Three Common Pain Points for Technical Job Seekers

The modern workforce has been granted unparalleled connectivity and an ability to work from anywhere, with few accompanying drawbacks, if any. The possibility of discovering a lucrative job is more present than ever, but finding such opportunities takes hard work, and in many cases involves painstakingly slow and frustrating processes.

Forward-thinking organizations have long realized the need to tap into global talent pools and that restricting hiring to a locality can be growth-limiting, save for when physical presence is an absolute requirement. Tech roles are a prime example of remote work being practical — jobs that can be conducted from anywhere with just a few tools; and the IT industry itself is begging for more people to move into its workforce given that as a profession it has one of the highest projected employment growth rates. The demand for technical personnel in an increasingly tech-oriented world can in-part be satisfied by the creation and adoption of modern recruiting tools and platforms, but there’s also a mentality shift needed.

It isn’t that the idea of an online recruitment database or platform hasn’t already been implemented, but there is still room for improvement and pain points remain. Often users get charged a commission to utilize the platform, have little control over how their information is used and are forced to sift through a lot of low-quality listings.

Outstanding Problems

Despite the increasing presence of online platforms as a means of hiring quality candidates, personal recommendations still dominate hiring decisions — even if the qualification of an online application is higher, a referral still tends to have a higher degree of success. This is with good reason, as references help to bypass much of the vetting processes, making things more efficient and ultimately trustworthy.

Tech also faces a subject matter issue to a higher degree than other industries. The HR department is still at the centre of the vast majority of recruiting, but in the case of technical roles, the personnel are not always qualified to assess the qualifications of the candidate. To overcome this, companies will often involve devs or engineers in the interview process, which is yet another resource-consuming detour in an already somewhat onerous system.

Spam and Information Pollution

The main problem is quality. Just as recruiters must be wary of applicants, spending extended time to verify their legitimacy, so too must candidates devote precious time to research a company, analyze the exact scope of the work in question and determine whether the opportunity is worth pursuing.

Often, to find a single suitable position, a candidate must sift through dozens, if not hundreds, of job descriptions, some of which are indistinguishable from spam, while some are downright scams. Old vacancies also pollute job boards, making the discovery process all the more difficult.

There is also the possibility that job seekers can overlook genuine opportunities while avoiding the deluge of spam. The sheer volume and tendency for vacancies to be classified as junk can lead to these communications ending up in the spam folder or getting pushed down in an overcrowded LinkedIn inbox.

Biased Processes

The selection process on online platforms themselves can also be fundamentally unfair. Consider either an automated screening process or a human-led one, on what specifics are candidates selected, beyond a generic description that “the most suitable candidates will be selected” based on experience, educational level and perhaps open-source work?

Both in terms of gender and culture, algorithms have proven to be untrustworthy so far, with Amazon’s internal AI recruiting tool favouring males and specifically dismissing profiles with the term “women” in it. Humans do not fare much better, as here too is gender bias particularly present in the tech industry. Researchers from the University of Toronto and Ryerson University surveyed employers with over 500 employees, discovering that those with minority-sounding names were discriminated against. The phenomenon is prevalent enough that candidates will likely face it as they apply to dozens of job listings.

The actual interview may also be problematic, as questions, whether overused logical puzzles intended to weed out candidates or concepts that are irrelevant to the particular interview, still linger. The nature of tech work has changed quickly, and the kind of assessment applicable to the industry a few decades ago may not be relevant today. Increasingly, employers are looking for candidates who have a demonstrable set of skills or a portfolio that showcases their efforts, as opposed to theoretical knowledge or background. A more efficient and accurate testing system would result in a stronger indication of a candidate’s suitability.

For the most part, online job boards also do not have reliable feedback mechanisms in place to inform an applicant of his or her shortcomings, so should an offer not materialize, the applicant is often left wondering as to what went wrong. The fault is not with the recruiter here, as the volume of online applications can make thorough feedback an impossible task.

New Platforms are Tackling the Big Issues

The good news is that, not only are existing platforms learning from the feedback presented to them by employers and candidates, new platforms are also emerging which offer a more convenient, niche-specific, fair and time-efficient recruitment process through fundamental changes in their service model.

The idea is to automate elements of the recruitment process that inconvenience both employer and employee, and consequently result in candidates being overlooked, or employers being handed incomplete or irrelevant applications.

Although these more technologically enhanced versions of job platforms, courtesy of blockchain technology, are still in its early stages of development, prospects look good. One of the most celebrated features of the technology is its ability to disintermediate processes that involve multiple parties — which is essentially the function that job platforms perform. The ability to attach a candidate’s qualifications to the blockchain — immutable and permanent with smart contracts — expedites the recruitment from the employer’s perspective, while candidates can be sure that their application is given a (more) fair treatment.

Concluding Remarks

In many cases, the status quo of technical hiring processes leave room for improvement with respect to efficiency, user experience, the automation of tedious tasks and fundamental fairness in selection. On the positive side, these issues have been noted by relevant stakeholders in the recruitment ecosystem, and the feedback is slowly starting to result in new solutions that reduce some of the problems that technical job seekers face.

WorkFork, an open distributed database of candidates, was designed as an alternative to existing recruitment platforms that suffer from the aforementioned flaws. It aims to overcome these issues by streamlining the recruitment process by standardizing resumes, providing an independent communication channel and employing an in-built candidate testing system.