Rant Post
I have been looking for opportunities in technology/design sector for a while now. This post entails the pain and suffering which I have faced in last 5 months.
Recruiters only contact you when you are happy at your workplace and when you want to move on, it becomes like screaming in a void and there is no one to listen.
The usual sources for finding the opportunities are LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor. Been browsing these websites for months now I have experienced they put in a lot of effort in just dumping the data without proper formatting or analysis. They both suffer from massive user experience issues, but that’s for another post. Let the rant begin.
Finding jobs in tech world will be so difficult I would have never imagined. Tech companies apprantly keep buying software to solve the hiring process but in turn making it more harder. Below are the list of major pain points I had with every software solutions.
Login and Signup
How come none of the software solutions has an inbuilt feature of openID authentication. In a world of monopoly of LinkedIn as a professional social network, it isn’t so hard to implement a login based of LinkedIn OAuth. I have since create accounts in 51 different odd websites.
Resume Processing
Every solution has a feature of uploading resume. But apprantly not every software implements the proper processing of pdf. Even after uploading resume in the standard format, software can’t process it.
This solution doesn’t work at all if you go a bit creative with your resume. I am not sure how designers use these websites for application as their resume will never be processed. They have to fill in the ever lasting form (8 pages - (back and forth)).
I can understand this is a very hard problem to solve. But in this scenario the tech and HR has to come to an agreement of not having that dreaded big form.
Redirection Hell
The worst expericence which I had with one of the job posting was something like this.
I call this as Redirection Hell. This is just not the only path, with these 4 combinations you can create atleast 6 dumb ways of redirection before a potential candidate is even on the page to fill out any information.
My Solution
After looking for opportunities for so long and getting frustrated everytime when I have to apply. I have now started to reach out to my contacts in the tech industry. This gets in directly in the door 80% of the time. For rest, the HR managers asks to go on the website, create a profile and apply.
I think there is still not a good solution in the industry currently. Getting inspired from this and creating another tool which can do proper pdf analysis, can implement proper OAuth; will be only used adding more wood to the hell fire of hiring process.
It is just the world which we live in now and have to accept the reality.