Comment by Aurornis
15 hours ago
> Companies have also adopted your strategy: interviewing candidates "to see what's out there" - there's a job I've interviewed for that's still open after 10 months
When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title.
It made a couple people furious because they assumed we were going to take the job posting down when we hired someone and then re-post a new listing for the next person.
One guy was even stalking LinkedIn to try to identify who was hired, without realizing that many engineers don't update their LinkedIn. Got some angry e-mails. There are some scary applicants out there.
Some times a specific job opening needs to stay open for a long time to hire the right person, though. I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed really had the specific experience we needed (though many falsely claimed it in their applications, right until we began asking questions)
> some specific job listings we had open for years
If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.
>If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person. You're doing this just to check some specific artificial goal that has little to do with the business.
There's a difference between "critically needing" and "would benefit from."
If you can find the specialist who's done what you're doing before at higher scale and help you avoid a lot of pain, it's awesome. If not, you keep on keeping on. But as long as you don't start spending too much on the search for that candidate, it's best to keep the door open.
So this is not a job that you need to fill, it is a wish you may have and that is mostly impractical. If you really needed that person, you would go find them and pay way more than they're making now or give them something else they want to join immediately.
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> If you need to wait YEARS to hire someone with some specific experience, I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready.
This was extremely true when we were working on things that could not be done remote (literal physical devices that had to be worked on with special equipment in office).
Engineers aren't interchangeable cogs.
> I can guarantee that you really didn't need that person.
So what? There are many roles where we don't "need" someone, but if the right person is out there looking for a job we want to be ready to hire them.
So what did you do when those devices broke for years while you had no local/physical person on site? You either didn't need to employ the person bad enough or didn't need the devices to function bad enough.
Engineers aren't cogs, but they are able to travel and you can hire them by other means that full-time employment. So I suspect that was probably what you were meant to do for your situation.
Nothing about this was mission critical or even all that important or you would have found a way to solve the problem or you did and it wasn't a problem to begin with. I'm in a field where people often want to hire me for some special thing like this, but it often turns out, most of my life would be spent idle because no one company has enough demand for me. I can consult instead and be busy all year, or I can take a job for someone that's OK with me being idle for 80% of my time. I prefer the former for multiple reasons but just making an example of why hiring for specialized roles that aren't mission critical is often not the thing you should be doing.
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> I've worked in specialized fields where it takes YEARS for the right candidate to even start looking for jobs. You need to have the job listings up and ready
If this is true then those shouldn't even be public job postings. That sort of critical position is for headhunters
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> If you need to wait YEARS ...
Imagine working on voyager II .. or some old-ass banking software that still runs RPG (look it up, I'll wait), or trying to hire someone to do numerical analysis for the genesis of a format that supercedes IEEE float .. or .. whatever.
There are many applications for extremely specific skillsets out there. Suggesting otherwise is, in my opinion, clearly unwise
Exactly. Hire someone 80-90% there and invest in their training FFS.
Answered elsewhere: If we're investing in someone's training we'll promote someone from within who is already familiar with the product and then backfill their simpler work.
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How do you know if someone is 80-90% there without having the job posting for the profile up, and interviewing candidates who come along?
That still takes a long time if random Senior Engineer X who's looking on LinkedIn is only 10% of the way there for what you'd need for a very specialized role.
> When I was doing a lot of hiring we wouldn't take the job posting down until we were done hiring people with that title
It's a small engineering org, allegedly head-hunting one principal engineer for the whole org, so it's a single opening. 10 months later they are still hunting for their special snowflake.
> I can recall some specific job listings we had open for years because none of the people we interviewed really had the specific experience we needed
This is exactly what I mean. If you can go for years without filling a role, it's non-essential , and are in effect, "seeing what's out there". More and more companies are getting very picky on mundane roles, such as insisting on past experience in specific industries: "Oh, your extensive experience in low-latency comms is in telecoms? We prefer someone who's worked in TV broadcast, using these niche standards specifically, even though your knowledge is directly transferable. We don't want to waste 5 days on training"
You expect more nonessential roles and slower hiring in a slower growing economy, especially if companies only hire for full-time roles.
For example, your company might need a full-time network admin once its network grows to a certain size and complexity. You won’t hit that level for three years but you’d hire the perfect person now if you found them even though they might be spending a lot of idle time scrolling Hacker News for the first year or two. At 5x the growth rate, you’d need that person within less than a year, and you might be less picky about whether they are coming from a TV or telecom shop.
Honest question. Were these super specialized roles with such specific skill requirements that it took such a long time to find the right person? Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?
> Looking back, do you think the team would have been better off hiring someone who came close enough, and supporting them to learn on the job?
More specialized.
If we wanted to train someone, we'd start with an internal candidate who was familiar with the other parts of the job and then train them on this one thing.
Hiring an outsider who doesn't know the subject matter and then teaching them is less efficient and more risky. It was better to have someone in the team learn the new subject as an incremental step and then backfill the simpler work they were doing.
Some academic departments do this... put a job ad every year in case there's a superstar.
I assume that this means you're sending out rejections that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for this role".
If your hiring model is hiring multiple people through one posting, then you will probably get a lot fewer angry ex-candidates being weird (because they think you've lied to them since the posting is still up) by just sending out rejections that don't say that and just get the "we're no longer interested in you for this role" message across.
Nicer/more corporate language for both, of course.
> I assume that this means you're sending out rejections that include a mention of "we've hired someone else for this role".
No, this isn't possible unless you delay rejections letters until you hire someone.
We send letters as soon as the decision is made not to continue with that candidate.
Honestly it would be cruel to string them along any longer.
From applying places recently I'd much rather get these fast. One company sent me them, the rest either reached out or I never heard from them.