times do give way, eventually, to light. If you need a rational basis for that claim, think of it as regression toward the mean: extremes, good or bad, move toward the non-extreme. Things will get better.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
Jobs are aggregated into gigantic boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, and the market is national or international. You can choose among thousands of companies, but you're also just one potential applicant among millions. The cost of applying tends to zero -> number of applications increases. The only way to succeed is by sending out an absurd number of CVs. Numbers that would have seemed inconceivable a generation ago before everything moved online and globalized. It's normal to send out hundreds or thousands before getting hired.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
How do you reconcile your experience with the common narrative that there is a huge shortage of tech workers in the US and, hence, the H1B/H4 programs?
What nonsense. Does he really think his friends are sharing the full extent of their difficulties? There is an exquisite feeling of shame, guilt, fear, and anger that goes with being jobless for the first time and making zero progress with the job search. When your savings is gone, when your credit cards are maxed and in collections, when you're selling your stuff to pay for food and electricity, when you're about to be evicted (and have no idea what to do with your stuff because you can't afford storage) - and you have to keep trying. Keep a smile on your face, act confident and happy because no-one wants to hire you if you're a drag. You revise your resume, you apply to tangential jobs - but you don't get any response, no interviews and no offers. The one you do get is a disinterested indian guy at a bank who is clearly not even hiring right now.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
This is very well said. It's horrifying, but very well said and very true. Sometimes the situation is just plain bleak. I have been unemployed for more than a year twice; I've been unemployed or underemployed for about 5 years in total. This despite accomplishing great things while employed and being well-regarded at past jobs. For me, each time the cloud has eventually passed and new work has come along, but that doesn't help until it actually happens.
Oh how I would love to just stop looking for jobs for a bit and leave it on rest.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
The thing that bothers me so much about this post is that it reeks of privilege by treating unemployment as if it were mainly just a bad trigger that you talk to your expensive therapist about once a week.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
Burnout is real, and it’s worth talking about, but it’s a luxury to be able to even think about rest when your bank account is at zero and you're juggling survival
My most recent job search had 30 interviews with 21 companies (you read that right) in 24 days. Rent was due and there were mouths to feed. Unemployment simply was not an option.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
A colleague, who is very accomplished in tech industry (but not rich, for good reasons), said he would be in town, and asked to meet.
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
> simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillets
I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.
The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
Last time I was unemployed for an extended period I thought I would put my skills to good use by hunting for bugs and contributing fixes to open source projects.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
I'm sorry you had that experience, I can certainly empathize.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
If you don't like how an open-source project is run then you can fork it, or start your own competing project from scratch. That's the beauty of open source.
As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.
The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
Been a couple of years since I last was an interviewer, but I’m always amazed at people who blatantly exaggerate in-depth experience while seeking a highly technical position.
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
I wonder if we are back to “who you know” because of a couple of factors:
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
On the hiring side too, and I really don’t understand the fake resume with AI trend. How can they possibly think they’ll pass the interview? Because when I’m hiring I find it very easy to spot someone lying when questioning to go into the details of past experiences. Maybe they are betting on a broken process? Maybe you can pass (dumb) HR filters with lies, but not real interviewers, at least from what I do and have seen.
The fact that even well-meaning hiring managers can't see great candidates because of filtering overload says a lot about how dysfunctional the current system is
> As someone who's recently been hiring (sorry folks, position was filled just a few days ago), it's wild to me how distorted things have become.
Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
>A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic.
In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?
Going through this right now. I hired someone about 8 months ago and the process was still pretty normal. But for the role I opened last week, we are getting a ton of AI-written resumes that are just a rewrite of the job description.
When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day.
(The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.)
While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.
The problem today is AI makes everything worse. Its jamming communications channels, and what you get once those channels are saturated is the equivalent effect that you see in cellular networks culminating in RNA interference.
No binding sites, no matches.
Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people.
Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works.
Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.
80 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 1383 ms ] threadSure, in the last 20 years I did "development" work which was related but more advanced (24 hours a day stuff, it's always in your head) - but once those efforts were complete, so were the jobs.
My field was laboratory science and I still take solace in the fact that 200 years ago, only the rich (or minimally subsidized) ever got a chance to to touch this stuff. But solace doesn't pay the bills.
Maybe take on volunteer work? Once you get involved, it leads to stories and sharing and new perspectives. I've done a few thousand hours over the past 15 years. It feels good. You chose to do it. You see results and have new ideas. Maybe even a new business.
Presumably the computer science departments will continue to churn out more supply for a while yet.
Something seems really off about this system. At least in tech, I see a lot of open recs and hiring. Im even seeing some teams struggle to fill open recs. It should be possible to build a system that matches workers to jobs without going through this dumb and stressful process.
I was in the job search after leaving the GOV for about 3-4 months. I had received offers but they were all less pay or less flexibility than before and I wasn't willing to compromise. All the "big and sexy" start-ups required 3+ interviews, most I had was 7, and they still ended up deciding I wasn't a fit.
I reflected often that I was in the wrong line of work... not being able to get what I had wanted. With some rationalization and imposter syndrome gone, it ended up being LinkedIn and my connections that had saved me. Living proof that network and connections out last technical prowess unless you're the best-of-the-best at something.
I’m not sure that the process the author describes is all that common in practice even if it is eminently sensible.
Between age discrimination that starts after 50, and how difficult the job search seemingly is...some people will have to work at least until they're 70. That's a solid 15-20 years more, after the job hunting is an uphill battle.
If the work search is hard while you're at your peak, professionally speaking, how are you supposed to be stay positive after that?
Me and my partner are doing everything we can to achieve some minimum level of FIRE, just in case.
I've also accepted that sooner or later, probably the next 10-15 years or so, I'll have to accept the fact that I'm going to end up in a lifer position. If FIRE can't save my ass, I simply can't afford to hop around.
That’s a long enough tech career to retire. I don’t know you, but I know that even 65 year olds with 6 million in the bank are nervous to retire.
People should not do this. It is causing so much suffering. In my 6 jobs in my career from college internship to startups to Big Tech, I have never gotten a job from sending an application into a site. It's always been through (somehow) tracking down a person to speak to over phone or coffee, and get a referral.
A form is not going to a hire you, a person is. You need to ignore the form and talk to a person.
I wish I could put this on a billboard everywhere. It seems like many people are suffering from thousands of applications, and it makes me sad.
And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.
(I'm making a pass at "learning AI" but don't feel 100% certain that demand for that will be sustainable at a high level over the next decade ...)
They give me sick to their kids as some sort of sick joke and wait for me to die. I had someone put fentanyl in the coffee they served at de haro church while I was lugging fifty pound bags of potatoes to give to the poor. Cool way to fuck up someone's back. Because they're insane and murderous. It's like that shit everywhere unless you have money and can hire private security or a group of you and your friends have a secret way to poison people.
I've asked construction workers if I can do shift labor for cash and they always say no. Fucking bonkers. I hurt all over more or less all of the time. There are people that have had their entire bodies melt from disease from being exposed to weaponized sick here.
There's absolutely no point in giving a shit about anything anymore. I'm just waiting to die truth be told.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
Economists look at this and see only an improvement in market efficiency, but they're ignoring the emotional toll. Reject, reject, reject, reject, drip drip drip every day like water torture. It's the same thing on dating apps. No wonder people give up.
Then you think, oh well I can find some sort of job, right? Even if it's a service job. Wrong. They won't hire you with your resume. I applied to Trader Joes and was ghosted. The only people who'll 'hire' me are day labor places that pay $13/hour for digging ditches - you just have to show up at 4:45am and hope you get called on. Then there is also substitute teaching, $109/day and you have to shell out the $85 for a background check on yourself to even get started.
Long before all this starts you cancel everything that can be cancelled. You might keep internet thinking it is necessary to find work and work remotely, but eventually that goes. You even let your car insurance expire, playing the odds. You sell everything you can. You keep looking. You go through periods of terror and sanguine acceptance. No-one really knows what you're going through - the people you do tell don't know how to process it, or what it really means, and some of them get offended that you'd burden them with this when more important things are happening in the world, like Gaza or Trump.
There is something perverse about starving in the middle of such wealth. When you have always been one of the smartest people in the room, you have a ton of real-world software engineering experience and have built real systems that service millions of people, and you are discarded like you are nothing for apparently no reason. You wonder if it's you, but you hear growing rumbles of it happening to others. Honestly, I hope its just me because if this happens to us in any great numbers you WILL start knowing people who couldn't get back on their feet. I find it easy to imagine the two kinds of reactions: he must have had some problem to not get a job, or if only he had reached out I could have helped! Both useless, both avoid responsibility for your "friend" in need.
Unfortunately I am selling things off right now to not go homeless and refusing to apply to jobs is an admission of defeat to me. Said as a (former?) tech worker.
For most people in the real world, psychological burn out is NOT the problem with unemployment. The problem is becoming homeless.
Thanks. You hit the nail on the head.
There are several drops in lifestyle you have been accustomed to, before that happens.
I consider myself exceptionally lucky to land where I did, and yet still would not care to do that process again.
He strangely didn't say why (not even "to catch up"), so I thought it was probably that he had a new startup or executive role, and he was going to pitch recruiting me again.
But immediately after sitting down in the cafe, he said he was looking for work, and asked for my advice.
I hope I didn't laugh. Since I was in a similar boat, after a startup got disrupted. I wasn't seeing hardly any good job opportunities, so I wasn't feeling like someone who should be asked for advice on job-hunting, except as a cautionary tale.
Quickly moving forward from there, we had a good talk, exchanging thoughts and ideas, but neither of us had direct opportunities to give.
What's really dumb is that the world has capable people who spend huge amounts of time and downtime, simply getting permission to apply their hard-earned valuable skillsets.
It's grossly inefficient and unpleasant. We know some of the reasons, but it's still dumb.
I dont think its this. I think its just brutally hard to earn a return on investment right now. For whatever reason, innovation has disappeared from the market. There's a lot of things changing with generative AI right now but very few actually valuable ideas have come out.
The real challenge today is finding problems to solve that people will pay money for.
Only to mostly be ignored, bugs closed as WONTFIX, or finding out many open source developers aren't really interested in fixing bugs, rather some self-aggrandizing labor of love.
That's when I learned to stop working for free.
Open source isn't working for free, it's working for connections instead of money. I find this way of thinking about it useful: my first order goal is not to fix a bug in the project, it is to do a favor for the human being(s) behind it.
If you're really contributing and aren't getting the reward, by all means, walk away and hack on something else. But it's also important to have some humility, and recognize that most of the time you don't get that reward, it is because you simply aren't being helpful.
The hard truth is that nobody is going to help you figure out how to be useful. They're just going to say no.
We had 1200 applications for an extremely niche role. A huge amount were clearly faked resumes that far too closely matched the job description to be realistic. Another huge portion were just unqualified.
The irony is that there actually _are_ a ton of exceptionally qualified candidates right now due to the various layoffs at government labs. We actually _do_ want folks with an academic research background. I am quite certain that the applicant pool contained a lot of those folks and others that we really wanted to interview.
However, in practice, we couldn't find folks we didn't already know because various keyword-focused searches and AI filtering tend to filter out the most qualified candidates. We got a ton of spam applications, so we couldn't manually filter. The filtering HR does doesn't help. All of the various attempts to meaningfully review the full candidate pool in the time we had just failed. (Edit: "Just failed" is a bit unfair. There was a lot of effort put in and some good folks found that way, but certainly not every resume was actually reviewed.)
What finally happened is that we mostly interviewed the candidates we knew about through other channels. E.g. folks who had applied before and e-mailed one of us they were applying again. Former co-workers from other companies. Folks we knew through professional networks. That was a great pool of applicants, but I am certain we missed a ton of exceptional folks whose applications no actual person even saw.
The process is so broken right now that we're 100% back to nepotism. If you don't already know someone working at the company, your resume will probably never be seen.
I really feel hiring is in a much worse state than it was about 5 years ago. I don't know how to fix it. We're just back to what it was 20+ years ago. It's 100% who you know.
Job Requirements: Senior Staff, Deep technical work in X, Y, Z
Resume: 10 years as tech lead in X, Y, Z
Reality: Once walked near someone with experience in X, Y, Z and heard them sneeze loudly. Can spell X correctly.
Why do they even bother?
1. The risk of a bad hire is great, and this de-risks that
2. It facilitates more natural and spontaneous conversations, which for better or worse short-circuits a well crafted and pre-planned anti-bias interview process which can be too rigid for both parties to explore detail
Then why would have unrealistic expectations in the ad?
Same here. I have been hiring and it is a shit show. We advertise one position and get inundated with resumes. Many of these resume are complete fabrications, so we cannot rely on them at all. So we implemented a filter by asking candidates to do a small project. Candidates do not have to hand-code it. We encourage candidates to just use AI for the simple project. Only about 10% actually do the required work that typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete with AI assistance. Some get offended that we even dared ask them to take the assessment test and start using profanity to let their displeasure be known. Quite strange.
Can you elaborate on why you consider a close match to the job description to be unrealistic?
In government work programs in British Columbia, we were taught to address every point or requirement in a job listing that we could. Is this tactic clearly distinguishable from clearly faked?
When I look many of these people up in linkedin, they often have jobs listed but completely empty descriptions of each job. I guess this is so they can have AI generate a rewrite of their resume based solely on the job description for every role they apply. This used to be too labor intensive to do, but now with AI it's easy to churn out a hundred of those a day.
(The more careless ones leave their actual job description on linkedin and submit a resume with a wildly different version, which just happens to be a rewrite of our job description. At least those are easy to filter out.)
While I don't like this, I'm finding that I need to find the person on linkedin, it must not be a recently created account and it must have a reasonably detailed description of what they did in each company and it must reasonably closely match the resume.
No binding sites, no matches.
Additionally, if competent people can't find work within 2 short years, they will leave that sector forever and retrain. They may have been rockstars, but that doesn't matter. No work, no food, bad investment. When you have coordinated layoffs across sectors you have a short period of time to scoop up the competent people.
Its not immediately clear, but it seems like you either skipped over the part of filtering properly (and didn't do it?), or just jumped to this other strategy when what worked before no longer works.
Instead of trying to wrangle the data, why didn't you put a physical barrier at the very beginning. A simple validation, this is your CV, you are this person, and you have a valid DL with that name, and then you whittle down from there.