Anecdotal share here. I know very few hiring managers that expect candidates to fit 100%, heck 80% even, of a posting. Those that do aren’t ones I would ever want to work for.
I look for 3 things. And that’s not a hard and fast rule or anything. Aptitude, motivation and culture fit. I also look to my peers and larger team for their thoughts along these points.
People (pleasantly) surprise you. My last best hire (I moved to away from direct line management in my new gig) was working at their local Walmart for a year after a tough layoff from a pre sales role. I thought I would get more push back but everyone including my then boss, were like yeah! They just needs another opportunity.
And for what it’s worth, they were a great culture fit and figured the rest out along the way.
I have no intention of applying for a job ever again. I’ll run my own business or I’ll eat my shotgun a little earlier than planned. There aren’t enough goods, services, intellectual properties and sex acts in the worldwide economy to pay me for the nine seconds it will take you to ask me “so what would you say is your greatest weakness?”
Yeah, that’s right flop sweat. I would much rather sell hand crafted furniture on Etsy or give flying lessons out of a T-hangar at my county airport than listen to you say nine words in exchange for $The Biosphere.
You’ll get a lot further when you realize hiring managers also are lost and most listings are bullshit. And I mean they probably don’t even intend for it to be bullshit but that’s what corporations everything results in. Apply to stuff you only mostly fit. Don’t look for complete fit or ability to check every box. So many interviews and jobs wind up not being exactly as advertised. If you read it as literal, you’ll ace out tons of potential jobs that might have been just fine for you.
I have also had some success through my career emphasizing (with actual stories) how I know how to learn from others and on my own. So it’s okay that I don’t know every little thing, and then point to my past examples of adapting to unknown or unclear situations where I had to learn on the job.
Also people are very impressed by factual stories. Numbers, or specific details, etc. that give them the impression you aren’t lying. Tell about times when you actually did a thing. Not how you are able to, but give an example of a problem and how you overcame. Even from school projects, team projects, thesis work. Anything.
I also think part of the issue is the huge influx or fake and phoney applications. They get tons of junk that makes it hard to find people with real qualifications.
It also doesn’t help that some of these companies are looking for unicorns.
I’m in HR and think about this a lot; it’s (mostly) a marker of poorly run companies when they say experience in software X is required. Mostly these orgs are using one of several software solutions and by saying a candidate must have experience in a specific software means the company is brittle; can’t train, wants to hire non-thinkers and learners, and also likely isn’t looking ahead at what will change in the future.
Software change will only accelerate likely, so hire learners.
You also want people who can follow rules and meet expectations. We don’t need any one getting to adventurous in there job. Problem solving is great but sometimes it is best to stay on the beaten path.
Ah, I see you’re familiar with my company
It jobs:
Need 10 years experience in 1 year old tech
Or
Need 10 years experience in tech that stopped existing 10 years ago.
Or
Need 10 years experience in this software that is a felony to use outside our business and the government.
The best one I saw was someone going for a job with a company that uses a particular platform stack. He didn’t get the job with the company saying you don’t have enough experience with said platform.
Except he wrote the platform.Never heard of this one tbh. The creator of homebrew was rejected at Google when he failed to implement a basic algorithm. The people interviewing him were using the software he wrote. But tbf, if you’re applying at Google they expect you to be able to invert a binary tree
I refer to this as companies wanting to hire the person who just quit.
😂 that’s great
I have been working in tech since ~1995. I also have been in a hiring position since 2002 and own the top firm in our field. Here is my advice; lie.
Let me clarify. A lie is only problematic if by the time you start in that new position, you do not have the skills to back it up. If you can do the job and do it well, no manager will ever give a fuck about what you put in your resume.
PS: In most cases, the school you graduated from will only matter for your first job. In most cases, your GPA will never matter.
I’ve been working in tech since 2000 and have been in a hiring position since ~2008. I’ve done very well for myself, and continue to do well, and I’ve never had to lie. I’ve always just treated most of the down page requirements as “nice to have” or “have something similar” rather than hard requirements, and have always been upfront about it in interviews about the actual amount of experience I’ve had in these things. What kind of interviews are you running where you aren’t asking about the requirements for the job? One of my main goals in interviews is to discuss what the candidate has worked on so I know how well it fits into what we’re doing.
I do agree that if you do the job well, no one is going to ask questions. But if looks like you’ve lied to get the job, it makes it pretty easy decision to fire you if things are going poorly.
I think you’re missing the main context of the post, which is experience. It doesn’t matter if you were not an expert when you applied. What matters is that you are an expert when it is time to be, which includes the interview.
That said, common sense tells you that this is all about “additional skills” like specific softwares, not core technologies. If you’ve never heard about Java and you apply for a Senior Java Engineer position, you’re probably not going to do well.
Again, I’m curious as to what kind of interviews you are running if you aren’t catching people who claim to have experience in something, but have only basically crammed online for (at best) a few weeks between an interview request and actual interview. I feel like if someone had tried to become an expert in the field during such a short time, it would be painfully obvious, unless they were an Olympic level bullshitter. Also, if you claim to have experience in something, and I ask about that experience, and you make it up, that is still lying.
Apparently privileged (cis, white, educated middle class or equivalent) men apply when fulfilling 60% of the requirements. Women and minorities 100%.
Maybe that’s why they have the ridiculous reqs?
No idea about privilege, but when I was struggling to find a job, that was a lesson I learned as well. Instead of applying only to 100% fit which is what I was doing, I started applying to the 50% and everything in between. This increased my chances of talking to someone at least, but also increased the amount of work I had to put in applying to everything. But just like in sales, after you get that first call, the chances of getting somewhere are much higher, so some things have to get flexible to make it happen.
Not really related to the post, but I feel like sharing.
Big boss where I work wanted all managers to read a book. He had staff scour the Internet looking for copies of this book so that they could give every manager their own copy.
He said we were going to have meetings with the entire management team to review chapters of the book one at a time.
The gist of the book was: take the time to make sure you hire the right people for the job, retain the good ones, and get rid of the people who don’t work out.
I think we covered two chapters in meetings.
After that, an upcoming hiring freeze was announced, and everyone was told to fill all their open positions within two weeks or the position would be cancelled.
The first job I had was for a dinky little 15 person company. Obviously they didn’t have loads of money and the way most corporate software contracts work is it’s a lot cheaper for a period, like 1-2 years, and then the price increases. So they would jump ship before the price increase and use another product after that. So I ended up learning loads of different digital marketing platforms. I list them on my resume when I can, otherwise I just list the big ones and put something like “various digital marketing platforms”. But thanks to all the magical algorithms that pick out what they need from all the entries, you pretty much have to have the exact platform they want on your resume in order for the bot to be satisfied. Some things I would understand, like if someone didn’t know how to use key software for their field. But all the other stuff that gets tossed around should be considered “trainable” and not part of application requirements. Yet here we are…
ATS allows the least skilled people in a company (HR) to be even less effective.
It does, however, facilitate the easy scraping of applicant data, which can be packaged and sold.
I bring new software into my organization through two methods:
- Someone has used it before
- We are reasonably confident in our ability to use existing staff, possibly with a new expert hire or consultation
It’s pretty rare for a large org to do completely net new software. Training is usually a big deal if that happens. Massive layoffs are also a possibility (see enterprises being dumb about containers). Smaller orgs tend not to have this problem. If they do you can usually tell in an interview and just not go there. Devs are constantly experimenting with net new shit (current libs don’t do the thing; gotta find new libs). Again, smart leaders are open to this.
In general, staffing is a huge part of any of these decisions. You might not see the convo but it is most likely happening.
In many industries hiring for attitude over aptitude is the key to true success. Just wished that was what most did.
It happens pretty frequently in tech job listings, to have a requirement listed for more years experience in some technology than that technology has existed
Counterpoint: They already know you can’t “do” the job-specific tasks because you don’t work there yet. If you know the tools, that’s extremely helpful as they teach you what to do with them. If there’s pile A and pile B and they’re mostly the same except B already knows JIRA or Visual Studio or whatever, then that’s a legitimate differentiator.
When the existing team is forced to get new software, there’s a presumption that they already know what tasks the tools are supposed to help them do. There’s no “other pile,” so might as well suck it up and kill your productivity by ten percent for a year. It’s okay though; you can improve it by 1% from the original baseline for nine years after, because the McKinsey and Accenture people totally promised us that makes sense. Rinse and repeat.
