The Science of the Job Search, Part VII: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements” – is a nice article in the series, with a few interesting numbers. The one that stands out the most is:
You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.
This sounds about right. And it also explains how the recruiting is still around, with all those ridiculous requirements in every other vacancy.
A while back I blogged the link to the Front-end Developer Interview Questions. Today comes a similar link, but for the Back-end Developer Interview Questions.
Question lists like these aren’t just useful for adjusting your interviews, but also for self-checks and assessments. Each company, team, and project often require a slightly more specialized expertise, which often leads to narrower interviews and “tunnel vision”. Looking at other people’s interview questions helps to review and adjust the questions and address the gaps, resulting in a more rounded interview and expertise.
The other day I came across this story by Guy Shachar, in which he shares his experience with hiring people and the lack of candidates.
The struggle is real. All the different startups are competing over the same human resource and let me tell you, the list of proficient talent isn’t as long as you might think. Or as someone once told me, the problem with going after the top 1% of talent, is that there is only 1% of top talent. In fact the only thing that’s harder than finding top talent employees, is finding top talent employees that are interested in working in your startup.
This reminded me of a long rant I wrote about ten years ago – Where did all the PHP programmers go? And I wasn’t even looking for the top 1% of talent at the time. I have been continuously involved in hiring for a number of companies since that blog post. I’ve tried a variety of different approaches with varying success. But the problem is real and it’s getting worse. There’s huge demand, insufficient supply, and the quality of the supply seems to be dropping as well, with many educational institutions falling behind the progress.
And it’s even tougher for the startups, as they don’t have much to throw into the competition with the larger established companies.
This TravisCI blog post welcomes AJ to the team. In it, there is a bit that caught my attention (except, of course, the one about bra burning):
If you’re so inclined, you can follow her on Twitter or run curl cv.soulshake.net.
Wait a second … A what? curl for the CV? I had to try it out. Here’s an even better way, for reading all the slides:
p=1; while [ $p -lt 9 ]; do curl -N cv.soulshake.net/$((p++)); read; done
Oh. My. God. Lo and behold, this is the coolest tech CV I’ve ever seen. Ever. Period. TravisCI is so lucky to have her!
P.S.: If you are interested in how this was done, here a couple of blog posts – one and two.
“The Engineer/Manager Pendulum” is a great article about a career shift from engineering to management. Anybody who’s in engineering now and plans or even just wants to become a manager should read this. Anybody responsible for “promoting” engineers to managers must read this too.
1. Becoming a manager is not a promotion – it's a lateral move onto a parallel track. You're back at junior level in many key skills.
— Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) May 11, 2017