I work for a small YC startup and we have recently wanted to hire another engineer. Our CTO posted a listing on WorkAtAStartup and within two or so days, got over 200 applicants. Apparently, WorkAtAStartup (which I've used successfully in the past) allows you to bulk send applications.
He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense.
He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.
We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.
We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.
Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.
Yes, you need to get better at filtering. Yes, it has always been like this. Public job listings have always attracted mostly junk.
The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is.
Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough.
Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.
The best hires I’ve ever been around have been from a previous connection to someone. It’s so much easier. Unfortunately, none of our small team had someone fitting who wasn’t looking to make a job change at this point.
I do have a few friends that may be interesting within the next quarter though, so I’m crossing my fingers.
I bet there were definitely some viable candidates in there, but I don’t think we had the resources to properly screen with the volume we got, so unfortunately, we didn’t get to sit down with them.
Crazy to hear how much spam & straight up liars are applying nowadays. Not being able to pass a technical interview is one thing, but sending a fake resume and then expecting to not be exposed as a fraud is just crazy, sociopath behavior.
He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense.
He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.
We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.
We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.
Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.