Comment by JSR_FDED
7 days ago
Admin & Office : 18 days
Software Dev : 22 days
Retail & Hospitality: 33 days
Would love to understand why.
- few jobs, much supply = can afford to be picky to get the best
- not much difference between applicants = hire first that meets requirements
- switching costs are high = be picky
- high impact on team/culture = be picky
None of these explain the data.
The only notable data point is the precipitous drop for software engineering from 40-60 days historical averages. lt basically says that tech has become just like the rest of the job market, competitive for applicants and heavily gatekept by insiders, and that will be quite a reckoning for those who never experienced in their professional life a "normal" job seeking process.
The rest are just noise.
I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.
There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc.
What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.
The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.
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I would wonder how much of it is _generic_ job postings. Like, unless you're really huge, you probably don't need to constantly hire, say, receptionists, so you'll put up an ad for a receptionist, get a receptionist, remove the ad. If you're moderately big, you may be fairly constantly hiring software engineers, so you put up the ad and leave it there. If you're in retail or hospitality, you are probably constantly hiring people, and many of the roles are quite generic, so you're more likely again to have long-lived ads.
From what I could see, big retailers have a lot of "evergreen" openings which makes sense as they can have multiple locations and there is a lot of churn. And there are obvious outlier sub-categories like warehouse workers etc which have median times <7d, I didn't break it down in the blog as it's too much data to present. But other than that, I don't have enough search data to draw meaningful conclusions. (say around supply/demand)
I think hospitality can sometimes struggle to get strong candidates at all so might leave positions open longer hoping for better applicants.
I read some time ago that hospitality is the lowest-paying industry. It’s unrealistic to expect strong candidates there.