from Hacker News

You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

by pixelcort on 11/28/18, 4:51 AM with 245 comments

by carlmr on 11/28/18, 2:19 PM
I've only once ticked of roughly 95% of job requirements. I didn't get the job. They actually cited the 1/20 requirements I didn't fulfill and said they can't hire anybody who doesn't have that.
They wanted a 100% candidate. Looking through the list of the things they listed as must haves and that they wanted an internal candidate I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would even find a better candidate for this position.
The position had been open for almost a year. I think there's a reason. These are probably the same people that go to the press and whine about a shortage of engineers.
EDIT: Made a small mistake there. Anyway I only mentioned it after the interview was over. Not during.
by paultopia on 11/28/18, 7:02 PM
From the "methodology" section of this post:
First, we randomly sampled 6,348 applications for 668 different users from TalentWorks. Then we extracted the qualifications from the original job postings and the users’ submitted resumes using proprietary algorithms. Finally, we grouped the results based on qualification match and regressed the interview rate using a Bagging ensemble of Random Forest regressors.
This is... not plausible. Effectively, they're trying to infer causality here, not merely do prediction. That has to be the case, because this is presented as useful advice---to go ahead and apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications. But when you're trying to infer causality you're doing social science, not data science, and that means you need to worry about omitted variables.
Here's an example: what if less qualified people who nonetheless apply are more confident. And what if that confidence is associated with other good things that show up on resumes, like attending prestigious schools, having had prestigious prior jobs, having a record of success in some other fashion, or even just doing things like paying careful attention to formatting?
This is why social scientists use tried and true techniques like old fashioned OLS regression with control variables rather than throw everything into a random forest and see if the hypothesized association standing on its own predicts things.
(Insert remark about how companies should be hiring data science people with science backgrounds rather than just pure cs backgrounds here)
by rossdavidh on 11/28/18, 2:47 PM
I think many people write their job description's requirements, as if it were the opening stage of a negotiation. You list everything you want as if it were a requirement, and you will only get about half of that. But the problem is, it isn't a negotiation, it's a minimum spec (especially if you put the word "required" next to that line), and so many quite good candidates won't apply.
However, typically, I see 20-30 requirements, many of which (e.g. "passionate about software development", "good communicator") aren't specific enough to tell the candidate whether they are a good match or not (do poor communicators know they are poor communicators?). Of the rest, really only 2 or 3 are actual requirements, and the candidate has to guess which those are.
by mszcz on 11/28/18, 1:22 PM
https://dilbert.com/strip/2008-03-01
I'm not a fan of HR in general and it's frustrating that they are often the clueless gatekeepers.
by scarejunba on 11/28/18, 12:41 PM
Perhaps companies over-list requirements because everyone knows requirements are not ANDed together. There is a scoring scheme that combines all of these, and the quality of the requirement.
And let’s be honest having spent “5 years of Python” at a Google is a different story from having spent “5 years of Python” at an Infosys.
To be honest, I’ve never seen a job description that exactly lays out what you’re going to be doing. And the reason for that is that hiring software engineers, you don’t actually know. You want them to also come up with what the future looks like.
by dexen on 11/28/18, 10:36 AM
re-post of my earlier post:
>I'm not sure why companies over-list [job requirements].
It's not companies, it's the individuals.
Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that:
```
  - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
  - she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires
```
The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away.
The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author.
Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify.
It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative[1] in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway".
Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring with carefully redacted ads for a long while, with repeatably good results.
--
[1] the narrative seems mostly created by the prospective employers in hopes of driving the worker supply up, and thus prevailing wages down
by tombert on 11/28/18, 3:17 PM
Heh, I think most autodidacts have discovered this independently. I'm a Physics-Major dropout, and have managed to find jobs in big brand-name companies that have "strict requirements" for a degree. Now, it's led to a level of imposter syndrome (I've posted about it on HN before), but at the same time, it demonstrates that these "requirements" are more "strong preferences".
Sadly, it does seem like the research-oriented jobs aren't BSing about their requirements; when I've tried to apply to MS Research and the like, they've always declined me due to lack of credentials, since the postings usually require at least a masters, preferably a PhD.
by GhostVII on 11/28/18, 2:03 PM
It's interesting how women seem to get interviews when matching fewer of the job requirements than men. Might be worth looking into whether this is due to gender discrimination in recruiting, or if women just apply to jobs that are a better fit, regardless of job requirements.
by bradleyjg on 11/28/18, 2:37 PM
I recently was involved in drafting a job posting that was extremely flexible. For example it didn’t specify a particular programming language, just listed a few and said “or other similar languages”.
However the essence of the posting was clearly for a programmer. Significantly more than half the people that applied were not programmers. We saw some resumes from seemingly quite accomplished statisticians but we were not looking for a statistician (or “data scientist”).
So I think which 50% matters. If someone is a self starter and has great communication skills but can’t program she isn’t going to be hired as a programmer.
by GuB-42 on 11/28/18, 1:36 PM
A recruiter once told me "we ask for God in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the followers".
by scaleout1 on 11/28/18, 5:28 PM
Unfortunately in Bay Area and specially at FAANG you need 0% of job "Requirements" on your resume as they will leetcode the shit out of you in the interview without asking one relevant question pertaining to your resume or even to the actual job. One of the reason given for this is that the stack used at these companies is completely homegrown so your experience using framework $X for $Y years has no relevance
by zaidf on 11/28/18, 9:41 PM
Someone I know applied for a designer AND front end dev position at a startup. He went through multiple rounds plus a project. This describes my friend:
- super passionate (paying customer for while) about the product
- great designer with a few years of experience
- degree in CS from a reputed school
- picked up react recently
- few years of work experience doing design and coding
He got turned down by the startup with the excuse that they would like someone more senior who has worked on a product like Facebook. I could just smh because from everything I know, if you are senior and worked at fb, you are unlikely to be (or want to be!) an AMAZING designer AND front-end dev.
by hocuspocus on 11/28/18, 1:31 PM
Recently I've seen a lot more job ads with minimal technical requirements and rather a focus on more generic skills.
That's good but please, if you aren't Google or Facebook, don't take it to the other extreme. If I have no idea about your tech stack I'm not going to apply, and the same probably holds true for a lot of experienced developers.
by sxp62000 on 11/28/18, 11:46 PM
I've noticed that smaller companies tend to fill their job requirements section with tons of stuff, larger companies do it less, or at least separate things into must-have and nice-to-have sections. Yet there are others who still have words like Flash Development, Macromedia and Dreamweaver in their list of requirements.
If you're looking for a job, just keep applying and don't stop till you actually have an offer letter in hand. Don't wait for the employer or recruiter to send you feedback after a promising interview. There are SO MANY reasons a company might decide to go for someone else. For example, culture fit, which sometimes means "will this person stop everything and play foosball with us in the middle of the day?"
by gefh on 11/28/18, 7:03 PM
This data is weirdly bucketed and the fit curve looks sketchy. I don't think it's a robust finding and I don't trust it.
Doesn't seem to have stopped a lot of people confirming their anecdotes though.
by BenjaminBlair on 11/28/18, 2:53 PM
I find that very frustrating. When a person is looking for a job he or she is stressed out already, and when reading all those huge qualification criteria you sometimes really feel like a total loser, not knowing anything at all. It's really important to still try and send a CV and go to an interview with a positive attitude, willing to learn that is. But I'd really like to see some reasonable hiring criteria, so you can know for sure that you have what they're looking for.
by codingdave on 11/28/18, 2:53 PM
That does match up with my job search I just completed. I sent out 5 resumes, got an interview on every one where I had a majority of the qualifications, did not get called on the 2 that were more off-target.
But I'm not sure that the sales pitch this article is trying to make is valid. They claim at the end that they'll get you 5.8x more interviews. But is that good? In my 3 interview processes, they each brought to light reasons why it was not a match in one or both directions. The article even touched on that, as candidates will self-screen out of jobs that aren't quite right. It would have been a huge waste of time to expand that to 10-12 interview processes that were not matches. Especially when I didn't end up taking a job even from the ones that went well, and re-joined an old team instead.
The screening that happens in the hiring process can feel frustrating when you really need a job, but I appreciate being screened out when it would not have worked anyway. It saves everyone time, and hopefully puts me in a healthy long-term role that will last for years.
by proxygeek on 11/28/18, 6:59 PM
Wondering if there is a corpus of "stop-phrases" like stop-words which will include gems like "passionate about software development", "good communicator", "truth-seeker" and the likes.
It might be interesting to do a basic pre-processing of the JD to remove all such stop-phrases before evaluating the role being offered.
by bitwize on 11/28/18, 1:56 PM
In my experience, unless you meet all of the requirements in the req, and substantially exceed a few of them, you will probably be passed over for a candidate with "more experience in technology X".
Not that I apply for jobs to get jobs, not to get interviews. Getting called in to interview means next to nothing.
by jkingsbery on 11/28/18, 2:03 PM
"They're more what you'd call 'guidelines.'"
by DEADBEEFC0FFEE on 11/29/18, 7:17 PM
As someone who hires for technical roles, I tend to profile the roles into a 5 X 5 grid. 5 core areas of proficiency, 5 levels of proficiency. a proficiency of 4 across the board is uncommon.
If I can find a 5, 4, 4, 3, 2 of combination of that, I'm happy. That's about 70%. That sort of profile should also provide learning opportunities for the candidate and typical that is intrinsically motivating for technical types.
by TheAdamist on 11/28/18, 12:32 PM
Unless HR prescreens all the applicants before they make it to staff, then you need 200%, or 0%. Sometimes it's rather frustrating working for bigcorp.
by rb808 on 11/28/18, 3:14 PM
The most interesting thing was 12% interview rate - is that normal? I was discouraged when getting 20% rates, maybe I need to apply to more stuff.
by create_novelty on 11/28/18, 5:18 PM
Most important job requirement - get a warm introduction to the HR / Hiring Manager via an existing employee of the company!
by mathattack on 11/28/18, 2:10 PM
A lot of job descriptions are written overly precise to specifically include or exclude internal candidates.
by pacuna on 11/28/18, 1:31 PM
Could be, but what if the requirements you're missing are supposedly essential for the job? Some jobs say you need to know X programming language. What if you're a good programmer but haven't worked with that particular language? Should you bother to apply?
by MattHeard on 11/28/18, 1:20 PM
My last job hunt resulted in a 12% success rate of getting an interview, which matches well with this data.
by austincheney on 11/28/18, 12:41 PM
You can eliminate all kinds of selective bias and incompetence by first filtering candidates based upon a battery of personality tests. You don't have to know anything about the candidates until this pass through the initial filter.