The hiring problem

10/26/2011 11:27 AM EDT

I liked the phrase "plug-and-play recruits"... very well written. :)
I am surprised to see the statistics...60% from 15% in just one year? That makes me thinking, what has changed over this one year, which has increased the difficulty in finding the right candidate in just one year drastically. Yeah, I think it is the cost pressure, reduced spending in training, expectation that the new recruit shall be productive from day 1 and almost a fullstop on recruiting fresh engineers.

10/26/2011 12:41 PM EDT

Isn't the 9% of people that are unemployed mostly made up of the Great Unwashed? How many of them are engineers?

Management has always tried to model employees, including engineers, as plug and play lumps of meat. That makes project planning and budgeting spreadsheets much easier even if this fails to reflect reality. This strategy might have worked in the past when a graduate could expect to emerge from college with a reasonable % of industry knowledge under their belts. With the explosion of technical detail that is no longer the case. A graduate is an empty vessel.

It is also not surprising that companies are doing less training. Years ago people took jobs for life and training investment made sense.

These days the workforce is far more fluid and the onus falls far more on the employee to develop their skills. If you want to work in a specific area then start to skill up on that.

10/26/2011 1:13 PM EDT

This simply put is an issue with job position advertisements. Somewhere in the equation (go look at job boards) HR and hiring manager write these page long thesis on the ultimate employee (looking for superman or superwomen) to save their company. In addition, a string of personality/psychological traits desired that probably no one on the planet could attain. The bottom line is if these companies compared their own personnel with the position requirements, no one would be qualified. So what would a savvy search be, look broad, have someone besides a non-technical HR clerk screen candidates and look for candidate depth. In addition, challenge your job description writers to 6-10 key bullets and that’s it. You would be surprised the effect would have in simplicity vs. looking for that pseudo employee that can walk on water and convert coal into diamonds.

10/26/2011 3:50 PM EDT

The inflexibility problem has a name -- recruiters call it the "purple squirrel" problem, where a company defines a position with such depth and precision that is impossible to fill, except by some mythical creature like a purple squirrel.

In some cases, the job posting is just plain stupid, like "Senior USB 3.0 designer, must have 10 years experience designing USB 3.0"

10/26/2011 4:44 PM EDT

You know that if shortage of qualified engineers goes from 15 to 60 percent in one year, it has to be the companies themselves that invented this problem. Had this been a time of very low unemployment, MAYBE that statistic would make some sense. As things are, it makes no sense.

It's simple. If companies have ridiculous practices like "don't bother applying if you are unemployed," or the "purple squirrel" approach that Frank mentioned, they deserve all the problems in hiring that come their way.

10/26/2011 6:28 PM EDT

It is worse than that. Most jobs require insane qualifications like: must speak English, Mandrin and Hindi fluently, must have walked on the moon, must have an MBA and have two PhDs, must be willing to relocate to China. Most jobs of late also only offer low wages and typically they are only contract positions. For example, of late in the PNW, I**** offers a max of $40 a hour, regardless of experience and education. The toughest requirement lately is that typically you must be employed now. I have been a perfect fit for several jobs lately, but they tossed my resume because I am not employed as an engineer RIGHT NOW. So the engineering jobs pool is limited to those that are employed as engineers.

Strange times...

10/26/2011 6:28 PM EDT

There has been another hudden riding issue here for years as well. That being that many jobs posted for engineers in the US are only posted in order to retain existing H1-B employee candidates at a particular company. Companies are required to post any H1-B positions as open reqs, and hence they pretty much try to exclude anyone that might take a job from an H1-B that a company wants to retain (and typically for lower wages). This process was rampant at the last two large companies I worked at in the Silicon Valley.

10/27/2011 1:17 AM EDT

A engineer friend of mine just got rejected for a job on the grounds that he didn't meet the experience or skills requirements. I happen to know that he exceeded both, by a great margin, and had even taught his skills to younger professionals, that's how good he was. But he got rejected without even an interview. As the headlines foretell, the economic instability will probably lead to additional political intervention. In the meantime, it's not a good idea to enter engineering in the U.S.

10/27/2011 1:33 AM EDT

Did you see the ad here on EETimes.com for the "USA Science and Engineering Festival"? It says "don't miss out!" I'd say they already missed out.

10/27/2011 1:48 AM EDT

One of the reasons why 60% posts are unfilled may be that many companies do not want to fill those posts ( to save money) and may be giving the unavailability of the right candidates as the alibi for not recruiting. So these companies put up the requirements so ideal that no candidate fits in. Similar thing happens here in India where there are some reserved seats for backward communities as per govt regulations.Many of these posts remain unfilled because of unnecessarily high expectations from the prospective candidates.

10/27/2011 7:35 AM EDT

In Europe, it is also hard to hire "good" Engineers for highly skilled jobs. To start with, Engineering is not seen as a good career by the majority of young people so the offer is fairly weak. Moreover, the education system is not following industrial needs very well which means that the few graduates available often do not have the right mix of skills. These jobs are going to the far east and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future I am afraid. Our kids will probably live off tourism in the future...

10/27/2011 8:27 AM EDT

What I don't get is that our politions keep harping about how "we need more engineers". Yet most of us are in want for oppertunity. I'm sure that our lawmakers really believe there are jobs that can't be filled with domestic talent. C'mon, if we were lawyers, they'd know better.

10/27/2011 11:25 AM EDT

Search for "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" by Matlof and have a look at the date. An interesting parallel? Companies either decide to hire, and hire someone that can do the job even if they're no plug-n-play or they get into the trap of looking for the ideal candidate. A number of jobs are really looking for the cream of the crop, but I'd say the majority are not that specialized. I've found that skills I was an expert in 5 years ago are pretty useless even if those skills are exactly what the position is for.

10/27/2011 12:39 PM EDT

Some thoughts on hiring or looking for a new job: 1.check to see if the company has an affirmative action policy; if it does, then it tells you right off that this company promotes/hires idiots over qualified personnel. 2. many companies advertise "ghost jobs" that don't really exist because they, the companies, want to give the impression to investors that they are busy and have to hire new people. 3. if you are presently employed and get a call from the HR personned from another company whatever you do make them come to you, not on weekdays but on the weekend. If they won't come, then it tells you that hiring top talent isn't a priority with this firm. 4. if you do get an interview, submit this "trick question" to the HR people (kind of work it in unexpectedly): "I see you have many interesting products; by the way, just what is your most important asset in this company?" Surprisingly, and I've been at a few interviews, they will answer something like a patent or a process they've developed. The correct answer is, of course, the people who work for the company, and finally 5. trust your instincts.

10/27/2011 3:12 PM EDT

It never seems to change: industry crying that they can't find engineers with graduate degrees, 5 years of experience willing to work for $30K/yr. Now, because some 35 year old whiz kid thinks they can solve the problem of the hi cost of finding qualified people the entire process is outsourced. The outside company's job is to screen out all unqualified applicant: all non-purple squirrels are rejected and the only people that can get thru the gatekeeper are those who meet each and every requirement. Since it is the responsibility of the outside company to screen out unqualified applicants they will always err on the side of caution. Result: even fewer purple squirrels make the cut.

I try not to worry about this, figuring that a company that lets the bean counters control everything like this will be weeded out by market forces. But now I'm not too sure. Kind of makes me glad I am finishing up a 35 yr career instead of just starting out.

10/27/2011 4:50 PM EDT

Lets not kid ourselves, there is a very real shortage of engineers willing to work at the offered compensation. That is, when the "free market" functions observed shortage should create an intense wage competition for those who posses the appropriate skills.


So consider the following:
(1) when was the last time you saw a job advertisment that even posted a wage? Until that starts to occur, its business as usual. No real shortage, just marketing for purposes of assuring that the H1B quota remains unchanged.

(2) Were the shortage really that significant, the rules for acquiring a Green Colored Card would be loosened. The shortage is after all not going to go away.

10/28/2011 2:09 AM EDT

its payback time Engineers.. Employers exploited us during last recession. Lets get our dignity back.

10/28/2011 3:27 AM EDT

Sometimes it is not all just about plug-and-play. Are you aware that many employers are smply racist? If they insist to hire a White over a Black, Hispanic or an Asian, all with comparable qualifications and credible experiences, then unemployment will only remained unsolved, when there are simply not enough White engineers.

10/28/2011 3:28 AM EDT

Australia is just a very typical example, where employment rate is increasing because they still want White to hold professional positions.

10/28/2011 5:25 AM EDT

Its difficult to get the right candidate. While hiring all you need to see is that the resource uses a logic to solve given problem and how well he/she communicates. All others can be dealt with later.

10/28/2011 2:14 PM EDT

There is no shortage of engineering talent. In this climate, most of the companies will not even look at individual who is already laid off and who has the skill. I know from head hunters who I have forwarded my friends resume say, Company B will not look at this resume as he is currently laid off...Yet the same companies will go to the US govt wanting more foreign workers, more tax breaks etc... It's those non-technical MBA's at the top who are milking the system for themselves at the expense of the highly skilled engineers and the US economy....

10/28/2011 2:29 PM EDT

Enough already. Let's stop whining and start our own companies. If you're sitting around or just searching for jobs after two years at other established businesses, doesn't it seem your time could be better spent on something else and something productive? Besides, after seeing how these firms operate, do you really want to work at one?

10/28/2011 2:41 PM EDT

When Java first came out a company advertised for a senior Java programmer with a minimum of 5 years of Java experience!
When the company I worked for moved out of state I applied at a competitor making the same product. I received a very nice letter saying your credentials are excellent but you don't have a Masters degree.
No wonder they can't find anybody.

10/28/2011 2:52 PM EDT

I've read these same complaints about jobs when I first graduated from school in the early 90s. We had a recession then too. These cycles repeat every 5-10 years in this business. But there is a fundamental shift now with outsourcing (due to the lower costs of communications allowed by the internet). Most to the outsourced jobs will never come back -- so stop crying about it and do something.

No body on these boards has mentioned the real problem with the current state of engineering employment -- lack of real innovation. Even Apple, the most successful tech company of the last decade is just re-bundling old technology with fancy new UIs. Until we get some real disrupting technologies, we'll be stuck with high unemployment in engineering ranks.

Old tech is something that can be taught in schools and outsourced to distant countries. New tech is limited to the practitioners who created it and the few that can figure it out.

So stop looking for work and start innovating in your garages/basements/barns. Get together with other unemployed EEs and pool your resources. Take a university course to get access to their lab facilities. You will get access to millions of dollars worth of EDA tools and test equipment for a cost of one course. Beg and borrow to get anything else you need.

Create your own destiny. At the least you'll develop some new skills you can put on your resume and cover the gap in your employment history.

10/28/2011 2:56 PM EDT

BTW, the bigger tech companies should sponsor more kinds of "innovation incubators" so the more entrepreneurial among us can get started creating jobs. It's time to give back.

10/28/2011 2:59 PM EDT

One more thing. If your unemployed, don't let your skills erode. Keep busy doing some kind of technical work. Take a course if you can afford it, or at least work at home on something technical. You can get eval versions of most EDA tools, cheap dev boards, etc. Get together with other engineers and share your knowledge.

10/28/2011 3:25 PM EDT

I'd never hire about half the "engineers" I went to school with. I think there are a lot of them who are not good, passionate engineering types who have the degree and were hired but have been let go because of "downsizing" (wink, wink).

10/28/2011 3:39 PM EDT

I know someone in engineering management in silicon valley, CA who has been trying to fill a job for several months. He has found a couple of qualified engineers, but they do not currently live in the CA bay area and because of the housing bubble issues cannot sell their current homes to relocate. I believe this problem is common these days. There have been recent stories in the media which seem to corroborate this antecdotal story of fewer Americans moving since 2008.

10/28/2011 10:35 PM EDT

The most amazing job postings that I have seen demanded 7 years experience on a brand new system.
Then there is another challenge, which is that they don't want to hire anybody who is unemployed. I finally squeezed that out of a headhunter whom I had been pressing for explanations as to what qualifications I lacked. So I revised my resume to include my startup company, which has done business but not enough for a living, and right away I started getting calls, and eventually job offers. My resume was honest, but I did leave out some details about my company. So it seems that there is a shortage of available engineers willing to leave one job for another, and that nobody wants to talk to the unemployed engineers. Perhaps our federal government should "ask" for an explanation about why it is this way. Perhaps it is discrimination.

10/30/2011 5:20 PM EDT

As an RF engineer with 47 years experience, why do all the people that look at my resume send me IT openings?

I wonder if I said IT engineer if they would send me RF Jobs?

10/31/2011 2:13 AM EDT

I am hiring and let me offer a perspective from my side. We had about 3 or 4 openings at various times during this 2011 year. All of them technical, requiring senior-level, i.e., architecture-level thinking with hands-on implementation skills. These days when I think of hiring, I don’t have much bandwidth for training or coaching the new hire. This is because we have committed to ourselves to finish a large project with a limited number of people in the team, certainly less than the # of people a similar project of the same size would have had two years ago, and with more aggressive milestone deadlines. The employee salary is not an issue for us. We realized over the past few quarters that we would rather pay more to a potential team-member who can get going from the start, than pay less to a less experienced team member who needs training to get things going. In fact we realized that these days it is much more efficient for the project to hire consultants who readily accept a well-defined task with a well-defined scope and are more capable of delivering it from the day they start.

Let me say a word or two about why I rejected a few candidates. These were by and large very experienced no doubt. But this experience was more geared towards managing technical people. The candidate’s expectation was that he/she would be managing a team of technical people. I don’t need that. I need the candidate to be one of the individual contributors as well, in addition to a level-headed and mature outlook about what fails and what works in an engineering project.

So, while I also believe that companies do not do a good job of knowing what they want, make no mistake about it that if the candidate doesn’t directly help solve an immediate problem for me in the project, I would be very reluctant to hire because, as they say, “it is very easy to invite a guest, but it’s hard to ask him/her to go.”

SR

10/31/2011 11:37 AM EDT

Many of the open positions may not be real positions at all. This is just an accounting trick. If a manager is clever and has a good team that he wants to keep, he opens a requisition for another engineer whenever he has the opportunity. The unfilled positions serves two purposes, it is his excuse for not meeting schedules and when he is informed that he must cut heads, he cuts a faux position, a requisition, and not a real engineer.

10/31/2011 4:44 PM EDT

"the complaints about skill shortages boil down to the fact that employers can't get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That's an affordability problem, not a skill shortage. A real shortage means not being able to find appropriate candidates at market-clearing wages. We wouldn't say there is a shortage of diamonds when they are incredibly expensive; we can buy all we want at the prevailing prices." - Wall St Journal
http://www.en-genius.net/site/zones/testmeasurementZONE/editorial_opinion/tmed_103111

11/5/2011 2:05 PM EDT

Misleading. The fact is the companies are not really hiring, but they have to express the idea in a political correct way.

As a company, if you say "we don't need to hire". The bad guy is the company. The meaning is the company is not growing, and might have a bad future.

But if you word that as "we have a lot of openings, but we cannot find the qualified person to fill". The bad guy is those who are looking for job. And the hint is the company is still growing.

11/6/2011 7:11 AM EST

Another aspect of all this hiring controversy is the $25K H.R. types who haven't a clue about resume's that use common acronyms specific to an industry that have 2 or 3 variances. A Bachelor's degree doesn't guarantee competence just as an Associate's along with advanced basket weaving doesn't ensure a "rounded" individual. I've worked with a Master's degree fellow who couldn't wire an A.C. plug.

11/6/2011 6:54 PM EST

If you want a prime example of "Do as I say, not as I do," ask NASA why they will not hire anyone in civil servant engineering positions with more than three years experience.
ANSWER: Over 50% of their (CS) engineering workers are eligible for full retirement in the next five years. They hire freshouts whom they can train for the next five years. What about the subcontractors who are already performing those jobs? They're too old.
Shouldn't NASA management have been thinking about that problem ten years earlier? How many other government technical agencies operate the same way in blatant violation of the law?

11/14/2011 1:19 AM EST

Geeze, you should see the resumes and interviews we get. And, it isn't because of the pay. I've seen the other side of this. And, it's no wonder companies just give up and contract to "other countries".

You know how you want to sell you car on craigslist, but you end up giving it to the dealer on a trade in, just because you don't want to deal with all SPAM you'll get. It's a pretty good analogy to the problem. It's not like you get a CarFax on a potential employee. :)

11/24/2011 12:16 AM EST

My previous company didn't train, didn't mentor, and most of the time hired every position "ad-hoc", meaning the specifications were made up on the fly according to the tastes and perceived needs of the hiring manager. Professionals within the company either became entrenched, or for the unfortunate ones identified as high-potential, they were put on an "up or out" path. Ironically, the result was to drive out many talented key persons, create a hiring gap, and gut the company of badly needed skills. A paradigm shift is required in most companies to have a multi-faceted pipeline of talent--develop talent within, without creating unnecessary career risk for those willing to try new challenges, link with universities & other talent sources and develop new hires from interns at least two years before graduation, and apply what seems oxymoronic--a standardized but flexible hiring and careeer path approach. The latter consists of standard job descriptions and grades, and professionals are hired into the path and grade based on their merits, and then take on particular tasks and grow within the company; those that do well advance to higher grades, those that don't either plateau out, exit, or move to another path. The all or nothing paradigm most companies are in is hurting US innovation and competitiveness.

12/2/2011 11:33 PM EST

I think companies are mainly window shopping for that FOA employee. It boils down to if companies are losing more money by not having an employee sitting in an empty chair, they will quickly find someone.