Is it just me or is the job matching mechanism in the USA absurdly inefficient?

Great Debates
1

So I presently have a job, and a ‘hot commodity’ skillset. I’ve *got *the college degree in engineering, the medium number of years of experience at a name brand firm, and so on. So I’m not presently hurting per say. But

Say I want to change jobs. There are probably 1000+ major and medium size corporations somewhere in America that have open positions for computer engineers with my approximate experience, education, and so forth.

But all I can ever find are, say, a few dozen name brand firms and whoever put ads up on indeed or Monster or other internet sites.

And if I start shoving my resume at these companies, they will be also inundated with thousands and thousands of other people, many of whom are unemployed or unsuitable for the position or liars.

And so they keyword filter and have absurd requirements. If I go around Johnny-appleseeding my resume around, many of them will keyword filter me out. Because maybe I have experience with all the common computer engineering serial buses but not FPD link or some other weird bus a particular firm is using. Or maybe I didn’t lie and claim I have experience with some IDE or software setup or library their firm happens to be using and no one else in the entire industry is.

It just…doesn’t make sense. It’s like an algorithm where if there’s 1000 companies with 10 positions open each, and 100,000 people seeking jobs in that field, then 100 of those 1000 companies will each get 10,000+ resumes to wade through.

The O(n) complexity is something like O(n*m) or something.

There’s also allegedly (this sounds like bullshit but ok) the factoid that more than half of all jobs go to someone who knows someone socially that works at a particular company.

If that’s true, well, I mean how many people can I really know? I work at a company with 500+ people, but I only really know maybe 20 of them. And they only know so many other connections as well. And so whole entire industries I wouldn’t be able to get a job with if this is how it works because I don’t know anyone who knows anyone.

Anyways they held a layoff at my company last week. While I kept my job, and the bosses claimed that financials were good and they don’t expect another layoff in the next 2-5 years, this got me thinking as to how unnecessarily distressing getting laid off is.

If it weren’t so absurdly inefficient and slow to get another job, a process that is supposed to take a month per 10k of salary on average, which means close to a year for me, the prospect of a layoff wouldn’t be stressful.

I’ve got a skill other companies want, all it should take is some quick and easy computer matchup and I have a job at a fair market value price by the next Monday.

You could in theory eliminate most of the disparity and discrimination if the process were more efficient and transparent as well. If companies somehow knew what their available matches really were at a given budget in salary and a given company reputation, they would be more realistic in their demands as well.

Part of the reason there’s so much inefficiency seems to be both sides in the job matching process can’t easily discover their real market value. It’s like companies are trying to buy a 3 year old Porche for 5k and believe they might get it because they get so many resumes, eventually someone will have what they want. And individual job seekers are trying to sell a “10 year old Ford Taurus for 20k” because they heard a friend from college got 120k right out of school and they should get the same.

2

It’s definitely not just you.

And you, as you point out, have a skillset and resume that is in huge demand—yet you live with anxiety. Think how much worse it must be for people whose experience and skills are less highly-sought.

It is probably a solvable problem. Data in, crunch the data, get an answer better than the ‘networking or luck’ system we have now.

But it won’t be solved because there is no clear road to profit in solving it.

3

Well, there is a profit gain. Allegedly, each open position a company has costs the company (in statistically likely revenue) twice the cost (in salary, benefits, etc) of the position.

And of course, to the jobseeker, they miss out on the pay for each month they have to sit unemployed.

And this is a loss to the national economy as well.

But yes the incentives may not align in a way that an efficient private matchmaker could operate.

4

Sure there is. Temp agencies make a living doing it. I agree Monster sucks. So…profitable opportunity for someone with capital and a clever algorithm for making this easier for both parties.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous believing that you need to know someone to get a good job. That’s why expensive colleges and frats exist. In some way it makes sense, in any bureaucracy making any decision means that person accepts the consequences so if a member of whatever group vouched for them, well, if the hire doesn’t work out the blame is spread around. Kinda like mutual funds.

5

Well, it’s ridiculously *inefficient *if this is true. One analogy is look how easy it is today to sell a used commodity you own on ebay. If the item you are selling has a high daily sales volume, and you take some good photos of the item and to potential sellers it looks roughly like any other listing, the item will sell if you list it at the market price.

Usually within a couple days. List a little higher and it might take slightly longer, depends on various factors.

Ebay efficiently connects you with potential buyers from all over the USA, so you have a vast market. Sure, they charge high fees (about 10%) and you will get more of the money if you manage to sell the item locally on craigslist or facebook, but ebay maximizes your chance of getting the item to sell at all.

Say you want to sell some commodity item but you can only offer it to your immediate neighbors and a few of their friends? What if no one wants what you have to sell, even if it’s an iphone or Xbox, because everyone already has one? You might wait a long time to sell the item or have to take a price that is a fraction of the value on the national market.

6

A friend of mine was leaving his job. They needed to replace him. According to the posting, he wasn’t qualified for his old job. And they wanted to pay less than they’d been paying him. Then they ended up hiring someone with a completely different skill set from what they advertised.

7

I agree that the profit motive is there, and even aligned with corporate interests. My employer at least encourages us to leave Glassdoor reviews (and to their credit, there’s no obvious pressure to inflate ratings).

I think it’s just a really hard problem, because employees are highly incentivized to lie about their skill set. It’s basically the same problem as email spam or junk web sites.
Certification is used in some areas but is pretty commonly seen as a joke, because at best they only put the candidate over a really low bar. And so it falls to networking, which comes with its own set of downsides, but at least encourages some degree of honesty since the endorser’s reputation is on the line.

8

It really depends on the industry. In my own, third party recruiters do placement for all but the very entry level people. I can always count on two or three calling to ask me to lunch every month or two. Last time I switched, it was a recruiter who made it happen.

9

People aren’t products though. Any group (like work) has a dynamic and everyone has an incentive to make the new person fit.

Hiring people online might be more like dating apps and less like Amazon Prime.

No one has figured out dating apps yet.

10

That’s a good point. All the analogies about job search being like selling a couch (for example) online, fall short to some extent because of that ‘human factor.’

An additional problem lies at the other end of the transaction: companies may be reluctant to outline what they need in an employee too closely or in too much detail, because of fears they could be revealing information about their current projects—information that they would prefer to keep to themselves.

11

What’s the problem with LinkedIn?

12

But even if there were some sort of national job-matching database, what’s to prevent the employers from listing absurd requirements and keyword filtering hoping to get that 3 year old Porsche for $5K?

Another example of throwing out the job description when the “right” person comes through the door. Or another example of the whole process being a sham. Take your pick.

13

Nothing stops a company from doing that. But take the ebay case. If you are selling a commodity item, and you look at the sold listings, and you see the actual sale prices for the item, you aren’t going to get 50% more than the last 10 prices the item sold for last week. If you’re listing the item for a job and your employer checks your work, you’d get written up or fired if you listed the item so absurdly over market value because it costs your company money but the item would never sell.

If you can see the superstars are all taking offers at 140k at Google or $200k at a company with a lesser reputation, and you only have a budget of 90k, you should realize you are not going to get a superstar. And in fact it would be kind of a waste of time to interview one, they aren’t working here.

Sort of like in the dating market - believe it or not, but if you’re a 5, you are generally wasting your time dating 10s even if you can get one to go out with you once. Yeah a miracle might happen and it has before, but in general you might have to go on 100-1000 dates on average to find the single 10 who would go for you. That’s 3 years of a date every night assuming you can line up the candidates and you are paying for dinner every time.

And yeah, nobody has figured out dating either. And it’s a similar problem. Men who don’t look like underwear models don’t want to settle for women who are anything less. Women who don’t look like underwear models - or they are - expect a taller and richer man than they realistically can pull. (I am exaggerating the problem slightly, but in a market where both parties tend to badly overestimate their own personal value, it is very difficult to get a deal closed)

14

A few of the issues my friends and I have run into:

[ul]
[li]Being offered only short-term contracts while you’re holding a full-time job.[/li][li]Being offered jobs in another country with restrictive visa requirements.[/li][li]Being offered jobs that are far below your seniority.[/li][li]Being offered jobs that match random keywords in your profile, or job titles you haven’t held for years.[/li][li]NOT being offered jobs when your profile is set to seeking, even when you can find jobs you’d be a fair match for on the site.[/li][li]Being sent customer complaints about your company’s product.[/li][li]Being propositioned. :smack:[/li][/ul]

15

But a job description that would exclude the “right” person is likely to be a massive source of inefficiency, don’t you think?

16

It may be that your profile(s) need to be changed. It may be your particular job category? While I occasionally get queried about jobs that are below my seniority, those are easy enough to ignore. I do regularly get queries about appropriate jobs (every week), even though I am not currently looking.

17

My best results from LinkedIn have been from active job searches, not passively waiting for people to contact me. I use it as a networking tool, so when I find a job listing (usually elsewhere online) I search my network for people who work there or used to work there and contact them directly. It’s also helpful to actively cultivate your network even when not job hunting.

18

Part of the reason that it’s inefficient is that an open job search has a lot in common with a Market for Lemons.

Everyone needs a job from time to time, but the worst candidates stay on the market much longer because the best candidates are hired very quickly. At one end, very high performers don’t ever go job searching. From time to time they choose one of the many valuable and qualified unsolicited job offers that have come their way. At the other end, people who can’t pass an interview or hold a job are perpetually looking for jobs. At any given time, the resumes you might get from open job searchers are mostly slush pile junk, or at least are indistinguishable from it. People who don’t have one of the below indicators of quality find it hard to differentiate themselves from others because it’s simply not that hard to write a resume that sounds reasonable.

The best way through that is to have measurements of quality: Personal relationships, credentials, professional recruiters and agents (the good ones), professional organizations, reputation, competitions and other demonstrations of talent

There’s a huge profit motive here, but it’s a hard problem to solve. The people who are best-suited to accurately determine the quality of an applicant are themselves high skilled, which means that their time is expensive. You can’t feed them the slush pile. Hence all the attempts at automating things. But most of those automations don’t actually solve the problem, they just push the costs onto the applicant pool, in the hope that the people who don’t belong in the slush pile will be enterprising enough to figure out how to escape from it themselves.

LinkedIn is just another slush pile. Which isn’t to say it’s bad. You can get a job through the slush pile, it’s just hard.

19

That this guy applied in the first place and made it through the HR screen is a wonder. We’ve since both met him and he’s great, but how many people didn’t apply or were rejected before the manager even saw them? Seems to be a mess.

20

First, you are not alone. Visit the Ask the Headhunter blog and you will see this problem discussed all the time. Nick the Headhunter hates job boards, and believes in networking, and has some good suggestions.

But you are thinking of inefficiency for you. Think about the hiring manager. Since the cost of applying is so low, she gets inundated with resumes, even after filtering by keyword searches. Interviewing is expensive and a lot of places have hollowed out their HR departments, and she has other things to do, even more so since her group is shorthanded.
Now say a candidate gets recommended by someone she trusts. Who gets the first interview?
Your position in the big queue of candidates is a matter of luck. Networking lets you jump the line. I’ve been the link that got a few people jobs, and my last job I got because my neighbor was a good friend of an HR person who was supporting a director who was looking for someone just like me.

Your ebay analogy doesn’t work because the risk someone takes buying something on ebay is much smaller than the risk someone takes in hiring. It’s more like buying a house or car sight unseen.