This article expresses one piece of the problem that's increasingly suggesting to me that it's not hiring or job-hunting that's broken, but the model of employment itself.
Skills assessment (and assertion) is difficult. Skills relevance is hard to assess. Incorportion and business as risk-externalising systems has worked rather too well (though the problem's hardly new), with much of employment risk being shifted from employers to employees, and from large employers to small ones (answering the anticipated small-business / startup response). The entities most able to manage risk are those most equipped to shift it elsewhere.
There's also the problems of offshoring, outsourcing, and shifting to the modern variants of endentured servitude, generally: employment-contingent temporary visa workers (H-1B in the US, similar equivalents elsewhere). And of gig, contingent, temporary, part-time, and other employment conditions, as well as of the tying of specific benefits (most especially healthcare) to employment status.
Don't even get me started on pensions/retirement, professional ethics, whistleblower protections, and labour organisation.
(For yet another example of broken hiring, see this story, also presently on the HN front page: https://medium.com/@bellmar/sre-as-a-lifestyle-choice-de9f5a...)
Skills assessment (and assertion) is difficult. Skills relevance is hard to assess. Incorportion and business as risk-externalising systems has worked rather too well (though the problem's hardly new), with much of employment risk being shifted from employers to employees, and from large employers to small ones (answering the anticipated small-business / startup response). The entities most able to manage risk are those most equipped to shift it elsewhere.
There's also the problems of offshoring, outsourcing, and shifting to the modern variants of endentured servitude, generally: employment-contingent temporary visa workers (H-1B in the US, similar equivalents elsewhere). And of gig, contingent, temporary, part-time, and other employment conditions, as well as of the tying of specific benefits (most especially healthcare) to employment status.
Don't even get me started on pensions/retirement, professional ethics, whistleblower protections, and labour organisation.