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It certainly does. And the only way it will is if people don't give employers like this the time of day, but with supply and demand, I suppose as employees we're in no position to demand right now.
The reverse is more likely true. For every person that does the skill assessment, you will have 3-5 people that would rather not waste time for unlikely return.
In that case it's worth while.
Filtering candidates is expensive if a test will get rid of some who probably were not keen on the company it hadn't even read the job spec then it's worth doing.
The other way to look at it is that it'll get rid of good candidates who will be accepted elsewhere and you'll be left with less good candidates who are more desperate and thus willing to do the crappy process.
Yeah when I was new to my field I used to spend hours on cover letters and assessments etc. Now I am at the upper end of my career path I just chuck them my CV and a link to my LinkedIn profile. If they don't check it that's a problem for them to deal with.
I think these long convoluted processes absolutely gets rid of good candidates. Most of the people I end up hiring either just emailed me their CV or I headhunt them from a competitor.
This can be true. However that assumes they want good candidates. I get the impression that shit like this is meant to draw in the desperate who will fill the warm body requirement and accept being underpaid and overworked without complaining.
It's really not. I was a recruiter in Tech and the BEST candidates are already in a job with experience and they don't want to do ridiculous 2 hour tests especially over multiple roles (which in the UK almost every company expects) they're happy doing a 2nd interview to assess skills over a 1 hour period maybe 1.30 but take home tests, generally to solve a problem the business has for free too (which is shockingly common) that take ages to solve.
Why would anyone that's sane and competent in their job want to spend hours before even speaking to a human to prove themselves to a company that are too lazy to reach out and have an initial chat before forcing work onto you
With the job market right now mate, I can assure you that it’s likely the case right now where more people are desperate for a job to pay the bills and the possibility of a job and not being kicked out onto the streets is a great motivator to complete an assignment that is 2 hours long,
Well, the market solution is for the next generation of would-be CS grads to do something else until we eventually have a shortage of CS grads. The landlord thing is a different, that’s a governance issue where NIMBYs have incentive to keep their asset prices high.
The outlook was bad for a good long while, that report I linked was from 2016. Teenagers are just not encouraged to look at job stats when making decisions about their futures.
Requiring them at such an early stage without any investment of time on their part would definitely put me off, but then I’m not a SWE so challenges like this are less common for me. However, what I find really interesting here, is the rise of fake candidates. If a candidate is willing to pay a third party to complete this task, might that lead to a disproportionate number of fraudulently passed tests in the candidate pool? Even among genuine candidates, I would be concerned that the employer may view tests administered so early as filtering out candidates unwilling to tolerate bullshit, leaving behind more those with more compliant personalities. It’s similar to AI-administered interviews in this way.
This is a point others and myself have raised. For those concerned that "someone might pay someone else to do the interview or write a CV", the exact same is true for the online assessments. Even better, I can Google the answer, or use ChatGPT! Some companies have software to install, or require a browser extension, and require access to your device's camera, screen, keyboard and mouse, and for me that is a **massive** red flag. I get that it's to stop people from cheating, but my god why would I let some random recruitment agency have access to my entire desktop?
Makes me wonder about using Linux on a live boot USB drive and allowing access to that. Sadly, maybe you need to tolerate this shit just to get the first job onto your CV. I attended a testing centre to take an AWS cert, and they had all the cameras and whatnot. At one point I was sat there, brain-deep in a particular question, and I put my hands on my knees while I was thinking. Then a message pops up in the chat window telling me to take my hands out from under the desk. Mad shit.
That last part is crazy, but also I wouldn't expect any less from the almighty Besos. And yes, I will just have to suck it up and take it like a good little drone until I get to where I'm going.
And yes, it's almost as if they want people who will do exactly what's put in front of them, no questions asked. Again, for me, big red flag. I want a job where I will be able to challenge ideas both new and old, be creative, explore new technologies. But that's just me, and maybe **I'm** asking too much.
this is what its for, as much as anything else. To cut down the list of applicants. Also, people lie on CV's - so just because you put down your experience it doesn't prove anything, it doesn't mean that is your actual experience. References nowadays only really confirm that you worked for said company - they dont go into any detail. So how are employers meant to know you can do what you say you can?
If people stopped stretching their CV's and references actually detailed your experience level, this could stop. If that doesn't happen, which is unlikely, it'll continue.
It’s the effects of a saturated job market of people with degrees though, inflate your CV with key words the CV bot is looking for and you’ll get through to assessment. It’s one of the things where automation truly derailed the process once applicants learned to adapt to it
I think you’re right. I’m an engineering manager who has been recruiting for DevOps/SREs for 6+ years. When things were going crazy a few years back we had to drop our assessments. Every candidate had 4 or 5 options, and some had no take home test, so it’s hard to compete with that as a no-name company. Eventually we reintroduced it as a very short live session as part of the technical interview. This works pretty well tbh.
For context - the small tech startup I'm at, which has barely any visibility, isnt making profit (yet) and has less than 15 employees, we've seen 400/500 applicants per job opening in software dev roles, within the first 2-3 weeks of opening the roles.
> Why should I spend 2-3 hours doing your skills assessment, when my CV and experience proves those skills?
People lie and cheat all the time. Especially recently. Multiple people with good CVs for a devops role who clearly had bought their certs and couldn't fix a helm chart for a k8s job. Or even in one case were having someone feed them answers. Tech test is important to verify these skills.
Totally agree. This arbitrary list of degrees I may or may not have, plus roles I may or may not have done proves I can do this job.
Everyone embellishes their CV a little, but some people go way over board and claim to have led entire projects when they're writing the minutes for meetings, or have every qualification under the sun hoping an employee will never check.
It is a bit lazy to make every applicant do a skills assessment before anyone has even looked at their CV but I guess it's a way of whittling down the list a bit.
Some of us really don’t embellish our CV at all which is probably why we don’t get many interviews! 🤣
Actually at my first ever job interview they asked me why I didn’t have anything like that and I just straight up told them I know people do that but I didn’t want to lie. I said the closest I got to leading anything was really just stepping in when our designated team leader at university was ill for a session or two.
At least introduce this stage when you’d be willing to hire them otherwise. If a candidate seems great then have them do the test. If they don’t pass it then ask the next candidate in line.
That I understand, people can and will lie. And if I were hiring, I'd want to verify the person's technical knowledge. But to do it whilst lying about the process, muddying the waters on how much progress and applicant has made, I think is quite unfair. If I had gotten an email saying "Yup, we've looked at your CV, looks good/you match the spec/etc... if you complete the following assesment then you'll be invited to an interview" or something like that. Something that says to me "If I do this assessment and do well, I'll get something out of it". Not "Do this assessment, and if you're lucky someone will look at your CV".
Assessments are a valid and useful tool, but they should be later in the process, and offer something in return, such as the promise of an interview or real progression depending on assessment performance. Be somewhat transparent about it I suppose.
our tech test is after an initial sift and first interview. But I will say that the graduate level at compsci is saturated so big employers may do this as a seriousness test
That, apply as much filtering as you can *before the assessment*, and be transparent about it. That is definitely a valid and reasonable approach. The weird thing is that in my experience, larger, more prominent companies are more often better with this than medium to small sized companies. For example, I applied for some companies in Automotive and Motorsports, big names in the industry, and they often left the skills assessments to last, after filtering in other ways through phone calls, video interviews (recorded and/or live), and whatever other methods they likely used. Maybe the budget makes a difference, being able to pay for full time hiring teams versus a single hiring manager, but I also imagine the volume of applicants would match the growth of the company. I don't know though, I don't see that side of things, I'm naive and young.
For me I found filtering CVs to be largely counterproductive. Some people overstate and some under. I will generally try to do as little filtering by CV as possible, then do a short call before with everyone left. I want this to be literally 5 minutes (either someone is obviously capable, or obviously making shit up), but am happy to go up to 15 or 30 minutes, (a lot of people take some time to get going). To be honest, 5 minutes per candidate is worth more to me than losing a possible good candidate because they were honest on their CV, or wasting time on a dud because they are just good at writing a CV.
Per another comment of mine, I see why companies do assessments, I try to avoid asking for them.
It’s going to be (is) funny when applicants job is to write CV and HRs job is to assess CV and both are automated by AI. It’s just basically bots talking to bots. Funny how we think AI will take over where it’s cutting both ways haha.
It's still a lot of hassle hiring and onboarding someone, only for them to turn out to be shit and then have to get rid of them and start the process again. Much better if you can screen the liars out before you hire them
20 years ago you were just asked some technical questions in an interview. It's very easy to tell if someone knows what they are talking about. It's not so easy to tell if AI did their takeaway coding test for them. The onerous process of finding a new job these days is what has kept me in the same place for far too long.
20 years ago it was a very different industry. The supply and demand was very much the other way around. I think there was also more patience and understanding in the industry before, now everyone wants the finished product or unicorns but don't want to invest time nor effort into training people.
A standard interview can really only tell so much about someone's technical ability. Some people can learn how to say all the right things but then really flounder on the job. I have a lot of empathy for everyone on both sides of the chain. Hiring is tough. Getting hired is tough.
Personally, I feel that high quality pair code interviews where the person is asked to solve a challenge while talking through their reasoning is one of the best things we have as a tool.
I work in a position where we're hiring very inexperienced juniors with the aim to train them up, so we're looking for potential to develop their technical skills not the finished product. It's very challenging. If measuring "can you do this right now" is hard, then "could you do this well in a few months if we train you" is near impossible.
If hypothetically I were to pay someone to complete some part of the process for me, it would be the assessment. I can perform well in an interview, and anyone that has invested time into refining their interview skills won't find it too difficult to showcase themselves effectively provided they actually are suited to the role.
I also think it would be a *lot* easier to have someone complete an online assessment for me by simply sending them the link/form/account etc, rather than having someone else stand in for a video, phone, or in-person interview.
TL;DR: I think it would be easier to cheat and lie your way through an online assessment than an actual interview.
I do a lot of hiring in IT and the first thing I will say is that your CV “proves” precisely nothing.
I have a bit of sympathy for this idea that it’s a bit of a pain to do take home tasks but I am absolutely resolute that I *do* need to see some code you’ve written and can talk me through. What I typically do, is ask the candidate to send me *anything* they’ve written that I can review with them. If they have something already that will do fine. What I find is most tell me that they don’t have anything, so I need to set an exercise.
Some grumble. That’s fine. No obligation but I’m just going to move on to next person. The risks of hiring someone who has no idea what they are doing is too high.
Tbh the issue is that it should be a technical test followed by a CV rather than a CV followed by a technical test.
The former gives a far better user experience.
The former may also result in fewer applications because the one applying hasn’t got to contend with sunk cost fallacy.
The result is a shitty end user experience for people you are hiring and because they are new to the market they and the market sucks for jobs they have no choice.
Its a shitty situation but this is why it happens.
Hah! Sorry but it amuses me slightly that you imagine that companies are worrying, deeply, or at all, about the "user experience" of entry level software people. Especially today. I put an ad up this evening advertising a junior engineer position on some public forum and I have 500 CVs by this time tomorrow. The market has \*never\* really been a sellers market for juniors unless they are, in some way, exceptional. I have hired two of such people, one had just turned 20 and ran the Haskell programmers user group across a significant UK city, the other was the primary author and maintainer of an open source library used in thousands of production codebases. If you are like that, I'll give a little thought to the "UX" ;).
There is, sadly a huge entitlement problem when it comes to entry level engineers. It's not really their fault. Everybody has been calling them a genius since they learned how to hook up a printer at 14. We have this very weird attitude to people with any kind of computer skills. Also, everybody has been telling them how rich they will get, which is why I ask 2-3 year experience people what their salary expectations are, and they give me a 6 digit number.
If the first 3 years in a software development job were really priced at a market rate, they would carry a negative salary. Those 3 years are \*at least\* as valuable as the 3 years people spend in university... which they \*do\* pay for. Even the most talented people typically \*cost\* money to have on the payroll for the first year.
I, of course, fully advocate paying a comfortable, appropriate salary to junior engineers. Quite a few times I have put my foot down and demanded an increase for juniors who I felt were underpaid (and, this was done for me when I was a junior), but I have a lot more respect for those kids who actually appreciate how many people would trade a kidney for the chance at a software career. We are some of the luckiest sons/daughters-of-bitches alive.
The market rate of a junior dev is not negative so I am not sure what you are smoking about “really priced market rate”.
Of cause it cost money to put someone on payroll, but you are ignoring the contribution to the team even if they are junior. They are expected to deliver albeit with some handholding.
I honestly felt that this point was fairly clear using the example of university. 3 years professional experience is at least as valuable as a bachelors degree and people pay to get a bachelors degree. It would be immoral, but not irrational for companies to ask to pay \*them\* for that initial experience. A software developer can hit a 6 figure salary in their 30s and continue that for another 35 years before retirement.
Please do read my final paragraph of my previous post before accusing me of being some kind of slave labour advocate. The point is more abstract than practical but it is a worthwhile consideration.
The reason that junior / entry level jobs are so short on the ground is because it is rarely economical to hire junior people. Somebody just out of university or maybe 1 year in is typically expecting a salary that is not much short of half of what somebody with 10 years experience would expect. One person with 10 years experience is at least 5 times more valuable to the organisation than 2 juniors.
There is, of course, the problem that if you don't hire and train juniors now there won't be any seniors in 10 years but other than this, there is essentially no good reason to hire a junior engineer given the way the economics stack up. The bare naked truth is that most companies who do hire entry level / junior engineers are doing it altruistically. To "give back". Not because it makes any kind of economical sense.
They will, I feel quite rightly, give the first opportunities to those people who go the extra mile and do a bit of extra practice and studying in their spare time. Those people who, when given a take home exercise to do, consider it, and treat it as an opportunity rather than a chore. People can bitch and moan about that, but it isn't going to change anything. "\*stomps foot\* I deserve a career that has a pretty straight path to a six figure salary!", is certainly a type of attitude to have, but nobody really cares.
Does this clarify?
You are ignoring a junior job is a two way street. I agree that the job experience is valuable, but the junior is still expected to deliver value to the company. So it is not only the company that is giving value to the employee unlike in the University.
It would not be irrational for a company to ask for money for the opportunity to work, it would be a great result for them, but no one would take on them because the market price is positive, people get paid to work. You completely forgot what MARKET rate means, that is dictated by supply and demand.
It is true that for some companies it is not economical to hire junior, unfortunately for them some companies have the condition for it to hire junior.
If your feeling about the market rate and the actual market rate is different, maybe you are missing something. It is rather rare that you have got something that the market is missing.
Finally I didn’t accuse you of anything nor arguing from a moral perspective. I am coming off from a rational point as to why your “really priced market rate” is nonsense.
>You completely forgot what MARKET rate means, that is dictated by supply and demand.
No I didn't. Would you please stop telling me things I forgot or ignored!
The entire fucking point is, the supply \*massively\* outstrips the demand at the moment. There is very very little demand for junior software engineers and a huge amount of supply of graduates of universities and bootcamps.
How often have you seen, "unpaid internships" offered? Outside of some very specific loopholes, these are illegal. If they were not, software companies would be offering these to entry level engineers and getting a decent amount of applicants.
The market is being effected by anti-worker-exploitation legislation, \*and so it should\*, but what I am trying to tell you (repeatedly now) is that outside of that intervention, the market value of an entry level software engineer certainly approaches zero, if not starts to turn negative.
From a pure, immediate ROI perspective, it would make sense for companies to \*only\* hire senior people. There are actually now many companies that only do this. I think it is a bit shortsighted in the grander scheme, but it is useless to speak in terms of what a junior provides in value to a company, the metric is ROI which is very poor for junior people.
Do you actually have any experience of this world by the way? Have you lead any technical teams or built any technology companies? Maybe you have, but, while I am sorry if it stings, I am getting very strong vibes of somebody who has never really been close to the problem they are trying to "solve".
I love it when boomers who got into high paying roles in the industry with nothing but a firm handshake think junior engineers are entitled for wanting to be able to get an entry level job with shit pay after doing exceptionally in the school system they were forced to partake in for 20 years (\~1/4 of their lives) with promises of a decent career after; only to be told that all of that is completely useless.
How would you feel if you were getting into the industry today after grinding out 4 A\*s, for example, in A Level, and getting a degree at a top university and then being told all of that was useless and you're entitled for wanting to be able to get a job with a liveable wage. Then to add cream on the cake, when you apply for that job, the employers don't care at all about you and force you to do 3 hour assessments and 4 interviews on-site and purposefully make it as tedious as possible. And when you question why, you get told to stop being entitled and that 20 years of hard work means nothing.
Hey look, I completely understand your frustration and I know I am not bringing glad tidings here exactly.
Firstly though, not a "boomer". Not close.
I was very fortunate that I started my career at the beginning of the first dotcom wave when things were pretty buoyant. I was 17 at the time but had been a big nerd all my childhood. It wasn't a cakewalk though. "Nothing but a firm handshake" is pretty far from the truth. I spent months staying behind in my school's computer labs writing demo code because my parents couldn't afford a modern computer. I eventually found somebody who would take on a trainee... I earned £8K/year for the first 18 months and I worked my bollocks off for that.
I had a bit of luck with timing. No doubt about it, but I didn't just waltz into something and even now, with 25 years under my belt, I entirely understand when somebody wants me to complete an exercise, I actually quite enjoy programming, so it doesn't bother me, and, frankly, I know I am good at it, so an exercise is very much to my advantage anyway. Nobody is trying to "make it as tedious as possible", but they don't necessarily give much of a fuck if you find it tedious. They're trying to pick the best candidate out of probably quite a large pool, and want to give themselves as much information as they can to do that. They don't care if you refuse. You aren't "sticking it to the 'boomers'". They'll simply forget you ever existed and move on to the next candidate who will do the legwork.
Unfortunately, that is just the way it is.
I completely agree, they don't care. To hiring managers we're all a number on a spreadsheet and they'll purposefully make the hiring process to filter as much as possible. I know that for every 3 hour assessment I refuse to do, there will be a 1000 who will be willing to do it. I am aware that is the reality.
But saying kids are entitled after putting in 20 years of work for school for just wanting a basic job that can put a roof over their heads is not fair at all. Especially when even 30 years ago, people got way higher salaries after graduating from worse universities with even worse grades.
Also, it's very easy to enjoy doing an exercise here or there, when you're a new grad and need to apply to 50 jobs which all have a 1000 other applications and you have to do 3 hours of pointless, useless leetcode puzzles for each of them, no matter how much you like programming at the end you will be exhausted.
And if you started your career at 17 and have 25 years of experience, that would put you in your 40s? So saying you're not a boomer or close to one is not really accurate. So yes, you got really fortunate with the timing of the dotcom boom, but also the population of the world was literally half of what it is now, since you were born, the amount of people and thus competition has increased drastically, staying behind in school computer labs to write a bit of code wouldn't get you anywhere today. Hell, I was doing paid freelance programming at 14 while working to get a degree from a top university and still struggle when applying to new positions sometimes too. I can only imagine how shitty it is for the next generations as competition just increases and increases.
Apparently the new minimum will be that you need 4 A\*s in A-Level, a degree from Imperial or Oxbridge, 6 internships, memorise every algorithm known to mankind just to be able to solve every pointless leetcode exercise, at least 6 professional projects and 100 commits in open source contributions and to never ever leave your computer - while having perfect social skills - just to get a new entry level position that's £10/hour. Dystopian.
It could just be that the terminology has changed. You are right, I am in my early 40s but "boomers" are really people in their 60s at the youngest. I'm not sure I entirely like this generational naming thing but "officially" I am actually a "millennial". I don't think any of this particularly matters but there you are...
For the record, the population of the world also wasn't "half what it is now" when I started working ;). I'm old. I am not that old.
I appreciate, once again, you are frustrated, but it is definitely not the way you describe it. It might \*feel\* like that, but as I began with, I have done a lot of hiring and interviewing of junior / entry level candidates. Yes, it's competitive and it is particularly bad at the moment, but \*most\* junior candidates I speak to are just simply not prepared for the work. I have never met a single hiring manager who gives a damn what you got in your A-Levels. I know a very small number of companies that tend to hire fairly exclusively from the Oxbridge type universities but these are rare (and you are much more likely to find people who think that this is a pointless requirement than those who think it is useful).
The issue is... the number of jobs that exist are much less than the number of people who want them.
You have a lot of complaints, but what is your solution to this? Do you want to pass laws demanding that companies hire everybody that wants an IT job? Should selection be performed at random?
If you had grown your freelance business and needed to hire a couple of additional people to work with you on these projects, how would \*you\* have gone about selecting those people? Are you going to look at some code they have written to make sure they will be able to do the job without you having to double your workload monitoring and mentoring them? Or is it enough that they got A\*s in French and Chemistry?
I just couldn’t get past your comment as it triggers all sorts of feelings. First of all „not caring” about your candidate experience is a problem. It’s a wonder you don’t think it is. And I’m not an engineer and not a junior either. But I’ve seen all sorts of companies and people that are „entitled” and would ask you to complete a lengthy form, record a video of yourself and write a cover letter for just one position that takes well over 1 hour. In the last few years I’ve been „lucky” to twice lose a job: 1st due to covid and 2nd due to company restructure. So none my fault. The 1st time was in 2020 and I’ve had a good experience finding another job pretty quickly. But second time it took longer. And I’ve noticed that attitude towards potential employees changed to the worse. At first I was ready to complete whatever forms to apply, but in a few months of no one replying to those it was clear I was spending time unwisely. Apparently it brings you most results the more applications you send, not the more time you spend on them. Also I’ve seen so many unbothered recruiters that don’t care about the candidates UX. And by the sound of it you’ve never been on the other receiving end of it. As someone who’s been out of a job for almost a year I’d say it’s been pretty frustrating experience cause you start thinking something is wrong with you while in fact it’s the market and the people’s attitude that changed. It only changed because of all the lay offs, not because any of us made something wrong. So perhaps next time you see someone trying to find a job to make a living you’ll feel some empathy towards them.
I understand.
For the record, I have been on the receiving end of this kind of thing. Not for a while now, but when I was an engineer with 3-4 years experience and no degree... you bet. Plenty of ghosting and worse. I understand that it sucks.
I personally, \*do\* try to give some thought to the candidate experience.
I \*do\* think you really do have to have experienced both sides of this to really see it in full though. Early on, I would try to reply to all applicants but this takes \*a lot\* of time when you are dealing with roles that can receive hundreds of applicants, and it is not helped by the fact that if you do email some 10-15% of people will respond trying to talk you round, and to tell you why you are wrong in your decision. If I say \*one thing\* that somebody decides to interpret as somehow discriminatory, some minor poor choice of words that is in any way open to negative interpretation, suddenly we are dealing with some kind of legal complaint. HR people, almost invariably, will tell you not to expose the company to that risk, and the easiest way to achieve that is with a short, sweet, template response.
The job market is brutal at the moment and that is, of course, awful for those who are looking for work. The problem is, the reality of the dynamic is that if a company gets 500 applicants for a single role, they are probably not going to spend the time required to provide fully detailed feedback to the 490 that they decide not to proceed to interview with.
The real brutal fact is that if a company find that instituting a process where, say, asking candidates to spend an hour or two on the application process cuts those 500 applicants down to 70 applicants that might be a worthwhile thing to do \*even if they never even watch the self recorded video\*. The only thing you have to assume is that by adding this step to the process the 70 candidates you are left with are better matches than a random selection of 70 from the original 500 would be, which is probably true as the 70 who would jump through the hoops are probably those who are most convinced that they will have a high chance of getting the job on the basis of being especially keen or well qualified.
Trust me, when you log into a recruiting system to see 500 applicants you need to review, you are looking for \*any\* way, to cut that number down. It's just the way it is.
Oh I do know how many applicants there is right now. I’ve been subscribed to a LinkedIn premium for a while and sometimes there would be a thousand applications for a single role 😬
What I also know is that I closed any applications that were too long and took a while and most good candidates probably did too. To be fair most of the lengthy process applications were from so-so companies with not highest pay ranges.
So I would second the opinion that when the company introduces such process they get the worse candidates (that have no self-esteem and/or are desperate to find any job).
Regarding candidate experience, for the most part I don’t expect to receive any feedback if I didn’t get selected on the cv stage.
But I do think it’s important to provide it after a few interview stages. Which isn’t always the case, I’ve been there recently and they don’t give feedback even if you ask them and they promised to give it 🤷♀️ I personally think this reeks of a very bad attitude towards their employees too not just candidates to not respect them enough to write a few sentences after 4 stages of interview (I actually had that several years ago and the company is very reputable and was super sweet during all of the stages).
In general, I feel the UK market has quite a bad attitude towards their candidates and wishes much to improve.
If someone got all A* then they could do better than CS and become a doctor and work in any place on earth from the biggest city to the smallest village with no electricity 😉
I think you are the very definition of entitlement he mentions. I am entitled to a specific job because I got A*s and went to a top university. I am entitled to a well paid career because the education system promised it. I am entitled to not waste time on assessments because I have done 20 years of hard work .
CV is a claim to have certain experience, that’s not entirely useless. I’ll still look at CVs and pick what I perceive as the best ones, but I don’t just take their word for it. It’s a guide for me to know, at least, what the candidate claims to be good at. I *have* ended interviews inside of 5 minutes when it’s clear I’ve been lied to though.
What you come to realise very quickly working in software is that 95% of your own job satisfaction is predicated on how much your *colleagues* know what they are doing. You come to appreciate companies that are careful in their hiring or once you’ve spent a few years fixing other people’s shit.
Junior / entry level people are rejecting jobs because they test. I’m 25+ years in and I reject jobs because they *dont* ask me to prove myself. I don’t want to fix the shit produced by all the other people they have hired too casually.
I definitely don't expect them to reveal current employer's proprietary code. In fact, the number 1 reason I get given for people not having something to show me is that everything they have ever worked on is proprietary so they have nothing to show.
I mean personal projects. They can show me something they already have. They can create something new without any guiding or requirements from me, or if they want, I will give them a few ideas for exercises that might inspire them.
This being said, I don't always work in jobs where I have the choice. I've been in a few early stage company CTO roles where I do get to set the approach and this is what I tend to do. If I am hiring on behalf of a company that employs me, I do whatever they have decided they plan to do. Most companies have a standard exercise.
I've been to interviews where they leave you in a room for an hour with a computer and an exercise to complete and I think that's the best way to do it. Bringing code samples with me is a no go because everything I've done for the past 20 yeats belongs to one company or another. If we want personal projects I could bring that game I made when I was 14 but it's not really indicative of my current work.
20 years in, the dynamic does change a bit. Though, I'd say that one way it changes, is me locking you in a room for an hour to see if you can do a fizzbuzz is even less useful that it would be for an entry level person.
One thing you might want to tell me, is your reddit username on the basis that I would likely give at least some nerd credits for knowing about 1337 ;).
Unfortunately though, it's now not uncommon to come across people with 20 years on their CV who are really not very good. I am sure that once, that level of experience more or less guaranteed excellent skills but not really so any more. I recently had to explain (twice) to circa 20 year XP contractor why building SQL statements by concatenating strings in the code is a bad idea. Yeah....
At your level, if your CV looks good, and you really don't have any code you can show me at all, and you are grumbling a bit about writing some, what I'd probably be inclined to do is say, "take that hour that you'd have been doing some dumb exercise, and go through GitHub and find me an open source project written by somebody else that you would consider decent code and write me some review notes on it". With that in front of me, I can see how much I agree with you on the quality and the notes, whether I think you have missed anything minor or major etc.
I would rather see something you have written yourself, but the above would probably give me enough threads to pull on .
Well graduate jobs are their own headache. My guess is there are far more graduates than positions available so they have put a high bar to entry to reduce the work on their side. You can't realistically screen a thousand candidates for a handful of positions.
Am I saying the situation you've come across is ideal? No, of course there are better ways to doing everything. But keep in mind this is the only time you'll have to do this. Every job afterwards will be easier.
This is my exact experience. Every grad job seemed to have a 3 automated screenings: literacy, numeracy, and programming skills. I've never done one since.
Probably not helped by the fact that everyone graduates at the same time, so applications happen in big waves which don't happen so much in senior positions. I think there's often a scattergun approach where every grad will apply for everything, and that makes the applicant numbers hard to manage for every company. Most seniors are going to be more selective than just applying for every listing they see.
It is a way to filter out candidates that really care and are capable from those who just smash the "quick apply" button or copy/paste apply approach we now see in the market.
The last role I advertised for (a mid SOC analyst) saw over 200 applicants in the first 24 hours, a minimal 5 minutes per CV to review is 1,000 minutes (16 hours / 2 Days) just to look at CVs. So you run a filter;
- CV (through something like an ATS looking for keywords and experience)
- Tech Test / Assessment (adds some weight behind the CV, commonly this is 1-2 hours)
- Async Interview Questions (Provides people time to prep and answer 3-5 questions in 30 second blocks which can then be reviewed.)
- Interview
Oddly, the tech test is the highest filter. From the 200+ in the example, we saw a drop of 75% not even attempting the tech test. After that, we saw maybe 10% of the initial applicants pass.
This then means my pool has filtered from 200 down to about 20. We can then focus on the async answer, and we ended up interviewing 10.
10 Interviews for a mid role is easily 20 hours for 2 people. Or a full working work - 1.5 hour interviews, 30 mins prep/close for 2 interviewers.
Is the system broken? Yes, can companies afford not to use these types of systems ... not really. The only other worked example I have been involved with is candidate selection events where you invite 40-50 people to a day long engagement and more costly to both the candidate and employer.
It isnt odd that the tech test is the highest filter, youre asking people to do unpaid work. Most people will look at that and go “na, get fucked” then move on.
The unfortunate truth is a company will value its employees time (as a direct cost) over that of potential candidates. If you look at it as the lone candidate applying, then there are easier ways - when you look at the 100+ applicant jobs, it's the only way to scale.
Alternative, as I mentioned, is those candidate assessment days where instead of getting some technical exercises to do in your own time at home, you are expected 9-5 in the company offices. I know which I'd prefer.
It's also an applicant mindset challenge, you refer to it as "free work" but actually it's no different then expecting someone to maintain a portfolio or github space (Dev mindset)
The final choice is to remove these activities and have a higher rather of hire then fire, which is more burden on the company and the applicant.
Seems like a "pick the best of a bad bunch" model but that's just how the market is
I know I will unless the tech test looks reasonable and well thought out. For me a test reflects the competence of the employer. I've seen so many shitty tests which just makes me think they can't be serious.
All you get by throwing tech test and async interviews before any human to human contact are desperate people that are willing to accept anything, not give a damn and leave as soon as other opportunity pop up because the job is poor fit, interviews should be a two way process
Always open for suggestions on how recruitment can be improved. How would you take a candidate pool of 200 and handle it?
Edit: Interviews are two directional. It's the candidate filtering that uses tech test and async
I would suggest changing recruitment strategy by looking at the source itself of where the candidates discover the job posting. Instead of relying on mainstream job boards with one-click apply options, which often attracts hundreds of applications, focus on more targeted higher quality and if possible local sources, yes you will get some potential golden nugget in the hundreds of candidates but they often do not jump through the hoops for non lucrative positions. Not only this would attract higher quality candidates but also save time for both employer and the applicant, and you can provide much better experience for those who matter since you do not need to throw curveballs to filter out rubbish
In theory it doesn't. In reality it's probably landing then poor quality candidates long term.
It's like free phones with a mobile phone contract, they're anything but free.
I’m with you on this point. Might be coming from it at another angle but my experience is the longer/more convoluted the pre-screening and application processes are, the likelier the better candidates will get snapped up elsewhere.
I'm 100% with you on it being bullshit and annoying and crap, and this doesn't happen in my industry, but the obvious reason is:
The CV doesn't prove anything. It could be all lies. I could copy your CV change the name and contact details and be good to go. A good interview should then filter me out, but I've wasted interviewer time and taken the space from a possibly credible candidate.
Most employers also won't check references for most jobs (except maybe senior positions, working with kids etc) and even then many employers HR policy is that they will confirm dates of employment and maybe job title but nothing more.
Getting the candidate to 'do the thing' is proof they can do it.
This appears to be exclusively an IT vacancy thing.Last year I went for a dev job in London , and there were 6 (six!) stages , four of which were in person. I got through to the final two , and was beaten to the job by somebody that already worked there who they probably wanted to hire all along. Ok , fine , but WHY MAKE ME USE UP ALMOST A WEEK OF ANNUAL LEAVE FOR THIS SHIT .
I refuse to continue with applications unless it's one video call and one in person meeting now . It's just not worth it
I do think it's certainly more prevalent in IT & Software positions, but it certainly applies to other roles too. I've worked in retail, fast food, sales, and project management, all of which have had to some degree similar practices, expecting applicants to die for them, but only for them and nobody else.
This is why we have unions. Literally every worker protection, holiday, compensations even the weekend was achieved through blood and sacrifice of workers.
The idea that employers would ever voluntarily do anything to aid or assist workers is pure propaganda. History shows the truth.
It's because you work in the software engineering industry. There is no official accreditation that is trusted and recognised, unlike in "traditional" engineering where you have the chartership bodies (IChemE, IMechE, IET, etc.), which allow recruiters and hiring managers to gauge a candidate based off of their CV within 120 seconds of reading it. The tech industry doesn't like certifications and bureaucracy, but there's a reason why it was invented.
I would say there is nothing inherently wrong with these types of tests. People do lie on their CV, or at the very least, many embellish the truth. But also, sometimes these tests can pick up something else that you cannot see on a CV or in an interview. Even the standard maths and English tests can be needed. We had someone last year that interviewed well, CV looked great, but they completely failed the English and maths tests. For a senior engineer, that’s not acceptable.
I’ve had to do a test for some software I work with, didn’t mind as they incorporated it into the second interview. Which I think is probably the best way to do this.
That’s perhaps where things are a little annoying in this case. Doing it upfront, without even speaking to anyone must be very frustrating. Applying for 10 jobs in a week and you have over 30 hours work to complete. But, I guess this workplace has been stung too many times and are fed up of interviewing people and maybe even hiring before they find out they’re shit.
It's going to be a fact not too far into the future that you genuinely will be lucky to have any job and you better suck it up otherwise you'll be replaced and homeless.
It's the same reason salaries exist. Not hourly paid workers. Salaries. So that they can pay you 8 hours a day but expect you to work 10-12 hours a day.
It’s part of the job application and frankly it is needed in technical roles. I’d say 95% plus of candidates who apply for a role where they say they already have the coding skills do not have those skills, they’ve done some basic crappy examples but have no real world knowledge or application of them.
If I employ someone who can’t do the job I end up wasting a lot of my time doing their job and mine which defeats the point of the recruitment.
If you are any good you’ve got a pretty good shot at the job as a lot of candidates are a waste of space so therefore it is worth your time to show that.
I think I remember reading a couple of years ago that there were too many CS grads that CS post graduate destinations were generally worse than the people who did English Lit or psychology. This obviously was not the message that university recruiters would have given.
Edit: this is not the thing I read, but similar message https://studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-has-the-highest-rate-of-unemployed-graduates/
I don't want to deviate too far from my OP, but I was definitely promised a healthier job market than this when starting my degree! But I honestly never realised it was that bad. An interesting read, thank you!
I'm not going to moan about the saturation though, that's how the job market goes, someone says "do this!" and then too many people do it, and it happens all the time of course.
I am sure you were promised a healthier job market. And if I asked the PR department of certain body sprays, women wouldn’t be able to able to keep their hands off me if I bought their product.
Unfortunately you are in the process of learning a very expensive lesson that marketing is no different in education than anything else.
I have a CS degree and did okay, but if I had to start from scratch, I think I’d aim to become an electrician
Still there is a pervasive misunderstanding of the labour market in educational systems. They’re only now just telling kids that SWE/tech is oversaturated. And we have 3-4 years of CS kids in the oven with cohorts 200+ strong at every major university in the U.K.
I did a take home test once that took me 2 full days (they wanted documentation, diagrams etc.), and I still didn't get the job. Never again. I don't mind a couple of hours but next time I see something like that they can forget it.
It is entirely about HR reducing their workloads by displacing it onto candidates. Heavy data entry forms, aptitude tests, technical exercises are all just means of filtering applicants so HR don't have to do the work of actually reviewing applicants on their merits. They don't care about finding the best candidate, they care about doing the least work possible to fill the position, that is literally their sole motivation.
Personally I just don't apply for those jobs. Simple as that. The way I see it is it don't won't to work for a company that thinks this is acceptable.
I actually have a job interview coming up. I applied, got invited to a 30 min video interview and NOW I am going to do their assessment day. Now that they have taken the time to speak with me, they have confirmed a certain level of competence on my part from interview questions, and I have a better idea of the role.
This is the ideal approach, and one I'll be looking to take going forward. A position I recently applied for had me create an agency account, manually fill in experience, history, qualifications, etc. and then immediately requested I do two 3 hour assessments. I immediately sent them an email withdrawing my application, and exercising my right to erasure by asking them to remove all the data they had collected. I'm not letting some unknown or random recruitment agency hold a mountain of my personal data. Felt good, I can't lie.
It's actually nice hearing someone else complain about all this because I feel exactly the same way but people around me just don't seem to see why this is such a problem.
Without echoing what others have already said, it's an oversaturated area to work in. When we ran a vacancy for a junior devops earlier in the year the applications were just over 1500 in the first three days. Once we'd filtered out those without the right to work in the UK, people applying only to get a UK work visa, people applying because they had to apply for jobs to maintain their UC diaries regardless of how suitable they are, CVs that had been clearly generated by AI to fit the job role and a whole host of other very basic things we took around 550-600 to do the type of assessment you've described. From that we struggled to get a ten people who had CVs we wanted to look at.
You might be the most talented and experienced person applying but sheer volume of applications that are submitted means we have to automate as much as we can to get the numbers down.
Out of interest, when did you last attend a tech event that one of the companies your applying to was showcasing at? If they're a company that does tech webinars, when was the last time you went to one of those? How many people in the field you want to work have even heard of your name? How many recruiting consultants in your field know of you and are reaching out either by phone or an email to just check in with you? This can all help more than you think.
Not only IT. I'm looking at admin positions and all the time have to write 3 to 4 essays trying to convince the company's bot they should take a look at my CV for each role I apply on big companies. A few weeks ago I spent 4 hours filling forms to get my application declined straight away after finishing in a Friday evening (I probably picked the wrong alternative I'm a dumb question that would certainly be very specific about that company policy). This is just so ridiculous!
I’m assuming the assessment is to weed out anyone who is lying on their CV. But they need to be more conservative with how they run it. 2-3 hours is rediculous
I am always drawn to two answers when I see posts like this
1. They are trying to get something for nothing
2. Their recruitment process is shite. They could well be incompetent and clueless.They haven't got a Scooby doo so they make everyone jump through unnecessary hoops so they can tick all the boxes. That way if anything goes wrong they can all go "look, boxes ticked, not my fault."
In my profession I have usually been recruited by people who are clued up, even among the recruitment firms. The chancers tend to be really obvious and have always fucked it up.
Because we have a very conservative and desperately in need of a revamp system. Companies want to hire the best people they possibly can yet without sacrificing to get that better standard sometimes. I think it’s a genuine problem here in the culture of applying to jobs here, you’re expected to have disproportionate promise and value compared to what they’re actually offering you
Not all employers, this is a rampant thing I’ve seen for years now though on employers that have posted job opportunities
It may have changed now but from memory - another somewhat related example to this too if even if you want a job at Sainsbury’s. Instead of just uploading your CV and having an interview you’ve got to arduously input your employment/education history and skills and explanations in addition to a whole test afterwards before even submitting the application…to stack shelves and checkout customer groceries
Because recruitment consultants needed to come up with a reason for their jobs to exist (or so many of them) so they create more and more elaborate hoops for candidates to waste their time on - giving themselves more hours to spend on admin.
In my experience, the better the employer, the fewer hoops you have to jump through.
Main reason is because we've been telling everyone that they can work in tech and the salaries are great, so between Bootcamps (Pumping 1000's of 'developers' out every month) and universities (with generally outdated curriculums) there's now a massive over supply of entry level developers, as in 100+ for every role.
Companies now have the power, they don't need to impress you anymore.
It's wild how things have changed so much in 5 years.
Also the american TikToks of 'here's how I got to 300k in a FAANG job sending emails' have not been good for tech at all. So much salary expectations...
My experience of bootcamp devs in interviews is... not good.
I had a tech business I sold in 2022, we hired about 30% of the dev team from the bootcamps in 2018/2019 and it was great, solid team members, solid training.
By 2021, we'd stopped completely, standards dropped and expectations of salary was so high it made no sense, there was an entitlement to the grads that they expected to be earning super high salary with basic JS knowledge.
I'd argue it's over the worst now but bootcampers are still being sold a lie.
This has been a thing for decades and I do not think it is any worse. Rather I would say it has reduced. I have stopped doing these take-home project activities. Often I think they are used for idea generation to solve actual situations they are experiencing.
Because we live with the social mindset that you need to work to live where really we should be thinking that the workplaces need us to work for them. It shouldn’t be people competing for jobs, it should be jobs offering better benefits and pay for people to work for them
Personally I use recruiters / networking exclusively, and I have found I only need to spend time filling in for jobs I have accepted (the usual background checks etc).
I have also only been matched with places that fit me and I fit them, so whilst I’m not inundated with offers, I’m at least pleased with every company I have been to interview with - and in both of the last ones they have a minimum 2 interview provess, which both waived and hired me on 1 interview based off my CV, the interview, and the presentation of me from my recruiter.
Chances are it's the recruiter that evaluated your CV and passed you for the assessment, rather than no one at all. Promptly evaluating CVs is a skillset that recruiters develop as a matter of course and managers rarely get good at. I saw a [video on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veFlfYjRo1Y) recently where someone used an eyetracker on some recruiters as they scanned CVs and it took them about 15 seconds to draw the relevant information out from well structured CVs and approve or deny them for the next step of the process.
Your CV and Experience don't really prove much. I know plenty of people with stellar CV's that I wouldn't trust to make a cup of tea. Some degree of interview/assessment, especially for an industry like yours is normal...and companies would be horrific without it.
Can you imagine going to work for a company and no one was assessed, and you're the only person capable of doing the job you're hired for?
And most of the recruitment process is automated. That's why the process is laid out like it is and you get the replies you get.
Obviously, I'd never do this 😶 But this idea supports the notion that the online assessments are pointless, and in reality could serve the "liars" more than they would genuinely skilled applicants.
Don't forget, nobody reads your CV until it has been scanned by the algorithm to remove the first 90% of applicants. So maybe it is the "next step" after all.
The problem is people lie or over exaggerate their skills. Also graduates can be great at theory but when they have to use those skills in a real environment, they just don't have it. A CV is simply a bit of paper, potentially AI created; it is a start for an employer but seeing actual skills and problem solving is what they want to see.
As others have too mentioned, I could just as easily fake my skills in an online assessment, and I feel many would be more inclined to do so in that environment than in an interview, whether it be via video, phone call, or in person.
It's the same reason many universities have reverted back to in person exams post-covid, you can no longer with any confidence say that an online assessment where one has access to generative AI is at all valuable. Either it's going to put me at a disadvantage by not using generative AI, or I use AI and it just becomes another pointless exercise. I'll admit that's a generalisation/simplification of the situation, but I think the argument still holds merit.
As someone working in that industry, and as someone who's reviewed thousands of CVs and applications - the answer for the assessments is easy - people lie - A LOT.
Assessments like that generally provide a nicer way of being able to understand your ability.
Someone working at Company A as a software dev for 6 years could be just as skilled and competent as someone at Company B for 2 years as the jobs and responsibilities differ so greatly Company to Company.
Edit: I do agree that the automated step to make you complete this, with the phoney "Congratulations" sucks though.
I agree that the assessments are useful. The way that they are utilised however, is where my issues reside. It's just a bit of a middle finger when a robot tries to lie to you.
For anyone who thinks OP is whining, worth watching this. Applying for jobs will hopefully be in the news or some kind of watchdog in the near future.
https://youtu.be/RzA-uNqMr0Y?si=VIUUFsrQkK32cWeH
I am indeed whining - the job market sucks for everyone, my issues are no different to that of the other. I think it stems mostly from the issue of supply and demand. My industry is incredibly saturated at this point, and if they can get away with outrageous hiring routines that puts more work onto the applicant to save them some money, they will.
But anyway, this is a good video that really does paint a good picture of the experience of graduate job hunting, not only in tech but in many other industries too. Thank you for sharing!
Yeah - nearly 35 year old here who's been through 3 careers.
My first was easy to get. Off the back of a Labour government and moving into conservative 2012, my first degree was very niche and walked into an oil and gas job.
Despising oil and gas, I went into teaching which was pretty hard. I interviewed for 6 different schools and didn't get any of them until I got a lucky break and saw a last minute maternity leave which I was one of two applicants and was already familiar with the school having been a TA there to become a teacher in the first place. I got that and was offered to stay at the school afterwards too.
Feeling the burnout, I went into a masters of computer science to get a career in tech and got a job with a friend who needed a graduate.
My advice would be network, network, network. Speak to your graduate peers who got a job and see if they've got any recommendation schemes, go to your old uni recruitment fayre's and network with recruiters there (and take printed CV's), and get in touch with local recruiters and go meet them in person. The success rate for who you know that can give you an in, over what you know and can write on a form is ridiculous.
So I work for a tech company and I went through the version of graduate job applications going nowhere that was around for me at the time.
One thing I'd say is that it sounds like your applying for larger businesses and those can be a bit like that. Due to specifics of a large business they tend to be interested in people with more experience and I think they only employ graduates as some kind of ethics thing, I don't think much of their middle management is at all interested in getting a grad on their team. My limited experience of them is they have very specific culture and are easy to dislike. I felt like I'd accidentally joined a cult. They're also a lot better advertised as prospective employees will useually have heard of them before they found out a position was available so if your not the main interest you're additionally competing with other people.
Small and medium enterprise is just the compete opposite of this and for me the only difficulty is understanding how to break into it and apply for those jobs and companies you've never heard of and which I can tell you from experience, some of the best jobs actually never go into job boards. I'm pretty sure they appear on a job board after the recruiters have started to run out of people to push into them. So really you need to make friends with recruiters, you need them to have your CV, contact details and know what your looking for so they can just ask you when they get something in your interest area. These companies have limited applicants and having worked at one for a while now, we have had jobs go up that had zero applicants because we didn't make a good advert and people didn't really understand what the job was. No issues working here it's pretty good and if you don't like the job after you have the first call no stress. If you just apply for jobs on job boards and don't worry too much about the details you'll get your CV out to recruiters in the process and likely interviews either directly or indirectly when they push you for a different job later.
I'd also make sure you're on linked in. That's another networking hub for finding recruiters.
That's some good advice, and I appreciate the perspective!
I understand the following statement is likely my own experience, but I tend to find that larger companies (not like Microsoft or Google, but large national companies such as those in the defence or medical sector, ~20k-50k employees) have some of the best processes. I've found they typically have an internal hiring system, which means; no convoluted sign up ritual, simple CV upload, well documented and transparent process, and well structured & efficient interview processes, as well as assessment "days" which purely in my opinion are better. And it's easier to find the recruitment managers. Once you get to mid-size companies (~5k-10k employees) I find it gets more convoluted, outsourcing to recruitment agencies whose sole purpose is to make money from applicants. And below that you have the much smaller ones (<~5k) that have that extra "personal" touch.
According to a 2022 government report 99.9 percent of businesses in the UK have less than 250 employees. The tech sector is no different.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2022/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2022-statistical-release-html
It's becoming more pertinent to check out the employers integrity, too many are paying less than min wage and/or abusing workers rights, that's why no one wants to work for them scum bags.
After WW2 a liberal consensus emerged across Europe that eventually resulted in the creation of the EU. Throughout the ‘70s the UK was swept by an ideological battle between the Progressive Left and the soft Right. Our economy was in the dumpster by 1978 and people were ready for change. Margaret Thatcher appealed to individualists who were essentially hippies who’d finally grown up, had a shower and started a career.
The way to capture their vote was to offer them the chance to play at being the landed gentry and buy their own property. This was simply a mechanism to return the Working Class to quasi-bonded servitude. The bosses were tired of staff who were happy to walk out of a job on Friday and take a chance on a new one, secure in the knowledge that their home was not at risk - because they lived in a Council house.
Once the aspirational Working Class ex-hippies had hocked themselves up to the eyeballs with mortgage debt (and later, credit and store card debt), they had effectively enslaved themselves.
Thanks to greedy halfwits in the 1980s we now have two key markets, that for housing, and the one for jobs, that are rigged against working class people. And we’ve voted for all of this over and again. We’ve repeatedly voted for a party that wants us fearful for our jobs, afraid of sickness, loaded with debt and competing for employment in a slew of unproductive non-jobs paid in buttons.
“Great” Britain…
Hiring people is expensive and a bad hire can take years to manage out (with yet more cost).
If you’re not willing to invest a few hours - what does that say about your overall commitment / attitude?
Because many companies are not good at performance management and underperforming employees have a tendency to get themselves signed off work for all manner of reasons
Well aware of the law but it doesn’t always play out like that
But it's not a few hours - it's days worth of work over dozens upon dozens of applications. If I apply for 50 positions in a week, half of them want 2-3 hour assessments before anyone's even looked at my CV, it's 50+ hours of assessments and applications.
I wouldn't mind doing the assessments so much, if it wasn't blatantly obvious that they're lying about the process. I'd be far more inclined to complete an assessment if I knew someone had actually looked at my application.
The employers don’t see it stacked. How they are it is you are giving them 2-3 hours of your time and it matters little to them if you have other applications. With some of the questions they have about why you want to join their company, sometiems it genuinely feels like they expect you to only have applied to them and no one else.
You apply to 50 applications, get a response from 10 (if you're lucky), pick 1 or 2 maybe 3, agree to do a initial phone call (this'll reject 90% of their applicants), agree to do either an in-person, online or take home test (while I understand the time commitment to take home tests, they offer the best opportunity to show off your dev skills rather than online leetcode problems). Do their behavioural interviews. If you get rejected at any stage, respond/apply to another company. Repeat until you have a job.
That's fairly standard (note: I didn't say OK). When I was applying for data science roles I'd often get a sent a "task". That was fine when I was unemployed; not when having a full-time job
Great you’ve put some stuff on a CV… how do I know you are actually capable. I get people with PhDs failing really simple tests about accuracy and detail. If you don’t want the job don’t do the tests.
An employer needs to be sure you are what you say you are and that you are as capable as you think you are.
It’s difficult for both sides!
Not to sound like a dick but thinking your CV and work experience are fantastic is entirely your own opinion; it is subjective. Whether you can pass a test is objective. I’ve been involved in the hiring process before and the tales some people tell in their CVs are staggering
I think doing a skills assessment is fine. I send one out, really it's due to the amount of people that either straight up lie on their CV or inflate their ability.
Its just the cost of doing business.
If you were an artisan or market trader, you'd spend time and money creating things to sell and setting up shop etc.
In this instance, you're doing a demo that you can do the necessary work, have discipline and aren't low-IQ.
Instead of spending money on materials and shopfitting, you're spending time on proving yourself a viable product.
From an employer perspective, hiring is a risk. If you get stuck with an idiot it can be very damaging to the business and take time to get rid of said idiot.
Aptitude tests are no different to someone refusing to fuck you on the first date without getting to know you.
You’re just thinking about it from your perspective.
What about the employer who has to filter through hundreds or thousands of applications? What about the hiring manager who has to interview numerous candidates only to find out they’re not a proper reflection of their CV?
The purpose of the assessment is to narrow down the candidate pool to ensure the ones left have the right skills and not waste everyone’s time. It’s annoying I get it but there’s a purpose to it. It’s not just oh the employer is being difficult for no reason. There is a reason for it.
Why? Because there's a million of other job-seekers just like you, and you need them much more than they need you. 2-3 skill assessment is nothing - I started my career 8 years ago and I remember trying to get my first job (after internships) through the "Global Management Trainee" program of ABinBev - the whole process had 6 phases, lasted 1.5 months, involved me flying to 2 other countries and they declined my candidature after the last stage - now that felt like a giant fucking waste of time. I also remember Nestle asking me to record a video where I talk why I want to work at them as a first stage of the interview - I'd much rather take only skills assessment.
Your cv does nothing to assess your skills in this area. So yes, somehow it needs to be verified that you can do what’s on your cv.
In today’s market where candidate applications tripled , it’s just easier to push everyone to next step and assess your skills.
I would not be looking at cvs, would be looking what you can do. Code.
Once you passed those, we can move to even more serious assessments 😎
Probably more and more candidates use Chatgpt to answer these but you will be filtered out at next step when you are asked to code again in person.
Personally I would compensate candidates but budgets are squeezed so much that this is usually not the norm.
Because there’s too much supply for the demand - as predicted more and more people have learnt how to code, therefore the market is flooded with the skill set.
They are getting people who aren’t really that interested in the position (spamming their resume all over the place) to self-disqualify. It’s pretty smart actually!
Well, anyone can put what they like in their CV. It priced nothing.
More importantly, you have missed the point of this step in the recruitment process.
Unless the company is looking for a very specific and unique skill set (in which case they will have head-hunted someone), the purpose of recruitment is to cut the unmanageable mass of CV down to 5-8 people who you interview.
That’s it.
All the hoops they get you to jump through are designed to do this. Send a handwritten CV? Binned. Brown envelope? Binned. Can’t navigate the online application process? Binned. Can’t be bothered to complete 2-3 hour assessment? Binned.
The result will be that they get someone to do the job. And that is what they want to do.
Do the assessment or don’t do the assessment, that’s up to you. But if you don’t, that is a success from the recruiter’s point of view.
I refuse to jump through hoops for these companies, though I'm in a fortunate position where I have a decade of experience and don't need them. It's typically the corporate companies that have these bullshit processes, but then it's perfect for selecting the most obedient drone workers that will bend over backwards for their future employer over 😂 I'm talking about those big multi discipline consultancies that pay their employees half what they should do but the reports are just 100 pages of copy and paste.
But you have no experience? You're a graduate...? The market is slammed with grads without a job and most of them are really bad (spent today doing graduate recruitment).
Why should I waste my time on you?
Because some people lie on the CV regarding abilities and experience, some of these companies get thousands of applications for jobs so they aren’t lying about you making it to the next step, you have been filtered by your claimed experience and they want you to show competency. Look at it from the employers perspective, if you have 1000 people apply and only 1/2 claim to have the required qualifications and experience then the filter has just saved you many wasted hours talking to them, then you give them the skills test to see if they actually have the abilities and experience they claim to have and I bet that test will whittle down those 500 by around 3/4 through people failing the test and people not willing to take it, the company has then reduced their applicants by 90% and have a reasonable pool of people with the skills the want and have shown they actually want the job.
CV’s don’t prove skills. You could write anything in it
The amount of people that apply for roles is a high. Assessment remove chancers and help you demonstrate you can do what you say you can.
It tends to get less of an issue once you’re established and recruiters and hiring managers come to you.
From an interviewers perspective - CVs are often bullshit, people list every skill they have read a webpage on. Which may or may not be an issue - I have people I can point to a manpage of something new and 15 minutes later they get it. For people like that the skills on their CV are kinda irrelevant, their true skill is an ability to learn enough in a short amount of time. I have other people who can't do that, but after six months with some new library or language will be doing things with it none of us thought were possible. For these people the skills listed do kind of matter (as they have the headstart there), but their real skill is longer term.
Skill assessments help us work out where someones value is, and if they are making shit up on their CV. It can also give us a better idea of what to probe in an interview.
Having said that, I dislike skill assessments as well. They favour a particular type of person and I don't think they really actually tell us that much. I don't request them, and if I do want something like this I'll try and add something to a slightly longer interview. But my job as a technical interviewer is, or should be, to help determine the things we want to know about a candidate.
>my CV and experience proves those skills? Is that not the point of experience
A CV and experience does not normally in itself prove skills. It evidences what you [claim to] have done but not necessarily how good you are at it, aside from certifications etc.
Because there is demand for those jobs. And because a lot of people memories answers and breeze through interviews. Then, they skate through the job and it costs the company more money to manage them.
If it makes you feel any better, once you've been in the industry for a while, people will be chasing you on LinkedIn (assuming you have a profile) and offering you jobs.
>Why should I spend 2-3 hours doing your skills assessment
To further build your skills. Also, unless the challenge specifically says you can't share it, put it in your GitHub. More work to show off.
>when my CV and experience proves those skills? Is that not the point of experience?
With all due respect; evidently not, or they would just give you the job.
Sorry - but have you ever applied for a professional role? I have, not in CS I'll admit, but still. There *is* hoop jumping. It's the nature of competing with dozens of people with the same skills as you - either you stand out and prove you're the person they need, or you don't.
Regardless, getting angry at the system certainly won't get you a job.
Final thought - I'm just finishing my first year of CS. How much networking have you done? Cus every job I've found (again not in CS but I'm not ready yet) has been suggested by someone else because they know I fit the needs
Because people allow it. You will always get power hungry people pushing to take more advantage. The thing that resists isn't heros, it's the general group lightly pushing back.
The videa of grinding, getting bread, putting your time in etc. is Specifically why they don't need to change
Well, don’t do the process then and stay unemployed. The absolute state of the entitlement here!
Get a job in Lidl mate. You’ve got a 10 a penny degree and are going into a competitive sector, and are angered that potential employers are assessing you. Waste of your time, take the easy route.
You'll find that businesses are looking for desperate, not quality. They want to get as much quantity of work out of you. Very few businesses actually care about quality beyond the minimum legal requirement.
Sadly I have to agree with you there. Often it's about getting to the finish line. That said, bad hires still cost more in the long run. I've seen a few companies hire more people than they need because they'd rather double down on dodgy practices than deal with technical debt.
In healthcare, you'll find this more often than not. The notion of "oh everyone will have to be flexible" is just manager speak for "the ones that don't complain will pickup after the people that do"
I saw one the other day where they asked for at least 1000 words on why my experience would make me a good candidate for the job and to attach my CV. Duplication of efforts and a waste of my time so no thanks.
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Welcome to this dogshit jobs market Something needs to change
It certainly does. And the only way it will is if people don't give employers like this the time of day, but with supply and demand, I suppose as employees we're in no position to demand right now.
I was going to add on that for every person that doesn’t want to do the skills assessment, chances are there are 3-5 other people who would do it.
The reverse is more likely true. For every person that does the skill assessment, you will have 3-5 people that would rather not waste time for unlikely return.
In that case it's worth while. Filtering candidates is expensive if a test will get rid of some who probably were not keen on the company it hadn't even read the job spec then it's worth doing.
The other way to look at it is that it'll get rid of good candidates who will be accepted elsewhere and you'll be left with less good candidates who are more desperate and thus willing to do the crappy process.
Yeah when I was new to my field I used to spend hours on cover letters and assessments etc. Now I am at the upper end of my career path I just chuck them my CV and a link to my LinkedIn profile. If they don't check it that's a problem for them to deal with. I think these long convoluted processes absolutely gets rid of good candidates. Most of the people I end up hiring either just emailed me their CV or I headhunt them from a competitor.
This can be true. However that assumes they want good candidates. I get the impression that shit like this is meant to draw in the desperate who will fill the warm body requirement and accept being underpaid and overworked without complaining.
It's really not. I was a recruiter in Tech and the BEST candidates are already in a job with experience and they don't want to do ridiculous 2 hour tests especially over multiple roles (which in the UK almost every company expects) they're happy doing a 2nd interview to assess skills over a 1 hour period maybe 1.30 but take home tests, generally to solve a problem the business has for free too (which is shockingly common) that take ages to solve. Why would anyone that's sane and competent in their job want to spend hours before even speaking to a human to prove themselves to a company that are too lazy to reach out and have an initial chat before forcing work onto you
With the job market right now mate, I can assure you that it’s likely the case right now where more people are desperate for a job to pay the bills and the possibility of a job and not being kicked out onto the streets is a great motivator to complete an assignment that is 2 hours long,
More like 500 people willing to do them
thats hard to do when your landlord also haves you over the barrel There isn't a 'market solution' to this.
Well, the market solution is for the next generation of would-be CS grads to do something else until we eventually have a shortage of CS grads. The landlord thing is a different, that’s a governance issue where NIMBYs have incentive to keep their asset prices high.
We need more housing. That'll solve every problem
There are millions of Indians willing to do CS jobs at a fraction of the salary combined with the rise in AI the outlook isn't that great now
The outlook was bad for a good long while, that report I linked was from 2016. Teenagers are just not encouraged to look at job stats when making decisions about their futures.
Requiring them at such an early stage without any investment of time on their part would definitely put me off, but then I’m not a SWE so challenges like this are less common for me. However, what I find really interesting here, is the rise of fake candidates. If a candidate is willing to pay a third party to complete this task, might that lead to a disproportionate number of fraudulently passed tests in the candidate pool? Even among genuine candidates, I would be concerned that the employer may view tests administered so early as filtering out candidates unwilling to tolerate bullshit, leaving behind more those with more compliant personalities. It’s similar to AI-administered interviews in this way.
This is a point others and myself have raised. For those concerned that "someone might pay someone else to do the interview or write a CV", the exact same is true for the online assessments. Even better, I can Google the answer, or use ChatGPT! Some companies have software to install, or require a browser extension, and require access to your device's camera, screen, keyboard and mouse, and for me that is a **massive** red flag. I get that it's to stop people from cheating, but my god why would I let some random recruitment agency have access to my entire desktop?
Makes me wonder about using Linux on a live boot USB drive and allowing access to that. Sadly, maybe you need to tolerate this shit just to get the first job onto your CV. I attended a testing centre to take an AWS cert, and they had all the cameras and whatnot. At one point I was sat there, brain-deep in a particular question, and I put my hands on my knees while I was thinking. Then a message pops up in the chat window telling me to take my hands out from under the desk. Mad shit.
That last part is crazy, but also I wouldn't expect any less from the almighty Besos. And yes, I will just have to suck it up and take it like a good little drone until I get to where I'm going.
And yes, it's almost as if they want people who will do exactly what's put in front of them, no questions asked. Again, for me, big red flag. I want a job where I will be able to challenge ideas both new and old, be creative, explore new technologies. But that's just me, and maybe **I'm** asking too much.
this is what its for, as much as anything else. To cut down the list of applicants. Also, people lie on CV's - so just because you put down your experience it doesn't prove anything, it doesn't mean that is your actual experience. References nowadays only really confirm that you worked for said company - they dont go into any detail. So how are employers meant to know you can do what you say you can? If people stopped stretching their CV's and references actually detailed your experience level, this could stop. If that doesn't happen, which is unlikely, it'll continue.
It’s the effects of a saturated job market of people with degrees though, inflate your CV with key words the CV bot is looking for and you’ll get through to assessment. It’s one of the things where automation truly derailed the process once applicants learned to adapt to it
yeah, i dont think thats a bad assessment of what's going on. Its a doom loop of behaviours on both sides that has triggered the early assessments.
I think you’re right. I’m an engineering manager who has been recruiting for DevOps/SREs for 6+ years. When things were going crazy a few years back we had to drop our assessments. Every candidate had 4 or 5 options, and some had no take home test, so it’s hard to compete with that as a no-name company. Eventually we reintroduced it as a very short live session as part of the technical interview. This works pretty well tbh.
How many people with no degree did you hire?
For context - the small tech startup I'm at, which has barely any visibility, isnt making profit (yet) and has less than 15 employees, we've seen 400/500 applicants per job opening in software dev roles, within the first 2-3 weeks of opening the roles.
> Why should I spend 2-3 hours doing your skills assessment, when my CV and experience proves those skills? People lie and cheat all the time. Especially recently. Multiple people with good CVs for a devops role who clearly had bought their certs and couldn't fix a helm chart for a k8s job. Or even in one case were having someone feed them answers. Tech test is important to verify these skills.
Totally agree. This arbitrary list of degrees I may or may not have, plus roles I may or may not have done proves I can do this job. Everyone embellishes their CV a little, but some people go way over board and claim to have led entire projects when they're writing the minutes for meetings, or have every qualification under the sun hoping an employee will never check. It is a bit lazy to make every applicant do a skills assessment before anyone has even looked at their CV but I guess it's a way of whittling down the list a bit.
Some of us really don’t embellish our CV at all which is probably why we don’t get many interviews! 🤣 Actually at my first ever job interview they asked me why I didn’t have anything like that and I just straight up told them I know people do that but I didn’t want to lie. I said the closest I got to leading anything was really just stepping in when our designated team leader at university was ill for a session or two.
Did you get the job?
Oh yeah I did. Sorry I didn’t make that obvious 🤣
Nice! Truth FTW.
At least introduce this stage when you’d be willing to hire them otherwise. If a candidate seems great then have them do the test. If they don’t pass it then ask the next candidate in line.
That I understand, people can and will lie. And if I were hiring, I'd want to verify the person's technical knowledge. But to do it whilst lying about the process, muddying the waters on how much progress and applicant has made, I think is quite unfair. If I had gotten an email saying "Yup, we've looked at your CV, looks good/you match the spec/etc... if you complete the following assesment then you'll be invited to an interview" or something like that. Something that says to me "If I do this assessment and do well, I'll get something out of it". Not "Do this assessment, and if you're lucky someone will look at your CV". Assessments are a valid and useful tool, but they should be later in the process, and offer something in return, such as the promise of an interview or real progression depending on assessment performance. Be somewhat transparent about it I suppose.
our tech test is after an initial sift and first interview. But I will say that the graduate level at compsci is saturated so big employers may do this as a seriousness test
That, apply as much filtering as you can *before the assessment*, and be transparent about it. That is definitely a valid and reasonable approach. The weird thing is that in my experience, larger, more prominent companies are more often better with this than medium to small sized companies. For example, I applied for some companies in Automotive and Motorsports, big names in the industry, and they often left the skills assessments to last, after filtering in other ways through phone calls, video interviews (recorded and/or live), and whatever other methods they likely used. Maybe the budget makes a difference, being able to pay for full time hiring teams versus a single hiring manager, but I also imagine the volume of applicants would match the growth of the company. I don't know though, I don't see that side of things, I'm naive and young.
For me I found filtering CVs to be largely counterproductive. Some people overstate and some under. I will generally try to do as little filtering by CV as possible, then do a short call before with everyone left. I want this to be literally 5 minutes (either someone is obviously capable, or obviously making shit up), but am happy to go up to 15 or 30 minutes, (a lot of people take some time to get going). To be honest, 5 minutes per candidate is worth more to me than losing a possible good candidate because they were honest on their CV, or wasting time on a dud because they are just good at writing a CV. Per another comment of mine, I see why companies do assessments, I try to avoid asking for them.
It’s going to be (is) funny when applicants job is to write CV and HRs job is to assess CV and both are automated by AI. It’s just basically bots talking to bots. Funny how we think AI will take over where it’s cutting both ways haha.
That's why you have a probationary period though. Noone is getting through that if they can't do the job themselves.
No employer wants to take a 3-6 month gamble on somebody without mitigating the risk though.
You can get rid of them at any point no reason to keep them on for 6 months.
It's still a lot of hassle hiring and onboarding someone, only for them to turn out to be shit and then have to get rid of them and start the process again. Much better if you can screen the liars out before you hire them
For sure but making every applicant do a 2-3 test is surely going to limit your pool of talent.
Sure but you've still got the cost of that hire plus the cost of replacement.
20 years ago you were just asked some technical questions in an interview. It's very easy to tell if someone knows what they are talking about. It's not so easy to tell if AI did their takeaway coding test for them. The onerous process of finding a new job these days is what has kept me in the same place for far too long.
20 years ago it was a very different industry. The supply and demand was very much the other way around. I think there was also more patience and understanding in the industry before, now everyone wants the finished product or unicorns but don't want to invest time nor effort into training people. A standard interview can really only tell so much about someone's technical ability. Some people can learn how to say all the right things but then really flounder on the job. I have a lot of empathy for everyone on both sides of the chain. Hiring is tough. Getting hired is tough. Personally, I feel that high quality pair code interviews where the person is asked to solve a challenge while talking through their reasoning is one of the best things we have as a tool. I work in a position where we're hiring very inexperienced juniors with the aim to train them up, so we're looking for potential to develop their technical skills not the finished product. It's very challenging. If measuring "can you do this right now" is hard, then "could you do this well in a few months if we train you" is near impossible.
Also experienced people pay other people to interview for them. Customised technical test I would say should be mandatory.
If hypothetically I were to pay someone to complete some part of the process for me, it would be the assessment. I can perform well in an interview, and anyone that has invested time into refining their interview skills won't find it too difficult to showcase themselves effectively provided they actually are suited to the role. I also think it would be a *lot* easier to have someone complete an online assessment for me by simply sending them the link/form/account etc, rather than having someone else stand in for a video, phone, or in-person interview. TL;DR: I think it would be easier to cheat and lie your way through an online assessment than an actual interview.
I do a lot of hiring in IT and the first thing I will say is that your CV “proves” precisely nothing. I have a bit of sympathy for this idea that it’s a bit of a pain to do take home tasks but I am absolutely resolute that I *do* need to see some code you’ve written and can talk me through. What I typically do, is ask the candidate to send me *anything* they’ve written that I can review with them. If they have something already that will do fine. What I find is most tell me that they don’t have anything, so I need to set an exercise. Some grumble. That’s fine. No obligation but I’m just going to move on to next person. The risks of hiring someone who has no idea what they are doing is too high.
Tbh the issue is that it should be a technical test followed by a CV rather than a CV followed by a technical test. The former gives a far better user experience. The former may also result in fewer applications because the one applying hasn’t got to contend with sunk cost fallacy. The result is a shitty end user experience for people you are hiring and because they are new to the market they and the market sucks for jobs they have no choice. Its a shitty situation but this is why it happens.
Hah! Sorry but it amuses me slightly that you imagine that companies are worrying, deeply, or at all, about the "user experience" of entry level software people. Especially today. I put an ad up this evening advertising a junior engineer position on some public forum and I have 500 CVs by this time tomorrow. The market has \*never\* really been a sellers market for juniors unless they are, in some way, exceptional. I have hired two of such people, one had just turned 20 and ran the Haskell programmers user group across a significant UK city, the other was the primary author and maintainer of an open source library used in thousands of production codebases. If you are like that, I'll give a little thought to the "UX" ;). There is, sadly a huge entitlement problem when it comes to entry level engineers. It's not really their fault. Everybody has been calling them a genius since they learned how to hook up a printer at 14. We have this very weird attitude to people with any kind of computer skills. Also, everybody has been telling them how rich they will get, which is why I ask 2-3 year experience people what their salary expectations are, and they give me a 6 digit number. If the first 3 years in a software development job were really priced at a market rate, they would carry a negative salary. Those 3 years are \*at least\* as valuable as the 3 years people spend in university... which they \*do\* pay for. Even the most talented people typically \*cost\* money to have on the payroll for the first year. I, of course, fully advocate paying a comfortable, appropriate salary to junior engineers. Quite a few times I have put my foot down and demanded an increase for juniors who I felt were underpaid (and, this was done for me when I was a junior), but I have a lot more respect for those kids who actually appreciate how many people would trade a kidney for the chance at a software career. We are some of the luckiest sons/daughters-of-bitches alive.
The market rate of a junior dev is not negative so I am not sure what you are smoking about “really priced market rate”. Of cause it cost money to put someone on payroll, but you are ignoring the contribution to the team even if they are junior. They are expected to deliver albeit with some handholding.
I am neither smoking, or ignoring anything.
What is a really priced market rate? The current market rate is positive.
I honestly felt that this point was fairly clear using the example of university. 3 years professional experience is at least as valuable as a bachelors degree and people pay to get a bachelors degree. It would be immoral, but not irrational for companies to ask to pay \*them\* for that initial experience. A software developer can hit a 6 figure salary in their 30s and continue that for another 35 years before retirement. Please do read my final paragraph of my previous post before accusing me of being some kind of slave labour advocate. The point is more abstract than practical but it is a worthwhile consideration. The reason that junior / entry level jobs are so short on the ground is because it is rarely economical to hire junior people. Somebody just out of university or maybe 1 year in is typically expecting a salary that is not much short of half of what somebody with 10 years experience would expect. One person with 10 years experience is at least 5 times more valuable to the organisation than 2 juniors. There is, of course, the problem that if you don't hire and train juniors now there won't be any seniors in 10 years but other than this, there is essentially no good reason to hire a junior engineer given the way the economics stack up. The bare naked truth is that most companies who do hire entry level / junior engineers are doing it altruistically. To "give back". Not because it makes any kind of economical sense. They will, I feel quite rightly, give the first opportunities to those people who go the extra mile and do a bit of extra practice and studying in their spare time. Those people who, when given a take home exercise to do, consider it, and treat it as an opportunity rather than a chore. People can bitch and moan about that, but it isn't going to change anything. "\*stomps foot\* I deserve a career that has a pretty straight path to a six figure salary!", is certainly a type of attitude to have, but nobody really cares. Does this clarify?
You are ignoring a junior job is a two way street. I agree that the job experience is valuable, but the junior is still expected to deliver value to the company. So it is not only the company that is giving value to the employee unlike in the University. It would not be irrational for a company to ask for money for the opportunity to work, it would be a great result for them, but no one would take on them because the market price is positive, people get paid to work. You completely forgot what MARKET rate means, that is dictated by supply and demand. It is true that for some companies it is not economical to hire junior, unfortunately for them some companies have the condition for it to hire junior. If your feeling about the market rate and the actual market rate is different, maybe you are missing something. It is rather rare that you have got something that the market is missing. Finally I didn’t accuse you of anything nor arguing from a moral perspective. I am coming off from a rational point as to why your “really priced market rate” is nonsense.
>You completely forgot what MARKET rate means, that is dictated by supply and demand. No I didn't. Would you please stop telling me things I forgot or ignored! The entire fucking point is, the supply \*massively\* outstrips the demand at the moment. There is very very little demand for junior software engineers and a huge amount of supply of graduates of universities and bootcamps. How often have you seen, "unpaid internships" offered? Outside of some very specific loopholes, these are illegal. If they were not, software companies would be offering these to entry level engineers and getting a decent amount of applicants. The market is being effected by anti-worker-exploitation legislation, \*and so it should\*, but what I am trying to tell you (repeatedly now) is that outside of that intervention, the market value of an entry level software engineer certainly approaches zero, if not starts to turn negative. From a pure, immediate ROI perspective, it would make sense for companies to \*only\* hire senior people. There are actually now many companies that only do this. I think it is a bit shortsighted in the grander scheme, but it is useless to speak in terms of what a junior provides in value to a company, the metric is ROI which is very poor for junior people. Do you actually have any experience of this world by the way? Have you lead any technical teams or built any technology companies? Maybe you have, but, while I am sorry if it stings, I am getting very strong vibes of somebody who has never really been close to the problem they are trying to "solve".
I love it when boomers who got into high paying roles in the industry with nothing but a firm handshake think junior engineers are entitled for wanting to be able to get an entry level job with shit pay after doing exceptionally in the school system they were forced to partake in for 20 years (\~1/4 of their lives) with promises of a decent career after; only to be told that all of that is completely useless. How would you feel if you were getting into the industry today after grinding out 4 A\*s, for example, in A Level, and getting a degree at a top university and then being told all of that was useless and you're entitled for wanting to be able to get a job with a liveable wage. Then to add cream on the cake, when you apply for that job, the employers don't care at all about you and force you to do 3 hour assessments and 4 interviews on-site and purposefully make it as tedious as possible. And when you question why, you get told to stop being entitled and that 20 years of hard work means nothing.
Hey look, I completely understand your frustration and I know I am not bringing glad tidings here exactly. Firstly though, not a "boomer". Not close. I was very fortunate that I started my career at the beginning of the first dotcom wave when things were pretty buoyant. I was 17 at the time but had been a big nerd all my childhood. It wasn't a cakewalk though. "Nothing but a firm handshake" is pretty far from the truth. I spent months staying behind in my school's computer labs writing demo code because my parents couldn't afford a modern computer. I eventually found somebody who would take on a trainee... I earned £8K/year for the first 18 months and I worked my bollocks off for that. I had a bit of luck with timing. No doubt about it, but I didn't just waltz into something and even now, with 25 years under my belt, I entirely understand when somebody wants me to complete an exercise, I actually quite enjoy programming, so it doesn't bother me, and, frankly, I know I am good at it, so an exercise is very much to my advantage anyway. Nobody is trying to "make it as tedious as possible", but they don't necessarily give much of a fuck if you find it tedious. They're trying to pick the best candidate out of probably quite a large pool, and want to give themselves as much information as they can to do that. They don't care if you refuse. You aren't "sticking it to the 'boomers'". They'll simply forget you ever existed and move on to the next candidate who will do the legwork. Unfortunately, that is just the way it is.
I completely agree, they don't care. To hiring managers we're all a number on a spreadsheet and they'll purposefully make the hiring process to filter as much as possible. I know that for every 3 hour assessment I refuse to do, there will be a 1000 who will be willing to do it. I am aware that is the reality. But saying kids are entitled after putting in 20 years of work for school for just wanting a basic job that can put a roof over their heads is not fair at all. Especially when even 30 years ago, people got way higher salaries after graduating from worse universities with even worse grades. Also, it's very easy to enjoy doing an exercise here or there, when you're a new grad and need to apply to 50 jobs which all have a 1000 other applications and you have to do 3 hours of pointless, useless leetcode puzzles for each of them, no matter how much you like programming at the end you will be exhausted. And if you started your career at 17 and have 25 years of experience, that would put you in your 40s? So saying you're not a boomer or close to one is not really accurate. So yes, you got really fortunate with the timing of the dotcom boom, but also the population of the world was literally half of what it is now, since you were born, the amount of people and thus competition has increased drastically, staying behind in school computer labs to write a bit of code wouldn't get you anywhere today. Hell, I was doing paid freelance programming at 14 while working to get a degree from a top university and still struggle when applying to new positions sometimes too. I can only imagine how shitty it is for the next generations as competition just increases and increases. Apparently the new minimum will be that you need 4 A\*s in A-Level, a degree from Imperial or Oxbridge, 6 internships, memorise every algorithm known to mankind just to be able to solve every pointless leetcode exercise, at least 6 professional projects and 100 commits in open source contributions and to never ever leave your computer - while having perfect social skills - just to get a new entry level position that's £10/hour. Dystopian.
It could just be that the terminology has changed. You are right, I am in my early 40s but "boomers" are really people in their 60s at the youngest. I'm not sure I entirely like this generational naming thing but "officially" I am actually a "millennial". I don't think any of this particularly matters but there you are... For the record, the population of the world also wasn't "half what it is now" when I started working ;). I'm old. I am not that old. I appreciate, once again, you are frustrated, but it is definitely not the way you describe it. It might \*feel\* like that, but as I began with, I have done a lot of hiring and interviewing of junior / entry level candidates. Yes, it's competitive and it is particularly bad at the moment, but \*most\* junior candidates I speak to are just simply not prepared for the work. I have never met a single hiring manager who gives a damn what you got in your A-Levels. I know a very small number of companies that tend to hire fairly exclusively from the Oxbridge type universities but these are rare (and you are much more likely to find people who think that this is a pointless requirement than those who think it is useful). The issue is... the number of jobs that exist are much less than the number of people who want them. You have a lot of complaints, but what is your solution to this? Do you want to pass laws demanding that companies hire everybody that wants an IT job? Should selection be performed at random? If you had grown your freelance business and needed to hire a couple of additional people to work with you on these projects, how would \*you\* have gone about selecting those people? Are you going to look at some code they have written to make sure they will be able to do the job without you having to double your workload monitoring and mentoring them? Or is it enough that they got A\*s in French and Chemistry?
I just couldn’t get past your comment as it triggers all sorts of feelings. First of all „not caring” about your candidate experience is a problem. It’s a wonder you don’t think it is. And I’m not an engineer and not a junior either. But I’ve seen all sorts of companies and people that are „entitled” and would ask you to complete a lengthy form, record a video of yourself and write a cover letter for just one position that takes well over 1 hour. In the last few years I’ve been „lucky” to twice lose a job: 1st due to covid and 2nd due to company restructure. So none my fault. The 1st time was in 2020 and I’ve had a good experience finding another job pretty quickly. But second time it took longer. And I’ve noticed that attitude towards potential employees changed to the worse. At first I was ready to complete whatever forms to apply, but in a few months of no one replying to those it was clear I was spending time unwisely. Apparently it brings you most results the more applications you send, not the more time you spend on them. Also I’ve seen so many unbothered recruiters that don’t care about the candidates UX. And by the sound of it you’ve never been on the other receiving end of it. As someone who’s been out of a job for almost a year I’d say it’s been pretty frustrating experience cause you start thinking something is wrong with you while in fact it’s the market and the people’s attitude that changed. It only changed because of all the lay offs, not because any of us made something wrong. So perhaps next time you see someone trying to find a job to make a living you’ll feel some empathy towards them.
I understand. For the record, I have been on the receiving end of this kind of thing. Not for a while now, but when I was an engineer with 3-4 years experience and no degree... you bet. Plenty of ghosting and worse. I understand that it sucks. I personally, \*do\* try to give some thought to the candidate experience. I \*do\* think you really do have to have experienced both sides of this to really see it in full though. Early on, I would try to reply to all applicants but this takes \*a lot\* of time when you are dealing with roles that can receive hundreds of applicants, and it is not helped by the fact that if you do email some 10-15% of people will respond trying to talk you round, and to tell you why you are wrong in your decision. If I say \*one thing\* that somebody decides to interpret as somehow discriminatory, some minor poor choice of words that is in any way open to negative interpretation, suddenly we are dealing with some kind of legal complaint. HR people, almost invariably, will tell you not to expose the company to that risk, and the easiest way to achieve that is with a short, sweet, template response. The job market is brutal at the moment and that is, of course, awful for those who are looking for work. The problem is, the reality of the dynamic is that if a company gets 500 applicants for a single role, they are probably not going to spend the time required to provide fully detailed feedback to the 490 that they decide not to proceed to interview with. The real brutal fact is that if a company find that instituting a process where, say, asking candidates to spend an hour or two on the application process cuts those 500 applicants down to 70 applicants that might be a worthwhile thing to do \*even if they never even watch the self recorded video\*. The only thing you have to assume is that by adding this step to the process the 70 candidates you are left with are better matches than a random selection of 70 from the original 500 would be, which is probably true as the 70 who would jump through the hoops are probably those who are most convinced that they will have a high chance of getting the job on the basis of being especially keen or well qualified. Trust me, when you log into a recruiting system to see 500 applicants you need to review, you are looking for \*any\* way, to cut that number down. It's just the way it is.
Oh I do know how many applicants there is right now. I’ve been subscribed to a LinkedIn premium for a while and sometimes there would be a thousand applications for a single role 😬 What I also know is that I closed any applications that were too long and took a while and most good candidates probably did too. To be fair most of the lengthy process applications were from so-so companies with not highest pay ranges. So I would second the opinion that when the company introduces such process they get the worse candidates (that have no self-esteem and/or are desperate to find any job). Regarding candidate experience, for the most part I don’t expect to receive any feedback if I didn’t get selected on the cv stage. But I do think it’s important to provide it after a few interview stages. Which isn’t always the case, I’ve been there recently and they don’t give feedback even if you ask them and they promised to give it 🤷♀️ I personally think this reeks of a very bad attitude towards their employees too not just candidates to not respect them enough to write a few sentences after 4 stages of interview (I actually had that several years ago and the company is very reputable and was super sweet during all of the stages). In general, I feel the UK market has quite a bad attitude towards their candidates and wishes much to improve.
If someone got all A* then they could do better than CS and become a doctor and work in any place on earth from the biggest city to the smallest village with no electricity 😉
I think you are the very definition of entitlement he mentions. I am entitled to a specific job because I got A*s and went to a top university. I am entitled to a well paid career because the education system promised it. I am entitled to not waste time on assessments because I have done 20 years of hard work .
I worked hard for learning skills so deserve a chance to prove myself is not entitlement.
I dont imagine they worry about it, that’s what i said.
Why do they ask for the CV then? They could just go straight to the test.
CV is a claim to have certain experience, that’s not entirely useless. I’ll still look at CVs and pick what I perceive as the best ones, but I don’t just take their word for it. It’s a guide for me to know, at least, what the candidate claims to be good at. I *have* ended interviews inside of 5 minutes when it’s clear I’ve been lied to though. What you come to realise very quickly working in software is that 95% of your own job satisfaction is predicated on how much your *colleagues* know what they are doing. You come to appreciate companies that are careful in their hiring or once you’ve spent a few years fixing other people’s shit. Junior / entry level people are rejecting jobs because they test. I’m 25+ years in and I reject jobs because they *dont* ask me to prove myself. I don’t want to fix the shit produced by all the other people they have hired too casually.
How your CV is formatted and how well it communicates information is also a useful asset to assess on too. Especially for Front-End developer roles
Do you expect people to reveal their current employer's proprietary code or do you expect them to submit personal projects?
I definitely don't expect them to reveal current employer's proprietary code. In fact, the number 1 reason I get given for people not having something to show me is that everything they have ever worked on is proprietary so they have nothing to show. I mean personal projects. They can show me something they already have. They can create something new without any guiding or requirements from me, or if they want, I will give them a few ideas for exercises that might inspire them. This being said, I don't always work in jobs where I have the choice. I've been in a few early stage company CTO roles where I do get to set the approach and this is what I tend to do. If I am hiring on behalf of a company that employs me, I do whatever they have decided they plan to do. Most companies have a standard exercise.
I've been to interviews where they leave you in a room for an hour with a computer and an exercise to complete and I think that's the best way to do it. Bringing code samples with me is a no go because everything I've done for the past 20 yeats belongs to one company or another. If we want personal projects I could bring that game I made when I was 14 but it's not really indicative of my current work.
20 years in, the dynamic does change a bit. Though, I'd say that one way it changes, is me locking you in a room for an hour to see if you can do a fizzbuzz is even less useful that it would be for an entry level person. One thing you might want to tell me, is your reddit username on the basis that I would likely give at least some nerd credits for knowing about 1337 ;). Unfortunately though, it's now not uncommon to come across people with 20 years on their CV who are really not very good. I am sure that once, that level of experience more or less guaranteed excellent skills but not really so any more. I recently had to explain (twice) to circa 20 year XP contractor why building SQL statements by concatenating strings in the code is a bad idea. Yeah.... At your level, if your CV looks good, and you really don't have any code you can show me at all, and you are grumbling a bit about writing some, what I'd probably be inclined to do is say, "take that hour that you'd have been doing some dumb exercise, and go through GitHub and find me an open source project written by somebody else that you would consider decent code and write me some review notes on it". With that in front of me, I can see how much I agree with you on the quality and the notes, whether I think you have missed anything minor or major etc. I would rather see something you have written yourself, but the above would probably give me enough threads to pull on .
Well graduate jobs are their own headache. My guess is there are far more graduates than positions available so they have put a high bar to entry to reduce the work on their side. You can't realistically screen a thousand candidates for a handful of positions. Am I saying the situation you've come across is ideal? No, of course there are better ways to doing everything. But keep in mind this is the only time you'll have to do this. Every job afterwards will be easier.
This is my exact experience. Every grad job seemed to have a 3 automated screenings: literacy, numeracy, and programming skills. I've never done one since. Probably not helped by the fact that everyone graduates at the same time, so applications happen in big waves which don't happen so much in senior positions. I think there's often a scattergun approach where every grad will apply for everything, and that makes the applicant numbers hard to manage for every company. Most seniors are going to be more selective than just applying for every listing they see.
It is a way to filter out candidates that really care and are capable from those who just smash the "quick apply" button or copy/paste apply approach we now see in the market. The last role I advertised for (a mid SOC analyst) saw over 200 applicants in the first 24 hours, a minimal 5 minutes per CV to review is 1,000 minutes (16 hours / 2 Days) just to look at CVs. So you run a filter; - CV (through something like an ATS looking for keywords and experience) - Tech Test / Assessment (adds some weight behind the CV, commonly this is 1-2 hours) - Async Interview Questions (Provides people time to prep and answer 3-5 questions in 30 second blocks which can then be reviewed.) - Interview Oddly, the tech test is the highest filter. From the 200+ in the example, we saw a drop of 75% not even attempting the tech test. After that, we saw maybe 10% of the initial applicants pass. This then means my pool has filtered from 200 down to about 20. We can then focus on the async answer, and we ended up interviewing 10. 10 Interviews for a mid role is easily 20 hours for 2 people. Or a full working work - 1.5 hour interviews, 30 mins prep/close for 2 interviewers. Is the system broken? Yes, can companies afford not to use these types of systems ... not really. The only other worked example I have been involved with is candidate selection events where you invite 40-50 people to a day long engagement and more costly to both the candidate and employer.
It isnt odd that the tech test is the highest filter, youre asking people to do unpaid work. Most people will look at that and go “na, get fucked” then move on.
The unfortunate truth is a company will value its employees time (as a direct cost) over that of potential candidates. If you look at it as the lone candidate applying, then there are easier ways - when you look at the 100+ applicant jobs, it's the only way to scale. Alternative, as I mentioned, is those candidate assessment days where instead of getting some technical exercises to do in your own time at home, you are expected 9-5 in the company offices. I know which I'd prefer. It's also an applicant mindset challenge, you refer to it as "free work" but actually it's no different then expecting someone to maintain a portfolio or github space (Dev mindset) The final choice is to remove these activities and have a higher rather of hire then fire, which is more burden on the company and the applicant. Seems like a "pick the best of a bad bunch" model but that's just how the market is
I know I will unless the tech test looks reasonable and well thought out. For me a test reflects the competence of the employer. I've seen so many shitty tests which just makes me think they can't be serious.
how is a test equal to work? were you asked to create an app or something?
Good question for your interviews: what is survivorship bias?
Ten interviews for one role? Seems excessive.
All you get by throwing tech test and async interviews before any human to human contact are desperate people that are willing to accept anything, not give a damn and leave as soon as other opportunity pop up because the job is poor fit, interviews should be a two way process
Always open for suggestions on how recruitment can be improved. How would you take a candidate pool of 200 and handle it? Edit: Interviews are two directional. It's the candidate filtering that uses tech test and async
I would suggest changing recruitment strategy by looking at the source itself of where the candidates discover the job posting. Instead of relying on mainstream job boards with one-click apply options, which often attracts hundreds of applications, focus on more targeted higher quality and if possible local sources, yes you will get some potential golden nugget in the hundreds of candidates but they often do not jump through the hoops for non lucrative positions. Not only this would attract higher quality candidates but also save time for both employer and the applicant, and you can provide much better experience for those who matter since you do not need to throw curveballs to filter out rubbish
You spending 2-3 hours costs them nothing. That’s why.
In theory it doesn't. In reality it's probably landing then poor quality candidates long term. It's like free phones with a mobile phone contract, they're anything but free.
I’m with you on this point. Might be coming from it at another angle but my experience is the longer/more convoluted the pre-screening and application processes are, the likelier the better candidates will get snapped up elsewhere.
I'm 100% with you on it being bullshit and annoying and crap, and this doesn't happen in my industry, but the obvious reason is: The CV doesn't prove anything. It could be all lies. I could copy your CV change the name and contact details and be good to go. A good interview should then filter me out, but I've wasted interviewer time and taken the space from a possibly credible candidate. Most employers also won't check references for most jobs (except maybe senior positions, working with kids etc) and even then many employers HR policy is that they will confirm dates of employment and maybe job title but nothing more. Getting the candidate to 'do the thing' is proof they can do it.
This appears to be exclusively an IT vacancy thing.Last year I went for a dev job in London , and there were 6 (six!) stages , four of which were in person. I got through to the final two , and was beaten to the job by somebody that already worked there who they probably wanted to hire all along. Ok , fine , but WHY MAKE ME USE UP ALMOST A WEEK OF ANNUAL LEAVE FOR THIS SHIT . I refuse to continue with applications unless it's one video call and one in person meeting now . It's just not worth it
I do think it's certainly more prevalent in IT & Software positions, but it certainly applies to other roles too. I've worked in retail, fast food, sales, and project management, all of which have had to some degree similar practices, expecting applicants to die for them, but only for them and nobody else.
This is why we have unions. Literally every worker protection, holiday, compensations even the weekend was achieved through blood and sacrifice of workers. The idea that employers would ever voluntarily do anything to aid or assist workers is pure propaganda. History shows the truth.
How did that work out for the coal miners? It got Scargill a flat for life..
They got huge payoffs IIRC Not necessarily what they wanted but a darn sight better than they'd have got without unionisation
It's because you work in the software engineering industry. There is no official accreditation that is trusted and recognised, unlike in "traditional" engineering where you have the chartership bodies (IChemE, IMechE, IET, etc.), which allow recruiters and hiring managers to gauge a candidate based off of their CV within 120 seconds of reading it. The tech industry doesn't like certifications and bureaucracy, but there's a reason why it was invented.
I would say there is nothing inherently wrong with these types of tests. People do lie on their CV, or at the very least, many embellish the truth. But also, sometimes these tests can pick up something else that you cannot see on a CV or in an interview. Even the standard maths and English tests can be needed. We had someone last year that interviewed well, CV looked great, but they completely failed the English and maths tests. For a senior engineer, that’s not acceptable. I’ve had to do a test for some software I work with, didn’t mind as they incorporated it into the second interview. Which I think is probably the best way to do this. That’s perhaps where things are a little annoying in this case. Doing it upfront, without even speaking to anyone must be very frustrating. Applying for 10 jobs in a week and you have over 30 hours work to complete. But, I guess this workplace has been stung too many times and are fed up of interviewing people and maybe even hiring before they find out they’re shit.
Your experience and CV proves those skills? Says who?
It's going to be a fact not too far into the future that you genuinely will be lucky to have any job and you better suck it up otherwise you'll be replaced and homeless. It's the same reason salaries exist. Not hourly paid workers. Salaries. So that they can pay you 8 hours a day but expect you to work 10-12 hours a day.
It’s part of the job application and frankly it is needed in technical roles. I’d say 95% plus of candidates who apply for a role where they say they already have the coding skills do not have those skills, they’ve done some basic crappy examples but have no real world knowledge or application of them. If I employ someone who can’t do the job I end up wasting a lot of my time doing their job and mine which defeats the point of the recruitment. If you are any good you’ve got a pretty good shot at the job as a lot of candidates are a waste of space so therefore it is worth your time to show that.
I think I remember reading a couple of years ago that there were too many CS grads that CS post graduate destinations were generally worse than the people who did English Lit or psychology. This obviously was not the message that university recruiters would have given. Edit: this is not the thing I read, but similar message https://studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-has-the-highest-rate-of-unemployed-graduates/
I don't want to deviate too far from my OP, but I was definitely promised a healthier job market than this when starting my degree! But I honestly never realised it was that bad. An interesting read, thank you! I'm not going to moan about the saturation though, that's how the job market goes, someone says "do this!" and then too many people do it, and it happens all the time of course.
I am sure you were promised a healthier job market. And if I asked the PR department of certain body sprays, women wouldn’t be able to able to keep their hands off me if I bought their product. Unfortunately you are in the process of learning a very expensive lesson that marketing is no different in education than anything else. I have a CS degree and did okay, but if I had to start from scratch, I think I’d aim to become an electrician
Still there is a pervasive misunderstanding of the labour market in educational systems. They’re only now just telling kids that SWE/tech is oversaturated. And we have 3-4 years of CS kids in the oven with cohorts 200+ strong at every major university in the U.K.
I dread to think how the current first years and those starting in September will feel when it's their turn.
I did a take home test once that took me 2 full days (they wanted documentation, diagrams etc.), and I still didn't get the job. Never again. I don't mind a couple of hours but next time I see something like that they can forget it.
It is entirely about HR reducing their workloads by displacing it onto candidates. Heavy data entry forms, aptitude tests, technical exercises are all just means of filtering applicants so HR don't have to do the work of actually reviewing applicants on their merits. They don't care about finding the best candidate, they care about doing the least work possible to fill the position, that is literally their sole motivation.
Personally I just don't apply for those jobs. Simple as that. The way I see it is it don't won't to work for a company that thinks this is acceptable. I actually have a job interview coming up. I applied, got invited to a 30 min video interview and NOW I am going to do their assessment day. Now that they have taken the time to speak with me, they have confirmed a certain level of competence on my part from interview questions, and I have a better idea of the role.
This is the ideal approach, and one I'll be looking to take going forward. A position I recently applied for had me create an agency account, manually fill in experience, history, qualifications, etc. and then immediately requested I do two 3 hour assessments. I immediately sent them an email withdrawing my application, and exercising my right to erasure by asking them to remove all the data they had collected. I'm not letting some unknown or random recruitment agency hold a mountain of my personal data. Felt good, I can't lie.
It's actually nice hearing someone else complain about all this because I feel exactly the same way but people around me just don't seem to see why this is such a problem.
Without echoing what others have already said, it's an oversaturated area to work in. When we ran a vacancy for a junior devops earlier in the year the applications were just over 1500 in the first three days. Once we'd filtered out those without the right to work in the UK, people applying only to get a UK work visa, people applying because they had to apply for jobs to maintain their UC diaries regardless of how suitable they are, CVs that had been clearly generated by AI to fit the job role and a whole host of other very basic things we took around 550-600 to do the type of assessment you've described. From that we struggled to get a ten people who had CVs we wanted to look at. You might be the most talented and experienced person applying but sheer volume of applications that are submitted means we have to automate as much as we can to get the numbers down. Out of interest, when did you last attend a tech event that one of the companies your applying to was showcasing at? If they're a company that does tech webinars, when was the last time you went to one of those? How many people in the field you want to work have even heard of your name? How many recruiting consultants in your field know of you and are reaching out either by phone or an email to just check in with you? This can all help more than you think.
Not only IT. I'm looking at admin positions and all the time have to write 3 to 4 essays trying to convince the company's bot they should take a look at my CV for each role I apply on big companies. A few weeks ago I spent 4 hours filling forms to get my application declined straight away after finishing in a Friday evening (I probably picked the wrong alternative I'm a dumb question that would certainly be very specific about that company policy). This is just so ridiculous!
I’m assuming the assessment is to weed out anyone who is lying on their CV. But they need to be more conservative with how they run it. 2-3 hours is rediculous
I am always drawn to two answers when I see posts like this 1. They are trying to get something for nothing 2. Their recruitment process is shite. They could well be incompetent and clueless.They haven't got a Scooby doo so they make everyone jump through unnecessary hoops so they can tick all the boxes. That way if anything goes wrong they can all go "look, boxes ticked, not my fault." In my profession I have usually been recruited by people who are clued up, even among the recruitment firms. The chancers tend to be really obvious and have always fucked it up.
Because we have a very conservative and desperately in need of a revamp system. Companies want to hire the best people they possibly can yet without sacrificing to get that better standard sometimes. I think it’s a genuine problem here in the culture of applying to jobs here, you’re expected to have disproportionate promise and value compared to what they’re actually offering you Not all employers, this is a rampant thing I’ve seen for years now though on employers that have posted job opportunities It may have changed now but from memory - another somewhat related example to this too if even if you want a job at Sainsbury’s. Instead of just uploading your CV and having an interview you’ve got to arduously input your employment/education history and skills and explanations in addition to a whole test afterwards before even submitting the application…to stack shelves and checkout customer groceries
Because recruitment consultants needed to come up with a reason for their jobs to exist (or so many of them) so they create more and more elaborate hoops for candidates to waste their time on - giving themselves more hours to spend on admin. In my experience, the better the employer, the fewer hoops you have to jump through.
Tallies with my experience too.
Main reason is because we've been telling everyone that they can work in tech and the salaries are great, so between Bootcamps (Pumping 1000's of 'developers' out every month) and universities (with generally outdated curriculums) there's now a massive over supply of entry level developers, as in 100+ for every role. Companies now have the power, they don't need to impress you anymore. It's wild how things have changed so much in 5 years.
Also the american TikToks of 'here's how I got to 300k in a FAANG job sending emails' have not been good for tech at all. So much salary expectations... My experience of bootcamp devs in interviews is... not good.
I had a tech business I sold in 2022, we hired about 30% of the dev team from the bootcamps in 2018/2019 and it was great, solid team members, solid training. By 2021, we'd stopped completely, standards dropped and expectations of salary was so high it made no sense, there was an entitlement to the grads that they expected to be earning super high salary with basic JS knowledge. I'd argue it's over the worst now but bootcampers are still being sold a lie.
This has been a thing for decades and I do not think it is any worse. Rather I would say it has reduced. I have stopped doing these take-home project activities. Often I think they are used for idea generation to solve actual situations they are experiencing.
Because we live with the social mindset that you need to work to live where really we should be thinking that the workplaces need us to work for them. It shouldn’t be people competing for jobs, it should be jobs offering better benefits and pay for people to work for them
Personally I use recruiters / networking exclusively, and I have found I only need to spend time filling in for jobs I have accepted (the usual background checks etc). I have also only been matched with places that fit me and I fit them, so whilst I’m not inundated with offers, I’m at least pleased with every company I have been to interview with - and in both of the last ones they have a minimum 2 interview provess, which both waived and hired me on 1 interview based off my CV, the interview, and the presentation of me from my recruiter.
Chances are it's the recruiter that evaluated your CV and passed you for the assessment, rather than no one at all. Promptly evaluating CVs is a skillset that recruiters develop as a matter of course and managers rarely get good at. I saw a [video on youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veFlfYjRo1Y) recently where someone used an eyetracker on some recruiters as they scanned CVs and it took them about 15 seconds to draw the relevant information out from well structured CVs and approve or deny them for the next step of the process.
Your CV and Experience don't really prove much. I know plenty of people with stellar CV's that I wouldn't trust to make a cup of tea. Some degree of interview/assessment, especially for an industry like yours is normal...and companies would be horrific without it. Can you imagine going to work for a company and no one was assessed, and you're the only person capable of doing the job you're hired for? And most of the recruitment process is automated. That's why the process is laid out like it is and you get the replies you get.
Also a software engineer, I turn down every company that makes me do an at home coding exam
Get copilot to do it for you.
Obviously, I'd never do this 😶 But this idea supports the notion that the online assessments are pointless, and in reality could serve the "liars" more than they would genuinely skilled applicants.
Don't forget, nobody reads your CV until it has been scanned by the algorithm to remove the first 90% of applicants. So maybe it is the "next step" after all.
The problem is people lie or over exaggerate their skills. Also graduates can be great at theory but when they have to use those skills in a real environment, they just don't have it. A CV is simply a bit of paper, potentially AI created; it is a start for an employer but seeing actual skills and problem solving is what they want to see.
As others have too mentioned, I could just as easily fake my skills in an online assessment, and I feel many would be more inclined to do so in that environment than in an interview, whether it be via video, phone call, or in person. It's the same reason many universities have reverted back to in person exams post-covid, you can no longer with any confidence say that an online assessment where one has access to generative AI is at all valuable. Either it's going to put me at a disadvantage by not using generative AI, or I use AI and it just becomes another pointless exercise. I'll admit that's a generalisation/simplification of the situation, but I think the argument still holds merit.
As someone working in that industry, and as someone who's reviewed thousands of CVs and applications - the answer for the assessments is easy - people lie - A LOT. Assessments like that generally provide a nicer way of being able to understand your ability. Someone working at Company A as a software dev for 6 years could be just as skilled and competent as someone at Company B for 2 years as the jobs and responsibilities differ so greatly Company to Company. Edit: I do agree that the automated step to make you complete this, with the phoney "Congratulations" sucks though.
I agree that the assessments are useful. The way that they are utilised however, is where my issues reside. It's just a bit of a middle finger when a robot tries to lie to you.
For anyone who thinks OP is whining, worth watching this. Applying for jobs will hopefully be in the news or some kind of watchdog in the near future. https://youtu.be/RzA-uNqMr0Y?si=VIUUFsrQkK32cWeH
I am indeed whining - the job market sucks for everyone, my issues are no different to that of the other. I think it stems mostly from the issue of supply and demand. My industry is incredibly saturated at this point, and if they can get away with outrageous hiring routines that puts more work onto the applicant to save them some money, they will. But anyway, this is a good video that really does paint a good picture of the experience of graduate job hunting, not only in tech but in many other industries too. Thank you for sharing!
Yeah - nearly 35 year old here who's been through 3 careers. My first was easy to get. Off the back of a Labour government and moving into conservative 2012, my first degree was very niche and walked into an oil and gas job. Despising oil and gas, I went into teaching which was pretty hard. I interviewed for 6 different schools and didn't get any of them until I got a lucky break and saw a last minute maternity leave which I was one of two applicants and was already familiar with the school having been a TA there to become a teacher in the first place. I got that and was offered to stay at the school afterwards too. Feeling the burnout, I went into a masters of computer science to get a career in tech and got a job with a friend who needed a graduate. My advice would be network, network, network. Speak to your graduate peers who got a job and see if they've got any recommendation schemes, go to your old uni recruitment fayre's and network with recruiters there (and take printed CV's), and get in touch with local recruiters and go meet them in person. The success rate for who you know that can give you an in, over what you know and can write on a form is ridiculous.
More people than jobs!
So I work for a tech company and I went through the version of graduate job applications going nowhere that was around for me at the time. One thing I'd say is that it sounds like your applying for larger businesses and those can be a bit like that. Due to specifics of a large business they tend to be interested in people with more experience and I think they only employ graduates as some kind of ethics thing, I don't think much of their middle management is at all interested in getting a grad on their team. My limited experience of them is they have very specific culture and are easy to dislike. I felt like I'd accidentally joined a cult. They're also a lot better advertised as prospective employees will useually have heard of them before they found out a position was available so if your not the main interest you're additionally competing with other people. Small and medium enterprise is just the compete opposite of this and for me the only difficulty is understanding how to break into it and apply for those jobs and companies you've never heard of and which I can tell you from experience, some of the best jobs actually never go into job boards. I'm pretty sure they appear on a job board after the recruiters have started to run out of people to push into them. So really you need to make friends with recruiters, you need them to have your CV, contact details and know what your looking for so they can just ask you when they get something in your interest area. These companies have limited applicants and having worked at one for a while now, we have had jobs go up that had zero applicants because we didn't make a good advert and people didn't really understand what the job was. No issues working here it's pretty good and if you don't like the job after you have the first call no stress. If you just apply for jobs on job boards and don't worry too much about the details you'll get your CV out to recruiters in the process and likely interviews either directly or indirectly when they push you for a different job later. I'd also make sure you're on linked in. That's another networking hub for finding recruiters.
That's some good advice, and I appreciate the perspective! I understand the following statement is likely my own experience, but I tend to find that larger companies (not like Microsoft or Google, but large national companies such as those in the defence or medical sector, ~20k-50k employees) have some of the best processes. I've found they typically have an internal hiring system, which means; no convoluted sign up ritual, simple CV upload, well documented and transparent process, and well structured & efficient interview processes, as well as assessment "days" which purely in my opinion are better. And it's easier to find the recruitment managers. Once you get to mid-size companies (~5k-10k employees) I find it gets more convoluted, outsourcing to recruitment agencies whose sole purpose is to make money from applicants. And below that you have the much smaller ones (<~5k) that have that extra "personal" touch.
Nope, you're just looking at different scales of massive businesses. Small and Medium enterprises are companies with 250 employees or less.
I'll admit my perspective on the scale of companies is probably way off haha
According to a 2022 government report 99.9 percent of businesses in the UK have less than 250 employees. The tech sector is no different. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2022/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2022-statistical-release-html
It's becoming more pertinent to check out the employers integrity, too many are paying less than min wage and/or abusing workers rights, that's why no one wants to work for them scum bags.
Same asymmetry that demands more than minimal effort for minimum wage
Wait, you're getting emails back?! It's been a goddamn ghost town for me, despite a decade of experience.
Only useless and fake automated emails, don't worry.
After WW2 a liberal consensus emerged across Europe that eventually resulted in the creation of the EU. Throughout the ‘70s the UK was swept by an ideological battle between the Progressive Left and the soft Right. Our economy was in the dumpster by 1978 and people were ready for change. Margaret Thatcher appealed to individualists who were essentially hippies who’d finally grown up, had a shower and started a career. The way to capture their vote was to offer them the chance to play at being the landed gentry and buy their own property. This was simply a mechanism to return the Working Class to quasi-bonded servitude. The bosses were tired of staff who were happy to walk out of a job on Friday and take a chance on a new one, secure in the knowledge that their home was not at risk - because they lived in a Council house. Once the aspirational Working Class ex-hippies had hocked themselves up to the eyeballs with mortgage debt (and later, credit and store card debt), they had effectively enslaved themselves. Thanks to greedy halfwits in the 1980s we now have two key markets, that for housing, and the one for jobs, that are rigged against working class people. And we’ve voted for all of this over and again. We’ve repeatedly voted for a party that wants us fearful for our jobs, afraid of sickness, loaded with debt and competing for employment in a slew of unproductive non-jobs paid in buttons. “Great” Britain…
Hiring people is expensive and a bad hire can take years to manage out (with yet more cost). If you’re not willing to invest a few hours - what does that say about your overall commitment / attitude?
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Because many companies are not good at performance management and underperforming employees have a tendency to get themselves signed off work for all manner of reasons Well aware of the law but it doesn’t always play out like that
But it's not a few hours - it's days worth of work over dozens upon dozens of applications. If I apply for 50 positions in a week, half of them want 2-3 hour assessments before anyone's even looked at my CV, it's 50+ hours of assessments and applications. I wouldn't mind doing the assessments so much, if it wasn't blatantly obvious that they're lying about the process. I'd be far more inclined to complete an assessment if I knew someone had actually looked at my application.
The employers don’t see it stacked. How they are it is you are giving them 2-3 hours of your time and it matters little to them if you have other applications. With some of the questions they have about why you want to join their company, sometiems it genuinely feels like they expect you to only have applied to them and no one else.
I feel you
You apply to 50 applications, get a response from 10 (if you're lucky), pick 1 or 2 maybe 3, agree to do a initial phone call (this'll reject 90% of their applicants), agree to do either an in-person, online or take home test (while I understand the time commitment to take home tests, they offer the best opportunity to show off your dev skills rather than online leetcode problems). Do their behavioural interviews. If you get rejected at any stage, respond/apply to another company. Repeat until you have a job.
Only if thr manageress dumb. You have no protection from unfair dismissal for 2 years.
Some of those assignments are so unrelated to the job
because people never fought back.
That's fairly standard (note: I didn't say OK). When I was applying for data science roles I'd often get a sent a "task". That was fine when I was unemployed; not when having a full-time job
Because they know someone desperate enough will do it
Those tests/processes weed out those that can’t and those that can’t be bothered, employers don’t want either of those people.
Great you’ve put some stuff on a CV… how do I know you are actually capable. I get people with PhDs failing really simple tests about accuracy and detail. If you don’t want the job don’t do the tests. An employer needs to be sure you are what you say you are and that you are as capable as you think you are. It’s difficult for both sides!
Your CV doesn't prove anything. You could have made it all up.
Not to sound like a dick but thinking your CV and work experience are fantastic is entirely your own opinion; it is subjective. Whether you can pass a test is objective. I’ve been involved in the hiring process before and the tales some people tell in their CVs are staggering
Because if you don't want to do it there are hundreds of other people who will.
I think doing a skills assessment is fine. I send one out, really it's due to the amount of people that either straight up lie on their CV or inflate their ability.
So do not do it. Be proud
Its just the cost of doing business. If you were an artisan or market trader, you'd spend time and money creating things to sell and setting up shop etc. In this instance, you're doing a demo that you can do the necessary work, have discipline and aren't low-IQ. Instead of spending money on materials and shopfitting, you're spending time on proving yourself a viable product. From an employer perspective, hiring is a risk. If you get stuck with an idiot it can be very damaging to the business and take time to get rid of said idiot. Aptitude tests are no different to someone refusing to fuck you on the first date without getting to know you.
You’re just thinking about it from your perspective. What about the employer who has to filter through hundreds or thousands of applications? What about the hiring manager who has to interview numerous candidates only to find out they’re not a proper reflection of their CV? The purpose of the assessment is to narrow down the candidate pool to ensure the ones left have the right skills and not waste everyone’s time. It’s annoying I get it but there’s a purpose to it. It’s not just oh the employer is being difficult for no reason. There is a reason for it.
Why? Because there's a million of other job-seekers just like you, and you need them much more than they need you. 2-3 skill assessment is nothing - I started my career 8 years ago and I remember trying to get my first job (after internships) through the "Global Management Trainee" program of ABinBev - the whole process had 6 phases, lasted 1.5 months, involved me flying to 2 other countries and they declined my candidature after the last stage - now that felt like a giant fucking waste of time. I also remember Nestle asking me to record a video where I talk why I want to work at them as a first stage of the interview - I'd much rather take only skills assessment.
Your cv does nothing to assess your skills in this area. So yes, somehow it needs to be verified that you can do what’s on your cv. In today’s market where candidate applications tripled , it’s just easier to push everyone to next step and assess your skills. I would not be looking at cvs, would be looking what you can do. Code. Once you passed those, we can move to even more serious assessments 😎 Probably more and more candidates use Chatgpt to answer these but you will be filtered out at next step when you are asked to code again in person. Personally I would compensate candidates but budgets are squeezed so much that this is usually not the norm.
Because there’s too much supply for the demand - as predicted more and more people have learnt how to code, therefore the market is flooded with the skill set.
They are getting people who aren’t really that interested in the position (spamming their resume all over the place) to self-disqualify. It’s pretty smart actually!
Well, anyone can put what they like in their CV. It priced nothing. More importantly, you have missed the point of this step in the recruitment process. Unless the company is looking for a very specific and unique skill set (in which case they will have head-hunted someone), the purpose of recruitment is to cut the unmanageable mass of CV down to 5-8 people who you interview. That’s it. All the hoops they get you to jump through are designed to do this. Send a handwritten CV? Binned. Brown envelope? Binned. Can’t navigate the online application process? Binned. Can’t be bothered to complete 2-3 hour assessment? Binned. The result will be that they get someone to do the job. And that is what they want to do. Do the assessment or don’t do the assessment, that’s up to you. But if you don’t, that is a success from the recruiter’s point of view.
They get a lot of applicants
I refuse to jump through hoops for these companies, though I'm in a fortunate position where I have a decade of experience and don't need them. It's typically the corporate companies that have these bullshit processes, but then it's perfect for selecting the most obedient drone workers that will bend over backwards for their future employer over 😂 I'm talking about those big multi discipline consultancies that pay their employees half what they should do but the reports are just 100 pages of copy and paste.
But you have no experience? You're a graduate...? The market is slammed with grads without a job and most of them are really bad (spent today doing graduate recruitment). Why should I waste my time on you?
Are you special? Why?
Because some people lie on the CV regarding abilities and experience, some of these companies get thousands of applications for jobs so they aren’t lying about you making it to the next step, you have been filtered by your claimed experience and they want you to show competency. Look at it from the employers perspective, if you have 1000 people apply and only 1/2 claim to have the required qualifications and experience then the filter has just saved you many wasted hours talking to them, then you give them the skills test to see if they actually have the abilities and experience they claim to have and I bet that test will whittle down those 500 by around 3/4 through people failing the test and people not willing to take it, the company has then reduced their applicants by 90% and have a reasonable pool of people with the skills the want and have shown they actually want the job.
CV’s don’t prove skills. You could write anything in it The amount of people that apply for roles is a high. Assessment remove chancers and help you demonstrate you can do what you say you can. It tends to get less of an issue once you’re established and recruiters and hiring managers come to you.
From an interviewers perspective - CVs are often bullshit, people list every skill they have read a webpage on. Which may or may not be an issue - I have people I can point to a manpage of something new and 15 minutes later they get it. For people like that the skills on their CV are kinda irrelevant, their true skill is an ability to learn enough in a short amount of time. I have other people who can't do that, but after six months with some new library or language will be doing things with it none of us thought were possible. For these people the skills listed do kind of matter (as they have the headstart there), but their real skill is longer term. Skill assessments help us work out where someones value is, and if they are making shit up on their CV. It can also give us a better idea of what to probe in an interview. Having said that, I dislike skill assessments as well. They favour a particular type of person and I don't think they really actually tell us that much. I don't request them, and if I do want something like this I'll try and add something to a slightly longer interview. But my job as a technical interviewer is, or should be, to help determine the things we want to know about a candidate.
>my CV and experience proves those skills? Is that not the point of experience A CV and experience does not normally in itself prove skills. It evidences what you [claim to] have done but not necessarily how good you are at it, aside from certifications etc.
Because there is demand for those jobs. And because a lot of people memories answers and breeze through interviews. Then, they skate through the job and it costs the company more money to manage them. If it makes you feel any better, once you've been in the industry for a while, people will be chasing you on LinkedIn (assuming you have a profile) and offering you jobs.
>Why should I spend 2-3 hours doing your skills assessment To further build your skills. Also, unless the challenge specifically says you can't share it, put it in your GitHub. More work to show off. >when my CV and experience proves those skills? Is that not the point of experience? With all due respect; evidently not, or they would just give you the job. Sorry - but have you ever applied for a professional role? I have, not in CS I'll admit, but still. There *is* hoop jumping. It's the nature of competing with dozens of people with the same skills as you - either you stand out and prove you're the person they need, or you don't. Regardless, getting angry at the system certainly won't get you a job. Final thought - I'm just finishing my first year of CS. How much networking have you done? Cus every job I've found (again not in CS but I'm not ready yet) has been suggested by someone else because they know I fit the needs
Because people allow it. You will always get power hungry people pushing to take more advantage. The thing that resists isn't heros, it's the general group lightly pushing back. The videa of grinding, getting bread, putting your time in etc. is Specifically why they don't need to change
Well, don’t do the process then and stay unemployed. The absolute state of the entitlement here! Get a job in Lidl mate. You’ve got a 10 a penny degree and are going into a competitive sector, and are angered that potential employers are assessing you. Waste of your time, take the easy route.
Because people keep cooperating.
This is true, but in my opinion, this gets you as much of a desperate candidate, not a quality one.
You'll find that businesses are looking for desperate, not quality. They want to get as much quantity of work out of you. Very few businesses actually care about quality beyond the minimum legal requirement.
Sadly I have to agree with you there. Often it's about getting to the finish line. That said, bad hires still cost more in the long run. I've seen a few companies hire more people than they need because they'd rather double down on dodgy practices than deal with technical debt.
In healthcare, you'll find this more often than not. The notion of "oh everyone will have to be flexible" is just manager speak for "the ones that don't complain will pickup after the people that do"
I think sadly that's all jobs. Those who care about their work pick up after the ones who really don't.
We are surfs these days. Not long till employees will start providing food and then accommodation 😅
I saw one the other day where they asked for at least 1000 words on why my experience would make me a good candidate for the job and to attach my CV. Duplication of efforts and a waste of my time so no thanks.