I dunno, I managed to get stellar reviews form my boss and colleagues after getting the job. Maybe not everyone is incompetent.
Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.
You touched on an important topic: if a candidate has potential but HR has no way to tell if that candidate is any good, should they hire him?
How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
The problem is that this is not a HR problem. This is a you problem. Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?
The problem with HR is not buzzwords. Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data. What are you giving them that allows them to say you are a safer hire than any other candidate around you? You are not giving them anything to work with. They can take a gamble on you, but they can also take a gamble on anyone else walking through their door. If they are going to take a gamble, wouldn't they bet on someone who on paper leads to better odds? What are you giving them to work with?
>Why are you failing to stand out and prove your value?
Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector. They don't know what a Github is, they don't even know the difference between Java and Javascript, they only know to look for "5+ years of Java experience" because that's what the job description says, that's all they do.
I also couldn't believe that myself until a recruiter posted a video of herself on LinkedIn showing why "It's hard to find good SW engineers", and all she was doing was pattern matching and filtering based on buzzwords and years of experience.
How do you stand out in such cases? Are you gonna write a one extra page on your resume where you are explaining the value of transferable technical skills to a 20-somethign year old humanities graduate who has 30 seconds to review your resume?
>How can they tell apart a candidate with potential but an abismal CV from a candidate who is utterly incompetent and a bonafide scrub?
Easy. For example, if someone has good experience in Java, they most likely can be a good C# programmer. But that needs some technical knowledge, beyond matching keywords like a baboon. Even ChatGPT would be better at assessing resumes and potential of candidates than the clueless HR people.
>Their problem is that they need to justify their choices with objectively verifiable data.
Other than some officially signed credentials like accountants, doctors or lawyers have, there's no data on a resume that's instantly objectively verifiable on a quick glance since everything there could be a lie until further proven. I could say I was CTO of Google. When they get 50+ applications for one position, they're only gonna skim through resumes to pick the best fitting one, not start doing checks on all of them.
>What are you giving them to work with?
Just like lawyers and bean counters, HR's job is to protect the company and their careers and to minimize risks. I'm giving them a white lie that fits to their biases and covers their ass in order to pass to the technical stage. That's what I'm giving them. It's a constant cat and mouse game in this racket.
> Because HR has no technical understanding of transferrable skills in the tech sector.
That's a cheap excuse. That's not their job. Their job is to hire someone, anyone, within the budget and that meets minimum requirements. Their responsibility is to get a butt on a seat that can do the work. Any candidate that passes that hiring bar is a safe choice.
You're talking as if their goal was to hire the absolute best based on rigorous objective criteria and crisp stack rankings. It is not. They look for someone, anyone, that is able to do the job, fit in, and not shit the bed. And they need to be able to defend their choice. That's why education matters, prior experience matters, certiciation matters, and even recommendations matter.
Why do you think internal recommendations are a fast track to hire? Do you have any excuse like corruption? Or do you understand that the goal is to find people who are able to do the job, fit within the organization, and not cause problems?
If you fail to understand the problem, you will never find it's solution.
Maybe some people who are good at doing one thing, are also gonna be good at doing other things, but HR and recruiters are terrible at screening for adaptability and transferable skills, or they are just risk adverse and play it safe for an easy pay cheque, so you end up missing out on jobs you could do just fine, simply because in their limited understanding of tech jobs, you lack some buzzwords in your resume or some years of experience.