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The job market is not great, 9.4% unemployment in the USA, and not efficient either. At my full time job, we hired a ruby on rails developer (web programmer) this month, and are looking to hire another.
Job listings online filled with jargon
Job search sites are gaining traffic and providing a great service to the unemployed and unhappily employed. Unfortunately, the inability of corporations and recruiters to provide prospective applicants with sensible job postings threatens to render these sites useless.
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Filling the entire job posting with corporate and industry acronyms, abbreviations, and jargon – By filling the job posting with nonsensical jargon, a recruiter further inflates their false sense of importance and also avoids the issue that they know absolutely nothing about the job. The applicant is left wondering whether they just applied for a job responsible for fixing Boeing 747s or installing Kimberly-Clark toilet paper dispensers. Pretty much a toss up.
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It’s scary to imagine what job postings might look like in 10 years if this trend continues. If anyone is interested in building a Google Translate with a “Recruiter to English” option, I can serve as your Subject Matter Expert.
In the information technology field the standard practice is to include a large number of basically irrelevant skills as requirements. And then managers wonder why they don’t get decent applicants. You need to include the knowledge, skills and experience you really need and not all sorts of details that an employee can easily pick up, if needed, once they are on the job.
Related: Hiring: Silicon Valley Style – Interviewing and Hiring Programmers – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Joy in Work: Software Development – Management Improvement Career Connections
June 6th, 2009 at 5:21 am
On the topic of “fun with jargon”, check out this tongue in cheek video presentation of Rockwell Automation’s turbo encabulator.
June 9th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
The requirements in the job postings are even worse regarding the fact that they serve as a means to exclude job applicants. One example for the results of this has been a position in a bank for which I’ve applied and which consisted of the analysis of financial numbers. I’ve studied statistics, wrote my thesis about a subject from the stock market and worked in an CRO and has then a longer stint as a multimedia developer in an IT company.
I received a negative reply on the grounds of missing bank experience, which means that my study of statistics were of no avail because I should have worked in a bank instead.
I also should mention that my father worked in the computing department of a German Waterways and Shipping office and took care of the data collection and analysis of tide data and the like and became downright indispensable in his function. The thing is that originally he had studied construction engineering. The question is whether this sort of development is still being considered nowadays.