[yowlingcat]

> I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions.

There's your conundrum. Having specific professional interests in an area you're experienced in is great...assuming that specialization has enough market demand liquidity for you to not be in this situation. If that's no longer the case, perhaps it's worth asking if you'd be willing to negotiate on what you're looking for?

I've done a variety of things so as far as what I have been looking for with my current search, it's really more a high growth company that places a premium on backfilling senior talent, which likely means I'll get (read: have already gotten) a very attractive offer. It's true that this means I am somewhat compromising on picking specific things that I want to do, but the reason I do it is because I'd rather bet on a company than a role, and if I do it this way, I only really have to find one company that has more to lose by not hiring me than hiring me.

I guess that's probably the advice (perhaps unsolicited) I'd give to you -- are you flexible with what you want to do but want to be well compensated and work with a company that has defensible growth? In that case, it might make more sense to take a position that might not be ideal today but is in a growing org where you can make it closer to something that would have the specifics you like. Do you want to do a very specific role? Well, unless it opens your pool of potential companies rather than closes it, you'll have to work within the diminished market demand for it, which leads the the sort of frustration you express.

[atomashpolskiy]

I appreciate your advice, and it absolutely makes sense. But my complaint was not about jobs being absent, but about companies ignoring applications.

[yowlingcat]

Ah, I see what you mean now.

> One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.

This is kind of a poor analogy, but I think a lot about parallels between talent agencies and the entertainment industry. Prima facie, there shouldn't need to be middlemen involved, right? And yet, there are, and they vary in quality from being horrible to being stars that the talent absolutely prefers to have. Interestingly enough, plenty of companies that try to disintermediate them can end up getting reputations as being talent unfriendly (IE Spotify), to the extent that the disrupting competitor inevitably plays ball.

I guess what I think is fascinating is that your anecdote may reflect this. Frankly, I think the job application is not useful. Creating the equivalent of an effective "spam filter" or ranking for job applications is challenging, so there's no reason to expect it to always be clogged with poor match applications. Having been a hiring manager before, it's really, really time consuming to go through low quality applicant leads. It's time consuming enough that your job is nearly intractable unless you have an in house or contingent recruiter that does a good enough job at separating the wheat from the chaff. I've had to play recruiter and hiring manager at the same time before, and it was more than a full time job. Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

What you want as a hiring manager is a lead, not an "application" and in order to get that, you need some kind of a pre-qualification process. I've had some really awful experiences with recruiters, some of whom will join my LI network, have an intro with me about a position, never respond, and then re-post that same position on LI. Then again, I've had professional recruiters that are extremely well informed, shephard me through the process with very well defined expectations of timeframes, and timely communication at every step up to and including a potential rejection. What I'm trying to get at is that you seem to think that the problem is too many middlemen, but I think the problem is not enough -- that is, the middlemen have an important job to do, but there are too many incompetent ones that are costing both companies and candidates valuable missed opportunities.

[atomashpolskiy]

> Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

Can't agree more. That said, there are so diminishingly few good recruiters, that it seems like we all would have been much better, if there weren't any recruiters at all.

[yowlingcat]

I really understand and empathize with this sentiment, because for at least five years, I had pretty bad experiences with recruiters. But I'd caution you to not throw out the baby with the bathwater -- they're out there.

At the past few companies I've been at, I've had the chance to work with some really thoughtful, practical and productive recruiters. Secondly, at companies I've worked at with great recruiters, we overwhelmingly were able to build a great organization of engineers who I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with. I think getting to the root of there being so few good recruiters requires a bit of reframing -- why are there so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there?

If you think about it that way, there's so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there for the same reason there are so many shockingly subpar companies. The internal economics of a company allow it to "remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- but just as equally, it could force to company to hire in a savvy manner to arbitrage an edge in the talent market that bigger, more complacent actors are leaving untapped.

There can be a lot of problems with VC funded rocket-ship companies that can end up being pseudo-cult like entities that crash and burn like WeWork. And yet, I've consistently had great luck getting amazing opportunities at growth stage startups that would be very hard to get at established companies that could really care less about losing me (or anyone else) as a candidate -- with a recruitment process that belies that apathy in a very palpable manner. Conversely, these growth stage startups actually fought to hire me, as well as the organization that I saw develop around me. I know that not every such company is like this, but I guess what I'll say is that I've had better luck with them than with the big companies.

[ummonk]

Are the positions you’re hiring for very dependent on experience or soft skills? If not, what is preventing you from using a coding challenge or quiz as a pre-screen?