Comment by motbus3
6 days ago
It is very hard to hire in the UK.
Good part of it is because the salaries are too high because everything is crazy expensive. The second thing is that people do put many restrictions. We had a position that we had a bare minimum bar but we said that we needed the candidates to understand well few topics and they simply said they wouldn't. I am not saying like "become specialist in Fortran in 3 weeks" But more like, learn SQL and database well enough to not make a 1 Million USD query and we heard, more than once, that they did not want to learn SQL and if they needed they would just quit the process.
It sucks for everyone folks. This AI bubble will soon burst. People are already seeing diminished returns with each new model and AI is not returning value as everyone promised.
Now it is the hard part which is a bunch of suit guys trying to excuse that no one could foresee it was going to happen like everyone said it would
Haha if someone paid me and assured I would use it in daily tasks, I would finally have the motivation to learn SQL thoroughly.
Same for me.
Except it doesn't work that way. You can't meaningfully learn a skill to get a job because you will have no experience in the skill and potential employers are looking for people with experience in whatever skills they are asking for.
Employers have become very good at finding means of screening out older workers without exposing them to charges of discrimination.
We were hiring for a very well paid position and naturally we were expecting certain skills. But even though we were quiet lenient on the skills we required some skills to be there.
I would say that we probably would want someone around 40s or older for that position applied (or I guess so because we never get to ask those things)
I was in the step before the interview with the CEO of the company, and we approved 10-20% of the candidates. First steps were approved at maybe the same ratio, and the CEO decided not to hire anyone in the UK after trying for a long time.
We had only maybe 6 candidates for the last phase, and out of those, there were only 2 candidates we really thought could be approved.
I will say thought, we were committing a sin that now many companies are doing. We were expecting too much from the same person. I am sure that one person would be able to hold what that position required but I don't think the professional with that particular set of skills is easily available in the market. I guess money wise the company did not want to hire more than one person, but if it was me, I would have hired a senior instead of an specialist and a junior.