Something which is annoying me. This wasn't the case 10 years ago. Even for a senior or management role. Two interviews max.
This Business and Moment...
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Something which is annoying me. This wasn't the case 10 years ago. Even for a senior or management role. Two interviews max.
What makes me laugh is my Mrs got rejected by a company, their first choice ghosted them and then they came back and offered her the job. She's one of the longest serving people, highest performing (to the point they offered her professional qualifications to retrain in tax which she did) and in a current board level issue one of the directors not even in her chain demanded by name that she was on the Taskforce as she seems to have a fearsome reputation of getting things done correctly. She used to be a company board level secretary (company house secretary and FD PA) and so the work ethic of getting things done carried forward into this role..
I'm coming to the conclusion that a large portion of company issues is actually manifesting itself from the way HR works and filter people only made worse by AI and automation.
I'm coming to the conclusion that a large portion of company issues is actually manifesting itself from the way HR works and filter people only made worse by AI and automation.
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Soldato
There's a bunch of stuff happening the week before my start date that ideally I wouldn't miss... so down to London it is for 4 days before I have officially started, will take the time back over the next couple of months
I've just received a CV for a job application that:
1. Uses Comic Sans as the font
2. Has been printed, photocopied, and then emailed as two separate JPEGs. So combined with the above, it is barely legible.
3. Lists the applicant's date of birth. In the first sentence of the CV the applicant then refers to their age, which doesn't match.
I haven't even read beyond that yet.
1. Uses Comic Sans as the font
2. Has been printed, photocopied, and then emailed as two separate JPEGs. So combined with the above, it is barely legible.
3. Lists the applicant's date of birth. In the first sentence of the CV the applicant then refers to their age, which doesn't match.
I haven't even read beyond that yet.
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The whole employment market is going through turmoil akin to the political shifts. It's a self reinforcing issue.
A company uses digital media to attract new applicants to a role.
The role is ill specified and doesn't take into account variations of interpretation or desire to grow into that role.
The company is overloaded with the number of applicants with varying capabilities, strengths and weaknesses far wider than previous decades.
The company then use AI tools - forgetting bad data in = bad data out.
The company then doesn't trust the HR pipelines it's created and opts to spend more interviews to get precisely the right person.
The effort for an applicant rises in line to get past those steps, to then address the multiple interviews, leading to higher competition as the application hedges their bets and may receive multiple offers leading to ghosting.
When the applicant arrives in the role - often the role and the HR doesn't align (although the long interview process should enable discovery of this by the applicant) which leads to churn.
Companies change more rapidly in line with rapid change of markets at the moment, leading to roles changing in 18months (most digital deliveries don't take more than that) as their business cases are typically yearly, thus increased in the short term employment clause to terminate people rather than make their roles redundant. Essentially substituting the traditional contractor with a short term employee. No need to offer culture to short-term staff which on face-value reduces costs, but costs the business holistically far more.
Increased competitive job market (see points above - it's not really competition but noise), makes employers believe they can turn down the employee culture and increase productivity by attempting to reinstall corporate culture. The result is increased churn.. increasing noise.. making it harder for applicants and company alike.
It just seems that there's a couple of points:
* clarity in defining the role and what that means, true to the actual role.
* hiring for the person's true strengths/skills rather than the keyword matching (CV buzzword bingo)
* hiring people to flex with the company - you can hire/fire or hire/transform, the issue is companies has such a high turnover that the ratio of 'new blood' vs stability is vastly pushed to the former, but that is undercut by rapid churn by design (hire/fire) and churn.
In short if you want to compete - hire bright people and let them transform and take on new challenges, and perhaps consider that the structure of the company is wrong (and should be operating a reassignable pool). Don't hire bright people, pigeon-hole them into a misleading role and then don't invest in them.
People may find a matrix/reassignable pool organisations soulless but if the company is operating short term changes only and not long term operational products, then it feels many companies are operating incorrectly.
Bit if a rant but better out than in.
Soldato
Got through to the second interview with a role that came out of nowhere but is a similar role for similar money but with a more interesting company in an exciting sector in a better location. Also sounds like their performance management puts their money where their mouth is and rewards people.
Trying not to get my hopes up, but the recruiter says I’m top of the candidates they’ve put forward. Hard to know if it’s bull though.
Trying not to get my hopes up, but the recruiter says I’m top of the candidates they’ve put forward. Hard to know if it’s bull though.
Interesting day, meeting with senior manager (A) who knows nothing out side his specific area, yet has oversight for half the IT projects, and another manager (B) who reports to (A) but blocks everything.
(A) didn't understand anything in front of him, thought fully a finished project, was not working, because (B) has been blocking a 2 min configuration change for years. (A) didn't understand or want to deal with (B's) frankly incomprehensible explanations, so (A) is going to just outsource the whole thing, and wipe his hands of it. Meanwhile (B) and any one who invested anytime on it, has just wasted their time.
(A) didn't understand anything in front of him, thought fully a finished project, was not working, because (B) has been blocking a 2 min configuration change for years. (A) didn't understand or want to deal with (B's) frankly incomprehensible explanations, so (A) is going to just outsource the whole thing, and wipe his hands of it. Meanwhile (B) and any one who invested anytime on it, has just wasted their time.
Tbf with my experience with recruiters, I don’t think they’re BSing when tbey say stuff like this - simply because they won’t waste time on you, if there are any doubts or issues.
I find with recruiters, if you’re not already top, or close to the top of the pile - they just ghost you relentlessly and you get nothing.
Ahh the joys of ivory towers! Blind leading the blind?
I just had a message from a recruiter for a new trading platform CTO position, only concern is this feels like a Japanese board hence will be highly complex - I'm not sure if I have the skills for it. I also don't think there's much demand for yet another trading platform with no market penetration currently.
Great post
This is similar to something I was talking about with a recruiter not long back. Essentially - he was tearing his hair out, because he gets a role to advertise for a client and within 3 hours he has 200-300 applicants.
On the face of it, it feels like there's a lot of competition as out of 200-300 applicants - you'd think there would be a good chunk worth hiring. But it's actually not the case - out of that 200-300, there usually ends up being less than 10 worth considering, and maybe 2 worth sending to the client - where they get rejected, and the recruiter has to start again.
So there's this illusion of it being a competitive market, but in reality - it seems to mostly be a small number of high quality candidates, padded out with lots of spam and it's making recruitment a nightmare.
To add to this, I have some irons in the fire with two of the biggest Algo trading firms at the moment (just finished a final stage with one and I'm flying out to the Netherlands next Friday for another final) and with one of them - in the early stages of one of them I had a Hackerrank test.
I wasn't sure about the test at first, but I actually thought it was a great idea - most of it was prose, with some coding and a few multiple choice questions - it took me 2 hours, but I did well in it, I later found out that 90-95%% of people fail it.
There's so much noise in the market, it felt like a good tool to weed out the serious people - which feels like a very difficult thing right now.
I feel that recruitment agencies get a bad wrap - they're given a brief, typically one of many in a short meeting along with all the other account business.. typically that job description is has been mashed by HR and the hiring manager but then edited by proxy by the line management.. the resulting job spec then is a failure in writing, the agency is then word matching because they don't know the reality of the role being offered.
It would be more beneficial if the agency spent 2-3 hours "in the role" to build up the specification, agree it and then sign it off. It would also ensure that the agency staff had enough technical understanding of the role to be able to credibly sift and locate individuals.
I think hackfests are excellent to gain understand and truth. I know one place I worked with actually had people come in and peer-develop for the day. The same can be done for product or non-technical roles - but hackathons are a large and expensive event to organise. It's better if you can combine multiple disciplines and see how fast the teams can generate a solution.
It's almost like you need a HR/agency hackathon to weed out the agencies that don't understand the subject/ask.. then keep those that do for the next year. Utilise those only those participants for the staffing requirements.
Soldato
I'm being made redundant on the 30th, our game comes put on the 4th Oct 
Just set myself up as a company and secured a big project. It's all go here!
In an industry that's on its knees at the moment, (game dev), I feel I've been very lucky
Just set myself up as a company and secured a big project. It's all go here!
In an industry that's on its knees at the moment, (game dev), I feel I've been very lucky
Soldato
Hope they paid them, because can guarantee if someone wanted me to interview with them I wouldn't be giving them a day's work free of charge. I'm not a big fan of the whole system of interviews for tech with things like LC/HR these days, because they're never, ever relevant in my experience.
I'm not sure of the commercials - this is was a third party partner at the time.
Nice, I'm very tempted to go freelance myself. We should talk!I'm being made redundant on the 30th, our game comes put on the 4th Oct
Just set myself up as a company and secured a big project. It's all go here!
In an industry that's on its knees at the moment, (game dev), I feel I've been very lucky
I got the news last week that we're all being told to be back in the studio 3 days a week from April. I made it very clear when I joined that the 2 days a week is right on the limit of what works for me with the commute.
I've told them they need to choose whether they want to keep me on, because there's no future in which I do that bloody drive 3 days a week. Pretty sure it will end with me handing my notice in. Which sucks, I'm a manager, and I don't want to leave my team, and the job is decent (although bloody hard and a right mess of a project).....but I'm pretty sure they are going to choose to drive a whole load of talent away instead of taking a common sense approach to the new policy.
They are all doing it now, look at Amazon. Soon as they announced they want everyone back in the office from next year. All the other tech companies are following like Lemmings.
They job market is crap at the moment and they know this. I dont think people are going to say "oh well, I return back to the office full time." All the good talent will just quit.
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