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>After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they tho

>After harassing HR at my company, I finally made a lateral move where my manager told me he thought at the time of hiring that they needed someone and they thought I might be able scrape by, but now they want me to find someone else just like me. I so relate to this. I was specifically poached from one department by another for a new position within my company. HR process requires internal transfers to apply for the posting on the company website. I did so overnight, and about 15 minutes after HR got in for the day the next morning, I got an email telling me thank you for the application but I would not be considered or interviewed for the position. My new manager had to fight with HR to even get them to send the application she had requested from me on to her because I didn't precisely tick all the checkboxes on the posted job description. This despite the fact that A. she'd specifically gone after me because her people knew the work I was already doing and knew I'd be a good fit with them and B. the position had gone unfilled for months, was badly needed, and the apps HR had passed on were a far worse fit for the job. I mean, I had the odds about as stacked in my favor as you can get and it was still an uphill battle to get me hired on. Makes me cringe to think how many solid people we have to have missed out on because HR rejected them out of hand.

gcb0 11y ago
A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then
- pyre 11y ago
  At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
  - commandar 11y ago
    Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
    - benaston 11y ago
      HR don't want to hold out for a unicorn. They couldn't give two hoots about your skill. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to evaluate it. HR are simply brokers. It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market". Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process). The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to. The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR. The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity. Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions). (1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete. The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.

gcb0 11y ago

A. you were enough to get the job done but wasn't the person to change the game. B. they knew that person was out there but they were failing to reach out to then

pyre 11y ago
At the same time, it says something about the HR process if the hiring manager says that filling the position is critical and that this person would be adequate for the job (even if not game-changing), that HR will fight tooth-and-nail to not consider this person just because every checkbox is not precisely checked in exactly the right way.
- commandar 11y ago
  Exactly this. HR wanted to hold out for a unicorn candidate when we're geographically in an area that makes finding such a candidate difficult and when the pay they were willing to offer wasn't going to attract a unicorn. Meanwhile, we were having to spend several multiples the cost of an employee on outside consultants just to keep daily operations going and had been doing so for months. It probably doesn't help that tech isnt our core competency and we work in an industry that's occupational license heavy, so HR is probably used to being highly selective, but there comes a point where not just cross training somebody that's already been vetted by the hiring manager --and actively resisting it-- when having the position unfilled is costing the company serious money just gets absurd.
  - benaston 11y ago
    HR don't want to hold out for a unicorn. They couldn't give two hoots about your skill. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to evaluate it. HR are simply brokers. It is a board-level decision on salary ranges that prevents you from hiring "at market". Clearly there will always be some excellent developers at any given moment, available to work sub-market for their own, irrelevant reasons - and these will be the "unicorns", and typically your dev team will be full of them (somewhat by definition because they have already been hired by the unicorn-finding process). The question as to why many (most?) highly profitable companies refuse to "pay market" is very interesting and I do not have a good answer to. The best I can come up with is that actually the company (i.e. the important people in the company: the board) explicitly doesn't want to pay for the best (or even above average) candidates, through some recognition/perception that they "do not need the best". But the development team does want to hire good guys, and so you have a kind of stand-off by proxy between the technical team and the board via HR. The board may be focussed on a buy-out, or this year's figures or making some kind of an exit. I very much doubt the board for most companies sees developers as anything other than a fungible commodity. Add in the fact that developers are seen as subordinates to management, and that many developers are already approaching or at their managers' (often low-ish) salaries(1), and I think advertised developer salaries will continue to be massively under-market (there are of course exceptions). (1)Of course managers often get 100% bonuses while developers do not, so this is an untruth, but humans are emotion-driven and so this barrier remains. Realise that companies will happily pay way more than 2,000 USD per day for the very same resources they will not recruit for more than 75,000 per year, and the picture is complete. The situation is exacerbated by our inability as a field to successfully discriminate between good and bad hires and our resultant desperate, near religious avoidance of false positives in the hiring process.