| >I'm not sure why companies over-list. It's not companies, it's the individuals. Consider this: in a corporate environment, a person that is responsible for hiring but that is not a stakeholder in the success of any particular project, is incentivized to prove that: - she or he made an effort ("I've posted N ads on top ten websites")
- she or he didn't cause any particularly bad hires
The first incentive favors cookie-cutter hiring requirement lists and ads, in the "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" sense. Copy-paste an ad from a different project, adjust a few minor points, file it away.The second incentive favors over-specifying requirements, in the hopes that no particularly bad hire will be made and then blamed on the requirements / ad author. Suppose for a second a hiring manager or HR specialist were told by project stakeholders "certification X and skill Y are requirements", but figured out they aren't actually key to success - perhaps learning on the job would work out just fine in this case. So our brave hiring manager or HR specialist puts the certification and the skill in the "nice to have" section instead. Now suppose a candidate hired without the certification or skill ended up disappointing and underachieving. The manager or HR specialist would shoulder the blame for not filtering the hires well enough. Thus they play it safe and over-specify. It doesn't help that there's a persistent, lingering narrative in the press that pretty much all the skilled specialists are in high demand and in very short supply on the job market. This provides a cover for anybody who failed to attract candidates due to over-specified requirements - "the specialists are in short supply anyway". Source: having been doing guerilla-style hiring for a long while, with repeatably good results. |