We haven’t been ghosted on interviews since September. First half of the year was another story. Candidates wouldn’t show up to interviews and when we tried to contact them, they didn’t respond.
There are engineers complaining about not enough jobs/getting ghosted by employers, and employers complaining about not enough candidates/getting ghosted by candidates. It's easy to assume that the complaining engineers aren't qualified, or that the complaining employers have bad hiring processes.
In the end, I've learned nothing about the state of the job market.
I lost a contract position in September. I'm a Linux Admin guy who does DevOps with Ansible. I've mostly worked in Enterprise environments. I took a job in March with a Federal contractor and I ran into some difficulties getting up to speed with Terraform and a mac devops environment. I've always developed on Linux in the past.
There were, and still are a ton of recruiters hitting me up. Most of them are garbage, probably 95%. I still feel like a broke the salt circle by telling people I was actively looking for a new opportunity.
I have a family and need insurance for one of my daughters with special needs, so I went hard at interviewing. It took a solid 6 months, but I had half a dozen offers for Sysadmin work that met the pay I needed.
The hardest part about comparing offers is the benefits... Different copays, deductibles, OOP max, and premiums. Also different pay schedules can make it difficult to compare premiums. Then you have waiting periods...
I ended up with an excellent opportunity and I've been super impressed, but it was a rough 6 weeks.
The majority of offers I received were from companies I applied to directly. I had some I cut short in early interview phases because I started my new job. Stability trumps the chase for afew more dollars.
The market is still good, but remote hiring is slow, although in person wasn't really much faster at most companies.
More then I made last year, about the same as the DevOps position I left at the beginning of the year, but bonus opportunities and way better benefits.
In normal conditions - I wouldn't be surprised if >20% of people interviewing aren't really interested in working at the company.
You need competing offers to get a good offer - so you need to interview at places you have little interest in actually working for.
I would expect a lot of these people either got a good enough offer, or good enough competing offers, or just didn't get an offer from where they actually want to work - so don't need competing offers.
Additionally, there's a lot of people that interview for practice just to keep fresh for when they do need a job, and a lot of people that interview at a few places as practice before they interview at the places they're really targeting.
On the other side, in normal conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if >20% (probably far higher) of companies interviewing candidates aren't really interested in hiring anyone. They may be getting a pulse check on the hiring market. They may be interviewing simply to check off due diligence, but intend to only hire their already pre-determined candidate. They may need to have backup candidates if an offer they just extended falls through. They may be trying to pre-vet candidates so that they can quickly hire later if headcount suddenly opens up. They may be doing it because simply company policy is to always be interviewing.
A lot of the process seems to be performative and not really being done for the purpose of matching a real job seeker with a real job.
I would be surprised by this, given every time someone left at a company I worked for scrambled to get someone new and seemed to have no real infrastructure for actually hiring someone beyond maybe automated résumé software. If a recruiter was involved at all it would be a contractor, bur otherwise everyone involved in the hiring process were just people with enough experience who ‘volunteered’ their time to do interviews and rate candidates.
Over here we have requirements for applying for jobs to receive unemployment, to a ceetain degree. There are quite a lot of people who "just gimme the stamp". (Usually those got reported to the AMS)
They are ghosting on the call screen where I go over comp, process, role etc. Most of the times they took another job offer but have the common courtesy of telling us so I am not sitting on zoom by myself for 10 minutes.
I took the past six months interviewing to find a place I wanted to work at so went through quite a few companies. My observation was that most places haven't adapted their hiring process successfully to remote interviewing or engineers being in high demand. Even for places that were "desperate" to hire their golden path interview processes were fairly onerous or just really long calendar wise with all their gates.
They pretty much fell into two categories.
The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.
The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.
Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.
Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.
It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.
In the end, I've learned nothing about the state of the job market.