| The usual HN refrain here is 'pay more'. And as a developer in NYC, I'd say this is accurate, but simplifies the problem a bit too much. Companies like their salary bands. Companies like to hire people at around the same compensation as current employees in the same role with around the same experience. The problem is that demand has recently gone up and pay should go up with it, but companies are refusing to adjust their bands and greatly increase pay for their current employees across the board. So, instead of addressing the pay issue head on, we're seeing a few really really bad practices: - Lose candidates at the offer stage - Try to get comp expectations out of the way earlier.
- Losing candidates to Big Co. for big pay discrepancies is likely tolerable
- Losing candidates over $20k salary band issues is absolutely unacceptable
- DO NOT let HR takeover the closing process.
- Don't try to give an exploding offer
- Don't say an offer is 'best and final'
- The CTO or VP eng should give the offer and
make it a priority to close the candidate
- Giving pay increases to current employees only when they have other offers or explicitly ask for it- Giving regular title bumps to justify pay increases - Your 'senior' engineers will be involved with hiring.
It's better to give junior/mid-level engineers big raises
than title bumps that will make hiring talent more difficult
If these points sound obvious, they're not. As a candidate, I have not seen a single company that follows them.And this post just addresses issues around compensation. I haven't even begun to touch on being honest around your interview process. But let me put a few questions out there as well: - How many rounds do you have? - 3 is probably a maximum. Never have more than one on-site
- What is your accept rate at each round? - the accept rate should increase from round to round
- For testing candidates - be very clear about what questions you're asking and why
- know, objectively, what is considered a pass vs a fail for every question
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