Intro
I’ve never been involved in the recruitment process to hire someone else, but have applied to jobs and read many job adverts. It’s a process that’s intriguing though, and I don’t think many companies get it right.
I’ve criticised performance reviews in previous blogs, and have stated it is very difficult to accurately judge someone. However, job interviews seem even more impossible to me. You need to come up with a good job advert to bring in the correct people to assess. Then your interview and assessments need to judge the best applicants.
Finding the correct people to fill a job vacancy is probably hard. I think you need to clearly convey what the job entails so people know if they are qualified and interested. You want all these people to apply for the job, whilst not wasting your time with people who aren’t qualified or aren’t actually interested.
When someone applies, you need to make a judgement whether to call them in for an interview/assessment. Anyone you reject through the entire process – is time wasted. Employing someone and regretting it is lots of time and money wasted.
I’ve seen many people come and go over the years, some quietly leaving and not even lasting a few months.
Here’s a collection of Job Advert stories.
Apprenticeship Schemes
When I first started my job, we had a special type of apprentice role where you start off as a software tester but then eventually become a software developer.
It sounded like a great idea; you get technical people joining, they then learn how the system works as a Tester. When they have the required development skills after learning with a mentor over a period of time, they can move into a development role. They will show their quality mentality from their Testing role, but also understand the requirements much more than hiring a new developer.
However, they joined, were never assigned a developer mentor, and were stuck as a software tester until they threatened to quit. It was just a scam. The company got technical and ambitious people that did a great job at testing. Those that were allowed to move to the Development role all became great developers. However, some actually moved elsewhere so they lost these good people.
It’s a fantastic idea if it is implemented as promised.
More recently, we hired loads of Apprentices via boot camp companies. Just like before, they never really got assigned a proper mentor. They mostly got placed in teams which didn’t have any direction on how to use them. A few months later, presumably someone highlighted this to managers and they were then moved to another team but without anything else changing.
They also had the promise of “Apprentices spend 20 percent of their time learning new skills and the rest based in the work environment”. We even published stories in newspapers with this claim. Maybe you could say 100% of their time were learning new skills because they were kinda just left alone and not really integrated into the team. Some quit after being frustrated that they couldn’t produce any valuable work. The better ones quit to find another software developer role, and the rest just seem to be happily taking the pay cheque for little expectations.
Having a nice spread of abilities: Apprentice, Junior, Developer, Senior, Expert is great as long as you have a plan of how to integrate everyone in the team. If you don’t have a plan for short term and long term, then there’s no point in hiring them.
Women are likely to apply if the job is accurate
“Women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.”
Hewlett-Packard
I find this statement bizarre. Most job adverts are basically just keyword spam and it is hard to ascertain what the job actually involves when they are being vague. If it really does reduce the number of women applying for roles, then why does it keep happening?
I’ve seen job adverts that we put out which may say something like “experience with VMWare” when you don’t need to know anything about how it works – you just need to know how to open sofware and log in. Or you see job adverts like “experience with React, Vue, Svelte” when you know the job is only going to involve one of them… but which one? If you have experience in React and have no interest in using Vue or Svelte, are you going to apply to it?
lorem ipsum
On a few occasions, our HR have put out adverts where the full text was just “lorem ipsum”. This is ridiculous. I mean, they have 1 job to put out adverts, and they just copy and paste a template and don’t even fill it in.
If people see that in a job listing, are they really going to take our company seriously? The fact that it has happened on multiple occasions means that they should change their process so it doesn’t happen again.
Cycle to work
We work at home now, but yet still heavily promote the cycle-to-work scheme as a benefit. Recently we have promoted other “green” ideas like discounts on electric cars. If we don’t drive to work, then really it’s just a potential employee discount. Additionally, it’s not as directly aligned to the company values as they make out – they are basically encouraging more cars on the road!
Bad Impression
We are a tech company that makes various software products. However, our Job Vacancies page isn’t mobile-friendly – you have to use a PC to view them properly. Again, this is going to leave a bad impression and people won’t take our company seriously.
Conclusion
When it is hard to find the right people, and costly to recruit, it is important that you get every stage of the recruitment process correct. You need to get the right people applying, then your process has to accurately judge the best candidates.
Placing a “lorem ipsum” advert which doesn’t display correctly on a mobile device, and also promotes a cycle-to-work scheme on a home-working role – isn’t going to get many applicants.
Stranger Coding Tings 