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Tech Recruiting, You Have a Problem | by Brenton Poke | Nov, 2021 | Medium
Published:
A while ago, I came across a joke resume filled with buzzwords which managed to get a higher response rate than a truthful one despite it including:
- the personal website pointing to a Rick roll
- numerous porn star references
- “spread herpes STD to 50% of intern team”
- “mine ethereum on company servers”
and more.
It should have no business getting shortlisted, but even when they replied to recruiters telling them it’s a joke they didn’t care. The brand names were enough.
The conclusion for this is that tech hiring is broken as most recruiters only look for unicorns with perfect experience at superstar companies.
In short, companies don’t know how to evaluate tech candidates.
I don’t want to talk a lot about tech hiring because what the hell do I know, but I’ll leave with this:
Honestly, recruiters should rethink their entire profession. They should actually learn what the org does, what it uses and what they’re looking for. They should then spend all their phone time actually getting to know candidates. This will mean recruiters reach out to fewer people, but that’s just fine because most of us are ignoring you right now. And hiring managers need to get real about what they need. I intentionally didn’t say “want”, because you honestly don’t deserve everything you want. When hiring managers go to recruiters, they should be asking for no more than programming competence (look at the damn github) and general knowledge or exposure to specific technologies. This would likely bring a shock to the staffing industry if done widely enough, because they would likely downsize and many of those former employees could end up working directly for former clients. Overall, I think that’s a good thing. Recruiters need to understand the jobs they’re recruiting for better as well as the candidates themselves.
Given all the criticisms of tech hiring, I don’t know how you can make a process that makes everyone happy. People would love just to be given the job regardless of aptitude since every evaluation mention has flaws that are exclusive one way or another.