We are deeply honored to have received your application (which we did not bother to read).
We’re sorry we didn’t hire you, but also never contact us again.
Signed,
Someone in HR who has nothing to do with this process.
At my old company I offered to help with the hiring. I said we should make job postings and just see if a great candidate applies.
My CEO told me "oh, we already have some postings. Let me give you the credentials".
I log in to (BreezyHR). There's over 2,000 applicants in the last 6 months. Tailored resumes, cover letters, everything. All the effort people put in to applying. Never even acknowledged by someone at the company. Reading the cover letters from people saying it would be such a great fit was kind of sad.
I've stopped tailoring resumes and doing cover letters. As someone who has been on the hiring end, they make maybe a small difference but the amount of time spent isn't worth the potential upside.
Keep in mind that the people doing the hiring don't want to be reading resumes either. That's why networking is still the best way to land a new job.
Oh, and also, all the information in your CV that you also painstakingly rewrote into our forms, is going to be spread around to other companies who will use it to send you spam and phishing messages.
Good luck with your future endeavours of staying sane with others trying to get money out of you, that you don't have.
I once had to post a position that was specifically made for my employee, but my recruiter was awesome. I told her there was no possibility I would pick anyone else, so she suggested I make the requirements hyper specific. So, I met with my employee and we worked up a list of 10-20 things that she had done in her career and put them all in as requirements to qualify.
I received no other "qualified" applicants, so I only had to interview the one. My next meeting with her I said, "this is your official interview, do you have any questions for me?" She said "no" and I congratulated her on being selected for the role.
Job postings like yours are extremely common when the applicant has been pre-selected but the company still requires an external posting. Your applicant likes off-grid hiking, is a hobbyist drone pilot, and enjoys grilling?
Now the job posting for a IT position requires an applicant who is capable of accurate pathfinding using a paper map and compass, two years of drone pilot experience, and four years of culinary experience.
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Yeah, that's how we did it for my PhD position as well. Someone still send an application anyways but they were clearly not fulfilling these hyper specific requirements so my prof didn't have to invite them :)
I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.
Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasn’t the X they were looking for.
Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the role—and the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying they’d done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.
That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.
Never again.
… come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if they’d just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And I’m way happier with this company than I would’ve been there.
The Universe does funny things.
Never do more than 3 interviews. And that's assuming they're relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don't want you bad enough.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
I worked at a job for a long time as a contractor. I was originally hired as a temporary filler, but they liked me so well that they kept me on, and let other lower-performing contractors go instead, despite me being the newest. Eventually due to economic downturns they released all their contractors, including me.
A few years later as the economy recovered, they brought me back as a contractor again, with the intention of hiring me once a position became available. Months later, one did open up and they specifically told me to apply for that position as an internal hire - but they would have to open it up for external applicants too.
I was a tad annoyed that some external applicant could in theory swoop in and take my “promised” position away from me, even though I’d been doing the job for years and was clearly the favored candidate.
I felt bad for the external applicants who probably never really had a chance, but at the same time I felt I’d earned that job.
I did get hired, of course, and I am still at the company to this day - fifteen years later. And I’m up for another promotion at the end of this fiscal quarter.
I'm fine with internal preselected individuals getting positions and promotions. What is universally disliked is us also getting interviews only to find out later they were a waste of time for this exact reason.
It also sucks for the hiring manager who has to interview candidates they know they won't hire just to stick to the process. It's a waste of everyone's time.
How does the old saying go?
Ah, yes: "This is funny because it is true"
Where science?
Academia counts as the realities of working in a lab. This is a big thing in academia.
Nothing lab-specific about this though, it's the case for every industry!
I guess human science?
Having been on the other end of this where they picked an applicant from outside so they could pay them less, despite more than one person being more qualified and already working for the company, I'm not sure who's side to be on here. On the one hand, if you've already got someone lined up for the job, this is disingenuous. On the other hand, if someone already working for you can do the job but you don't want to pay them what they're worth, that's just messed up on several levels.
Companies do 2 things:
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lie to you
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underpay you
If you are going to play the game of working in a corporation, the best time to apply to new jobs is the moment you get one. Loyalty died a long time ago, so don't pretend your manager is on your side.
Or also go freelance and never let 1 person control your income. In capitalism, money is freedom. If someone controls your money, they control your freedom.
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It's a real bummer interviewing these external applicants that you know won't get the job. Like I wish I could just let them know, but we're required to go through the entire interview process.
As someone in the inside, what's the rationale behind having to publicly post jobs like this? Why can't you just offer the job to the person you want to give it to?
It's because of anti-discrimination laws. In some US states it can be illegal to hire someone for a position without posting it publicly. The concern is that if you're not posting the job publicly, it can be because you want to prevent certain people from applying.
When you do post it publicly, the company can demonstrate that they allowed anyone to apply, show records that they considered multiple people for the job, and then decided on the internal candidate as the best fit. No room for a discrimination lawsuit.
Source: I'm a hiring manager at a multi-billion dollar company and have actually learned a thing or two from annual compliance training over the years.
In academia (my line of work) they’re required to have positions posted and open for a certain amount of time, interview a certain number of applicants, etc.
In theory, it’s for equal opportunity and finding the best person for the job.
In practice, it’s a waste of time, money, and hope.
Likely corporate and/or legal politics. I would imagine things not unlike EEOP loopholing would play a big role in it. (Yes, gov'ment we are offering this opening to "anyone". So, send that funding check right over)
