False Advertising Jobs

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

See Women In Tech blog.

“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.

Mentoring #4

I am mentoring an Apprentice who has never done C# before and this is his first programming job. So this is a diary of some-sort of his progression and my ability to mentor.

I haven’t written about my Apprentice in detail for a while. After spending a bit of time with him, he then got involved in more form-filling and exams for his Bootcamp company. It seems weird that we probably paid a premium for the Bootcamp company to train him, but yet he has been working with us for about a year now (I think) and we have barely managed to do anything with him. I really hope we don’t hire from those Bootcamp companies again. You may as well just hire someone and train them up yourself.

The good news is that my Apprentice has now “passed his apprenticeship” which means he has no more dealings with the Bootcamp company and now can work with me full-time.

At the moment, I’ve given him some Junior developer tests that employers normally give before an interview, so he is working his way through those. Ideally, he should have done them in an hour, so I guess he is a long way off from a Junior standard since he has had them a few days. But hopefully, I can train him well, so I’m quite excited for that.

Another complication is that my team has been assigned another Apprentice and my manager asked me if I could also train him. I made a great point that we have loads of Seniors in the team, so why aren’t they being asked? He said it was a good point and would look at promoting me. We will see how that goes.

Here’s a small summary of aspects I have gone through with my Apprentice. These are C# or Visual Studio topics:

Use some shortcuts like F12 to navigate methods
Ctrl+t “Go to type” shortcut that seems way better than Ctrl+f to find code
Use the “Rename” feature to easily rename variables/methods/classes setc
Break large methods into smaller ones – use Visual Studios “Extract method”.
Using breakpoints, the watch window, immediate window, “tracepoints” to debug. This is very important, you can never be a good developer without being good at debugging.
What the “Call Stack” is, and how to navigate through the method calls using Call Stack window.
How to create a branch in Git, push it to the server and create a Pull Request.
Class inheritance and polymorphism.
When to use Abstract classes and methods.
The difference between “hard” casts and “as” casts.
Using some basic Linq (Select, Where, OfType).
Creating basic Winforms, and how to use Dock and Anchor to automatically resize controls as the form resizes.

Mentoring Again

Background

A few years back, I was assigned an Apprentice to mentor. I said I would love to do it, but I questioned why the Senior Developers in the team didn’t have anyone to mentor when it is literally in their job descriptions.

At the time, my manager said that she thought I’d be the best mentor in the team, and if I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I think the mentoring went successfully, but I didn’t get a promotion.

Present Day

Fast-forward to the present day: My new manager said that an Apprentice is joining our team, and out of everyone, he reckons I would be the best mentor. If I do it successfully, then that is good evidence I can be promoted.

I said I’d love to do it. This time I didn’t complain about the Seniors not mentoring. I didn’t want to risk my manager reassigning the Apprentice. I have a good feeling my manager will actually promote me, but we will see.

The Future

I had a chat with my Apprentice. He has never done C# before; but it’s vital to our team. We already had a lack of developers – and a lack of skilled ones. Now we have someone who has never seen the program we are working on, and never used the language it is written in. He has come via a bootcamp that taught him basic Web Development, so that’s some wasted training.

This means that I’ll have to spend a lot of time training him, which means my productivity to bug fixes/enhancements will drop. Our team’s productivity was already low, and now we have another member which is actually going to decrease productivity. I hope managers realise this.

I think I’ll have to encourage him to learn as much as he can on his own. I’ve sent him a C# ebook which is pretty comprehensive. He has access to an online training platform to watch in his own time, plus all the rest of the free content on the internet.

This is another topic to write about on the blog. It can document me learning how to teach someone from scratch, and also document funny mistakes he makes.

The Junior Contractors

Recently, we have hired a bunch of Junior developers via a Bootcamp company. This company basically takes people on an intensive training course, then they find them work. So they are essentially a contracting company, but are sending out fresh-faced developers to their first jobs. Let’s refer to them as Training Company.

As far as I understand, the intention is to hire them permanently, but my company is prepared to pay the premium for the Training Company to educate them.

I think to preserve their own interests, the Training Company give them assignments/exams to complete. This way they can understand how good they are and quickly reassign them if they are let go by their current “employer”.

So for the past two weeks, these Juniors have either been studying for an Agile exam, or writing an essay based on work they completed, but they are doing it in company time, not in their own free time.

So the way I see it; they are getting paid by my employer to do work for the Training Company… with the Training Company pocketing a fee.

They are completely mugging us off there.

Yet, if the intention is to employ them permanently after the initial contract; then all these assignments the Training Company give them are pointless. Unless of course, you can prove that these assignments and exams are actually beneficial.

One of the Juniors comes back from the exam and says they have failed. They then go up to their line manager and say “was that a retrospective I led last week?”, the line manager brutally replies “no, it was a refinement session; that’s exactly why you failed”.

Hiring Juniors

The company I work for sometimes has problems with recruitment, because they don’t often offer wages comparable with the rest of the industry. Also, there are companies offering more money with better transport links. Instead of increasing wages, they often have the idea of acquiring unskilled workers and training them up; hoping enough of them will be long-term employees.

The thing is, although that has worked in the past, we were in a situation where we had experienced C# developers teaching Juniors C# to work on C#. Now we have the case that C# developers are expected to teach Juniors Web-related technologies like Javascript and AWS.

We have hired a batch of these Juniors from Bootcamp companies that do “crash courses”, where they learn various skills within 3 months, then they find them a proper job. Some of them I’ve asked questions, expecting them to be more knowledgable than me, and then they say something along the lines of “this is new to me, I didn’t study it”. So what are they doing their crash course on? We are hiring them for Javascript and AWS and they come here and tell us they haven’t seen it before.

The other day, one of these Juniors asked me a question, but added: “I expect you won’t know because this is new to you as well, but I don’t know who I can ask”. This is exactly the problem. How can we train them if we are trying to learn ourselves. The whole point of hiring Juniors is that you have enough Seniors to turn them into good developers and this just can’t happen with our structure. The fact that a Junior has joined, all excited to learn and start an exciting career; only to find he has little support and is set to struggle; it’s disheartening, and he knows this already.

Managers are proper proud of all this recruitment though, and even HR/Marketing have placed sponsored articles about it in a local newspaper. One article was about how one guy had all these dead end jobs and now he is employed to produce “solutions and codes”. Such strange phrasing.