[deepsquirrelnet]

Recruiters conflate skills with technologies. Or perhaps the author does. I feel like a skill is something that doesn’t go away if a particular business folds.

This might seem nitpicky, until you’ve had a recruiter ask how skilled you were in JIRA and demands you tell them a story about a time when you used advanced JIRA skills to solve a problem. It becomes a checklist of things that really don’t matter that much compared to actual skills.

Employers, this is also why you can’t find good candidates. They might not have a lot of “skills” in the way they’re being defined.

[jvans]

I had a lightbulb moment recently where I had a recruiter ask me if I had any experience building recommendation systems. While I don't use that word on my resume, my resume is full of technologies and projects that point toward recommendation system experience.

The recruiter was tasked to find candidates with a recommendation system background but the only way they know to do that is look for that exact word.

[J_Shelby_J]

Because asking an LLM to create a list of technologies used to build a recommendation system is not a skill they have?

[ct0]

In my experience, the parent category would be a Competency. With skills, tools, knowledge, and personal ability as children categories. Most HR analytics software breaks it out similarly.

[drewcoo]

I would just like to say that "advanced JIRA skills" exist.

But if you need them, the business is likely f'ed and you should leave. Rapidly.

[michaelrpeskin]

Yes! I came here to say this.

It's like saying my skills in "English" are equivalent to Maya Angelou's skills in "English"

Skills are things can do regardless of the technology/language. My skills are in computational math. I could write you a good algorithm in JavaScript with maybe a day or two of ramp-up/review of the nuances of the language. I could not (quickly) write a (good) web application in the same language.

I can deploy complex distributed computational code using EC2, I cannot even begin to understand the IAM. Do I have "Skills" in AWS?

It's such a pain when I'm reviewing resumes. I don't care about the language, I care about what you can do, and that's so hard with the checkbox system we've devolved into.

Much of my career has been based around low-level C and bit-twiddling optimizations for micro optimizations of math for speed and floating point accuracy. My current job is at a Java shop. When interviewing for that work, I hadn't touched Java since CS101 in college. I was lucky that I was interviewing at a small company that didn't have recruiters, but had me talk directly to the team and they could understand that the skill was "Math" not "Java". I still can't understand how Gradle or the rest of the Java build system we uses works, so it's good we have someone with "Skills" in DevOps to do that.

I hope the industry recognizes this soon - I think you're right, it's probably the biggest impediment to finding good candidates.

[itronitron]

yeah, unfortunately it matters to the recruiter