About the jobs requirements
Every now and then you see job postings requiring N years of experience about a technology that was created way less than N years ago. Unless someone worked two full time jobs using this technology and can double count the years of experience, no one would be hired if we were to stick to the requirements.
Jokes aside, while I’m not a recruiter, there are a few tips I learned along my career (both as a candidate and as a hiring manager) about job postings:
- Sometimes job requirements are written in the form of “N years of using A, B, C or D technology”. Note that the requirements have an “or” meaning that not all technologies are required, only one – this type of wording is sometimes used only to make the job requirements more difficult and to build stronger cases for visa applications
- In general, related technical skills for specialized positions are hard requirements – e.g. you have little chance to be hired as a network engineer if you don’t know your network layers or as a React engineer if you don’t know what a React component is).
- Level and year of experience are often a hard-ish requirement only – e.g. some companies would consider strong senior engineers for staff positions (you may not get a staff offer though). You have to be reasonable – you can’t apply to a director position if you have no experience though. Some companies don’t post all their open positions, especially junior ones as they already get too many applicants.
- Applying through a referral is better – but it has to be a genuine referral, meaning someone that worked with you. A referral from someone you never worked with has close to no value in my opinion (there are a few rare cases though)
- You have nothing to lose if you apply to positions that are slightly out of your reach – you are missing all the shots you are not taking. Note that applying to unreasonable openings is a waste of your time though.
What interesting tips did you pick up about job postings? I’m personally curious how AI is used to create leads for recruiters but more importantly how candidates use it to apply to a lot of openings (while giving the impression they are applying to very few?)