After submitting more than three hundred job applications for completely different positions in different companies in different countries, I began to notice a clear pattern in how the job description directly reflects what is actually waiting for you in the workplace. It is not always possible to easily and immediately understand what is behind and what HR really means, for example, under the item “stress resistance” in the list of requirements for a candidate. In this article, I want to share my experience in finding the perfect job, and the skills that I have acquired after hundreds of interviews out of the three hundred applications mentioned above. I want to show you how to analyze the description of vacancies before employment, in order to find a job that will really suit you according to your criteria for an “ideal” job. Here, we will consider job search as a separate science,with illustrative examples.
This series of articles is aimed both at green graduates who have just received a diploma, and at seasoned senior men who have replaced more than one team. It can also be useful for HR managers as an overview of their activities from the outside to analyze errors and work on them.
About me
, , IT . . : software engineering (double major, ). , . - , “” .
Introduction
So, let's begin. The first thing to remember when reading job descriptions is that people wrote them. Oil-oil, right? But it is much more important, then to understand exactly who was given the task to write a job description - June HR / team lead / not June HR, but still little understanding of what development is, etc. Such an analysis can be very useful in the subsequent stages of employment. I came across a huge number of vacancies that require incredible skills for the N-th position, which often led me to the conclusion that the person who wrote this description of the position does not have the slightest idea of what they expect from the candidates (a small sidenote, often on at the later stages of interviews, even relatively more competent employees than HR jones, team leaders for example, do not understand exactly what they expect from candidates for this role,but more on that in the following parts of articles in this series).
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An unclear, extensive description of the required skills is a very good preliminary indicator that you will be “driven” and will have to deal with tasks outside your area of specialization. For example, among those three hundred vacancies about which I spoke at the beginning, there were many vacancies for the position of a backend developer, where the requirements were quite drawn to the fullstack, to which domain knowledge and understanding of ML / DL, and not the backend, were often attracted. Managers and the team as a whole should have a clear delineation of tasks and an understanding of who is doing what. You cannot hire a backend developer and force him to develop the front, and in addition train ML models for the backend's salary. If, for example, the company is small and there are not so many people in the team that justifies such a use of personnel, then this should be in the job description,exactly like the company in this case should clarify that it is not looking for a backend developer, but a boy of all trades, well, or just a fullstack developer. However, nothing is perfect, and you have to put up with what is, and therefore pay attention to such details when looking for a job.
Unclear requirements for candidates: They themselves do not know what they want
There is another variation of ambiguously described vacancies, when the requirements for candidates mix a set of similar technologies. Below is an example that I found and even saved among those three hundred vacancies during my job search 2 years ago.
Requirements:
the Python 3.6
the Django, the Django-REST, the Django-rq, the Flask, Tornado, CherryPi;
MySQL / Postgres;
Knowledge of docker / docker-compose;
Understanding how http, https work. REST, RESTful, SOAP;
Knowledge of React Redux, AngularJS;
Despite the relative simplicity of these frameworks, it’s hard for me to imagine a candidate for the backend position of a developer who understands all of these technologies at the same time. It can be assumed that knowledge of one framework is probably enough for this position, but again, recruiters demand too much, and the main essence of what exactly you will be doing is not completely clear. In fact, the requirements should specify exactly the technology stack with which you will directly work; requirements should be clear and clear - this shows that the people hiring you have a clear and clear idea of who they are looking for for this position, and how it is generally needed in development.
Basic requirements: resistance to stress
Finally, my favorite item on the list of requirements for a candidate is “stress resistance”. This is the most common of the controversial items that can be found on job search sites. What does he mean? I still do not fully understand what kind of personal quality employers are looking for in candidates under such a clause, but one thing I know for sure, there are several very good reasons not to get a job where there is such a clause in the description. First, a normal, healthy person who does not suffer from masochistic inclinations does not want to be stressed at work. Contrary to all myths, work should NOT be stressful! It should be pleasant to work! Secondly, this is another indicator of what is happening in the team, and what are the tasks with which you may have to work. There are endless reasonswhy recruiters are looking for stress-resistant candidates. Most likely, project managers are incompetent and do not know how to correctly assign tickets by skill and by the number of tasks. Those. a manager may not know how to manage human resources and how to manage a team. Another reason is that the company may be saving on the number of employees: the team lacks hands, and there are more tasks than the number of people who can handle them, and everything is constantly “burning”. The company can also save on the quality of its employees by hiring those who simply asked for less salary in interviews. In any case, the whole raison d'être of managers is so that ordinary developers do not have to stress because of the tasks that were thrown at them; while the main task of team leads and department managers is to ensure thatso that the team has a sufficient number and quality of employees for the projects that they are going to develop.
Contrary to the clickbait title of this article, unfortunately, the topic of the psychological approach that I used at the later stages of employment (telephone and especially on-site interviews, where sometimes I literally consulted my interviewers as clients) was not revealed in it. However, in the following parts of this series of articles, I will try to immerse you more in the topic of applied analysis of behavior, and at least teach you to pay attention to the little things in the behavior of interviewers, just as I tried to teach you to pay attention to the little things in the description of vacancies.
What do you think about this? I will be glad to discuss with you in the comments.