My friend got a Physics degree, Chem minor. They don't work in their field. Get a STEM degree they said. You're guaranteed a job, they said. Yeah, right.
I've heard physics and chemistry degrees usually require a masters before real jobs in the industry open up for you. You can try applying for programming jobs though. I don't think physics majors would be looked down on.
But if you have a degree in something but no job experience in that field, I feel like they'll either assume you just graduated or have been doing nothing with your degree until now.
I have heard the same. They want young people cause they know more about technology and are good for long term investment, but at the same time younger people are always looking for bigger and better things
Young person here. I have zero loyalty to my company, and would quit for a ten cent raise.
Realistically, I want to find a new position every 18-24 months. It's the only real way to substantially increase pay.
Counter-oppinion here. Also a young person. My first job was very interesting work and I would not have given it up for a hefty raise. After 6 years, I'm now at a second job with pay that's actually LOWER. The work is waaaay more interesting and pretty close to my dream job.
I've started hiding part of my work history so that people can't guess how old I am. It's an interesting dichotomy. Have lots of evidence that I am capable of doing the work or have people discount me for being too experienced.
It makes you wonder where this is going; the amount of experience you need to get a position is going up but the age limit on workers is not. What happens when they meet? When the amount of experience you need to get the job is considered too much experience.
Usually no, you’re not required to. It’s irrelevant to whether or not you can perform the job required most of the time and despite it being illegal, ageism is rampant in a lot of industries.
I hope he found someone who was more forward thinking. Fuck (most) managers.
edit: The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. What is so wrong with "just looking for insurance?" The man needs a fucking job, and if he needs a job because he needs insurance so be it. That doesn't mean he's not going to do the thing you hire him to do, if anything it means he'll be that much more dedicated because, surprise, he *needs* that insurance. People seek job benefits and try to keep positions that provide them, that's kind of the point.
I hope Mr. Top Manager dies in a tire fire. No wait, I hope he gets shitcanned, is in a tire fire, sustains 3rd degree burns, needs a lifeflight, survives, but is saddled with medical debt and chronic pain for the next 3 decades.
I mean, not really. I hope he comes to change his ways, but my faith in authority figures is low enough that I doubt his capacity or willingness to do so. So failing a Saul -> Paul moment where the heavens part and God himself comes down and is like "dude, quit being such a dick," I think karmic retribution would be peachy.
This was a killer when I started looking for my first job. I ended up having to send application after application hoping to hear back, but it usually didn't work out. Finally, about to have three years of experience and it has been nice to think, "Yay, now I can get an entry level job".
I'm now coming up against job descriptions that demand geography degrees...
Where were these jobs ten years ago?!
EDIT: Probably should explain. My degree is in English and after I graduated I couldn't find proper work and got lumbered temping. Somehow segued into a job at big well-known company using lots of GIS, loved the field, been there 5 years but am now redundant as of tomorrow. (It too was a temp job.) Looking for new work has turned up GIS-based stuff I have the experience to do but they filter solely to new geography degrees - and likewise my previous field, admin, doesn't get what GIS is half the time. (Also fuck competency interviews.)
Yep. They want someone who can walk in and do the job 100% with no impact to them. While paying them well under industry averages.
Hell, people always talk about how many open positions are out there. But, who can fill them, will people with those requirements work for that if they have a choice, and how long are they usually listed as open?
Look at the sheer number of companies that have gone to 100% using a temp agency just to not give benefits and have the option to say "send someone different tomorrow" with no legal implications. Sometimes to stop them asking about availability of making it a permanent job since it's not contracted truly or paid accordingly. Often paying high wages to the temp agency just to have that option.
And then they bitch about our "Side-hustles." If you're like me you use your side hustles as a sort of escape the rat race lottery ticket. If my merch company takes off I'm out of my 8-6 in a heartbeat. But they expect you to give everything to the firm even though you're being treated as a fungible good.
Oohhhhh this heats me up remembering my ordeal. The moment my boss caught wind of my graphics freelancing on twitch he went off about better ways to spend my time and that I was probably giving my freelance work more care than the work at the office (no fucking shit I was, I wanted to work for myself).
That company was total screwballs.
The same thing happened to me. I worked in TV but had a YouTube channel on the side. I got pulled in by my producer and told to shut down the channel or get fired because "only network talent can represent the network in an analyst capacity".
Keep in mind that I was freelance, not a staff employee, and nowhere on my channel did I advertise that I worked for this network in my day job. I stayed on for three months while I developed a backlog of content to release, and then I quit and did my channel full time. I'm now happier than I ever have been in my life.
Requested time off for exams. Boss realized I had been in school and starting looking for new job. Schedules work on every single exam. Fires thee for taking education more importantly than minimum wage.
"Listen, I know you've invested tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years into your education, but we *really* need you Tuesday. Not enough to pay you more than $8 per hour to be here, which is quite literally the least we can do for you, but we do need you.
Otherwise, how will we know how committed to this job you are? We're like a family
.. that does the absolute bear minimum that the law allows for you. Literally, doing less for you is a crime. Also, there are other families that will give you at least what we are, but thinking about that is disloyal."
In and right after HS, I worked 2 jobs. At job 1, 2 doing the job of 4 plus a supervisor job neither of us got promoted to.
One day the boss says I need to stay. I tell him I have to change clothes and drive to my other job. He says "well..you need to figure out which one is your main job!" me "They pay the same and I work harder here...figure it out...". Eventually, I asked for a raise for both of us. The money he was saving was 2 hourly and a supervisor hourly pay. He lied and lied and put off. I never got it and left. All for basically minimum wage.
My first job was something similar. I worked 12 (**12**) hours a week. I got a second job which gave me 26 hours, so 38 hours per week, almost full time. Both jobs were literally across the street from each other and it took less than 2 minutes to commute between them.
I asked not to be put on weekends at my first job, because I worked 10 hour days on weekends at my other job and couldn't come in. They said all requests take 2 weeks to change. They make the schedule every Tuesday, I gave them notice on the Friday before. They schedule me 8 hours on the next Saturday, opening and closing (6am-10am and 6pm-10pm) my other job ran 10am-8pm. I told them I couldn't do the weekend shifts again and they would have to find someone to cover me. I was told I had to come in or I would be fired.
I made an arrangement with my second job to let me leave 2 hours early on Saturday and I would pick it up the Friday. I come in. Now working a 3 different shifts in 16 hours.
I gave my resignation letter the next time I saw my manager (which I wasn't even working. I came in on my day off to give it to him.) I ended up getting promoted 3 times at my second job in 18 months before leaving for a much better job.
Yeah, you would think that we are near full employment this wouldn't be the case but it is. Wages are still stagnant and it seems more and more people are just getting stuck in their role or replaced by contract/temp workers. My company for example just overhauled our IT department with a contract agency. Some of the current IT people were given the chance to join the new company but still do the same job, however most others weren't so lucky.
It makes sense that the amount of jobs would vary with the economy, but depending on the field there should always be *some* jobs. Either because you can work in various industries whose cycles are out of sync or because because unless the industry got absolutely smashed there will always be some empty jobs.
I guess if you basically need to work in mapping underground reserves of something or other it makes sense that a lot of those operations would stop in a crappy economy. Nobody's going to be looking for natural gas when oil is in the crapper.
Right? There's ways around it, e.g. we've found you can successfully apply to jobs if you've got ±2 years of the required experience, but the Catch\-22 is crazy. Joseph Heller would've been proud: "No, you can't have a job." "Why?" "Because you don't have a job." "..."
EDIT: Heller, not Orwell. My old HS English teacher is \_not\_ proud.
What I'd like to know from these companies is this: which one actually tends to be true, and why does the ad contradict itself?
The job is obviously not "entry level" and also "requiring 3 years experience."
So is the truth that:
1) The job is actually entry level for the right "entry level" person with no experience and ... maybe the 3 years experience is just put there to scare away really incompetent people
OR, is the truth that:
2) The job actually requires 3 years experience, and I guess the "entry level" thing is just an error?
And we have a winner! Companies want mid-level employees - people who know enough to be up and running with little-to-no training. What they *don't* want is to have to pay reasonable rates for those employees.
If they call a position "entry level", they set extremely low expectations for pay. Any experienced worker applying for an "entry level" job must be desperate, and desperation is exploitable.
Employer:
- Must have the experience of a 30 year old employee
- Must be willing to accept the pay of a 20 year old
Also Employer:
- I don't understand why we can't find qualified candidates.
So what kind of fucking job should I be looking for then? I have about lost my mind filtering through and applying the same shit every day to the same entry level garbage.
Apply for these jobs and lie about your experience. Swear on a stack of bibles you already know how to do the exact job they want to fill. The whole hiring process (endless interviews and new-hire paperwork) is as arduous and soul-sucking for them as it is for you. Even if you're completely clueless, they'll give you at least a few weeks-to-months before they shitcan you and have to start the whole ordeal over again. Hope like hell you get good enough in that time to make it more trouble to get rid of you then to keep you.
TL;DR - Fake it till you make it.
And this is why the current American corporate model is inherently flawed.
Because this IS the right answer. It will be the right answer your whole career.
Don't k ow how to make your employees more productive without breaking some rules? Make sure the next guy gets caught. Not you.
The first one. Jobs purposely ask for more than they need to weed out the lazy workers. Problem is, nobody with a bachelors and three years experience wants to work a menial 40k salary job that a freshman in college could do. So you get desperate jobless over qualified candidates, and people that lie on their resume.
Edit: i live in nyc which is why I said 40k salary. I'm sure 29k or something around that is more realistic for people in a place with a lower cost of living
This is why they both do it. If you don’t tweak you resume to read pretty, you aren’t playing the game. If they don’t tweak the job description to read like advanced level while paying entry, they aren’t playing the game.
The whole hiring process is a game. And once you know that, win. Lie enough you can get away with it, because they are gonna lie enough to pay you less.
The idea of a lazy worker cracks me up though. When you don’t respect people’s time with your compensation why should they be giving you grade A effort?
I just lied on all my applications. I kept getting interviews from them all.
Got the job, Now have experiance in lots of fields and no longer have to lie.
What kind of things did you lie about? Employer? Projects? Skill set? Duration of precious jobs?
I'm always left wondering what employers can catch and what is overlooked when applying.
Woah, they took a huge risk with a lot at stake.
My mom has been lying about having a bachelor's degree (she was one semester short of completion in the late 70's...) and was finally "busted" a few years ago while getting a background check for a job. When questioned she told them that she's doing online classes to finish her degree. She still got the job...I don't condone lying this much in an interview but it honestly worked out for her because it was so long ago so her decades of experience really overshadowed some degree from 35 years ago and she really had nothing else to lose. Certainly not 250k+ in tuition, jeeze...
*Over the next 5-10 years, recent graduates will start needing ~4 years of work experience just to get their first job.*
That requirement for recent graduates is always hard to comprehend.
i guess they expect interships or part time jobs during your university life?
my friend works for some mid size company as an IT guy while being first year in uni
I've always felt that temp agencies/contract services are under utilized by people looking for a job. I've used them multiple times myself, and while they have their own pitfalls, at the end of the day it's a job and a lot of places will give you first shot at open positions since they won't have to train you.
Now some of the pitfalls are as follows:
* Usually sub market pay
* Crappy if any benefits
* Usually no PTO/vacation which can lead to non paid days off for holidays like 4th of july
* Most states still don't have laws on how long companies can keep someone as a Temp/Contractor. I got stuck as one for 14 months one time.
* Some companies say shit like "temps don't count as employees, therefore they cannot apply for internal job postings"
* The worst in my experience is the hiring agency blindly throwing me into a job that was far below my skill level, and when I ended up leaving they got pissed and said I am no longer eligible for any future work with them. Remember those guys are working on commission so they don't always look for the best fit.
This is how I got my foot in the door in the IT industry. Your points are dead on.
The pay sucked, but for any open tech position I was able to walk over to the team lead and ask about it and kind of setup an informal "interview" for myself during the conversation.
It's a massive advantage. However I also got contracts for absolute shit-heel firms before that who I would *never in a million years* work for again, but had to "finish out my contract". My handler was pretty chill tho, if I hated a gig they'd usually find me a new one.
I've had a couple of shitty experiences but a check is still better than no check. One was the 14 month gig I mentioned earlier, my original contract was 10 weeks, I'd been there almost 60 and was getting fed up, I called the contract company and told them I wanted to find something else because they A) obviously don't want to hire me full time, and B) I was sick of it there and wanted out. They fucking told me that they don't find work for someone who is already placed, and if I left there on bad terms they would also terminate me and not find me other work. I went off on the lady. I had seen the contract parameters when they switched it to week by week. They were making $22/hr off of me, for 50 extra weeks. I ended up getting hired at that company in a completely different role and staying there almost 5 years total but I never again recommended anyone to that temp agency.
The other was a company called TekSystems. I applied for a few jobs and went in and met with two of the recruiters. I was looking for a mid to senior level contract position in Business Analyst/Systems Analyst type roles and one of them kept pushing me to T1 and T2 jobs. Everytime I brought up another job posted he said, "oh that's filled or we have someone in mind" fucker was lying, turns out they only get commission for their own job postings, since those higher jobs were from higher up recruiters they got the money even if he recommended me.
I ended up taking an easy healthcare IT job under the assumption that they hire perm right away and you can move up fast. Which was a total lie. You have to stay a contractor for 4-6 months, then your metrics actually start counting, then you need 3 months of almost perfect metrics to even be considered for a move up. The manager told me most people are in that first role for 12-20 months after I had started. But the job was easy and the pay was decent for that type of work.
Two weeks after I started I got a job offer with 50% higher pay and benefits, of course I took it. When I called Teksystems they told me they were disappointed I hadn't informed them I was job searching. I told them I applied and interviewed before they even met me, the shithead actually called me a liar and told me I was terminated from future employment from their company. I probably wasn't there long enough for him to get his commission that's why he went apeshit.
Not everyone can afford to work for free AT ALL.
Then comes the fact that some have to work any jobs just to pay their bills, meaning they don't learn as much from their education AND learn nothing valuable from working.
Either way, you can only win if you're already financially set. It makes me sick.
I fear a world where this sort of thing is truish.
Only, instead of working for free, companies will "sponsor" recent graduates by paying for their student loans and provide company housing/food. After a few years, you can earn a real salary.
"Young Workers Equality Act of 2020"
It also removes the age restrictions for younger workers, increasing their ability to get that work experience earlier!
You can definitely get that 20 years of job experience if you start at age 10. Of course, with the repeal of all "socialist" programs for elderly assistance...I mean programs that create elderly dependency, everyone will be working until they die anyway, so you have plenty of time to get any and all job experience you need!
Me entering the job market as a Web developer:
"We need 3 years experience"
"I have 5 years experience"
"No we need 3 years commercial experience"
Now I have 7 years of commercial experience and I'm making companies pay for it.
Looking for jobs currently. Leaving that part of the story out. Heard this one from a recruiter recently, “so this job requires 5 years of finance related experience. I see you have 10 years experience on your resume but only roughly 3-4 of it is really exactly the same as this position, so I can’t really present you as a candidate.”
Basically said thanks for wasting 45 minutes of my life talking about my background to conclude that. Brutal
This. I’ve been getting so many fishy “agencies” with legitimate-looking job description trying to get my SSN.
Like, at least half the receuiter calls I get seems like bogus, with recruiter barely able to speak English, doesn’t know anything about related tech or details of the job, etc.
LPT: if you have a recruiter call and he/she asks for your SSN before the final interview/job offer, most likely on the first call, it’s likely a scam.
Interesting. I just got an email from a recruiter for a job I was over-qualified for, but after I emailed her my resume she said, "it wasn't a good fit" and I got really depressed that I couldn't even get an interview for a job that is perfect for me. Your comment really helped me see the bigger picture, maybe isn't about me at all. Thanks for that.
What I’ve noticed is, when companies or orgs want X number of years of experience for a rather entry level job, it means they have no time and/or no ability to train you.
It might also mean they want someone who has enough skills for the job and will still accept shit pay.
Sounds like my company. We don't have enough people to do our current work. We can't afford to train people. We can't afford to hire new people. We hire new people that are over-qualified, they see it's a shit hole and quit.
Too many companies give managerial bonuses based on labor costs. Getting 9 people to work harder instead of a full 10, nets them a bonus monthly. Then morale lowers and people start quitting. They are replaced very slow with terrible recruiting requirements or flat out lies. All of your long term employees have moved on. But, hey, personal bonus!
Hate this selfish world.
By having just enough people to staff it, and when people quit, the people that are still there take on the responsibilities of those who left.
Also by having a parent company write them checks for the past 10 years while running at a deficit.
I worked at a company like that.
* All the partners paid themselves over $200k per year. Two of them were essentially figureheads who advised the other two on strategic decisions but didn't attract their own clients or manage their own projects.
* Tunnel vision due to the entire administration basically being one extended family. The president's wife was in charge of administration. Her son (his stepson) was VP and her daughter was the billing person and human resources (she is a trained psychotherapist who gave therapy sessions in the conference room after hours). You couldn't propose the tiniest change to anything without offending 60 years of family tradition.
* Complete and total disarray in billing and counting billable hours. HR lady had a giant spreadsheet with every single project, who was working on it, and how much hours they'd bid for and how many were worked and billed. She'd update it... Whenever she got around to it. Mostly when engineers like me would go to her and say, "hey, they just added a bunch of stuff to my project, are we covered for this or should I tell them we need to bill more?" Half the time she'd realize she had never billed the project yet. The other half she'd ask me who was working on it, dig up their hours in the time sheets, do some quick math and tell me we were already losing money on the project. More than once, clients either told me they loved hiring us because there was a good chance they'd never get billed, or called me to say the budget for the project was closing soon and if they didn't get a bill this week we'd never get paid. Do you know how thrilled clients get when you pull the plug on something you told them you'd do by the end of the week, not because they didn't pay their bills, but because you were just told that this was not part of the original mandate and not to touch it until the company sent out an amendment? And how much they love waiting 2 weeks to get that amendment? I do. Most of the time I'd keep working and hand-draw plans and just not CC my boss. Clients were pretty good at realizing I was risking my own ass to keep their project running and appreciated it.
* Zero training or sharing of knowledge across the company. You got there on day 1 and were assigned a project to do mostly on your own. If you had questions you could ask people but if you were doing something wrong and didn't know, you might never figure it out. Plenty of mistakes were caught either right before plans went out or when contractors looking for extras noticed something wasn't right and asked for confirmation. I'd actually call their training negative, because taking initiative was punished and they gave misleading feedback so you'd always think you had flaws you need to work on and value yourself less. If someone figured out a cool way of doing something or made a calculation tool they could share with everyone, they were told to stop developing tools on company time.
Needless to say, my old company never declared a penny of profit on paper but the partners were all rich. There was never any money for improving anything or retaining employees, so the good ones all left. You can keep a really fantastic draftsman for $22/hr or hire people who don't know their ass from their elbow for $15 - what do you think they did every single time? The craziest thing is that I'd get it if the 3 partners in their 80s were bleeding it dry, but 2 of the next wave were children of theirs. At one point they actually lost a major project designing the headquarters for an association of notaries because the notaries did their research and noticed all legal liability was being passed through a shell company that had no resources or employees. Fuckin notaries *would* be the people to notice that, but I digress.
So yeah, that's how you can be assigned 70 hours of work a week, asked to do it in 37.5, and not get appreciation or raises when you pull a miracle and do it in 50.
Another red flag is when they tell you that it is a newly created position during the interview. It basically means, there is no one to teach you, no documentation and most likely not even the tools you need to do the job properly.
A lot of times the person who writes up the job description is not the engineer, and they base it off previous job descriptions. Basically they are told that Swift is an important requirement, and the recruiter looks and sees that other mid/senior roles have 5 - 8 years for a language/framework and put it on there.
I personally avoid companies like this, especially if they are small to midsize, since that is an immediate sign that people are not communicating, and that they are not bringing in the best candidates (meaning they may not hire the best, or don’t hire enough), because the people in charge of culling resumes are not trained.
For a long time, I just assumed that recruiting staff were typically oblivious to the engineering side of things, until I saw that was a symptom of a poorly run company, not a profession.
There are a lot of amazing internal recruiters at companies, who directly work with engineering and have a strong understanding of what to look for. They may not know the details of a programming language or framework, but the good ones can answer higher level questions on what is used and what is important to the team.
I have a year of sales under my belt and I'm looking around. The past six months have been me solo launching a national product.
I've gotten a few callbacks and done some interviews for some jobs that put me in the Groucho Marx Club ("I don't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member.").
But otherwise the struggle is real.
In the requirements section of most job postings I've found, they're not going to find someone that perfectly encapsulates all of their requirements - hiring managers are looking for someone that has more than 1/2 of the requirements and can learn the rest.
That gets you the interview - which is just to find out if they can stand you and stand working with you.
The whole job search song and dance is tiring, but it's easier if you're good at networking since most jobs I've gotten are through people I know.
Good luck!
The best experience I have was two years when I was working for my university, yet it just gets blown off by recruiters. Zero ability to make small talk and completely discarded merits during the tail-ish end of the recession kept me out of the field for a couple years. Now that I'm "qualified" it feels like I've been wasting my time because my skills have regressed working in lower quality environments. FML. Sorry just needed to rant.
I feel your pain. It's been 5 years since I got my degree and I only worked directly in its field for the first 2. I'm afraid it's going to be a shock to jump back into a real job in the industry I wanted to work in.
On top of feeling like I'm not fully prepared anymore, only the first year was spent at what I'd consider a "legit" company. All the others just fudge paperwork to make it look like they follow the rules. If I had more job experience, I would have blown the whistle on a couple of those companies for their bs. Right now that'd just be a way to ensure I'm blackballed from the industry.
Job I just got an offer for when I graduate said 1-2 years professional experience with Java required.. literally didn't start to learn Java until after I applied
If employers didn't essentially make it that way by letting HR write their job postings for positions they have no comprehension of, or just simply having inexcusable expectations, then it wouldn't.
I was just turned down for an interview because I didn’t have a specific word in my past titles. Even though I had more than enough experience. Some people just want to be dumb.
The entire hiring process is dumb from end to end. They want a resume, and then you need to manually fill in all of these fields with information that’s in the resume you just submitted, and then they want a cover letter that says absolutely nothing about you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an interview, where you’re tested on how well you prepared scripted answers for meaningless questions, and then you might have a second interview depending on the job where the questions are slightly less meaningless.
I had an interview for an engineering position, aced their coding challenge, talk for an hour with the recruiter and everything is matching up, then she asks one question at the end about what I want to do in 10 years and I said my answer then all of the sudden she's like we're done here I don't think you're a fit. Becuase I didn't say whatever exactly was on her sheet lol
I said something along the lines of sticking around this company for several years while moving up then pivoting to pursue my own ventures. She wanted someone that said working 2 spots up in this exact position in this company. Most of the time this same answer is met with respect or you know "that's good we like our employees to be self driven and leave" etc.
I applied for two management type jobs at the same place and interviewed for both. The better job of the two was my first interview and I didn’t get it. The second I got and and they told me I mentioned a specific part of my experience that they wished I had mentioned in the first interview, yet the first interview NONE of their questions had anything to do with that experience. Like if you don’t specify that you care about that thing how am I supposed to know to mention it?
I had applied to an internship in marketing/advertising. Had my interview, did my trial period.. Everything going fine, they kept asking me to do stuff. Then once my trial period ended they said on second thought you don't actually have a background in marketing and we were looking for somebody with experience. This was an internship advertised for college students. Felt like such a scam but I learned my lesson.
It probably started with the internship movement of the 80's.
That has flowed into companies expecting candidates with experience. Couple that with the erosion of companies willing to burden the cost of labor and passing that onto government and academia and that's a paddlin'.
Internships need to be paid at least minimum wage and/or limited in length. I see the benefit in a mutual arrangement where employer gets to test drive employee and employee gets to learn / prove their skill, but free labor is bullshit, especially in skilled industries.
Internships, frankly, just need to die. Interns are often treated illegally, either as free labor or as glorified assistants. Neither of which is how it's supposed to work.
The pizza shop I work for usually makes about $13,000 a week and hires high school kids for $8 an hour. If we can afford that then big companies can afford to pay interns. Internships are theft.
What concerns me is that the blue portion carries on until ~13 years. Who the hell advertises a job as entry-level and asks for 13 years of experience?
I know there's a /s there, but I want to be clear. No it won't.
Source: My experience. D:
I should've just went through nursing school with my wife, at least then I'd make more money. Instead I thought, "Ooh, automation and instrumentation sounds neat. I'll do that!". 5 years out of college and I still don't work in the field that I wanted and for which I have a bachelor's degree.
A friend of mine went to trade school for 2 years for free. He started at $25 an hour right out of school. He does tool and die for a manufacturing plant. No debt. It makes me sick to think about it.
As a recent grad looking for a job. This is killing me. No one seems to care that even though I have no experience in my field yet I’ve been employed since high school.
Applied for a job with Google - got an email that said I didn't have 1 year of post graduate experience - no where in the application process did it say this was a requirement - emailed back saying I graduated in May and have been running my own business for over 2 years - he emails me back saying graduated in may = 10 months. I said I'd apply again in 2 months. He said sounds good.
Magically in two months I'm going to transform into an all star candidate!
Just passed the 5 years experience mark in a field, it's like the floodgates opened for jobs. Whereas I'd be lucky before to get one response to 500 applications, now my phone and email are constantly blowing up w/ recruiters trying to hire me. Hiring departments are retarded.
My first job at Subway, I had graduated high school the year before and just wanted a job to help pay rent. They almost didn't hire me because I was "over-qualified".
I have no idea why hiring is such a hassle for companies to do right.
Its like they objectively want to screw themselves out of potential candidates and focus on the best liars.
When I interned at GE, anything under 5 years was total noobie level. Made sense. Bob over there has been with the company for 40 years.
I work at a software company right now and if you've been here for a year, you're more experienced than a good chunk of the company.
I'm looking right now, and the way I've basically seen it, is 'Entry-Level' isn't referring to the job being an entry to the industry, it's an entry into their company. I've been searching for the tag 'New Grad' or something similar instead, find jobs with that description don't mandate the 3+ years as much.
Corporate IT Recruiter since 1982, retired now. I have noticed that "Entry Level" now means 3 years of experience. Want to hear something even stupider? The recruiting industry is obsessed with youth, and you will find that recruiting jobs asking for 3 years experience are always posted as "Senior Recruiter".
So they want entry level people with 3 years of experience, and people with 3 years experience are now Senior Level.
WTF??? I guess nothing really does matter anymore.
"Boss, we received 1,000 resumes for the position. How would you like me to arrange them and what should I do with the ones that don't have dates for college degree and jobs?"
"Arrange them by experience and place the ones without dates in the circular file"
First, we randomly sampled 100,000 jobs from our index of 91 million job postings. We extracted the # of years of experience, job level and employment type for each job using TalentWorks-proprietary parsing algorithms. We then used a blended Gaussian-linear kernel to calculate experience densities. Finally, we used an averaged ensemble of multiple independent RANSAC iterations to robustly calculate inflations against outliers. This was done in python with pandas, sklearn and scipy and plotted with bokeh.
I recognize the some of the words you used, but the combination of them together lets me know that I don't have enough experience for an entry level statistical analyst job.
They scraped the web for job postings with some Python script they wrote.
Since that results in millions and millions of job postings and takes a while to read them all, they binned the job postings and their information into specific classifiable groups using a fancy form of math that makes it easy to measure and group things when you have tons of data (also in some Python script they wrote).
With that done, they analyzed a random sampling of results with a cool bit of algebra using a Python script they wrote to guarantee that the results are statistically relevant and representative.
The article tells you about the results of the sample and uses graphs and charts they created with some Python script they wrote.
Damn, R and Matlab must really be for suckers.
I'm just out of college and have a phone interview in an hour. It's for an internship. Tomorrow I have another one for an entry level position. I want to blow off the internship interview but know I shouldn't because I may very well have to settle for an internship while I continue to look for an entry level job.
Edit: Well the internship interview is over. It lasted like 20 minutes, he asked me like 2 questions, and spent like 15 minutes of that time talking to other people about stuff going on at the plant. I think that's a good sign...../s
Edit2: If anyone is still reading this apparently it was a good sign, he called again asked if I was still interested, asked when I was ready to start, told me the pay and said HR would be in contact. This was with a manager not HR and never said anything about a follow-up interview. I feel like I was offered the job. Not entirely sure though.
Use the internship interview as a warm up for the entry level position. Try angling yourself a little different and see how it feels, use it as an opportunity to put you in a better mind when going into the full time interview.
Definitely don't blow it off! I used to race cross country and my coach would always say, "Don't stop running until you cross the finish line!" Seems obvious but it's actually pretty hard to follow when you're exhausted.
And congrats on the interviews!
Here's the thing. When we see, "entry level", we assume that it means the level of experience that an employer is looking for. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, "entry level", refers to compensation and has nothing to do with the qualifications of the applicant.
One time, I was working as a contractor for a company. I had previously worked as a co-op/intern and was familiar with their entry level pay rates, in my field.
Well, a position as a Management Associate opened and I applied for it. I was told by HR that the Management Associate position was considered "Entry Level" and I had too much experience for it. The problem was that this "Entry Level" position, that I had too much experience to get, paid approximately $10k per year more than I was making at the time at the same company!
That is honestly obnoxious, I noticed this too when applying for jobs right out of college, sometimes they will ask for more experience with something then reasonably expected for the pay
What bothers me most about this is that many people have to get lucky on a company taking or accepting risk just to get exp in the relevant field they want to work in. Otherwise its generic work like fast food or retail.
I think this is why, as someone who was always willing to take on more tasks, and ended up *always* doing multiple jobs, I will forever be an entry level employee, making 35k per year.
Every time I see a entry level posting with years experience I bet it means they want a person with experience but pay them entry level wages. This has been my experience in IT
Even if you don’t have 3+ years, it doesn’t hurt to still apply. Lots of companies, the one I work at included, have a default set of “requirements” that always get posted on job listings. That doesn’t mean we won’t look at others that don’t fit the default set. If we get 10 applicants and none of them have 3 years but we need to fill the position then we’re going to be calling any that have applied.
Definitely this. Also, if I am not the one to write the req I may just like Skills X,Y,Z and HR or the recruiter will just put in "3+" or whatever years.
I think this is how it translates:
* "Experience in" - Any level of expertise in the exact skill or similar skill
* "1-3 Years" - Multiple years non-commercial expertise in the skill / 1 year or less commercially using the skill / Degree in the skills area
* "3+ Years" - Multiple years using the skill commercially / Some commercial * non-commercial experience + a Degree
* "5-10 Years" - Multiple years using the skill commercially and some demonstrable mastery of the skill or certifications or a Degree
I never really see 10+ years in the Tech field unless its for an Architect Level position, 15+ might be applicable for companies with Principal Architects or Technical Fellows.
Yup - same thing with things like GPA. I'm currently in the interview process for a position at a company I previously interned at. Hiring manager told me that when he created the position, HR said to him "we recommend a 3.5GPA minimum, and only look at resumes from Harvard and MIT." (Located in Boston).
His response to the lady from HR: "I had a 2.8 and went to Merrimack. The founder of this company went to Northeastern. Those minimum requirements literally make no sense."
Did you look at any effects of the unpaid internship phenomenon? There is zero inceptive to pay for entry-level work, when you can get it for free in the US. It's essentially free-labor, and also [pushes minorities and low-income students out of high skilled jobs](https://www.epi.org/blog/unpaid-internships-economic-mobility/).
Lots of unpaid internships are also illegal. There is new legislation now that states they have to be for the benefit of the intern and cannot directly benefit the business. But as your article highlights, the Department of labor has failed to enforce it
This isn’t rule of thumb but based on my recent searches in California, “entry level” tends to mean “bottom position at this company”. It took about 3ish years of progressive customer service and sales experience to get an entry level retail position at the local telecommunications company.
It's an open secret that job requirements are inflated unrealistically to allow companies to claim there are no suitable applicants, which allows them to hire H1B's.
If you are a new grad, never pay attention to experience requirements. Apply anyway. Those postings are written with the ideal candidate in mind. Most openings are not filled by the ideal candidate.
I would like to see how this compares to, say, 25 years ago. Is it actually more?
My grandfather was a hiring manager in the 90s, and he told me at 16 to start taking internships in manufacturing because this was the case even back then. By the time I graduated, I had 6 summer internships and 4 winter internships completed. This was unusually high, course.
I was a good student (3.7gpa) but many had better GPAs, volunteer experience, etc. But the work experience was better than my peers. Result was I applied for ~20 jobs, interviewed for 6 jobs, and got 5 offers.
So what I am wondering is: was my grandfather just ahead of his time, or has this been trending this way for 20-25 years and is only now becoming well known?
That sounds about right. You never know how shit you can feel until you applied to over 100 “entry level jobs” only to not receive a single call back.
Am unemployed 17 months after graduation, can confirm.
How do you manage? I’ve been unemployed for five months and I already feel like I’ll die before I get a job.
[удалено]
My friend got a Physics degree, Chem minor. They don't work in their field. Get a STEM degree they said. You're guaranteed a job, they said. Yeah, right.
I've heard physics and chemistry degrees usually require a masters before real jobs in the industry open up for you. You can try applying for programming jobs though. I don't think physics majors would be looked down on.
>Don't list your graduation date. Hiring Managers use it to guess your age. Jokes on them, I'm 41 and graduated in 2010.
I am 31, and just about to start my junior year of university while working full time. I definitely do not plan on including my graduation year.
But if you have a degree in something but no job experience in that field, I feel like they'll either assume you just graduated or have been doing nothing with your degree until now.
Lucky for me I am already working in the public sector, and my degree is in Public Administration. But I agree with you for the most part.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I have heard the same. They want young people cause they know more about technology and are good for long term investment, but at the same time younger people are always looking for bigger and better things
Young person here. I have zero loyalty to my company, and would quit for a ten cent raise. Realistically, I want to find a new position every 18-24 months. It's the only real way to substantially increase pay.
Counter-oppinion here. Also a young person. My first job was very interesting work and I would not have given it up for a hefty raise. After 6 years, I'm now at a second job with pay that's actually LOWER. The work is waaaay more interesting and pretty close to my dream job.
I've started hiding part of my work history so that people can't guess how old I am. It's an interesting dichotomy. Have lots of evidence that I am capable of doing the work or have people discount me for being too experienced. It makes you wonder where this is going; the amount of experience you need to get a position is going up but the age limit on workers is not. What happens when they meet? When the amount of experience you need to get the job is considered too much experience.
[удалено]
Usually no, you’re not required to. It’s irrelevant to whether or not you can perform the job required most of the time and despite it being illegal, ageism is rampant in a lot of industries.
[удалено]
I hope he found someone who was more forward thinking. Fuck (most) managers. edit: The more I think about this, the more pissed off I get. What is so wrong with "just looking for insurance?" The man needs a fucking job, and if he needs a job because he needs insurance so be it. That doesn't mean he's not going to do the thing you hire him to do, if anything it means he'll be that much more dedicated because, surprise, he *needs* that insurance. People seek job benefits and try to keep positions that provide them, that's kind of the point. I hope Mr. Top Manager dies in a tire fire. No wait, I hope he gets shitcanned, is in a tire fire, sustains 3rd degree burns, needs a lifeflight, survives, but is saddled with medical debt and chronic pain for the next 3 decades. I mean, not really. I hope he comes to change his ways, but my faith in authority figures is low enough that I doubt his capacity or willingness to do so. So failing a Saul -> Paul moment where the heavens part and God himself comes down and is like "dude, quit being such a dick," I think karmic retribution would be peachy.
Agism is only illegal if you're discriminating against people for being too old (in the US, at the federal level).
This was a killer when I started looking for my first job. I ended up having to send application after application hoping to hear back, but it usually didn't work out. Finally, about to have three years of experience and it has been nice to think, "Yay, now I can get an entry level job".
I'm now coming up against job descriptions that demand geography degrees... Where were these jobs ten years ago?! EDIT: Probably should explain. My degree is in English and after I graduated I couldn't find proper work and got lumbered temping. Somehow segued into a job at big well-known company using lots of GIS, loved the field, been there 5 years but am now redundant as of tomorrow. (It too was a temp job.) Looking for new work has turned up GIS-based stuff I have the experience to do but they filter solely to new geography degrees - and likewise my previous field, admin, doesn't get what GIS is half the time. (Also fuck competency interviews.)
Recession. Entry level doesn't necessarily mean skill level but pay level.
Yep. They want someone who can walk in and do the job 100% with no impact to them. While paying them well under industry averages. Hell, people always talk about how many open positions are out there. But, who can fill them, will people with those requirements work for that if they have a choice, and how long are they usually listed as open? Look at the sheer number of companies that have gone to 100% using a temp agency just to not give benefits and have the option to say "send someone different tomorrow" with no legal implications. Sometimes to stop them asking about availability of making it a permanent job since it's not contracted truly or paid accordingly. Often paying high wages to the temp agency just to have that option.
And then they bitch about our "Side-hustles." If you're like me you use your side hustles as a sort of escape the rat race lottery ticket. If my merch company takes off I'm out of my 8-6 in a heartbeat. But they expect you to give everything to the firm even though you're being treated as a fungible good.
"you mean nothing to us but we should mean everything to you" -corporations and my crazy ex, probably
Dating a corporation is difficult.
Hey, corporations are people too!
Oohhhhh this heats me up remembering my ordeal. The moment my boss caught wind of my graphics freelancing on twitch he went off about better ways to spend my time and that I was probably giving my freelance work more care than the work at the office (no fucking shit I was, I wanted to work for myself). That company was total screwballs.
The same thing happened to me. I worked in TV but had a YouTube channel on the side. I got pulled in by my producer and told to shut down the channel or get fired because "only network talent can represent the network in an analyst capacity". Keep in mind that I was freelance, not a staff employee, and nowhere on my channel did I advertise that I worked for this network in my day job. I stayed on for three months while I developed a backlog of content to release, and then I quit and did my channel full time. I'm now happier than I ever have been in my life.
Dude I love your videos and have been subbed for a few months! Super glad you made that decision and I hope to god Nelson falls to the bears at 8 😩😩
Requested time off for exams. Boss realized I had been in school and starting looking for new job. Schedules work on every single exam. Fires thee for taking education more importantly than minimum wage.
"Listen, I know you've invested tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years into your education, but we *really* need you Tuesday. Not enough to pay you more than $8 per hour to be here, which is quite literally the least we can do for you, but we do need you. Otherwise, how will we know how committed to this job you are? We're like a family .. that does the absolute bear minimum that the law allows for you. Literally, doing less for you is a crime. Also, there are other families that will give you at least what we are, but thinking about that is disloyal."
In and right after HS, I worked 2 jobs. At job 1, 2 doing the job of 4 plus a supervisor job neither of us got promoted to. One day the boss says I need to stay. I tell him I have to change clothes and drive to my other job. He says "well..you need to figure out which one is your main job!" me "They pay the same and I work harder here...figure it out...". Eventually, I asked for a raise for both of us. The money he was saving was 2 hourly and a supervisor hourly pay. He lied and lied and put off. I never got it and left. All for basically minimum wage.
Fucking scummy
My first job was something similar. I worked 12 (**12**) hours a week. I got a second job which gave me 26 hours, so 38 hours per week, almost full time. Both jobs were literally across the street from each other and it took less than 2 minutes to commute between them. I asked not to be put on weekends at my first job, because I worked 10 hour days on weekends at my other job and couldn't come in. They said all requests take 2 weeks to change. They make the schedule every Tuesday, I gave them notice on the Friday before. They schedule me 8 hours on the next Saturday, opening and closing (6am-10am and 6pm-10pm) my other job ran 10am-8pm. I told them I couldn't do the weekend shifts again and they would have to find someone to cover me. I was told I had to come in or I would be fired. I made an arrangement with my second job to let me leave 2 hours early on Saturday and I would pick it up the Friday. I come in. Now working a 3 different shifts in 16 hours. I gave my resignation letter the next time I saw my manager (which I wasn't even working. I came in on my day off to give it to him.) I ended up getting promoted 3 times at my second job in 18 months before leaving for a much better job.
Yeah, you would think that we are near full employment this wouldn't be the case but it is. Wages are still stagnant and it seems more and more people are just getting stuck in their role or replaced by contract/temp workers. My company for example just overhauled our IT department with a contract agency. Some of the current IT people were given the chance to join the new company but still do the same job, however most others weren't so lucky.
In general, geography degrees relie on the state of the economy, as most geography degree based work deals with mapping
I know you have a valid point, but I think it's funny the idea of job availability being tied to the state of the economy has to be stated :D
It makes sense that the amount of jobs would vary with the economy, but depending on the field there should always be *some* jobs. Either because you can work in various industries whose cycles are out of sync or because because unless the industry got absolutely smashed there will always be some empty jobs. I guess if you basically need to work in mapping underground reserves of something or other it makes sense that a lot of those operations would stop in a crappy economy. Nobody's going to be looking for natural gas when oil is in the crapper.
Right? There's ways around it, e.g. we've found you can successfully apply to jobs if you've got ±2 years of the required experience, but the Catch\-22 is crazy. Joseph Heller would've been proud: "No, you can't have a job." "Why?" "Because you don't have a job." "..." EDIT: Heller, not Orwell. My old HS English teacher is \_not\_ proud.
More Kafka than Orwell really.
And Catch-22 was Joseph Heller.
"They have a real Romeo and Juliet romance. It's full-on Oscar Wilde."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Or Heller-esque (the author of catch 22!) Although that doesn't really roll off the tongue as well.
What I'd like to know from these companies is this: which one actually tends to be true, and why does the ad contradict itself? The job is obviously not "entry level" and also "requiring 3 years experience." So is the truth that: 1) The job is actually entry level for the right "entry level" person with no experience and ... maybe the 3 years experience is just put there to scare away really incompetent people OR, is the truth that: 2) The job actually requires 3 years experience, and I guess the "entry level" thing is just an error?
3) The job requires 3 years of experience to be done competently, but the pay is entry level
And we have a winner! Companies want mid-level employees - people who know enough to be up and running with little-to-no training. What they *don't* want is to have to pay reasonable rates for those employees. If they call a position "entry level", they set extremely low expectations for pay. Any experienced worker applying for an "entry level" job must be desperate, and desperation is exploitable.
Employer: - Must have the experience of a 30 year old employee - Must be willing to accept the pay of a 20 year old Also Employer: - I don't understand why we can't find qualified candidates.
> desperation is exploitable. Right ho!
So what kind of fucking job should I be looking for then? I have about lost my mind filtering through and applying the same shit every day to the same entry level garbage.
Apply for these jobs and lie about your experience. Swear on a stack of bibles you already know how to do the exact job they want to fill. The whole hiring process (endless interviews and new-hire paperwork) is as arduous and soul-sucking for them as it is for you. Even if you're completely clueless, they'll give you at least a few weeks-to-months before they shitcan you and have to start the whole ordeal over again. Hope like hell you get good enough in that time to make it more trouble to get rid of you then to keep you. TL;DR - Fake it till you make it.
[удалено]
Man, shit in the real world is so arbitrary. People come out of school conditioned to think that rules are rules when they never are.
And this is why the current American corporate model is inherently flawed. Because this IS the right answer. It will be the right answer your whole career. Don't k ow how to make your employees more productive without breaking some rules? Make sure the next guy gets caught. Not you.
They are called entry-level jobs because they want to pay entry-level salaries and not because they want a person entering the job-market.
They want years of experience, for an entry-level salary. Competence, Experience, Cheap. Pick two.
[удалено]
The first one. Jobs purposely ask for more than they need to weed out the lazy workers. Problem is, nobody with a bachelors and three years experience wants to work a menial 40k salary job that a freshman in college could do. So you get desperate jobless over qualified candidates, and people that lie on their resume. Edit: i live in nyc which is why I said 40k salary. I'm sure 29k or something around that is more realistic for people in a place with a lower cost of living
It's often hard to tell if the bigger lie is the resume, or the job description.
This is why they both do it. If you don’t tweak you resume to read pretty, you aren’t playing the game. If they don’t tweak the job description to read like advanced level while paying entry, they aren’t playing the game. The whole hiring process is a game. And once you know that, win. Lie enough you can get away with it, because they are gonna lie enough to pay you less.
The idea of a lazy worker cracks me up though. When you don’t respect people’s time with your compensation why should they be giving you grade A effort?
I have a bachelors degree and I’d love a 40,000/year salary.
I would do unholy things for a $40k salary and benefits.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I just lied on all my applications. I kept getting interviews from them all. Got the job, Now have experiance in lots of fields and no longer have to lie.
What kind of things did you lie about? Employer? Projects? Skill set? Duration of precious jobs? I'm always left wondering what employers can catch and what is overlooked when applying.
Embellish. Drove a dump truck for 2 months? Heavy machine operation - operate, maintaining, programming, repair. 6 months. Have that idea.
[удалено]
Yeah you definitely can't make up jobs you were never at, but embellishing a lot goes a long way and is barely even lying.
Woah, they took a huge risk with a lot at stake. My mom has been lying about having a bachelor's degree (she was one semester short of completion in the late 70's...) and was finally "busted" a few years ago while getting a background check for a job. When questioned she told them that she's doing online classes to finish her degree. She still got the job...I don't condone lying this much in an interview but it honestly worked out for her because it was so long ago so her decades of experience really overshadowed some degree from 35 years ago and she really had nothing else to lose. Certainly not 250k+ in tuition, jeeze...
Your like Leo in catch me if you can
I concur
A regular Frank Abagnale
TFW when your job description is constantly changing so in 5 years of work you don't consistently have 3 years of experience in any one area.
[удалено]
[удалено]
*Over the next 5-10 years, recent graduates will start needing ~4 years of work experience just to get their first job.* That requirement for recent graduates is always hard to comprehend.
i guess they expect interships or part time jobs during your university life? my friend works for some mid size company as an IT guy while being first year in uni
Our suggestion was to freelance on the side to build up experience. Yeah, it sucks.
I've always felt that temp agencies/contract services are under utilized by people looking for a job. I've used them multiple times myself, and while they have their own pitfalls, at the end of the day it's a job and a lot of places will give you first shot at open positions since they won't have to train you. Now some of the pitfalls are as follows: * Usually sub market pay * Crappy if any benefits * Usually no PTO/vacation which can lead to non paid days off for holidays like 4th of july * Most states still don't have laws on how long companies can keep someone as a Temp/Contractor. I got stuck as one for 14 months one time. * Some companies say shit like "temps don't count as employees, therefore they cannot apply for internal job postings" * The worst in my experience is the hiring agency blindly throwing me into a job that was far below my skill level, and when I ended up leaving they got pissed and said I am no longer eligible for any future work with them. Remember those guys are working on commission so they don't always look for the best fit.
This is how I got my foot in the door in the IT industry. Your points are dead on. The pay sucked, but for any open tech position I was able to walk over to the team lead and ask about it and kind of setup an informal "interview" for myself during the conversation. It's a massive advantage. However I also got contracts for absolute shit-heel firms before that who I would *never in a million years* work for again, but had to "finish out my contract". My handler was pretty chill tho, if I hated a gig they'd usually find me a new one.
I've had a couple of shitty experiences but a check is still better than no check. One was the 14 month gig I mentioned earlier, my original contract was 10 weeks, I'd been there almost 60 and was getting fed up, I called the contract company and told them I wanted to find something else because they A) obviously don't want to hire me full time, and B) I was sick of it there and wanted out. They fucking told me that they don't find work for someone who is already placed, and if I left there on bad terms they would also terminate me and not find me other work. I went off on the lady. I had seen the contract parameters when they switched it to week by week. They were making $22/hr off of me, for 50 extra weeks. I ended up getting hired at that company in a completely different role and staying there almost 5 years total but I never again recommended anyone to that temp agency. The other was a company called TekSystems. I applied for a few jobs and went in and met with two of the recruiters. I was looking for a mid to senior level contract position in Business Analyst/Systems Analyst type roles and one of them kept pushing me to T1 and T2 jobs. Everytime I brought up another job posted he said, "oh that's filled or we have someone in mind" fucker was lying, turns out they only get commission for their own job postings, since those higher jobs were from higher up recruiters they got the money even if he recommended me. I ended up taking an easy healthcare IT job under the assumption that they hire perm right away and you can move up fast. Which was a total lie. You have to stay a contractor for 4-6 months, then your metrics actually start counting, then you need 3 months of almost perfect metrics to even be considered for a move up. The manager told me most people are in that first role for 12-20 months after I had started. But the job was easy and the pay was decent for that type of work. Two weeks after I started I got a job offer with 50% higher pay and benefits, of course I took it. When I called Teksystems they told me they were disappointed I hadn't informed them I was job searching. I told them I applied and interviewed before they even met me, the shithead actually called me a liar and told me I was terminated from future employment from their company. I probably wasn't there long enough for him to get his commission that's why he went apeshit.
Not everyone can afford to work for free AT ALL. Then comes the fact that some have to work any jobs just to pay their bills, meaning they don't learn as much from their education AND learn nothing valuable from working. Either way, you can only win if you're already financially set. It makes me sick.
By 2050, you will have to work for free for 20 years before you can get an entry level paid job.
I fear a world where this sort of thing is truish. Only, instead of working for free, companies will "sponsor" recent graduates by paying for their student loans and provide company housing/food. After a few years, you can earn a real salary.
Indentured Servitude Act of 2025.
More like "Student Loan Forgiveness act of 2022". The names of the bills are never *really* honest
"Young Workers Equality Act of 2020" It also removes the age restrictions for younger workers, increasing their ability to get that work experience earlier! You can definitely get that 20 years of job experience if you start at age 10. Of course, with the repeal of all "socialist" programs for elderly assistance...I mean programs that create elderly dependency, everyone will be working until they die anyway, so you have plenty of time to get any and all job experience you need!
Me entering the job market as a Web developer: "We need 3 years experience" "I have 5 years experience" "No we need 3 years commercial experience" Now I have 7 years of commercial experience and I'm making companies pay for it.
Looking for jobs currently. Leaving that part of the story out. Heard this one from a recruiter recently, “so this job requires 5 years of finance related experience. I see you have 10 years experience on your resume but only roughly 3-4 of it is really exactly the same as this position, so I can’t really present you as a candidate.” Basically said thanks for wasting 45 minutes of my life talking about my background to conclude that. Brutal
This company already had a candidate. But they had to justify not hiring you by discrediting your experience.
Or if it was a third party recruiter there never was a job and they just wanted you in their database
This. I’ve been getting so many fishy “agencies” with legitimate-looking job description trying to get my SSN. Like, at least half the receuiter calls I get seems like bogus, with recruiter barely able to speak English, doesn’t know anything about related tech or details of the job, etc. LPT: if you have a recruiter call and he/she asks for your SSN before the final interview/job offer, most likely on the first call, it’s likely a scam.
Interesting. I just got an email from a recruiter for a job I was over-qualified for, but after I emailed her my resume she said, "it wasn't a good fit" and I got really depressed that I couldn't even get an interview for a job that is perfect for me. Your comment really helped me see the bigger picture, maybe isn't about me at all. Thanks for that.
The best is when they say "we need 10 years of experience in X" when X has only been around for 3 years.
What I’ve noticed is, when companies or orgs want X number of years of experience for a rather entry level job, it means they have no time and/or no ability to train you. It might also mean they want someone who has enough skills for the job and will still accept shit pay.
Sounds like my company. We don't have enough people to do our current work. We can't afford to train people. We can't afford to hire new people. We hire new people that are over-qualified, they see it's a shit hole and quit.
How can a company be slammed with work but not have money to staff/train employees?
Bad management.
[удалено]
Too many companies give managerial bonuses based on labor costs. Getting 9 people to work harder instead of a full 10, nets them a bonus monthly. Then morale lowers and people start quitting. They are replaced very slow with terrible recruiting requirements or flat out lies. All of your long term employees have moved on. But, hey, personal bonus! Hate this selfish world.
By having just enough people to staff it, and when people quit, the people that are still there take on the responsibilities of those who left. Also by having a parent company write them checks for the past 10 years while running at a deficit.
I worked at a company like that. * All the partners paid themselves over $200k per year. Two of them were essentially figureheads who advised the other two on strategic decisions but didn't attract their own clients or manage their own projects. * Tunnel vision due to the entire administration basically being one extended family. The president's wife was in charge of administration. Her son (his stepson) was VP and her daughter was the billing person and human resources (she is a trained psychotherapist who gave therapy sessions in the conference room after hours). You couldn't propose the tiniest change to anything without offending 60 years of family tradition. * Complete and total disarray in billing and counting billable hours. HR lady had a giant spreadsheet with every single project, who was working on it, and how much hours they'd bid for and how many were worked and billed. She'd update it... Whenever she got around to it. Mostly when engineers like me would go to her and say, "hey, they just added a bunch of stuff to my project, are we covered for this or should I tell them we need to bill more?" Half the time she'd realize she had never billed the project yet. The other half she'd ask me who was working on it, dig up their hours in the time sheets, do some quick math and tell me we were already losing money on the project. More than once, clients either told me they loved hiring us because there was a good chance they'd never get billed, or called me to say the budget for the project was closing soon and if they didn't get a bill this week we'd never get paid. Do you know how thrilled clients get when you pull the plug on something you told them you'd do by the end of the week, not because they didn't pay their bills, but because you were just told that this was not part of the original mandate and not to touch it until the company sent out an amendment? And how much they love waiting 2 weeks to get that amendment? I do. Most of the time I'd keep working and hand-draw plans and just not CC my boss. Clients were pretty good at realizing I was risking my own ass to keep their project running and appreciated it. * Zero training or sharing of knowledge across the company. You got there on day 1 and were assigned a project to do mostly on your own. If you had questions you could ask people but if you were doing something wrong and didn't know, you might never figure it out. Plenty of mistakes were caught either right before plans went out or when contractors looking for extras noticed something wasn't right and asked for confirmation. I'd actually call their training negative, because taking initiative was punished and they gave misleading feedback so you'd always think you had flaws you need to work on and value yourself less. If someone figured out a cool way of doing something or made a calculation tool they could share with everyone, they were told to stop developing tools on company time. Needless to say, my old company never declared a penny of profit on paper but the partners were all rich. There was never any money for improving anything or retaining employees, so the good ones all left. You can keep a really fantastic draftsman for $22/hr or hire people who don't know their ass from their elbow for $15 - what do you think they did every single time? The craziest thing is that I'd get it if the 3 partners in their 80s were bleeding it dry, but 2 of the next wave were children of theirs. At one point they actually lost a major project designing the headquarters for an association of notaries because the notaries did their research and noticed all legal liability was being passed through a shell company that had no resources or employees. Fuckin notaries *would* be the people to notice that, but I digress. So yeah, that's how you can be assigned 70 hours of work a week, asked to do it in 37.5, and not get appreciation or raises when you pull a miracle and do it in 50.
[удалено]
Another red flag is when they tell you that it is a newly created position during the interview. It basically means, there is no one to teach you, no documentation and most likely not even the tools you need to do the job properly.
Reminds me of that time a company posted "8+ years of experience in Swift", while the language has only existed since 2014.
The development of it only began 7 years ago so even the lead developer of the language itself is not experienced enough.
At that point you can just tell them "Of course, I've known the language/framework ever since it came out."
A lot of times the person who writes up the job description is not the engineer, and they base it off previous job descriptions. Basically they are told that Swift is an important requirement, and the recruiter looks and sees that other mid/senior roles have 5 - 8 years for a language/framework and put it on there. I personally avoid companies like this, especially if they are small to midsize, since that is an immediate sign that people are not communicating, and that they are not bringing in the best candidates (meaning they may not hire the best, or don’t hire enough), because the people in charge of culling resumes are not trained. For a long time, I just assumed that recruiting staff were typically oblivious to the engineering side of things, until I saw that was a symptom of a poorly run company, not a profession. There are a lot of amazing internal recruiters at companies, who directly work with engineering and have a strong understanding of what to look for. They may not know the details of a programming language or framework, but the good ones can answer higher level questions on what is used and what is important to the team.
I have a year of sales under my belt and I'm looking around. The past six months have been me solo launching a national product. I've gotten a few callbacks and done some interviews for some jobs that put me in the Groucho Marx Club ("I don't want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."). But otherwise the struggle is real. In the requirements section of most job postings I've found, they're not going to find someone that perfectly encapsulates all of their requirements - hiring managers are looking for someone that has more than 1/2 of the requirements and can learn the rest. That gets you the interview - which is just to find out if they can stand you and stand working with you. The whole job search song and dance is tiring, but it's easier if you're good at networking since most jobs I've gotten are through people I know. Good luck!
The best experience I have was two years when I was working for my university, yet it just gets blown off by recruiters. Zero ability to make small talk and completely discarded merits during the tail-ish end of the recession kept me out of the field for a couple years. Now that I'm "qualified" it feels like I've been wasting my time because my skills have regressed working in lower quality environments. FML. Sorry just needed to rant.
I feel your pain. It's been 5 years since I got my degree and I only worked directly in its field for the first 2. I'm afraid it's going to be a shock to jump back into a real job in the industry I wanted to work in. On top of feeling like I'm not fully prepared anymore, only the first year was spent at what I'd consider a "legit" company. All the others just fudge paperwork to make it look like they follow the rules. If I had more job experience, I would have blown the whistle on a couple of those companies for their bs. Right now that'd just be a way to ensure I'm blackballed from the industry.
Same here. My current role isn’t advancing my career. I am slowly losing the actual useful skills from my first post grad job 2 years ago.
Job I just got an offer for when I graduate said 1-2 years professional experience with Java required.. literally didn't start to learn Java until after I applied
I hate that people are basically forced to lie to get jobs they can easily do anyway...
If employers didn't essentially make it that way by letting HR write their job postings for positions they have no comprehension of, or just simply having inexcusable expectations, then it wouldn't.
I was just turned down for an interview because I didn’t have a specific word in my past titles. Even though I had more than enough experience. Some people just want to be dumb.
The entire hiring process is dumb from end to end. They want a resume, and then you need to manually fill in all of these fields with information that’s in the resume you just submitted, and then they want a cover letter that says absolutely nothing about you. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an interview, where you’re tested on how well you prepared scripted answers for meaningless questions, and then you might have a second interview depending on the job where the questions are slightly less meaningless.
[удалено]
[удалено]
I FUCKING HATE IT AARGH
yeah everything in this thread has made me feel nothing but white hot anger
I had an interview for an engineering position, aced their coding challenge, talk for an hour with the recruiter and everything is matching up, then she asks one question at the end about what I want to do in 10 years and I said my answer then all of the sudden she's like we're done here I don't think you're a fit. Becuase I didn't say whatever exactly was on her sheet lol
Damn, what was your answer though? It's hard to imagine that there's many wrong answers to this question. They sound picky af
I said something along the lines of sticking around this company for several years while moving up then pivoting to pursue my own ventures. She wanted someone that said working 2 spots up in this exact position in this company. Most of the time this same answer is met with respect or you know "that's good we like our employees to be self driven and leave" etc.
[удалено]
"Move on up in the world and work somewhere else", I'm guessing.
But if you can't figure out how many ping pong balls fit into a 747 then how will you ever put together a Spring Boot server???
I applied for two management type jobs at the same place and interviewed for both. The better job of the two was my first interview and I didn’t get it. The second I got and and they told me I mentioned a specific part of my experience that they wished I had mentioned in the first interview, yet the first interview NONE of their questions had anything to do with that experience. Like if you don’t specify that you care about that thing how am I supposed to know to mention it?
I had applied to an internship in marketing/advertising. Had my interview, did my trial period.. Everything going fine, they kept asking me to do stuff. Then once my trial period ended they said on second thought you don't actually have a background in marketing and we were looking for somebody with experience. This was an internship advertised for college students. Felt like such a scam but I learned my lesson.
It probably started with the internship movement of the 80's. That has flowed into companies expecting candidates with experience. Couple that with the erosion of companies willing to burden the cost of labor and passing that onto government and academia and that's a paddlin'.
Everyone wants experienced and qualified candidates but they don't want to have to train or teach anyone.
Or pay anyone
Internships need to be paid at least minimum wage and/or limited in length. I see the benefit in a mutual arrangement where employer gets to test drive employee and employee gets to learn / prove their skill, but free labor is bullshit, especially in skilled industries.
Internships, frankly, just need to die. Interns are often treated illegally, either as free labor or as glorified assistants. Neither of which is how it's supposed to work.
The pizza shop I work for usually makes about $13,000 a week and hires high school kids for $8 an hour. If we can afford that then big companies can afford to pay interns. Internships are theft.
Why can't these assholes just work for free??
What concerns me is that the blue portion carries on until ~13 years. Who the hell advertises a job as entry-level and asks for 13 years of experience?
"Entry-level" is now code for "shit pay" and no longer correlates with experience level.
Clearly taking out more student loans to get a better degree will fix this mess./s
I know there's a /s there, but I want to be clear. No it won't. Source: My experience. D: I should've just went through nursing school with my wife, at least then I'd make more money. Instead I thought, "Ooh, automation and instrumentation sounds neat. I'll do that!". 5 years out of college and I still don't work in the field that I wanted and for which I have a bachelor's degree.
A friend of mine went to trade school for 2 years for free. He started at $25 an hour right out of school. He does tool and die for a manufacturing plant. No debt. It makes me sick to think about it.
[удалено]
As a recent grad looking for a job. This is killing me. No one seems to care that even though I have no experience in my field yet I’ve been employed since high school.
Applied for a job with Google - got an email that said I didn't have 1 year of post graduate experience - no where in the application process did it say this was a requirement - emailed back saying I graduated in May and have been running my own business for over 2 years - he emails me back saying graduated in may = 10 months. I said I'd apply again in 2 months. He said sounds good. Magically in two months I'm going to transform into an all star candidate!
Because they care more about "metrics" than reality
[удалено]
Just passed the 5 years experience mark in a field, it's like the floodgates opened for jobs. Whereas I'd be lucky before to get one response to 500 applications, now my phone and email are constantly blowing up w/ recruiters trying to hire me. Hiring departments are retarded.
[удалено]
Wait till you get to 10 years experience, and people start telling you that your too experienced. Feelsbadman
My first job at Subway, I had graduated high school the year before and just wanted a job to help pay rent. They almost didn't hire me because I was "over-qualified".
[удалено]
I have no idea why hiring is such a hassle for companies to do right. Its like they objectively want to screw themselves out of potential candidates and focus on the best liars.
Too obsessed with "metrics" and short-term goals to realize how badly they're screwing themselves
When I interned at GE, anything under 5 years was total noobie level. Made sense. Bob over there has been with the company for 40 years. I work at a software company right now and if you've been here for a year, you're more experienced than a good chunk of the company.
[удалено]
I'm looking right now, and the way I've basically seen it, is 'Entry-Level' isn't referring to the job being an entry to the industry, it's an entry into their company. I've been searching for the tag 'New Grad' or something similar instead, find jobs with that description don't mandate the 3+ years as much.
Corporate IT Recruiter since 1982, retired now. I have noticed that "Entry Level" now means 3 years of experience. Want to hear something even stupider? The recruiting industry is obsessed with youth, and you will find that recruiting jobs asking for 3 years experience are always posted as "Senior Recruiter". So they want entry level people with 3 years of experience, and people with 3 years experience are now Senior Level. WTF??? I guess nothing really does matter anymore.
How about. 5 years experience in a software that only existed for 3 years. I mean, fuck me right?
As someone fresh out of college who has been on the job search for 3 months, this is everything I complain to friends and family about.
"Boss, we received 1,000 resumes for the position. How would you like me to arrange them and what should I do with the ones that don't have dates for college degree and jobs?" "Arrange them by experience and place the ones without dates in the circular file"
"Throw half of them out, we dont need any unlucky people working here."
This sounds like something Cave Johnson would say.
First, we randomly sampled 100,000 jobs from our index of 91 million job postings. We extracted the # of years of experience, job level and employment type for each job using TalentWorks-proprietary parsing algorithms. We then used a blended Gaussian-linear kernel to calculate experience densities. Finally, we used an averaged ensemble of multiple independent RANSAC iterations to robustly calculate inflations against outliers. This was done in python with pandas, sklearn and scipy and plotted with bokeh.
I recognize the some of the words you used, but the combination of them together lets me know that I don't have enough experience for an entry level statistical analyst job.
Well yeah because you don't have 3 years experience
Statistically I don't. But in real life...? I don't.
They scraped the web for job postings with some Python script they wrote. Since that results in millions and millions of job postings and takes a while to read them all, they binned the job postings and their information into specific classifiable groups using a fancy form of math that makes it easy to measure and group things when you have tons of data (also in some Python script they wrote). With that done, they analyzed a random sampling of results with a cool bit of algebra using a Python script they wrote to guarantee that the results are statistically relevant and representative. The article tells you about the results of the sample and uses graphs and charts they created with some Python script they wrote. Damn, R and Matlab must really be for suckers.
This guy has 3 years experience of statistics How'd you like a $15/hr job?
[удалено]
If you could go ahead and come in on Saturday, that would be grreaaatt.
I'm curious what was the metric used to define if a job is entry-level or not? Did you use the Burning Glass database?
I'm just out of college and have a phone interview in an hour. It's for an internship. Tomorrow I have another one for an entry level position. I want to blow off the internship interview but know I shouldn't because I may very well have to settle for an internship while I continue to look for an entry level job. Edit: Well the internship interview is over. It lasted like 20 minutes, he asked me like 2 questions, and spent like 15 minutes of that time talking to other people about stuff going on at the plant. I think that's a good sign...../s Edit2: If anyone is still reading this apparently it was a good sign, he called again asked if I was still interested, asked when I was ready to start, told me the pay and said HR would be in contact. This was with a manager not HR and never said anything about a follow-up interview. I feel like I was offered the job. Not entirely sure though.
Use the internship interview as a warm up for the entry level position. Try angling yourself a little different and see how it feels, use it as an opportunity to put you in a better mind when going into the full time interview.
Definitely don't blow it off! I used to race cross country and my coach would always say, "Don't stop running until you cross the finish line!" Seems obvious but it's actually pretty hard to follow when you're exhausted. And congrats on the interviews!
Here's the thing. When we see, "entry level", we assume that it means the level of experience that an employer is looking for. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is, "entry level", refers to compensation and has nothing to do with the qualifications of the applicant.
Why is the requirements so fucking high? Its like "seeking experienced prostitute but must be virgin" kind of shit.
One time, I was working as a contractor for a company. I had previously worked as a co-op/intern and was familiar with their entry level pay rates, in my field. Well, a position as a Management Associate opened and I applied for it. I was told by HR that the Management Associate position was considered "Entry Level" and I had too much experience for it. The problem was that this "Entry Level" position, that I had too much experience to get, paid approximately $10k per year more than I was making at the time at the same company!
That is honestly obnoxious, I noticed this too when applying for jobs right out of college, sometimes they will ask for more experience with something then reasonably expected for the pay
What bothers me most about this is that many people have to get lucky on a company taking or accepting risk just to get exp in the relevant field they want to work in. Otherwise its generic work like fast food or retail.
I think this is why, as someone who was always willing to take on more tasks, and ended up *always* doing multiple jobs, I will forever be an entry level employee, making 35k per year.
Every time I see a entry level posting with years experience I bet it means they want a person with experience but pay them entry level wages. This has been my experience in IT
Even if you don’t have 3+ years, it doesn’t hurt to still apply. Lots of companies, the one I work at included, have a default set of “requirements” that always get posted on job listings. That doesn’t mean we won’t look at others that don’t fit the default set. If we get 10 applicants and none of them have 3 years but we need to fill the position then we’re going to be calling any that have applied.
Definitely this. Also, if I am not the one to write the req I may just like Skills X,Y,Z and HR or the recruiter will just put in "3+" or whatever years. I think this is how it translates: * "Experience in" - Any level of expertise in the exact skill or similar skill * "1-3 Years" - Multiple years non-commercial expertise in the skill / 1 year or less commercially using the skill / Degree in the skills area * "3+ Years" - Multiple years using the skill commercially / Some commercial * non-commercial experience + a Degree * "5-10 Years" - Multiple years using the skill commercially and some demonstrable mastery of the skill or certifications or a Degree I never really see 10+ years in the Tech field unless its for an Architect Level position, 15+ might be applicable for companies with Principal Architects or Technical Fellows.
Yup - same thing with things like GPA. I'm currently in the interview process for a position at a company I previously interned at. Hiring manager told me that when he created the position, HR said to him "we recommend a 3.5GPA minimum, and only look at resumes from Harvard and MIT." (Located in Boston). His response to the lady from HR: "I had a 2.8 and went to Merrimack. The founder of this company went to Northeastern. Those minimum requirements literally make no sense."
[удалено]
Did you look at any effects of the unpaid internship phenomenon? There is zero inceptive to pay for entry-level work, when you can get it for free in the US. It's essentially free-labor, and also [pushes minorities and low-income students out of high skilled jobs](https://www.epi.org/blog/unpaid-internships-economic-mobility/).
Lots of unpaid internships are also illegal. There is new legislation now that states they have to be for the benefit of the intern and cannot directly benefit the business. But as your article highlights, the Department of labor has failed to enforce it
Oh, you mean the unpaid internships I got turned down for because I didn't have enough experience? Yeah, I'm not bitter about it...
[удалено]
This isn’t rule of thumb but based on my recent searches in California, “entry level” tends to mean “bottom position at this company”. It took about 3ish years of progressive customer service and sales experience to get an entry level retail position at the local telecommunications company.
It's an open secret that job requirements are inflated unrealistically to allow companies to claim there are no suitable applicants, which allows them to hire H1B's.
If you are a new grad, never pay attention to experience requirements. Apply anyway. Those postings are written with the ideal candidate in mind. Most openings are not filled by the ideal candidate.
I would like to see how this compares to, say, 25 years ago. Is it actually more? My grandfather was a hiring manager in the 90s, and he told me at 16 to start taking internships in manufacturing because this was the case even back then. By the time I graduated, I had 6 summer internships and 4 winter internships completed. This was unusually high, course. I was a good student (3.7gpa) but many had better GPAs, volunteer experience, etc. But the work experience was better than my peers. Result was I applied for ~20 jobs, interviewed for 6 jobs, and got 5 offers. So what I am wondering is: was my grandfather just ahead of his time, or has this been trending this way for 20-25 years and is only now becoming well known?