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You don't understand a thing or two about today's job market. It has nothing to do with being qualified or deserving or whichever way you want to twist my words.

It is a lottery. As simple as that. For every role out there, thousand++ candidates will show up. The bulk is coming via recruiters, yes, BUT there is already an unmanageable amount of candidates who come through connections and networking. Hiring managers don't give a damn about having a personal relationship with somebody who introduces somebody if there are 50 others who they also have a good relationship with who all also introduced somebody. There is enough work, but greed and short term thinking has put budget and hiring constraints on entire industries. There simply isn't enough headcount for all those who are looking for work. It has become a lottery. HR people and recruiters will confirm that if you care to ask.

The newest trend is for recruiters to have contracts that forbid them to make contact with anybody at their client, including HR personnel. The recruiters are nothing but data input operators for company's electronic candidate management systems. They enter your details on an internal company web application that is not visible to the public and they never get any reply for 999 our of a 1000 candidates they enter. This is where the whole HR thing is going, and its moving up the job hierarchy, too. Initially it was only drone jobs as you call them but it is increasingly being used for more and more roles, including the ones considered highly skilled. I have been talking to hundreds of recruiters and headhunters and they mostly tell the same story, the whole thing has become a lottery.

In such an environment, where filter algorithms pick candidates, the focus is on irrelevant details, and often the ones who make it through lied about the details because after some while in the game they realise that they are not getting through unless they lie.

A recruiter had sent me a requirement with 19 bullet points of just about anything you could ever possibly do while working for a bank, including sanitary facilities, car park and vehicle management, real estate management, all kinds of accounting roles, all kinds of financial management roles, and project management and IT and telecom skills, too. You name it, it was on that list. I thought they must be looking for a whole bunch of people, so I called up the agent and asked how many of those bullet points he expected a candidate to tick off to be considered. And he said "All of them, of course". I said "You are asking me to lie on my CV?". And he answered, "No.". I said "Come on, you know as well as I do that this is impossible.". He said "No, I have got at least 50 candidate CVs on my desk who all have all of these skills and experience in every area.". And he seemed to actually believed that himself.

regards

benjamin

On 17 March 2015 at 11:59, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

Benjamin Kowarsch writes:

> You are assuming I am looking for dev work through headhunters.

I made no such assumption.

I don't know (and actually don't care) how *you* search for work. I'm
telling you what I can easily observe around me: a lot of public
recruiting based on "drone qualifications", and successful job search
based on "true skills" and personal networks.

> Nobody looks at the true skillset, no matter how you present it

Sorry, you're wrong. In my personal experience, it's about 90% of
potential employers who look at true skillset. I'm sure I've had more
than my share of good luck, but I'm also sure it's not close to nobody
in the "real world".

In both the cases I mentioned, both my would-be boss and his boss were
looking at important subsets of the true skillset. The boss was
looking to offload certain aspects of catherding on me, and I had
significant relevant skills and experience. The boss's boss was
looking at departmental work culture and my experience, which was
limited to a couple of decades of professoring, and worried that (a)
I'd need a lot of herding myself, and (b) that my lack of coding
experience and productivity would make it very difficult for me to
successfully influence coding practices "in the trenches". I would
have been happy to work for those people, but the jobs on offer looked
like more -- and different -- work than I wanted to do. It didn't
work out, but nobody was focused on irrelevant formal qualifications
(such as my PhD in Economics).

Another way to put it is "don't search for a good job, search for a
good boss".

> When I have been introduced somewhere it was typically through
> somebody I know who know somebody or knew somebody who knew
> somebody. It makes little difference.

Yes, and that implies that finding good work is mainly a function of
one's ability to extend one's network.

> The subject matter idiots have it.

Well, have it your way. Somebody else will get the jobs that you
won't get offered! Despite being far more qualified for them than the
successful candidate in many cases .... ;-)

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