Appendix: Methodology + Survey Demographics
Methodology
Two surveys were created on Google Forms, one geared towards Hiring Managers and Recruiters, and another geared toward Tech Workers, each with about 50 questions.
These surveys were made public and available to complete from June 6 through June 30 2017 on The State of Tech Hiring website (stateoftechhiring.com).
During that period, the site received 934 visits and garnered 50 completions of the hiring manager survey, and 161 completions of the candidate survey. The top sources of traffic were:
- Direct — 503 visits
- Twitter — 113 visits (driven from author’s twitter feed: @jasonshen)
- Designernews.co — 95 visits
- Reddit — 62 visits
- Jasonshen.com — 42 visits (author’s website)
Gender
Overall, our study features the responses of more men than women. This disparity was most severe in our hiring manager + recruiter survey, 78% of whom identified as male, with 20% identifying as female and 2% as non-binary.
Candidates had a relatively more balanced distribution, with 59% of respondents identifying as male, 40% as female, and 1% as non-binary.
Role / Discipline
While the study targeted both hiring managers and recruiters, the vast majority of responses (86%) were from hiring managers, with only 10% of responses coming from recruiters (8% internal, 2% external) and another 4% of responses indicated they were part of the hiring team. Throughout this study, we will use the term “hiring managers” when referring to this group of individuals.
As for the discipline that respondents fell into, our hiring managers and candidates had a similar distribution:
- Engineering was the largest discipline for both groups, with 64% of hiring managers and 56% of candidates. Design made up a smaller percent of hiring manager responses (16%) compared to candidates (25%).
- Product management made up 12% for both hiring managers and candidates, and data science made up 4% (hiring managers) and 6% (candidates).
Location
This is fundamentally a United States-centric survey, which is unsurprising as I am based in the US (NYC) and some of the largest tech hubs globally are in the United States. That said, over a quarter (28%) of candidate responses were outside the United States, largely in Western nations like Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. We had far fewer international responses from hiring managers.
Outside of that discrepancy, the hiring manager / candidate ratio lines up pretty well, with New York City being top location for both groups at nearly one third for both hiring managers (33%) and candidates (30%). This was followed by the SF Bay Area and the West Coast (Seattle, LA, etc), then the Midwest and the South (including Southeast and Southwest) of the United States. This means the results are geographically skewed as the West Coast has, overall, equal if not more tech workers.
Employer size
We had a healthy mix of organizational size, with the largest segment being an organizational full-time employee base of 101–1000 people, 45% for hiring managers and 39% for candidates. The next largest group was between 1–100 employees at 29% for hiring managers and 30% for candidates, followed by 1,001–10,000 and 10,000+ employees.
A handful of candidates also indicated that they worked freelance for companies of different sizes (3%) or are not currently employed (5%).
Industry
Industry can be a challenging question to answer because technology has become such a core part of so many companies and this is a “tech hiring” survey. Arguments can be made that GE, Goldman Sachs, and Ford are better characterized as tech companies rather than manufacturing, finance, or automotive companies, and the reverse could be said for companies like WeWork, Blue Apron, or Postmates.
That said, technology was unsurprisingly the top industry citied by both hiring managers (63%) and candidates (48%).
Hiring managers also had the combined category of government, non-profits, and education (12%), consumer goods (8%) and media (8%) as top industries. Candidates had consumer goods (14%), finance (10%), and media (7%) as top industries.
Title / Seniority
For our hiring managers, we coded the job titles respondents provided and were able to determine that about 16% of respondents were senior executives — either CXO or VP and 33% identified as being a Director or Head of Recruiting/Data Science/etc.
Moreover, 22% were managers, 16% were lead designer/engineer/etc, and 12% were individual contributors either as recruiters or participants in the hiring process.
