Hiring is fucked

Great question. How do we make hiring more about humans than resources?

This interview touched a nerve I didn’t think was still there so let's have a proper think about it here, shall we.

Right, the market is more competitive and hiring has changed —arguably for the worse. The anonymous designer interviewed here says designers (although it applies to everyone really) caught in this mess need not to raise their concerns but suck it up, dry their tears, and just give. Offer yet more expertise, soul and time to greedy companies and the recruiters that represent them.

Look, I know applications are a tango and it takes two to close a deal. And I appreciated the practical tips shared here to guide people in taking the most helpful steps. But an avalanche of questions came to mind soon after getting to the end of this that the well-meaningness of it all had to take a side step.

Isn’t this problem as much about hiring processes as it is about candidates? What does it say about businesses who seem increasingly detached from spotting real talent?

And where is the conversation about these expectations and the weeks upon weeks of unpaid time candidates are asked to invest into each application?

Until recently, I'd been in the job market and was swimming in it for over a year. No matter how much my interview skills improved, no matter the increasingly positive feedback on my CV, the imbalance remained pretty clear.

For some, the question of who needs to adapt seems to fall heavily on candidates rather than being shared. What I find interesting is how people who land jobs—through skill, timing and yes, maybe a bit of luck and often a lot of free time on their hands—end up presenting their experience as a formula. "I've figured it out and if you just do what I did, you'll get there too!"

But they forget they’re asking you to pick up the burning tray from the oven with your bare hands, and rarely do they question why the system is keeping all the gloves to themselves.

Anyone else wondering about this? Are we just accepting these requirements as how things are? Shouldn’t we be having a chat about whether hiring should be more regulated and how it could work better for everyone?

This post makes the argument that the market has changed, hiring has changed, and if you want to stay competitive you need to do three times (or more) as much work as you were doing so far. Why? To make your design resume and portfolio hyper-relevant, to A/B test versions of those, to practice for interviews by listening to recordings of previous interviews and mentoring answers word for word.

This is crazy. This is less of a lesson for individual candidates to learn and more of a reflection of how unprepared busynesses and hiring departments are with the current candidate pool. How the crazy standards they set and the amount time expected people put in for free. Insane expectations if you ask me.

As someone who’s been in the job market for over a year, I have so much more to write about this imbalance and why it can’t be all put in the hands of candidates to work this out. And it infuriates me that there’s people that just because they made it, because they were those 1/10000 who got the gig, they feel like they’re solved the riddle and get to tell everyone that they riddle is easy if you know what to do. Yet never at any time question if the riddle should exist at all.