Some of my closest gradeschool friends and I met for dinner last night in Concord NH and started to talk about work. We're all about 39 years old, all in unrelated high tech domains, and all recently tasked with interviewing for the first time. One is an analog chip designer, another is a database guy for GIS, and I'm an OS orchestration/pipeline person for some place.
We came to the point that there is a serious lack of available talent - we all have some very well paying open job positions that we're responsible for helping to fill. But people are not finding their way in to get interviewed. On the flip side of this, I know that a good portion of people I know are always passively looking for new positions, generally at other companies because this is the only apparent way to get promoted. People want new jobs. We want people.
It doesn't add up. There's some black hole that we don't have any insight into. I had mused it was the glut of automatic resume application software available. I've heard that a quarter of a thousand applications are sent for each new position. Automatic systems only allow the few through that have the proper incantation of the same general information.
This sort of haphazard Ask HN is really just an attempt to understand this - is our perception wrong? Are we oblivious? Or is there indeed some new obstruction that everyone is still learning how to navigate?
For background, I'm an experienced generalist Linux programmer. I could explain strace output to you in detail, parallelize your software, etc.
I did a lengthy job search last year, after having taken a few months off due to life circumstances. I did maybe 20 phone screens, 10 tech screens, 5-6 on-site interviews. Even passed an on-site at Google. As you might imagine, this takes a ferocious amount of time and energy.
The result? No offers. Hard to say why. My skills are pretty solid. There's nothing about me or in my background that'd be a plausible red flag, aside from my age (50s).
My interpretation is that there's simply too much supply. Employers will regularly interview dozens of people for positions. (One job I was previously hired for bragged that they had a 1200-to-1 ratio of inquiries to hires.) Why do this? Because you can. Imagine interviewing 20 plumbers to redo your drain lines. Would they think you were being a jerk? (Would they be wrong?)
Looking back over my career, the best jobs I've had had remarkably non-selective hiring processes. They'd post a listing, collect resumes, choose three to interview, and hire one. The interviews weren't quiz-like--they were just conversations. It might seem like a recipe for mediocrity, but somehow it just worked. I did my best work for them, and they were very happy indeed.
My advice, spread your req far and wide, with as much honesty about what the job entails as you can muster. Wait for 20 resumes or a month. Pick two or three to interview in person. Hire one.