The tech hiring market is like a disfunctional dating pool. Lots of companies complaining they can’t find good talent, and lots of talent complaining they can’t find good companies. Is it too high standards on both sides or on one side? Is it a broken matchmaking system?
I think about this a lot. Here's a little brain dump:
Too many people are playing a numbers game, which creates a lot of noise. The noise makes it easy to miss good connections.
Inexperienced people (on both sides) are looking for the wrong things and just like it is w/ love, a lot of us need to learn the hard way. Wanting to date the most popular guy/girl in school is the equivalent of wanting to work at a "company everyone knows."
A few years later, we want to meet someone who is "ambitious, interesting, and has a good sense of humor," which is maybe like wanting to work at a company in an industry you can get behind. It's less superficial, and we have some direction here, but it's still too vague. (A lot of people are drawn to health and education not because they're truly passionate about either, but simply because it'll be easier find purpose/meaning.)
After a heartbreak or two, we finally figure out what our deal breakers are. Examples: I can't date anyone who cares a lot about fashion. I'm very attracted to people who dress well, but it turns out prioritizing it means attention and money is spent in ways I can't get on board w/. Similarly, I can't work anywhere that has a lot of mandatory meetings. Counter intuitive because I'm very extroverted and social, but meetings destroy my productivity. I would have never known these things 10 years ago.
Resumes and "dating profiles" don't give us a full picture. What we really want to know is: "Are we truly compatible? Are our goals and values truly aligned?" Those things take time, introspection, and research. However, it feels like job searching/sourcing/recruiting is going in the complete opposite direction (ie. "let's email 1k engineers every day, maybe 1% will respond").
This creates the noise that makes it hard for people who've figured out what they are looking for to find it.
I think this is part of what the advice is trying to say.
The noise looks like noise. It's the guys who say "Sup babe?" to every girl on dating-app-de-jour.
Standing out from the noise isn't hard. But it does mean at least writing a cover letter for each job app that shows you've done more than just copy/paste your generic details and cv into every role on $jobSite's new listing page this morning before you left for work.
Saying "Hey, I see you like live music, wanna go see $coolBand next Thursday? Oh, and I really like your hair in your 3rd pic :-)" isn't gonna "win you the girl", but it's going to be much less likely it be insta-deleted than "Sup babe?" sent to everyone.
> Resumes and "dating profiles" don't give us a full picture. What we really want to know is: "Are we truly compatible? Are our goals and values truly aligned?" Those things take time, introspection, and research. However, it feels like job searching/sourcing/recruiting is going in the complete opposite direction (ie. "let's email 1k engineers every day, maybe 1% will respond").
100% agree on this point. But it’s a hard problem to solve. How do you go about finding the best candidates? Just like in the dating world, the best candidates are already taken.
I don't know that you need the "dysfunctional" qualification to that statement.
It probably suffers from the usual problem: people want to work at a place that is too good for them (whatever that actually means) and companies want to hire people that are too good for them (again, whatever that means).
And it gets deeper too. From both ends. Nobody knows what they're doing here...
Most mediocre devs overestimate their abilities - while many of the truely top devs severely under estimate themselves.
The recruitment process/chain at many companies severely overestimates their desirability as an employer ("If selected, you'll be given the privilege of working at this traditional corporate bank, working on 6 year old Windows desktop development machines, under overpaid architecture astronauts who's suits cost more than your weekly take-home, on strictly waterfall projects. But we'll still expect you to be in the office at 9am for the mandatory "Agile Standup"!!!)
It is probably a combination of a) the standards being too high on the employers' side and b) the opportunity not actually being there... Employers are only willing to hire people that are a 'perfect fit' presumably because they can wait which would suggest that there isn't much pressure to fill the position. They often wait longer to fill a position than it would take to train/bring someone up to speed on their tech stack.
