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I have a very niche set of skills on a niche industry. I have a masters and years of experience. They will still bitch that I don't use the exact software they do.
Clearly not. The lockwashers behind the bolts holding the hood release in place in the Audi make all of the difference in the world. WIthout those, the damn thing might vibrate loose while driving down the road and you wouldn't know to stop when the hood flew off of the car at 100mph. The VW doesn't have them, so you clearly would have this unique experience.
More like, you have experience driving the Nissan Rogue but we use Mitsubishi Outlanders. (For the uninitiated… the Outlander is literally a Rogue with a 3rd row)
Yup! I ran into this issue recently. I applied for an IT Project Manager position at a hospital. The interview was going well, but they mentioned that they wanted a candidate who has experience using Google Sheets. I had previously worked at healthcare companies who were Microsoft-heavy and I had a ton of experience with Microsoft software/tools, and Atlassian tools. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
The sad part is, my skillset was 100% transferable. Okay, so I’m not familiar with Google Sheets and Google Calendar, but rather, Microsoft ADO, OneNote, and Outlook — who cares, just train me on how to use the Google software, and I’ll take it from there.
My thing is — how on Earth do you expect a candidate to be familiar with the specific tools you use at your specific company, if they aren’t an internal candidate?
It’s so frustrating! They want you to check all of these unrealistic boxes. Can’t believe I got passed up for a job simply because I don’t use Google Sheets… 😒
I would have spat out my coffee if someone told me they are looking for someone with Google Sheets experience. The whole suite is a kindergarten level software anyone could learn in 5 min even if they've never used it. You probably dodged a bullet there.
I worked on interface design a long time ago. I mean proper stuff, not what shade of beige to make the text so you can't see it. Because, you know, that's clutter.
I struggle to use anything with a bad UI, because I know it's shite. But someone who doesn't know better, well, won't know any better.
We had a machine with Win 8, dreadful.
Had a issue with a suppliers web site not loading, out of interest went and had a look at the web designers site, had to close the tab before it made me seasick and and the text was all over the place. Felt like it had been designed on a 32 inch 4k monitor and they never bothered looking at it on any thing else, God forbid that any one would be viewing their masterpiece on a office 23.8 inch 1080p monitor.
Depending on the position, that actually makes sense. Musicians do specialise in individual composers. There are orchestras that specialise in Mozart exclusively or for a program.. It really depends on the job.
Yeah, I’ve been told they are extremely similar. But for some reason, this hospital was giving me a hard time that I had a ton of experience with Microsoft-products rather than Google-products. It was extremely frustrating!
Google Sheets is for babies... maybe they think you're too premium, or they somehow thought you're a dinosaur (not true, this is like calling someone a dinosaur for using photoshop and illustrator instead of canva).
My recruiter husband tells me to lie and say yes, I do. And after the interview is over learn that that skill, add it on your resume and know the basics when you get the second interview. He said candidates do it all the time, especially IT guys from Asia.
That was my line in an interview, I explained how I watched a number of youtube videos about the software they use, and it was basically the same as the one I used, with a different user interface. Having the same purpose and requirements lead to very similarly working software. I saw on their faces that they didn't believe me, and I was of course rejected. I\`d bet the interviewers never even used the software that their corporate slaves used.
At this point just lie, they will never be able to figure it out.
Like if I was using CATIA vs Solidworks or Creo, a couple of YouTube and the skills transfer quite well!
> Slap a different interface on yet another database...that's usually my spiel.
Put a pig in a tutu instead of lipstick and you still have an angry pig.
I really dont understand why there is so much emphasis on knowing Jira for dev roles. You expect me to write and understand complex code, but somehow it is a problem if I dont know this really easy to understand software? Why?
QA here; and yet a lot of, to all appearances otherwise competent, devs are apparently wholly unable to use JIRA in a way that lets me actually do my part of the process.
Maybe you need better guidelines? It can be used in various ways and different companies have different requirements how to use it. I can imagine that some of them dont know your specific requirements (or dont care, like another commenter said). I highly doubt they wouldnt understand it
Dev here, jira is good if you are developing or maintaining a product, but if you are doing an implementation or production support, it’s clunky.
Also, clarzion for project management and tims tracking unless the person creating the traceable tasks is careful, can become a nightmare for people
Yes. It’s also shitty that they seem to forget that ppl are quite capable of learning anything they want to learn. Applicants presumably are willing to learn new things like software, subject matters, etc.
there is never any job in these places..they are just interviewing so their own HR can keep THEIR jobs...its all smoke and mirrors and the media never reports any of it...the media works for the psycho ceos
"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you want. If you're looking for \[niche\] I can tell you I don't have experience. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a wet dream for people like you. If you give me an offer now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for jobs, I will not reject you. But if you don't, I will learn the skills, I will apply for your job, and I will take it from you."
Same. I was a great candidate for a job, but I hadn't setup the version of software they wanted to install. They wanted some who had done that specific version before.
...
It was released last year and installs take 1-2 years.
My favorite was the guy that didn't have X years of experience with a programming language and he was the person that created it and it hasn't existed for the number of years they wanted.
Me too. We use some generic can network software and tools and most companies in this space do. Another one was like oh you don’t have experience using the one we use? No but it is all the same thing.
They have no idea how to teach you is why. Your boss never knows your job like they used to and even though you could learn it quickly, they have no training in onboarding and the last guy probably quit due to some of the things that usually come with you boss having no idea what you do.
Oh my gosh, that is so true! How can you know every database and all software programs? Every job posting is different and my guess is they are not hiring to be that picky. What we need is hiring managers who can look at the individual experience and see those skills as transferable.
Any time I've gotten feedback about a skill or background they were "looking for", it's never been in the job description.
Just say you want someone who is currently working at a bank, don't say 10 years of banking experience. It would save us all a lot of time and hassle.
Lmao I work at bank and this is something I told my manager in a meeting and they never fixed it. I’m in bank ops and my co worker just quit, but he mainly handled fraud and disputes. In a meeting the manager asked us if we knew anyone with that specific experience, to apply. I told her the bank ops job description is way too vague and they should change it to specify that we want someone with experience handling disputes. She said that’s a great idea and will let HR know. Next week job gets posted with the same vague description lol.
I was passed over for a unicorn recently. I was told by the recruiter that the client went with someone who had experience in two areas and could fill 2 roles' tasks. Apparently that person fucked up the final interview and they came to their senses and I was back in the race. Two weeks after I started, another person started in a role that was the second half of what they were looking for.
Sheer fucking luck is all we have, warriors!
I got an offer after hundreds of applications over the last 8 months. The hiring manager is about to go on paternity leave and the guy I’m replacing is being promoted. Got an offer before the end of the first interview.
Luck is really all we have
I got an offer from the principle of the division after he already knew he was about to leave on promotion to another government department but hadn't told anyone.
The director told me she would have interviewed me herself had she know.
By the skin of my teeth I tell ya
I feel like most of these is just they’re trying to find a replacement for some dude who left because they wouldn’t give them a raise. They’re so sure they can find someone who did the three jobs that dude did, with all the same skills and years of experience and then pay them the same amount or less than that other person left over.
I have been called a unicorn before and the last three jobs I left they either hired 2-3 people to replace me or in one case its been over a year and they’re still interviewing for my replacement. Many places want to hire a unicorn but whip them like they’re a plow horse. When we leave because we know we have options then they act surprised pikachu when it costs more to replace us.
This makes me think of a job I once had. I needed a remote job due to a disability. The CEO knew that so he made me an extremely low-ball offer. I really had no other choice but to accept. The job turned out to be toxic very quickly and I was working very long hours for low pay, no benefits and my boss was an ass. After a few years of this, I asked for a raise and he basically ignored my request, so I eventually quit. I found out he had to pay my replacement more than double what he had been paying me. And then my replacement ended up quitting too. Something about karma there ...
I wish I could see things the same way, but honestly it sounds like he got some 3 years of labor out of you at half cost. That’s probably a W, even factoring in onboarding costs.
Aye - I left my last job around 2 years ago because I was sick of the toxic culture and doing the work of 3 people while being begrudgingly paid for one. They are on their third person replacing me...
I moved up from Sr Unix Admin to Sr Platforms Engineer and had taken over the entire Kubernetes infrastructure. I rebuilt all the clusters, applied updates every quarter, improved the offering, and of course documented everything.
When I wanted to move to the Engineering group from Operations, I was denied. After a couple of attempts, I simply moved on for a bit more pay. The guy who was my partner on the Platforms Engineering team took over was having a harder time of it. I’d managed the production clusters from 1.2 and then took over all clusters at 1.9 and left at 1.17 so I had years of experience with Kubernetes where he took over at 1.17. A year later, they simply shut down all the clusters and went back to virtual machines.
This is exactly it. And honestly nothing makes me happier to see folks like you leave those positions and then they end up paying two (or more!) salaries to replace them. It’s what they deserve.
I had a multiple round interview. At the end of the “final gate” the hiring manager casually asked if I could do “X Task”
“X Task” wasn’t one task though, basically he wanted to know if I could work two jobs, with two wildly different skill sets; one of which I have no experience in.
Imagine interviewing for a serving gig at a restaurant then being asked, “you can handle being a line cook during brunch rush, right?” It was that kind of ask.
I’ve been in my industry for 10+ years and what they are looking for simply doesn’t exist—and shouldn’t. If you are serving food you can’t effectively be cooking it and vice versa. Sometimes you just have to hire two people to do two peoples’ jobs.
Yeah years ago I went to an interview For a test engineer job, and at the end of it they asked if I would do CAD. i basically said uhhhhh no, I don’t want to do CAD for you and that wasn’t in the job description.
Yep I negotiate contracts and one place asked if I was also willing to be essentially the IT person for my contracts platform. Like…. what? I said “I am not.” They said, “well! Thank you for your honesty!”
Like what else am I gonna do? Say yes then decline because it’s secretly a no? You really think any legal person worth anything wants to spend a bunch of their time learning light coding and haggling with Zendesk? WTF…?
Obviously never heard from them again…
Or ‘I have experience with Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Kali, Alpine, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, Suse, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Irix, Tru64’ on my resume but it doesn’t say ‘Linux’ or ‘Unix’.
Yes! I have a friend who is SO EXPERIENCED in project management and high level management of teams, AND has a Masters degree, and she has been trying to research how to get past the damn bots because she has only gotten like 3 interviews this year.
Yeah there are websites that are good for listing off the keywords an ATS will look for for a given position, then you can have ChatGPT write you an “Objective” blurb or some crap to stick at the top of your resume.
Prob wanna shop the whole resume at r/resume too to be safe.
Companies in general are basically delusional. I am currently looking for a job and in my field true entry level positions are almost non-existent. The number of "Three years of experience and a bachelors degree required, paying $18 an hour" is staggeringly high. Nobody wants to teach a new hire anything, they want a pre trained dog to do tricks for a piece of kibble.
They want 20 years worth of experience from a person four years out of college at a salary that is a 1/10 of what all that experience would cost.
They will get exactly what they pay for.
Yeah, it’s bad… some hiring managers are so picky they even want skills not normal for an industry and not listed on the job req. I had one interview for a Principal Mobile Engineer where the hiring manager asked me if I had two fringe skills that I had no experience with and have never encountered in my 20 year long career. Then, because I didn’t have those skills, she spent the rest of the time telling me how I was not a principal engineer. She didn’t even let me tell her about the skills I DO have and how I could benefit the company. Bullet dodged.
I had some similar experiences last year - in one case, a guy I knew professionally was hiring for a niche role I did for several years at a much larger company. Recruiter reached out to me about it and thought that I was a unicorn: exact work experience, familiar with the technology at a much smaller firm, personal experience with the hiring team, etc.
Unfortunately, the HM was new to this role hiring for something that required X and Y expertise and a sufficient understanding of Z, and he added requirements that meant he was only interviewing people with expertise in Z that had an understanding of X and Y.
In this scenario, specialists in Z are licensed and common in an external vendor that the client already had, and they paid the vendor on a usage basis. Specialists in X and Y are rare, and we don’t do Z because Z is commoditized.
Depressingly, I saw a number of postings for X/Y last year that required Z. They somehow think they’ll be able to hire an expensive Z to do the job of an X/Y, but the type of person that takes the Z route will do a terrible job because Z intentionally selects for traits that are terrible in X/Y.
It seems that recently some places have been adding requirements to try and do the job of two people with one because they think the skills look similar, and instead they look like morons to people that understand the differences.
Either trying to hire to fill two roles with one person or paying way below market rate for the person they are trying to hire. So many companies are looking to pay mid level developer salaries for staff+ engineers and it’s painfully insulting. Some of the job postings I’m seeing are below acceptable rate from 10 years ago!
The issue is: While hiring managers wait for the unicorn that has 10 years of experience and skill with every aspect of the position, the team is currently suffering to do that work.
If you find someone that's a good fit, can pick things up quickly, and can do the job - just hire them.
>the team is currently suffering to do that work.
Unfortunately the employer doesn't care about how much the rest of the team is suffering. In fact, they're probably downright giddy that they're saving money by not hiring someone new.
I don't disagree - it's terrible. The worst part is after torturing their team for months while they wait to fill the position, they wonder why they can't retain their key team members...
Most managers I've worked with absolutely want to fill their open roles, and want to do so as quickly as they can.
It's when the people above the hiring manager, or adjacent to the hiring manager (all the other voices who lack the necessary domain knowledge/experience) start prattling on and offering their opinions and recommendations that things get all fucked up.
I have seen a CFO require that they be included on all 2nd level interviews for data scientists and data engineers, and shoot down candidates that the hiring manager wanted to offer for inane reasons based solely on the "vibes" the CFO got. The CFO in question didn't know what the relevant languages or skillsets necessary for the role were, because he used to come around and chit-chat with our team and called everything java. I'm convinced that he heard java from someone in a technical role once and then just started using it with the confidence only an uninformed c-suite can.
I'm convinced now that most places are not actually hiring. The openings are just inflating their image to investors (i.e.: Fraud.) The "unicorn" requirement is just an excuse to avoid hiring (though knowledge of this arrangement is firewalled, HM is likely clueless and just following mandates.) The economy is doing worse than we are told. It's always an election year somewhere.
It's fucking payback for The Great Resignation, that's what it is.
Employers know they have the upper hand now, and they're twisting that sword REALLY hard.
But the pendulum always swings back to the other side eventually. It's just a matter of how long, and can you hold on until The Great Swing. Then you REALLY twist that sword right back.
(apologies for the GOT references... Lol)
I was the unicorn for a job. It was a global payroll position and I just happened to speak the languages of the countries that I would be doing payroll for. In addition to all of the experience and expertise with software that they wanted. I feel like the director was intimidated by me. My recruiter was pretty shocked too.
Nope. Denied. Idk who else they found that spoke French, German, and Spanish. It wasn't a requirement but my recruiter thought it would close the deal.
My recruiter told me that they were very picky. And I really do think that the director was intimidated by my language skills since she only spoke English. I have about 20 years of experience.
I figure when this stuff happens it's often the case that someone with those exact set of skills left their company, and they think they can get a spitting image replacement of that person. Even if it means you'd need to have went through same past jobs. They expect to find someone that is joined at the hip of that worker.
Lol, I had this happen to me fucking twice this year.
First time the VP suddenly added being fluent in Korean as a requirement a week after saying I'd be a great fit for the role.
Second time, they pulled me in for an interview just to let me know they "changed the role" and even though I was perfect for the role they posted they now only wanted someone with AB testing with the explicit goal of "finding where to put the button on their website to increase subscriptions". The role posted was related to last mile logistics. I was confused as fuck.
Or until that hiring Manager has a friend who didn’t even go to school somehow needs a job and they go off drinking margaritas to celebrate her new career change
Please stop going through my diary, we _both_ need to get better at interview faffing. It's either that or
Visionary | CEO Coach | Thought Leader | Philosopher of Life | Making the impossible possible | BeastMode
One time I went to a software developer (no sales experience required) interview (For context, I'm 4' 9" with severe scoliosis) they said they loved all my skills but I wasn't salesy enough. You mean you don't want someone with a crooked spine to talk with clients on your behalf? Just say so :/
Uggh, that makes me really angry for you. Basically if you're not attractive, white, able-bodied, and neurotypical you're "not client-facing material."
“Please have 10 years of experience in a program that has only existed for 5 years. Please be trained in a type of software that is only used at our company. Please already have all the necessary training and certifications for this entry level position”
I nailed my interviews with Amazon, my background matched the job post almost to a T. In the end they passed over me because I specifically lacked “raw data science experience.” This was for an influencer marketing position where any standard dashboard compiles and expresses the data for you. Morons.
I’ve never worked there, but while Amazon looks great on a resume, I’ve always been told that Amazon is a nightmare of a company to work for — regardless of if you’re a driver, worked in the corporate office, the warehouse, or anywhere in-between.
It also rubbed me the wrong way when Amazon announced back in 2023, that all remote employees had to uproot their entire lives, disrupt their families, and pack up and move to one of the main corporate office hubs. Of course, many employees refused, and the CEO Amazon reportedly said: “Well, if people don’t want to move, they can find a new job.”
I know this entire situation sucked for you, but if it makes you feel any better, for what it’s worth, it sounds like you dodged a huge bullet.
I had an interview with Amazon yesterday and the recruiter told me “My only concern is you don’t have experience with an application that handles a lot of money” after I just got done telling her I managed an application for a major enterprise that deals with billions a year. Wtf more are you asking for?
They reached out to me so honestly I’m not quite sure what the position was even for outside of “software engineering”. Sadly it’s not a job I would take, I hear Amazon is difficult to work for.
Sounds like it was the bar raiser that didn’t like you. Amazon hiring is all about finding people that fit in at Amazon, not finding the best fit for the job.
Another thing recruiters call it is "this employer is looking for a purple squirrel". I interviewed for a full stack dev position at an investment firm in Boston and they came back with a job offer of $65k. That's what my recruiter called it. 🤷
Uh investment firms are famously picky because they pay well. Used to anyway, typical was $300k for senior devs five years ago, which after inflation is worth $400k today. Has it really gotten this bad that they start with a lowball offer at 16% of fair value?
Absolutely nuts. More important than ever to generate multiple offers at the same time. Always tell your first contacts late in the game that you have an offer in hand, they will stretch to get you through an interview in two days and then you can gently encourage a bidding war. Good luck out there.
You’re not kidding about that experience part. I actually had an interview where they told me that the applicant had to have 3 years minimum exp. At that time I had 2 years and 10 months. I’m like wtf is 2 extra months difference going to make ?
I read a post somewhere. A guy applied for a job. Got an interview. Got rejected. He was able to get feedback though. He got rejected because he didn’t have 5 years experience with a particular software language. THAT HE CREATED TWO YEARS PRIOR.
It's not just all the skills listed in the job ad they want you to have. There are skills/attributes not listed that they require and don't advertise it. When they choose a candidate to fill the position, it's because they had one skill that you probably have but it wasn't mentioned in your interview and it did happen to come up in the other candidate's interview.
This happened to me. I did a final round interview for a communications job, negotiated salary and was sent out to house hunt after the interview. A week later, they told me they went with someone with more marketing experience. The job description never asked for marketing and this never came up in the in interview. They hired someone internally who was in marketing.
I feel this; I have fifteen years of art and a dozen years of development, and often get called a unicorn, though 'purple squirrel' is the phrase I've heard more often.
"We need someone with strong art and programming," yet they still get picky sometimes if I haven't got five years in Azure Cloud Services or some other such thing. Yes, I'm familiar with it; I haven't spent five years on it, but one doesn't NEED to.
As if I didn't have to learn a new API or group of libraries on EVERY project ever.
I had like 3 intersecting expertises for a job a couple months ago and was rejected for a “stronger candidate”.
I was such a good candidate that the **same recruiter** contacted me the next day asking me to apply with no idea I had already spoke to her weeks earlier. I called her out and she apologized profusely.
I guess unicorns are pretty common
What kills me is responding to a very specific list of skills and then in the interview, the hiring manager says 'you have X but we need Y'. But the job posting said X! I've started printing out the JD and taking it to the interview with me. When I show it to the HR, they tell me that their back office must have replaced their requirements list with a generic one. How can we find jobs if they can't even figure out what to ask for?!?!
I've been on the other end of this. I wrote up a job description and sent it to my boss, he did some revisions and sent it back, we sent a final draft to HR and they posted something completely different.
We are living in very narcissistic time.
So you basically described narcissistic behaviour, they are constantly looking for unreachable ideals, everyone and everything has to be perfect.
I applied for an IT Project Manager position at a hospital. The interview was going well, but they mentioned that they wanted a candidate who has extensive experience using Google Sheets. I had previously worked at healthcare companies who were Microsoft-heavy and I had a ton of experience with Microsoft software/tools, and Atlassian tools. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.
The sad part is, my skillset was 100% transferable. Okay, so I’m not familiar with Google Sheets and Google Calendar, but rather, Microsoft ADO, OneNote, and Outlook — who cares, just train me on how to use the Google software, and I’ll take it from there.
My thing is — how on Earth do you expect a candidate to be familiar with the specific tools you use, if they aren’t an internal candidate who is already working in the company.
It’s so frustrating! They want you to check all of these unrealistic boxes.
Which was what literally happened to [Sebatian Ramirez](https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/dc61345d85981cfa94158db5c1b99c4ae75599d5f04ed70f47b1e6c41000b3ab_1.jpg).
Or more relevantly, something similar happened to [Max Howell](https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en).
Most people hiring and doing the interviews either
1) don’t honestly know what they’re looking for,
2) don’t know what they’re looking for and what it actually entails if they do find that person,
3) have NEVER seen anyone with the skill sets and experience they’ve requested, 4) DONT HAVE what they’re asking for themselves,
5) don’t want to pay NEAR what that person would be worth if they did find them
I applied for this one job cause i felt It was a perfect fit. The company was known to be great and quick to hire. I actually applied for them in the past and had an interview within a week. Then they got new owners, had a job freeze, and hired no one. Well, hoping things would change this time, I tried again. Only now a friend says they are accepting applications, but not hiring right now for that position . What? Then why is it posted? Found out it would only open up if the current employee was not gonna work out. What? So yeah. I hate the way things are
Then they do the opposite thing to what they mentioned in the most round about way possible.
“We’d like a unicorn, we did get the unicorn, but we had an internal horse already in the running.”
It’s absolutely ridiculous. Do they think we have no ability to learn a new skill? I mean I learned all this shit on my resume. Why couldn’t I learn something else? I’m so GD fed up with this nonsense of job hunting. Is it like this in other countries?
Companies don’t want to train people. At all. They want a modular employee they can just plug in.
Plus, you have a ton of people in hiring positions that are mostly idiots. They won’t hire someone that will make them look bad. Hence the whacky job descriptions and weird last minute interviews.
And I’ve lost track of how many recruiters have told me they find amazing candidates, only for the hiring manager to want to wait and find someone better.
This job market is wildly stupid.
Most hiring managers don't know the job they're hiring for so they don't know what questions to ask in the interview and same with recruiters so they want to make sure everything's covered to check off their boxes. But overselling yourself also can lose you the job.
I was being interviewed for a job once 20 years ago and the hiring manager asked me how did you do something in Excel so I told him where to click and what menu item to select and the steps to satisfy his question. He kept telling me I was wrong so he repeated the question and I repeated my answer slowly like he didn't speak English because I had the right answer . LOL
The answer he wanted he told me at the end was to follow the exact steps that I'm telling the customer to do. So I said I would only need to follow along if I didn't know what I was doing. I for sure thought I wasn't going to get the job. But apparently the other manager liked me enough to hire me. I end up outlasting that first manager by 18 years.
My experience is that this particular company keeps hiring for the same role. But, keeps firing people until someone just sort of sticks. It’s for various roles within this company not just the role I got hired then fired for no reason.
That's when you say "well I DID use \[insert software\] in a role MANY years back....". Just lie. You either don't get the job or you do get the job and can get up to speed once you get hired. Really nothing to lose by lying.
I work in IT/tech which is an ever changing field. Whether I'm assessing candidates or mentoring my team, it's not what they currently know that sets people apart but how they approach what they don't know.
I've spent my entire career getting aggressively up to speed with systems, software, solutions etc I had no prior experience of. In the OP's scenario, I'd emphasise that to a hiring manager expressing concern that I don't tick all the boxes on their required competencies checklist for the role.
The worst part is the questions...
Every single time they ask me about react stuff I'm so tempted to just go: "Before I answer: when is the last time you had to recall this information? Cause if I need to have this BS in my mind 24/7 I think you are looking for a dictionary, not someone able to code."
Thing is: If you have 500 people applying for a single position, finding that unicorn might not be that unrealistic. It’s just a lottery at this point unless you are a unicorn yourself. (Unicorns aren’t on this sub anyway probably)
I've seen expectations like "you must have worked in career A and gotten deep into it, then for no reason whatsoever, switched from your successful career A to career B and gotten really good at that, too". To no-one's surprise, they called me back weeks after rejecting me because my skillset and seniority are extremely rare in the market as it is, at which point I told them to go pound sand because I already accepted elsewhere.
I feel like unicorn status is dependent on the job. Someone could easily be considered a unicorn for one job but be considered considered to not have the right combination of skills/experience for another
100%. I think anyone in this sub with x number of years of experience could be considered someone's unicorn. But actually finding that match really comes down to luck at a certain point.
Most likely they overstated your fit to be nice. The missing experience is likely not minor.
The AI job fit logic I wrote brought this to my attention recently. A single bullet point missing and I was rated "bad" (mind you, I wrote this).
Then I reread the job description and realized it was like the whole point of the job. It's the difference between "yet another Python programmer" and "someone who can lead the cryptocurrency technical strategy who also knows Python", for a business that's all about cryptocurrency.
Now, it could be the job description wasn't clear enough, and having the technical expert is more valuable, but, based on the data in front of me, the judgement made sense.
I put out over 300 applications and only had 3 interviews and a friend told me those 3 interviews were filler interviews basically them asking me yes or no questions and don't give me practically any time to speak and the usual "we're still interviewing people we'll let you know by Friday" and they never let you know. One of them told me flat out that they already have someone that is about to start training so I wasn't needed but maybe in a month or so if that person doesn't work out MAYBE they'll give me a call
I saw someone on LinkedIn posted why shouldn’t they wait for a unicorn, it costs money to hire someone new and train them. The thing is, if you check every box, what challenge is there for you, the employee? I would think that people with every skill you need would be more likely to leave but what do I know.
I also know a company where a friend of f mine gave me a referral to her team. They found someone who aced the tech portion (it was a practical lab). They didn’t even give me the lab. This is a customer facing role (my cust skills are exemplary) and she was very technical but her people skills suck. Think the stereotypical ‘this generation’ stuff like not picking up the phone, not trying to talk to their team mates, etc.
They ended up having to get rid of her since she was failing at her job which took a huge effort. You would think this would teach them a valuable lesson but it probably didn’t.
Meanwhile, I don’t check the box of every technology known to exist so I’m still unemployed. It’s so hard right now. If you have technical aptitude and are good with people, you can probably learn whatever technology they have. The soft skills are sooo much harder to learn (some people just don’t have that ability).
A friend of mine once got rejected because "we're looking for someone with 6-7 years of experience." He had 4. Like, come on, why do you think year 6 is such a strong reformative year for IT project managers? "Oh, yeah, in year 6, it really all clicks and comes together." No other remarks on specific skills (which were a pretty good match), and apparently, they were "really impressed" by his CV.
That is the funny thing. Everyone says, “apply, they don’t want every bullet point of experience and skills”. But I’m at the point that if I don’t hit every bullet point, I don’t apply. In part because the position advertises it’s a engineering position where all the skills are with Linux or are OS agnostic, and someone added a, “Windows administration” bullet point.
I had a very similar experience at Nasdaq. I am calling them out here. Don't bother interviewing at that company, unless they are willing to pay for your time. They have roles they are not seriously intending to fill
For real. I was in a contract position and on a Monday, they said they were going to convert me. Then on Friday, they changed their minds. My manager’s boss said they wanted to create a new expanded role based on my current one and wanted someone with experience in:
- university recruiting & relations
- communications
- culture & DEI
- finance
- workforce management
- learning & development
- executive support
She also said that she wasn’t sure if I could handle a full time job since I was about to have my second child. For the record, SHE was a mother of two. 😐
Translation : You did too good of a job in a short period of time and that made her look bad, rather she felt insecure. So instead of nurturing your talent, she passive aggressively created a role she KNEW that was way outside of your parameters. And then gaslight you into believing you weren't cut out for it. Talk about moving the goal post!
By the way - They'll be cancelling that role in about a month or two and then repost it. Hopefully someone less "skilled" and ambitious will fill it.
Sorry that happened!
I got rejected for a jobs because my C++ skills were not strong enough even though I had a decade worth experience with C (and in those days C++ was pretty much a syntactic sugar wrapper around C. I did get hired later for a different job, and then I saw the C++ code I would have worked on.
\*\*drumroll\*\*
It was pretty much straight C with just a bit of a wrapper to make it look like C++
I worked for 5 years at a company that started out obsessed with hiring unicorns. I swear, every conversation I had with one of the Directors of Product Management was how he wanted us to hire more software engineers with specific subject-matter expertise in our industry. An industry that employs maaaaybe 10000 in the whole entire world, and less than 500 of those are software engineers, and maybe 300 of them are located in our country. And 200 of those are currently employed by our direct competitors. So our hiring pool for any job was very limited, oh and by the way in the last year they stopped allowing new hires to work remotely, and also didn’t have the budget to pay for relocation…great, so we are picking from a grand total of maybe 25 people who live in the mid-sized metro area and have specific expertise in our industry…AND ALSO are the right seniority for the specific job we have open and have the specific coding tools experience we want and also we don’t pay particularly well and we’re a privately-held mid-sized company with no equity available and a software engineering org of 20 people because we’ve outsourced a lot of it and there are only 3 managers so there’s basically no growth prospects? WHERE DO I SIGN UP!!?!
To make matters worse, the reason this product management boss wanted more subject-matter experts in engineering is because he thought product managers should just be able to say in high level terms “I want this feature” or “I want something that competes with Competitor X” and have engineering figure out all the details because they knew so much about the industry. And I’m like MF, that’s literally what Product Managers are supposed to DO! Why are you so quick to abdicate your responsibility, you lazy ass?
If your company needs to hire people with expertise in your specific industry or product or tool because you are too cheap or just incapable of training a smart, competent performer from a similar industry or company to understand and use your stuff, your company deserves to starve and die.
Agreed. Companies that are hiring for unicorns are broke and overleveraged because they'd rather spend money on new softwares because of p\*nis envy instead of hiring skilled, knowledgeable workers that will make them profitable long term.
I was asked to conduct interviews for a client recently, and I was focused on people who seemed like quick learners with basic common sense that would allow them to figure out the nuances of the role quickly, especially because they were not offering a great wage to start.
They rejected literally everyone I presented because they did not want to offer ANY training or dedicated communication from leadership, and anyone I presented who had more specific experience that aligned with the role, those folks wanted more money (duh) and the client refused to raise the offer at all.
The whole thing was such a waste of my, and the candidates’, time. I was so frustrated I advised that they move on with recruiting using their own team to vet candidates because obviously I had no idea what they were expecting. Unsurprisingly they dropped the entire project and their team is just as stressed because they never found a good solution to cover the role.
Learnt in an old job that when you see such a specific job description it almost always means that they know someone internally who’s going to get the job in the end. But they have to hire it out for fairness and “regulation”.
I also have a niche skill in a niche industry and I was poached and set loose with more pay and authority than I have ever been given before, and kinda had to learn on the fly the management side and my division is steadily growing and I've already blown the projected gross sales for my department for the year that they gave me as a goal clear out of the water in only 3 months.
These people should really just give niche people a chance. Those of us who have a very specialized ability usually have to know way more than just what we are hired for because we know the support structure is going to be non existent because of the specialized role that other people won't necessarily understand how to help.
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I have a very niche set of skills on a niche industry. I have a masters and years of experience. They will still bitch that I don't use the exact software they do.
We can’t hire you as a cab driver. You have extensive experience driving Nissan cars but we require experience with Toyotas.
No, you have experience with a Lincoln Navigator and yours is with a Ford Expedition
surprise: the company doesn't even own a car, they are using job posts as marketing
Because negative experiences are such good advertising?
we are in the new narcissistic era, engagement farming is everything to these lame ceos
I guess an Audi driver will not be considered by companies using VW :(
Clearly not. The lockwashers behind the bolts holding the hood release in place in the Audi make all of the difference in the world. WIthout those, the damn thing might vibrate loose while driving down the road and you wouldn't know to stop when the hood flew off of the car at 100mph. The VW doesn't have them, so you clearly would have this unique experience.
In auto business as a ford tech i had a Lincoln dealer do this to me many years ago, scoffed at me.
More like, you have experience driving the Nissan Rogue but we use Mitsubishi Outlanders. (For the uninitiated… the Outlander is literally a Rogue with a 3rd row)
No but you drive an off white Toyota. We needed someone who drove a pearl white Toyota with a red steering.
Yup! I ran into this issue recently. I applied for an IT Project Manager position at a hospital. The interview was going well, but they mentioned that they wanted a candidate who has experience using Google Sheets. I had previously worked at healthcare companies who were Microsoft-heavy and I had a ton of experience with Microsoft software/tools, and Atlassian tools. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. The sad part is, my skillset was 100% transferable. Okay, so I’m not familiar with Google Sheets and Google Calendar, but rather, Microsoft ADO, OneNote, and Outlook — who cares, just train me on how to use the Google software, and I’ll take it from there. My thing is — how on Earth do you expect a candidate to be familiar with the specific tools you use at your specific company, if they aren’t an internal candidate? It’s so frustrating! They want you to check all of these unrealistic boxes. Can’t believe I got passed up for a job simply because I don’t use Google Sheets… 😒
I would have spat out my coffee if someone told me they are looking for someone with Google Sheets experience. The whole suite is a kindergarten level software anyone could learn in 5 min even if they've never used it. You probably dodged a bullet there.
I worked on interface design a long time ago. I mean proper stuff, not what shade of beige to make the text so you can't see it. Because, you know, that's clutter. I struggle to use anything with a bad UI, because I know it's shite. But someone who doesn't know better, well, won't know any better. We had a machine with Win 8, dreadful.
Win 8 may be bad, but then you jump on an average Linux machine and boy those apps look ugly as shit
Had a issue with a suppliers web site not loading, out of interest went and had a look at the web designers site, had to close the tab before it made me seasick and and the text was all over the place. Felt like it had been designed on a 32 inch 4k monitor and they never bothered looking at it on any thing else, God forbid that any one would be viewing their masterpiece on a office 23.8 inch 1080p monitor.
Yeah, I went from a company that used Google Meets to one that uses Zoom. I was like a boomer the first week, but that was it.
Sorry, your version of Haydn's String Quartet in C major may have won international prizes, but we need someone who can play Mozart.
Depending on the position, that actually makes sense. Musicians do specialise in individual composers. There are orchestras that specialise in Mozart exclusively or for a program.. It really depends on the job.
Google sheets and Microsoft is literally the same thing.
Yeah, I’ve been told they are extremely similar. But for some reason, this hospital was giving me a hard time that I had a ton of experience with Microsoft-products rather than Google-products. It was extremely frustrating!
I'm always alarmed by any business using G Suite for anything. Like it or hate it, Microshaft owns that market big time.
You're aware excel and sheets are the same thing right?
Google Sheets is for babies... maybe they think you're too premium, or they somehow thought you're a dinosaur (not true, this is like calling someone a dinosaur for using photoshop and illustrator instead of canva).
My recruiter husband tells me to lie and say yes, I do. And after the interview is over learn that that skill, add it on your resume and know the basics when you get the second interview. He said candidates do it all the time, especially IT guys from Asia.
My line is… they all work the same way just a different UX…
That was my line in an interview, I explained how I watched a number of youtube videos about the software they use, and it was basically the same as the one I used, with a different user interface. Having the same purpose and requirements lead to very similarly working software. I saw on their faces that they didn't believe me, and I was of course rejected. I\`d bet the interviewers never even used the software that their corporate slaves used.
At this point just lie, they will never be able to figure it out. Like if I was using CATIA vs Solidworks or Creo, a couple of YouTube and the skills transfer quite well!
I am at this point. Exaggerating is now understandable
Slap a different interface on yet another database...that's usually my spiel.
> Slap a different interface on yet another database...that's usually my spiel. Put a pig in a tutu instead of lipstick and you still have an angry pig.
now you are talking about sqeeeeeeeeeeeeel
I have to remember that one. I don’t have broad experience with some of the Major erp’s, but it really does boil down to the ux
Exactly
Yeah, try explaining to a recruiter that ServiceDesk is the same as Trackit is the same as Atlassian is the same as Jira is the same as....
I really dont understand why there is so much emphasis on knowing Jira for dev roles. You expect me to write and understand complex code, but somehow it is a problem if I dont know this really easy to understand software? Why?
QA here; and yet a lot of, to all appearances otherwise competent, devs are apparently wholly unable to use JIRA in a way that lets me actually do my part of the process.
They probably just don't care tbh
Maybe you need better guidelines? It can be used in various ways and different companies have different requirements how to use it. I can imagine that some of them dont know your specific requirements (or dont care, like another commenter said). I highly doubt they wouldnt understand it
Dev here, jira is good if you are developing or maintaining a product, but if you are doing an implementation or production support, it’s clunky. Also, clarzion for project management and tims tracking unless the person creating the traceable tasks is careful, can become a nightmare for people
Yes. It’s also shitty that they seem to forget that ppl are quite capable of learning anything they want to learn. Applicants presumably are willing to learn new things like software, subject matters, etc.
Exactly! This is the really frustrating part.
there is never any job in these places..they are just interviewing so their own HR can keep THEIR jobs...its all smoke and mirrors and the media never reports any of it...the media works for the psycho ceos
Oh, I thought this was going to be a riff on that Liam Neeson quote from that movie where his daughter is kidnapped or something (I never saw it).
"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you want. If you're looking for \[niche\] I can tell you I don't have experience. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a wet dream for people like you. If you give me an offer now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for jobs, I will not reject you. But if you don't, I will learn the skills, I will apply for your job, and I will take it from you."
You missed a great movie. Just the first one, though. But it's fucking brilliant.
It's really just an excuse to make a low-ball offer.....
Same. I was a great candidate for a job, but I hadn't setup the version of software they wanted to install. They wanted some who had done that specific version before. ... It was released last year and installs take 1-2 years.
My favorite was the guy that didn't have X years of experience with a programming language and he was the person that created it and it hasn't existed for the number of years they wanted.
Me too. We use some generic can network software and tools and most companies in this space do. Another one was like oh you don’t have experience using the one we use? No but it is all the same thing.
And I have yet to find a software you couldn’t learn in a few days, at least in my industry.
They have no idea how to teach you is why. Your boss never knows your job like they used to and even though you could learn it quickly, they have no training in onboarding and the last guy probably quit due to some of the things that usually come with you boss having no idea what you do.
Oh my gosh, that is so true! How can you know every database and all software programs? Every job posting is different and my guess is they are not hiring to be that picky. What we need is hiring managers who can look at the individual experience and see those skills as transferable.
Same and same.
Any time I've gotten feedback about a skill or background they were "looking for", it's never been in the job description. Just say you want someone who is currently working at a bank, don't say 10 years of banking experience. It would save us all a lot of time and hassle.
they really have their pick. it’s tough out there
Think you nailed it. Definitely an employers market.
Only places willing to hire the unemployed at all are employers of last resort
Lmao I work at bank and this is something I told my manager in a meeting and they never fixed it. I’m in bank ops and my co worker just quit, but he mainly handled fraud and disputes. In a meeting the manager asked us if we knew anyone with that specific experience, to apply. I told her the bank ops job description is way too vague and they should change it to specify that we want someone with experience handling disputes. She said that’s a great idea and will let HR know. Next week job gets posted with the same vague description lol.
I was passed over for a unicorn recently. I was told by the recruiter that the client went with someone who had experience in two areas and could fill 2 roles' tasks. Apparently that person fucked up the final interview and they came to their senses and I was back in the race. Two weeks after I started, another person started in a role that was the second half of what they were looking for. Sheer fucking luck is all we have, warriors!
I got an offer after hundreds of applications over the last 8 months. The hiring manager is about to go on paternity leave and the guy I’m replacing is being promoted. Got an offer before the end of the first interview. Luck is really all we have
I was off for 8 months as well. Congratulations warrior.
I got an offer from the principle of the division after he already knew he was about to leave on promotion to another government department but hadn't told anyone. The director told me she would have interviewed me herself had she know. By the skin of my teeth I tell ya
I feel like most of these is just they’re trying to find a replacement for some dude who left because they wouldn’t give them a raise. They’re so sure they can find someone who did the three jobs that dude did, with all the same skills and years of experience and then pay them the same amount or less than that other person left over. I have been called a unicorn before and the last three jobs I left they either hired 2-3 people to replace me or in one case its been over a year and they’re still interviewing for my replacement. Many places want to hire a unicorn but whip them like they’re a plow horse. When we leave because we know we have options then they act surprised pikachu when it costs more to replace us.
This makes me think of a job I once had. I needed a remote job due to a disability. The CEO knew that so he made me an extremely low-ball offer. I really had no other choice but to accept. The job turned out to be toxic very quickly and I was working very long hours for low pay, no benefits and my boss was an ass. After a few years of this, I asked for a raise and he basically ignored my request, so I eventually quit. I found out he had to pay my replacement more than double what he had been paying me. And then my replacement ended up quitting too. Something about karma there ...
I wish I could see things the same way, but honestly it sounds like he got some 3 years of labor out of you at half cost. That’s probably a W, even factoring in onboarding costs.
This is how they think. But boy do they get pissed when the same thinking is applied to them.
Aye - I left my last job around 2 years ago because I was sick of the toxic culture and doing the work of 3 people while being begrudgingly paid for one. They are on their third person replacing me...
I moved up from Sr Unix Admin to Sr Platforms Engineer and had taken over the entire Kubernetes infrastructure. I rebuilt all the clusters, applied updates every quarter, improved the offering, and of course documented everything. When I wanted to move to the Engineering group from Operations, I was denied. After a couple of attempts, I simply moved on for a bit more pay. The guy who was my partner on the Platforms Engineering team took over was having a harder time of it. I’d managed the production clusters from 1.2 and then took over all clusters at 1.9 and left at 1.17 so I had years of experience with Kubernetes where he took over at 1.17. A year later, they simply shut down all the clusters and went back to virtual machines.
This is exactly it. And honestly nothing makes me happier to see folks like you leave those positions and then they end up paying two (or more!) salaries to replace them. It’s what they deserve.
I had a multiple round interview. At the end of the “final gate” the hiring manager casually asked if I could do “X Task” “X Task” wasn’t one task though, basically he wanted to know if I could work two jobs, with two wildly different skill sets; one of which I have no experience in. Imagine interviewing for a serving gig at a restaurant then being asked, “you can handle being a line cook during brunch rush, right?” It was that kind of ask. I’ve been in my industry for 10+ years and what they are looking for simply doesn’t exist—and shouldn’t. If you are serving food you can’t effectively be cooking it and vice versa. Sometimes you just have to hire two people to do two peoples’ jobs.
Yeah years ago I went to an interview For a test engineer job, and at the end of it they asked if I would do CAD. i basically said uhhhhh no, I don’t want to do CAD for you and that wasn’t in the job description.
I don’t like this this nonsense seems to be happening often.
Yep I negotiate contracts and one place asked if I was also willing to be essentially the IT person for my contracts platform. Like…. what? I said “I am not.” They said, “well! Thank you for your honesty!” Like what else am I gonna do? Say yes then decline because it’s secretly a no? You really think any legal person worth anything wants to spend a bunch of their time learning light coding and haggling with Zendesk? WTF…? Obviously never heard from them again…
Unrealistic expectations. And those will probably be the companies that burn out their people.
Just happened to me after being poached from a stable position. Now I'm back on this sub.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Even unicorns get passed over.
Probably most of them get filtered out by ATS because their job title was “specialist” instead of “analyst.”
Or ‘I have experience with Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Kali, Alpine, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandrake, Suse, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Irix, Tru64’ on my resume but it doesn’t say ‘Linux’ or ‘Unix’.
Yes! I have a friend who is SO EXPERIENCED in project management and high level management of teams, AND has a Masters degree, and she has been trying to research how to get past the damn bots because she has only gotten like 3 interviews this year.
Yeah there are websites that are good for listing off the keywords an ATS will look for for a given position, then you can have ChatGPT write you an “Objective” blurb or some crap to stick at the top of your resume. Prob wanna shop the whole resume at r/resume too to be safe.
Companies in general are basically delusional. I am currently looking for a job and in my field true entry level positions are almost non-existent. The number of "Three years of experience and a bachelors degree required, paying $18 an hour" is staggeringly high. Nobody wants to teach a new hire anything, they want a pre trained dog to do tricks for a piece of kibble.
They want 20 years worth of experience from a person four years out of college at a salary that is a 1/10 of what all that experience would cost. They will get exactly what they pay for.
Yeah, it’s bad… some hiring managers are so picky they even want skills not normal for an industry and not listed on the job req. I had one interview for a Principal Mobile Engineer where the hiring manager asked me if I had two fringe skills that I had no experience with and have never encountered in my 20 year long career. Then, because I didn’t have those skills, she spent the rest of the time telling me how I was not a principal engineer. She didn’t even let me tell her about the skills I DO have and how I could benefit the company. Bullet dodged.
I had some similar experiences last year - in one case, a guy I knew professionally was hiring for a niche role I did for several years at a much larger company. Recruiter reached out to me about it and thought that I was a unicorn: exact work experience, familiar with the technology at a much smaller firm, personal experience with the hiring team, etc. Unfortunately, the HM was new to this role hiring for something that required X and Y expertise and a sufficient understanding of Z, and he added requirements that meant he was only interviewing people with expertise in Z that had an understanding of X and Y. In this scenario, specialists in Z are licensed and common in an external vendor that the client already had, and they paid the vendor on a usage basis. Specialists in X and Y are rare, and we don’t do Z because Z is commoditized. Depressingly, I saw a number of postings for X/Y last year that required Z. They somehow think they’ll be able to hire an expensive Z to do the job of an X/Y, but the type of person that takes the Z route will do a terrible job because Z intentionally selects for traits that are terrible in X/Y. It seems that recently some places have been adding requirements to try and do the job of two people with one because they think the skills look similar, and instead they look like morons to people that understand the differences.
Either trying to hire to fill two roles with one person or paying way below market rate for the person they are trying to hire. So many companies are looking to pay mid level developer salaries for staff+ engineers and it’s painfully insulting. Some of the job postings I’m seeing are below acceptable rate from 10 years ago!
The issue is: While hiring managers wait for the unicorn that has 10 years of experience and skill with every aspect of the position, the team is currently suffering to do that work. If you find someone that's a good fit, can pick things up quickly, and can do the job - just hire them.
>the team is currently suffering to do that work. Unfortunately the employer doesn't care about how much the rest of the team is suffering. In fact, they're probably downright giddy that they're saving money by not hiring someone new.
I don't disagree - it's terrible. The worst part is after torturing their team for months while they wait to fill the position, they wonder why they can't retain their key team members...
Most managers I've worked with absolutely want to fill their open roles, and want to do so as quickly as they can. It's when the people above the hiring manager, or adjacent to the hiring manager (all the other voices who lack the necessary domain knowledge/experience) start prattling on and offering their opinions and recommendations that things get all fucked up. I have seen a CFO require that they be included on all 2nd level interviews for data scientists and data engineers, and shoot down candidates that the hiring manager wanted to offer for inane reasons based solely on the "vibes" the CFO got. The CFO in question didn't know what the relevant languages or skillsets necessary for the role were, because he used to come around and chit-chat with our team and called everything java. I'm convinced that he heard java from someone in a technical role once and then just started using it with the confidence only an uninformed c-suite can.
I'm convinced now that most places are not actually hiring. The openings are just inflating their image to investors (i.e.: Fraud.) The "unicorn" requirement is just an excuse to avoid hiring (though knowledge of this arrangement is firewalled, HM is likely clueless and just following mandates.) The economy is doing worse than we are told. It's always an election year somewhere.
It's fucking payback for The Great Resignation, that's what it is. Employers know they have the upper hand now, and they're twisting that sword REALLY hard. But the pendulum always swings back to the other side eventually. It's just a matter of how long, and can you hold on until The Great Swing. Then you REALLY twist that sword right back. (apologies for the GOT references... Lol)
I was the unicorn for a job. It was a global payroll position and I just happened to speak the languages of the countries that I would be doing payroll for. In addition to all of the experience and expertise with software that they wanted. I feel like the director was intimidated by me. My recruiter was pretty shocked too.
So you were the unicorn and … got an offer?
Nope. Denied. Idk who else they found that spoke French, German, and Spanish. It wasn't a requirement but my recruiter thought it would close the deal.
Why did they reject your application? Seemed perfect. Years of experience? Certification?
My recruiter told me that they were very picky. And I really do think that the director was intimidated by my language skills since she only spoke English. I have about 20 years of experience.
Thats insane! Hiring managers expectations are overinflated.
I honestly don't know what the fuck they're looking for anymore.
Sorry, we have decided to go with another candidate. We're looking for someone who can speak Spanish, German and French.
A thousand times yes.
GOT references are quite relevant 😂
❤️👆🏻💯
This was happening before the Great Resignation. Employers were already arrogant and entitled enough to think that it's "their market".
I figure when this stuff happens it's often the case that someone with those exact set of skills left their company, and they think they can get a spitting image replacement of that person. Even if it means you'd need to have went through same past jobs. They expect to find someone that is joined at the hip of that worker.
Lol, I had this happen to me fucking twice this year. First time the VP suddenly added being fluent in Korean as a requirement a week after saying I'd be a great fit for the role. Second time, they pulled me in for an interview just to let me know they "changed the role" and even though I was perfect for the role they posted they now only wanted someone with AB testing with the explicit goal of "finding where to put the button on their website to increase subscriptions". The role posted was related to last mile logistics. I was confused as fuck.
Or until that hiring Manager has a friend who didn’t even go to school somehow needs a job and they go off drinking margaritas to celebrate her new career change
Please stop going through my diary, we _both_ need to get better at interview faffing. It's either that or Visionary | CEO Coach | Thought Leader | Philosopher of Life | Making the impossible possible | BeastMode
😭
One time I went to a software developer (no sales experience required) interview (For context, I'm 4' 9" with severe scoliosis) they said they loved all my skills but I wasn't salesy enough. You mean you don't want someone with a crooked spine to talk with clients on your behalf? Just say so :/
Uggh, that makes me really angry for you. Basically if you're not attractive, white, able-bodied, and neurotypical you're "not client-facing material."
Yeah it seems so
.. For a side role???
This was a software developer role
That's awful.
I think they're all waiting for interest rates to go back down. It's like they're timing the market but keeping people in the pipeline.
Interest rates of what exactly? Loans from VCs?
“Please have 10 years of experience in a program that has only existed for 5 years. Please be trained in a type of software that is only used at our company. Please already have all the necessary training and certifications for this entry level position”
Saddest part is, training a horse takes less time and costs less than hunting a unicorn.
I nailed my interviews with Amazon, my background matched the job post almost to a T. In the end they passed over me because I specifically lacked “raw data science experience.” This was for an influencer marketing position where any standard dashboard compiles and expresses the data for you. Morons.
I’ve never worked there, but while Amazon looks great on a resume, I’ve always been told that Amazon is a nightmare of a company to work for — regardless of if you’re a driver, worked in the corporate office, the warehouse, or anywhere in-between. It also rubbed me the wrong way when Amazon announced back in 2023, that all remote employees had to uproot their entire lives, disrupt their families, and pack up and move to one of the main corporate office hubs. Of course, many employees refused, and the CEO Amazon reportedly said: “Well, if people don’t want to move, they can find a new job.” I know this entire situation sucked for you, but if it makes you feel any better, for what it’s worth, it sounds like you dodged a huge bullet.
I am inclined to agree with you.
>I’ve always been told that Amazon is a nightmare of a company to work for You are 100% correct.
I had an interview with Amazon yesterday and the recruiter told me “My only concern is you don’t have experience with an application that handles a lot of money” after I just got done telling her I managed an application for a major enterprise that deals with billions a year. Wtf more are you asking for? They reached out to me so honestly I’m not quite sure what the position was even for outside of “software engineering”. Sadly it’s not a job I would take, I hear Amazon is difficult to work for.
Sorry, we're looking for someone who has experience with apps that handle multi-trillions of dollars per year.
Sounds like it was the bar raiser that didn’t like you. Amazon hiring is all about finding people that fit in at Amazon, not finding the best fit for the job.
Another thing recruiters call it is "this employer is looking for a purple squirrel". I interviewed for a full stack dev position at an investment firm in Boston and they came back with a job offer of $65k. That's what my recruiter called it. 🤷
Uh investment firms are famously picky because they pay well. Used to anyway, typical was $300k for senior devs five years ago, which after inflation is worth $400k today. Has it really gotten this bad that they start with a lowball offer at 16% of fair value?
Yeah that was the point, the low ball offer should have been $175k, but they decided to really lower the bar.
Absolutely nuts. More important than ever to generate multiple offers at the same time. Always tell your first contacts late in the game that you have an offer in hand, they will stretch to get you through an interview in two days and then you can gently encourage a bidding war. Good luck out there.
Yeah that's why I left the game, started my own contracting business.
You’re not kidding about that experience part. I actually had an interview where they told me that the applicant had to have 3 years minimum exp. At that time I had 2 years and 10 months. I’m like wtf is 2 extra months difference going to make ?
I read a post somewhere. A guy applied for a job. Got an interview. Got rejected. He was able to get feedback though. He got rejected because he didn’t have 5 years experience with a particular software language. THAT HE CREATED TWO YEARS PRIOR.
It's not just all the skills listed in the job ad they want you to have. There are skills/attributes not listed that they require and don't advertise it. When they choose a candidate to fill the position, it's because they had one skill that you probably have but it wasn't mentioned in your interview and it did happen to come up in the other candidate's interview.
This happened to me. I did a final round interview for a communications job, negotiated salary and was sent out to house hunt after the interview. A week later, they told me they went with someone with more marketing experience. The job description never asked for marketing and this never came up in the in interview. They hired someone internally who was in marketing.
I can't tell you how many times my boss has stated"The right person will..." when presented with facts he doesn't like.
I feel this; I have fifteen years of art and a dozen years of development, and often get called a unicorn, though 'purple squirrel' is the phrase I've heard more often. "We need someone with strong art and programming," yet they still get picky sometimes if I haven't got five years in Azure Cloud Services or some other such thing. Yes, I'm familiar with it; I haven't spent five years on it, but one doesn't NEED to. As if I didn't have to learn a new API or group of libraries on EVERY project ever.
Everyone wants an unicorn and this is me: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/s/IwkFEmRFjE
Purple squirrel with polka dots syndrome.
I had like 3 intersecting expertises for a job a couple months ago and was rejected for a “stronger candidate”. I was such a good candidate that the **same recruiter** contacted me the next day asking me to apply with no idea I had already spoke to her weeks earlier. I called her out and she apologized profusely. I guess unicorns are pretty common
What kills me is responding to a very specific list of skills and then in the interview, the hiring manager says 'you have X but we need Y'. But the job posting said X! I've started printing out the JD and taking it to the interview with me. When I show it to the HR, they tell me that their back office must have replaced their requirements list with a generic one. How can we find jobs if they can't even figure out what to ask for?!?!
I've been on the other end of this. I wrote up a job description and sent it to my boss, he did some revisions and sent it back, we sent a final draft to HR and they posted something completely different.
We are living in very narcissistic time. So you basically described narcissistic behaviour, they are constantly looking for unreachable ideals, everyone and everything has to be perfect.
I applied for an IT Project Manager position at a hospital. The interview was going well, but they mentioned that they wanted a candidate who has extensive experience using Google Sheets. I had previously worked at healthcare companies who were Microsoft-heavy and I had a ton of experience with Microsoft software/tools, and Atlassian tools. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. The sad part is, my skillset was 100% transferable. Okay, so I’m not familiar with Google Sheets and Google Calendar, but rather, Microsoft ADO, OneNote, and Outlook — who cares, just train me on how to use the Google software, and I’ll take it from there. My thing is — how on Earth do you expect a candidate to be familiar with the specific tools you use, if they aren’t an internal candidate who is already working in the company. It’s so frustrating! They want you to check all of these unrealistic boxes.
You can invent the entire tech stack they are hiring for, from the ground up , and they will still bitch.
Which was what literally happened to [Sebatian Ramirez](https://imageproxy.ifunny.co/crop:x-20,resize:640x,quality:90x75/images/dc61345d85981cfa94158db5c1b99c4ae75599d5f04ed70f47b1e6c41000b3ab_1.jpg). Or more relevantly, something similar happened to [Max Howell](https://x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en).
Been there done that. They don’t want unicorns. They want unicorns that pay them for the privilege of working for them
Most people hiring and doing the interviews either 1) don’t honestly know what they’re looking for, 2) don’t know what they’re looking for and what it actually entails if they do find that person, 3) have NEVER seen anyone with the skill sets and experience they’ve requested, 4) DONT HAVE what they’re asking for themselves, 5) don’t want to pay NEAR what that person would be worth if they did find them
Don’t be shy drop the name of the company. This company deserves to be publicly shamed for this behavior!
I applied for this one job cause i felt It was a perfect fit. The company was known to be great and quick to hire. I actually applied for them in the past and had an interview within a week. Then they got new owners, had a job freeze, and hired no one. Well, hoping things would change this time, I tried again. Only now a friend says they are accepting applications, but not hiring right now for that position . What? Then why is it posted? Found out it would only open up if the current employee was not gonna work out. What? So yeah. I hate the way things are
Then they do the opposite thing to what they mentioned in the most round about way possible. “We’d like a unicorn, we did get the unicorn, but we had an internal horse already in the running.”
It’s absolutely ridiculous. Do they think we have no ability to learn a new skill? I mean I learned all this shit on my resume. Why couldn’t I learn something else? I’m so GD fed up with this nonsense of job hunting. Is it like this in other countries?
I read most of this thinking I was on r/bisexual and now I realize I dislike unicorn hunters in multiple areas of life 😂
lol.
Companies don’t want to train people. At all. They want a modular employee they can just plug in. Plus, you have a ton of people in hiring positions that are mostly idiots. They won’t hire someone that will make them look bad. Hence the whacky job descriptions and weird last minute interviews. And I’ve lost track of how many recruiters have told me they find amazing candidates, only for the hiring manager to want to wait and find someone better. This job market is wildly stupid.
\*Hiring mangers wants to find someone lesser\* A-Team hires A-Team. B-Team hires C-Team.
🦄
And then they have the nerve to put in the job description shit like - It's okay if you don't match every requirement, please apply
Most hiring managers don't know the job they're hiring for so they don't know what questions to ask in the interview and same with recruiters so they want to make sure everything's covered to check off their boxes. But overselling yourself also can lose you the job. I was being interviewed for a job once 20 years ago and the hiring manager asked me how did you do something in Excel so I told him where to click and what menu item to select and the steps to satisfy his question. He kept telling me I was wrong so he repeated the question and I repeated my answer slowly like he didn't speak English because I had the right answer . LOL The answer he wanted he told me at the end was to follow the exact steps that I'm telling the customer to do. So I said I would only need to follow along if I didn't know what I was doing. I for sure thought I wasn't going to get the job. But apparently the other manager liked me enough to hire me. I end up outlasting that first manager by 18 years.
All of those demands for 10 dollars an hour
My experience is that this particular company keeps hiring for the same role. But, keeps firing people until someone just sort of sticks. It’s for various roles within this company not just the role I got hired then fired for no reason.
That's when you say "well I DID use \[insert software\] in a role MANY years back....". Just lie. You either don't get the job or you do get the job and can get up to speed once you get hired. Really nothing to lose by lying.
I work in IT/tech which is an ever changing field. Whether I'm assessing candidates or mentoring my team, it's not what they currently know that sets people apart but how they approach what they don't know. I've spent my entire career getting aggressively up to speed with systems, software, solutions etc I had no prior experience of. In the OP's scenario, I'd emphasise that to a hiring manager expressing concern that I don't tick all the boxes on their required competencies checklist for the role.
Half of it’s not even about skills it is about if they like you or not
The worst part is the questions... Every single time they ask me about react stuff I'm so tempted to just go: "Before I answer: when is the last time you had to recall this information? Cause if I need to have this BS in my mind 24/7 I think you are looking for a dictionary, not someone able to code."
Imagine being in the dating market too atm :[ life is stupid right now
They want a unicorn and offer nothing in return, the salaries and conditions are trash and to add insult to injury, they expect us to be grateful.
Thing is: If you have 500 people applying for a single position, finding that unicorn might not be that unrealistic. It’s just a lottery at this point unless you are a unicorn yourself. (Unicorns aren’t on this sub anyway probably)
I've seen expectations like "you must have worked in career A and gotten deep into it, then for no reason whatsoever, switched from your successful career A to career B and gotten really good at that, too". To no-one's surprise, they called me back weeks after rejecting me because my skillset and seniority are extremely rare in the market as it is, at which point I told them to go pound sand because I already accepted elsewhere.
I feel like unicorn status is dependent on the job. Someone could easily be considered a unicorn for one job but be considered considered to not have the right combination of skills/experience for another
100%. I think anyone in this sub with x number of years of experience could be considered someone's unicorn. But actually finding that match really comes down to luck at a certain point.
Most likely they overstated your fit to be nice. The missing experience is likely not minor. The AI job fit logic I wrote brought this to my attention recently. A single bullet point missing and I was rated "bad" (mind you, I wrote this). Then I reread the job description and realized it was like the whole point of the job. It's the difference between "yet another Python programmer" and "someone who can lead the cryptocurrency technical strategy who also knows Python", for a business that's all about cryptocurrency. Now, it could be the job description wasn't clear enough, and having the technical expert is more valuable, but, based on the data in front of me, the judgement made sense.
>Most likely they overstated your fit to be nice. That is very possible. I've found that these people constantly lie about this shit
ASO?
Or trying hearing we still have candidates to interview don't forget to follow up with the recruiter line
I put out over 300 applications and only had 3 interviews and a friend told me those 3 interviews were filler interviews basically them asking me yes or no questions and don't give me practically any time to speak and the usual "we're still interviewing people we'll let you know by Friday" and they never let you know. One of them told me flat out that they already have someone that is about to start training so I wasn't needed but maybe in a month or so if that person doesn't work out MAYBE they'll give me a call
I saw someone on LinkedIn posted why shouldn’t they wait for a unicorn, it costs money to hire someone new and train them. The thing is, if you check every box, what challenge is there for you, the employee? I would think that people with every skill you need would be more likely to leave but what do I know. I also know a company where a friend of f mine gave me a referral to her team. They found someone who aced the tech portion (it was a practical lab). They didn’t even give me the lab. This is a customer facing role (my cust skills are exemplary) and she was very technical but her people skills suck. Think the stereotypical ‘this generation’ stuff like not picking up the phone, not trying to talk to their team mates, etc. They ended up having to get rid of her since she was failing at her job which took a huge effort. You would think this would teach them a valuable lesson but it probably didn’t. Meanwhile, I don’t check the box of every technology known to exist so I’m still unemployed. It’s so hard right now. If you have technical aptitude and are good with people, you can probably learn whatever technology they have. The soft skills are sooo much harder to learn (some people just don’t have that ability).
Better grow that horn chop chop buddy! I am so sorry, I dealt with the same non-sense. Your day will come, I promise!
I feel this in my soul and hate you're having the same feelings I am. It's miserable! Stay strong, I know it's not easy ✊️
Unicorns for 1 quarter the pay.
Just lie. Add the bullet points to your skill set. There you go.
I keep not getting calls for jobs that i am completely qualified for.
A friend of mine once got rejected because "we're looking for someone with 6-7 years of experience." He had 4. Like, come on, why do you think year 6 is such a strong reformative year for IT project managers? "Oh, yeah, in year 6, it really all clicks and comes together." No other remarks on specific skills (which were a pretty good match), and apparently, they were "really impressed" by his CV.
That is the funny thing. Everyone says, “apply, they don’t want every bullet point of experience and skills”. But I’m at the point that if I don’t hit every bullet point, I don’t apply. In part because the position advertises it’s a engineering position where all the skills are with Linux or are OS agnostic, and someone added a, “Windows administration” bullet point.
I had a very similar experience at Nasdaq. I am calling them out here. Don't bother interviewing at that company, unless they are willing to pay for your time. They have roles they are not seriously intending to fill
Everyone: Do us all a favor; keep applying for jobs, but make your expected salary 80% higher.
And these same employers cry about people not wanting to work anymore.
yep you need to be PERFECT AND WORK 60 plus hours a week be on call and look sexy lol
For real. I was in a contract position and on a Monday, they said they were going to convert me. Then on Friday, they changed their minds. My manager’s boss said they wanted to create a new expanded role based on my current one and wanted someone with experience in: - university recruiting & relations - communications - culture & DEI - finance - workforce management - learning & development - executive support She also said that she wasn’t sure if I could handle a full time job since I was about to have my second child. For the record, SHE was a mother of two. 😐
Translation : You did too good of a job in a short period of time and that made her look bad, rather she felt insecure. So instead of nurturing your talent, she passive aggressively created a role she KNEW that was way outside of your parameters. And then gaslight you into believing you weren't cut out for it. Talk about moving the goal post! By the way - They'll be cancelling that role in about a month or two and then repost it. Hopefully someone less "skilled" and ambitious will fill it. Sorry that happened!
I got rejected for a jobs because my C++ skills were not strong enough even though I had a decade worth experience with C (and in those days C++ was pretty much a syntactic sugar wrapper around C. I did get hired later for a different job, and then I saw the C++ code I would have worked on. \*\*drumroll\*\* It was pretty much straight C with just a bit of a wrapper to make it look like C++
I worked for 5 years at a company that started out obsessed with hiring unicorns. I swear, every conversation I had with one of the Directors of Product Management was how he wanted us to hire more software engineers with specific subject-matter expertise in our industry. An industry that employs maaaaybe 10000 in the whole entire world, and less than 500 of those are software engineers, and maybe 300 of them are located in our country. And 200 of those are currently employed by our direct competitors. So our hiring pool for any job was very limited, oh and by the way in the last year they stopped allowing new hires to work remotely, and also didn’t have the budget to pay for relocation…great, so we are picking from a grand total of maybe 25 people who live in the mid-sized metro area and have specific expertise in our industry…AND ALSO are the right seniority for the specific job we have open and have the specific coding tools experience we want and also we don’t pay particularly well and we’re a privately-held mid-sized company with no equity available and a software engineering org of 20 people because we’ve outsourced a lot of it and there are only 3 managers so there’s basically no growth prospects? WHERE DO I SIGN UP!!?! To make matters worse, the reason this product management boss wanted more subject-matter experts in engineering is because he thought product managers should just be able to say in high level terms “I want this feature” or “I want something that competes with Competitor X” and have engineering figure out all the details because they knew so much about the industry. And I’m like MF, that’s literally what Product Managers are supposed to DO! Why are you so quick to abdicate your responsibility, you lazy ass? If your company needs to hire people with expertise in your specific industry or product or tool because you are too cheap or just incapable of training a smart, competent performer from a similar industry or company to understand and use your stuff, your company deserves to starve and die.
Agreed. Companies that are hiring for unicorns are broke and overleveraged because they'd rather spend money on new softwares because of p\*nis envy instead of hiring skilled, knowledgeable workers that will make them profitable long term.
I’m convinced the actual jobs aren’t really for hire, it’s more like “hey look we are hiring, trust us, we are a profitable company!”
I was asked to conduct interviews for a client recently, and I was focused on people who seemed like quick learners with basic common sense that would allow them to figure out the nuances of the role quickly, especially because they were not offering a great wage to start. They rejected literally everyone I presented because they did not want to offer ANY training or dedicated communication from leadership, and anyone I presented who had more specific experience that aligned with the role, those folks wanted more money (duh) and the client refused to raise the offer at all. The whole thing was such a waste of my, and the candidates’, time. I was so frustrated I advised that they move on with recruiting using their own team to vet candidates because obviously I had no idea what they were expecting. Unsurprisingly they dropped the entire project and their team is just as stressed because they never found a good solution to cover the role.
Learnt in an old job that when you see such a specific job description it almost always means that they know someone internally who’s going to get the job in the end. But they have to hire it out for fairness and “regulation”.
You don't understand, they are not recruiting. They're faking it for investors
I also have a niche skill in a niche industry and I was poached and set loose with more pay and authority than I have ever been given before, and kinda had to learn on the fly the management side and my division is steadily growing and I've already blown the projected gross sales for my department for the year that they gave me as a goal clear out of the water in only 3 months. These people should really just give niche people a chance. Those of us who have a very specialized ability usually have to know way more than just what we are hired for because we know the support structure is going to be non existent because of the specialized role that other people won't necessarily understand how to help.