Diversity and recruiting developers

Posted Jun 8, 2013 17:43 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Diversity and recruiting developers by giraffedata
Parent article: Diversity and recruiting developers

I can't take a manager seriously when he says there is an engineer shortage while writing, "must have two years experience with Python and HTML under Solaris in the financial services industry."

Why? You need people who will work well with other members of the team, but you can not just write that in advertisement: you'll see "harassment", "discrimintation" and other such words on a letter from a courts and in the end you'll have bunch of useless people who will just demand "fair treatment" instead of doing what needs to be done. Thus you write very specific requirements to have a valid reason to reject candidates you don't like. Cases where candidate indeed fits all the requirements are so rare that it's worth trying to accept even "feels bad" candidate: perhaps if he's so well accustomed to the position already his other quirks can be tolerated?

I have noticed, though, that when people hire people they know, they don't pay any attention to lists of skills. They'll cajole the candidate into taking the job as the candidate protests, "I've never done anything like that; I'm not sure I could."

Well, sure. Why not? Technical skills are rarely a reason to reject or accept candidate (well, except may be for the most basic programming skills), but since you are not allowed to use other characteristics of candidate in the official rejection letter...

to post comments

Diversity and recruiting developers

Posted Jun 8, 2013 18:52 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (3 responses)

you write very specific requirements to have a valid reason to reject candidates you don't like

How does that work? I'm talking about the solicitation for candidates; so how do you even get a candidate to evaluate if you state requirements no candidate has? Do job seekers ignore the requirements in job listings and apply anyway?

Or maybe the listings aren't real solicitations but just formalities, as another poster suggested, and the authors of them actually recruit a different way.

Diversity and recruiting developers

Posted Jun 8, 2013 18:59 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

How does that work? I'm talking about the solicitation for candidates; so how do you even get a candidate to evaluate if you state requirements no candidate has? Do job seekers ignore the requirements in job listings and apply anyway?

Sometimes, yes; after all, there's a decent chance that the skillset requirement was written by the PHB or Catbert instead of the people who know what the jobs actually require.

Or maybe the listings aren't real solicitations but just formalities, as another poster suggested, and the authors of them actually recruit a different way.

This is also a possibility. Often, a meticulously tailored job description means "we want to hire J. Specific Hacker so we will write a skill set that is exactly the skill set of J. Specific Hacker; in the event that someone who is J. Specific Hacker only better applying, well, we might hire them instead".

Diversity and recruiting developers

Posted Jun 8, 2013 22:05 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

> This is also a possibility. Often, a meticulously tailored job description means "we want to hire J. Specific Hacker so we will write a skill set that is exactly the skill set of J. Specific Hacker; in the event that someone who is J. Specific Hacker only better applying, well, we might hire them instead".

Yeah, but more often is like "int the event that someone who is J. Specific Hacker only better applying, well, don't bother because we are going to hire J. Specific Hacker instead."

Diversity and recruiting developers

Posted Jun 13, 2013 12:40 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>Do job seekers ignore the requirements in job listings and apply anyway?

Yes, and that's why the kind of practice khim suggests is bad business practice (in addition to being blatantly immoral and arguably illegal).

These requirements basically mean that the only candidates they get, by definition, are the kind of people who ignore requirements - I don't want to work with people who will happily ignore requirements. Who does?