It depends on the HR department. Some are under pressure to "add value" to hiring, so they insist on rewriting job reqs and screening all applicants. At a Fortune 50 company I worked at, my boss got in trouble because he sweet-talked someone in HR to print out all the resumes they rejected and secretly deliver them to him. He resorted to this after he informally recruited a new hire, wrote a job description specifically targeted at them, and then, after waiting two weeks for their application to filter through the system, found out that HR round-filed it because they supposedly weren't qualified.

HR refused to collaborate with him on editing job descriptions, so every time he submitted one, he had to check every day until he found out what garbage they posted so he could go beg them to fix it. They would randomly add technologies and "change the wording" of desired qualifications (how do you "change the wording" of proper nouns and jargon from somebody else's field?) and they were especially fond of turning nice-to-haves into absolute requirements because we supposedly didn't have enough. My boss was convinced they were under pressure to filter out a target percentage of applicants, because he begged them to just pass all the resumes to him, and they refused, hence his cloak-and-dagger tactics to get his hands on them.

Centralized HR is for managing benefits and setting policies. They never help with the hiring process, in my experience.

One of the engineering managers I had been working with as a consultant had tried to recruit me more than once, so I decided to accept. But shortly after a mandatory HR screening call, I got an apologetic rejection email from the engineering manager.

I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.

I think this has been a big source of my grief so far. I keep winding up in heavily political companies.

Thank you for the advice. Networking is definitely something I intend to take more seriously. It's become much more clear to me how important it is as my career progresses.

When people say "I'm not political" they're really just confessing to low social status and acumen. I personally wish things were different, but as you note they're not. So one may as well accept reality and play the game as best as one can. One can have a very successful career as a follower if one recognizes the traits of good leaders and the traits that good leaders are looking for.

Right. Politics is a tool often used to keep people with low social status where they are.

Much like gossip, politics is pack violence and order by other means, and is usable by people who have less physical power but more social influence. If you don't have either physical and social power, then you're dismissed as not a threat and ripe to be stepped-on. Gossip is often a political attack technique to take-down a physically-strong leader.

I was in a similar situation to you and through work I've developed a pretty good network of former colleagues. After about 10 years, it my network ended up stretching so far that I had contacts at basically every major company my city.

I mean, very few of my former colleagues ended up in the upper echelons of businesses, but almost all of them are in senior IC roles for which a recommendation carries a lot of weight, especially for an opening on their own team.

Be good at what you do, genuinely help people, without expecting or calculating whether it'll be beneficial to you, stay close with those who help you, and who you helped.

Eventually, you'll find your way into a good cluster. Some start in the middle of it, we started in the periphery. Accrue good faith and trust and it will only keep growing. It's non linear. Something something preferential attachment.

I have also had bad luck with jobs so far. Everywhere I go, people above me seem more inclined to try and keep me where I am than help me improve and grow. I always have very good relationships with my teammates though, so I know I'm doing something right.

I don't think I was supposed to know the name of the internal candidate, but having friends who worked for the uni, I knew the name and, well, the internal candidate would certainly have had a better culture fit.

I did exactly this, though I'm pretty sure I'm not your boss.

As a side note, HR's insistence on doing the initial resume review and phone screens usually skews the entire recruitment process. I've had situations where HR gave me 20 resumes and didn't even look at the rest.

I read all of them, even the greyed out ones, until I'd read enough to trust that the HR team's filter was well-calibrated, and I also let the HR team know when they got it right/wrong so they could improve their filtering process.

Overall it worked great but I understand that such functional HR teams are the exception, not the rule.

Edit: My apologies everyone. I actually read this as "cover letter" instead of CV.

I agree a resume (as noted below) should be required, but CV (academic style) is probably a US term not applicable here.

Sorry!

edit: saw another response which said a cv was a resume, this is correct. In the UK we use Curriculum Vitae (CV) instead of resume. They are the same thing. Not sure what you may have thought a CV was, however I would be interested to know.

On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug.

This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.

If you look at FB job reqs in prod network engineering (network in title, infrastructure is area of work), the qualifications should be reasonable. This covers most roles that are not pure SWE or rack and stack (SWE and "deployment and support" cover those roles).

~3-4 years ago a director shared a req and asked that we pass it on to our friends / anyone that might be interested. Some of us asked why specific items were in the req since they didn't reflect the team or our work. We also noted how it reinforced bias (women tend not to apply if they do not meet _all_ quals. men tend to apply if they meet _any_ quals).

Response was "good point, we'll remove them" and our reqs got a lot shorter and less exclusionary.

You might note that we tend to not have any education requirements. At one point the req listed university degrees. This was funny because we had a bimodal distribution of uni drop-out (maybe no high school diploma) on one side and MS or Ph.D on the other.

e.g. zero education requirements section in job reqs for my team: https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/468265564478223/

https://www.facebook.com/careers/v2/jobs/190442889615860/

It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.

That means it's too big and time to cut full time employees and hire contractors.

If HR are in charge of hiring for technical positions, the company has deep issues...

Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job.

That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.

I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason.

Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time.

On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.

He was going to transfer to a different company and was told that company rules meant he had to go through HR "as a formality".

He was blocked by his HR interviewer on the grounds that he was too successful and therefore wouldn't be "hungry" enough for such a competitive position.

He couldn't believe it. They didn't want someone with a proven record of repeated long-term success?

The person who was trying to recruit him was furious, but as my brother said, this was indicative of a wider problem, and so he declined to move there. Instead he won his Industry Award for the following year at the company he did move to....

In the end, I'd say that HR person did your brother a solid.

To be clear, not all of the jobs I've hired for sucked. But there was one project that was designed to chew up your soul (mine included), and we had very specific requirements- and people that had "extra" skills weren't qualified. I learned A LOT from that project.

In our area, we had 2 teams racing VERY FAST to 2 different objectives:

1) migrate ALL code and data to the new system (because it needs to be available on the new system) AND

2) archive everything (because we might sell all of our stuff and be unemployeed)

It was gut wrenching to look at code that I put my heart and soul into and know it would never run again. Or to look at code with comments like "I just threw this garbage together - it needs to be fixed, circa 5 years ago" and know it would never be fixed.

Or those automated gun turrets?

Then remove them? It says “Minimum Requirements”. It’s already proven that women, minorities and others on the outside don’t apply when they don’t meet these qualifications. You thinking that recruiters know what they’re doing at these companies, then we can only conclude they’re doing it on purpose.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/117/48/30303.full.pdf

I found it interesting to read, having gone down a small rabbit-hole after your comment :)

On the other hand, taking jobs that are a bit outside your comfort zone is how you grow. I agree that more realistic requirements would helps (especially if they're called "minimum"), but you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious.

You need to train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?

They say these are "minimum requirements". You called them "qualifications". They're not suggested capabilities that you should have to feel comfortable in the job. They have a separate section for "Preferred Qualifications", so these aren't just preferences, they're requirements if you're not willing to break the rules.

A certain subset of the population is willing to check the box that says "I meet these requirements" and then later push around the interviewer and say they don't actually meet them but that they ought to be considered anyways. This brash, often narcissistic, overconfident group is over-represented in management circles not because they're "more ambitious" than others but because they're willing to sacrifice their morals to cheat the system.

Nearly all business interaction is a form of negotiation. If you look at a job description and feel that you'd be able to succeed at it, that's usually enough to get started. Clicking "Apply" doesn't mean you are certifying that you meet the minimum requirements. It simply means you'd like to be considered for the job. The worst that could happen is you've wasted somebody's time (which is true of probably 90% or more of all interviews anyway).

In my 15 years in software, I've interviewed at probably a couple dozen different places. Not once have I been asked to promise that I meet the listed minimum qualifications prior to submitting an application.

Although, I do not engage in judging others much, I would feel a strong disdain toward disregarding the minimum requirements because it supposes that I suppose that the other person is not 100% honest/clear in their intention and certain set of values may forbid some people in what I guess may be called ''bad faith'' i.e. presupposing that people are dishonest without having a viable reason for thinking so.

Well these are just some thoughts but I have a huge mental block in going against requirements, rules etc based upon the idea that the you presuppose that the other person is dishonest because then it would follow that one lives by the presupposition that everyone is being dishonest until otherwise.

Of course, for more utilitarian oriented people there may be more room for flexibility. However, in a pluralistic society I would value a wide array of ethics compatible in a free and fair market which respects fundamental human rights.

It's an application. You're applying. It's one thing to say the job description is misleading. It's quite another to presume someone applying while not technically qualified is being dishonest.

Is your conclusion still that I'm suggesting to "train people to leave their ethics at the door and lie until they make it?"? Are there any points that I can clarify for you? Do you have any suggestions to protect the systems from people that exploit it by sacrificing their morals?

I'm aware that the world isn't black and white, someone who submits a truthful resume to a job posting where they don't technically meet the qualifications has only made a little white lie that's almost universally forgiven, you're correct that they'll likely look ambitious and confident if they tell the interviewer "if you want to be super technical about it I don't meet this one little qualification but I think you should ignore that because factors X and Y make me a great candidate".

It's this culture of pervasive little white lies which is harmful. Be brutally correct, not just sufficiently honest to brush off these occasional inconsistencies. When someone does make a little white lie, call them on the lie and take the mandated action. Otherwise people who are most flexible with what's acceptable will advance more than those who require correctness.

They haven't lied at all. Where is the lie in saying, "I don't meet your requirements but I think you should hire me anyway"?

It's crazy to assume people would be stuffing their resumes instead of they making it clear the position is exciting to them and they would work hard to get up to standards.

Yeah, I'm honest in interviews. Getting past Automated Resume Sorting Equations (ARSE) is tough. As soon as I talk to a real human, I'm honest and explain what I know and don't know.

Ambition is what you can become, not what you are.

The only way of applying without dishonesty would be to do so while openly saying “I don’t tick all your boxes, but I still think I’d be a good fit because XYZ”. I might like this if I saw it in a job application, because it means the applicant was paying attention and not just applying to everything… but that doesn’t work so well when there’s already a “Preferred Qualifications” section, and might even have the opposite effect.

If a job says you need 8 years of experience and you say you have 8 when you have 4, that is lying. If you apply to a job that says you need 8 years of experience and you only have 4, that isn't lying. It isn't dishonest. It would be like the person selling that PC asking, "hey, might 4GB work if we throw in a better processor?"

Is "doesn't want to waste our time when we tell them not to waste our time" really an important attribute for you to reject candidates on? Or would more accurate "minimum" requirements be better?

That's exactly what I meant by being ambitious. I think you shouldn't lie when applying for a job, but on the other hand there is a shortage of applicants in tech. You could recognize this as an opportunity if you're confident that you can "grow to the desired level" of the job offer.

But what is a candidate to do? Skip the job, because they don't have the required qualifications? Assume the requirements aren't real? Dress up the resume with some fake barely there qualifications to fit?

Different cultural backgrounds will have different responses, and very few will really be lying.

The worst thing, though? The knee-jerk response to the ones that dress up the resume is often to want to add even more requirements...

There is usually little correlation between the job requirements and what you're actually going to do on the job.

As someone from a rural background where the best case was usually HVAC repair and the not-too-uncommon case was addiction and stagnation, and who came into tech from far outside the normal path, this is the problem to fix, and tech company job requirements are way too late in the pipeline to exert much leverage there. This needs to be solved culturally, across years and generations.

That would be great, but if we can substantially reduce the impact of the difference in confidence by being honest about minimal job requirements right now, shouldn't we also do that?

This reverse-sexism/racism reads as if you believe on an ideological level that women and minorities have inferior character defects and need special accommodations.

> you also have to teach to people how to be ambitious

This is a jobspec, not a carrer coaching session.

Filtering out people who feel self-conscious or experience impostor syndrome ends up disproportionally hurting minorities.

If you didn't know ahead what your options were, and you were willing to accept someone who isn't an actual surgeon, maybe you would have preferred the person who whittles, has a biology degree, also is great with DIY videos, was a combat medic, AND isn't squeamish at the sight of blood, unlike me? Because she was turned off by the fact she didn't meet your listed minimum requirements; all you got applying are me and your nephew.

No idea if that's true. I heard it claimed by many. I guess it sounds kinda implausible for a large company, they would need to create possibly thousands of fake job listings.

What if we helped minorities, women, and others on the outside meet the qualifications instead of lowering the standards? And yes that also includes rewriting some of the qualifications to be more realistic, I am not discounting that.

This comment is coming off as incendiary, judging by the quick clapback style of response to simply the first clause. I want to emphasis I also believe requirements should be rewritten to be more realistic and pertinent to the job. The solution in my view is to cater to the people who do take job requirements seriously (which to my understanding is the reason why women for example are excluded more) rather than just throw your hands up and say "job requirements are a joke"

John Carmack is arguably one of the most qualified people in the industry for this role, and he doesn't meet the requirements.

So it's not the case that there's piles of white men who _do_ meet the requirements that get it instead, and we just need to help minorities get to that level, it's that there's piles of white men that recognise the requirements are nonsense, so apply and get it without meeting them. Setting the requirements to what the recruiters actually require isn't lowering the bar as a result.

You know how peoples used to have folklores and stories that got passed down? Well, we still do, but the culturally transmitted information is now stuff like "Oh, yeah, those requirement lists are bullshit".

I really think it's as simple as having friends/peers in the know-how or not. Some people have family members, classmates, maybe even majority of their social circle working in IT which obviously exposes them to inner workings including this issue with job requirements. And then there are people whose social circle is far from IT so they just don't have confidence to (pretty much) lie on resume.

I actually think this _worse_, let alone _much harder_ than simply telling HR to chill with that shit.

It's commonly talked about in a lot of places online, including here.

It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job. If you take minimum requirements at face value, there's almost no jobs anyone straight out of school would qualify for.

It is definitely cultural knowledge that not all people have, and, more to the point, an understanding of what parts of a particular job ad that are stated as MQs are likely to be nice-to-haves and which are real MQs and which are nice to haves behind which are hiding real MQs (such as “Ph.D. in <field>” really meaning something like “a Ph.D. would be nice but a Masters is a hard minimum”), and therefore, how to evaluate whether it is worth expending effort applying for a job is non-universal cultural knowledge.

This often requires understanding of the hiring cultures of the particular job-field, industry, employer, and sometimes organizational subunit. Which is, for people just starting out (or looking outside of their past experience), highly network dependent. And equally substantively qualified people from underrepresented demographics arr likely to have weaker, in terms relevant to the task at hand, networks and therefore less access to this cultural knowledge.

> It's also something you very quickly learn when searching for your 1st job.

Or not, in part because there are lots of places where its not true and if you act like it is you will learn hard.

Lying about requirements in hiring may be common, but it is not a universal norm, and calling it out and denormalizing it is a good thing, even outside of discriminatory impact, but its also very much a practice that has particular adverse impact on underrepresented minorities.

If John Carmack doesn't meet the standards, then you probably shouldn't worry about 'lowering them.' As if making tech more accessible requires lowering any standards, anyways.

Because you're not losing out on imaginary "significantly more qualified than John Carmack" applicants.

shouldn't worry about -> don't think there is a problem with

How are those the same?

You should worry about the requirements because they're bad and need fixing.

You shouldn't worry about the consequences of lowering the requirements because you weren't enforcing them anyway.

"shouldn't worry about about 'lowering them.'" -> don't think there is a problem with lowering them.

"probably SHOULD think about 'lowering them.'" -> should think about lowering them.

Is this an acceptable way to convey that you should evacuate the building without worrying?

> acceptable

It's a gratuitously ambiguous way to convey that you should evacuate the building without worrying.

No one, anywhere has said we shouldn’t be doing more. This conversation is around gatekeeping by listing unrealistic minimum requirements.

Why do we need this doublespeak and a wink and a nod for these roles?

Are they not able to reason through the fact that the requirements must logically be not realistic? Are women known to not question authority to the same degree as men? Why not endeavor to fix that about women.

All you're doing is filtering for people who are willing to bullshit their way into a job.

I was interviewed by MedTronics in 2015 by a HR fellow who asked me if I used 'C++11'. He had trouble believing that the 'C++11' was a language standard (adding features to the language) & not a language by itself.

Are you looking at the same Facebook job advert as me?

The key word here is tech company. There are many other sectors that employee below average labor for HR recruitment but the work an engineer can do there can be quite amazing, especially when the engineer realizes there is lots of room to innovate and optimize their workforce and what/how they output.

Then they are mislabeled as "minimum requirements." They must be relabeled as "preferred requirements."

Like using Leetcode popular at these top places you mentioned.

We recently had a person who did COBOL apply, which through recruiting for a loop.

I do get frustrated with the way our engineering manager write job descriptions. Especially since they can be wishy-washy on what they actually want (early on, candidate is good, but later on, mgmt wants more experience). It's been even worse recently as they've been just throwing out seemingly random job titles in order to just get candidates to bite. So I go for an interview and see they are applying for a job title like "data science engineer," and when I ask the manager wtf that is, they say, oh, that's your position (def NOT data science), but that job title gets more applicants.

I used to think HR was the problem, but the more I make sausage, the more I realize that engineering managers are a big part of the problem.

I can only hope that other HRs in other companies are a bit more useful.

For example, when dealing with accounting jobs, they'll sometimes ask for specific certifications.

We've ended up just basically saying "3 years experience with developing software" and shoved everything else into "some of the following would be nice".

We once had an open position on a team that was tied to our office in a lower-population city in a low-population US state. The wording of our listing made it clear that the list of technologies was mostly "nice to have" and not strictly required.

The first recruiter just punched in all the technologies into LinkedIn search and sent a form message to everyone that matched and already lived near the office. The result: My entire team got emails offering them to interview themselves for their own jobs.

Another big issue is the lack of precision in the description. When can you claim you know or are an expert in tech X? And then do that for 10 out of the 10 listed competencies/technologies? Who determines if I'm highly motivated? The specs they list are simply not realistic and ask for everything and the kitchen sink. Candidates have seen through this BS and just apply to anything that might possibly fit them. This means that companies get a ton of underqualified candidates. If they were just real and cut the BS, that could make the whole process more efficient. Dont even get me started in "5 years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 3 years or less.

Reading job posts is probably something I hate even more interviews. At least in interviews you can have a conversation and get some questions answered.

For me? Never. For my agency? As soon as I complete a single job well.

Part (but not all) of the problem is resume spam. There's a small amount of people who apply for every job under the sun, even though they aren't qualified.

That, IMO, is what HR resume filtering should be: Making sure someone isn't just spamming their resume. Otherwise, the "We use FooLang, so your X years of experience with BarLang is okay" really is a decision the hiring manager needs to make. [Edit] Ideally, HR should know enough to not pass along a resume from someone who just completed a 3-month coding bootcamp for an architect-level position.

While that might work for most software teams, my team has a couple of specialties that are not just hard to hire for, but also hard to train for, and sometimes take years to learn. If we hire someone with general software engineering expertise, we typically consider their entire first year to be a training year with extremely limited productivity...even if they are a well experienced senior level engineer.

So we try to put out more specific requirements: Experience with geospatial information systems and standards. Or experience with constraint programming or other forms of mathematical optimization like LP, MIP, IP, or QP. Or experience with spectrum licensing regulation or 3gpp standards.

And because they don't put out easily searchable reqs, we never get candidates that we wouldn't need to train extensively, unless we do their job and seek them out ourselves.

Perhaps the solution is to not always aim for the narrowest possible fit. There are many people who would like an opportunity to learn new things and grow.

I understand that this thinking can't be applied to all positions. If, for example, you want to bring in someone new to your company and put them in charge of "everything Foo-related", then you need someone with suitable experience in Foo. However, too many companies tend to extend that too far down the ladder.

The hiring manager writes the job description and comes up with the requirements. In many cases these job descriptions are written by a senior IC and the hiring manager just massages.

I haven't really had any issues finding folks with experience outside of our stack when doing this.

In all my jobs we ALWAYS sidestepped HR to do any form of hiring, even though we used recruiters which had their own ways of sourcing candidates (that was mainly useful to get candidates of a certain race and gender to fill in diversity quotas). The CTO has the budget and agrees benefits with HR. After that the job post and ways of sourcing candidates is through the engineering team.

Once we do an offer, the ball is back to HR and they finalise the contract / bureaucracy.

I call this fingerprinting.

If there’s 5 different choices for each layer and there’s 5 different layers, assuming an even distribution, there’s 3k combinations right there. If you require that combo, you’ve just eliminated 99.97% of candidates.

It’s not just an IT problem.

“We want someone with experience in (already niche industry) but uses our (unusual choice of) system”.

I get the problem you’re trying to solve with a shovel-ready candidate, but…

I am trying to find front end devs to work on an Electron app, using react. Recruiter is ignoring people with Node/ React or Vue, angular etc and just replying that there are no candidates!

Here's your mistake. Don't involve HR except to sign paperwork.

Yes, HR is bad at hiring engineers. Nonetheless hiring engineers is a lot of work, and engineering departments need someone somewhere to take that load.

The solution is hard[1], but at the end of the day needs to be something much closer to "better HR" than "don't involve HR".

[1] And something very few large companies have cracked. Small outfits can usually get by with networking via their existing staff, but that doesn't scale well and leads to feedback effects like toxic monocultures.