The problem is the job market has basically priced in exaggerations on resumes. People exaggerate all the time and don’t get punished for it.
If you don’t exaggerate, you may even miss out on opportunities and hamper your career goals whatever they may be, because they already assume you exaggerate and already account for it when reading your resume. And if you don’t exaggerate? Well, they’re happy to pay you less than they would’ve.
Certainly at least in tech in the Bay Area, fake it till you make it is the norm. I’ve met plenty of people with amazing resumes and references just to see them not be as good as advertised.
A job I applied to a year ago made me do a general logic test. It’s the only job that’s ever made me do one. I think I spent like half the time on one question because I was so confused. I genuinely believe there was a typo. Anyways, it’s the closest I’ve come to putting my foot down and asking for accomodations because holy shit.
So, I ace the part relevant to my job but failed that part bad. Get this: they say they want me to retake it before giving the results to the potential client. HUH? If the test is bullshit, why make me do it at all? AND GET THIS. I retake it. I’ve now wasted three hours of my 2023 holiday season on this. The client rejects me because I didn’t have experience with some random technology. WTF??? I think I even asked before all this why don’t they show my resume to the client before the test and they said because they like to give a full file. I was so angry. It’s probably the most unprofessional email I’ve sent, but I literally sent one saying something like “Then why didn’t you show them my resume before making me waste three hours???” Seriously. They didn’t even talk to me. Which is fine, I’m not saying they should have to, but for the contracting company to make me waste so much time… And to make me retake it (proving the whole thing is BS). Wow.
Anyways, I’m employed now, thank goodness.
My boss’s boss said everyone should be happy on Friday because it’s bonus day. I’m my boss’s only contracted employee. I think I don’t get one. I’m very tempted to just send him an email like “was I supposed to see a bonus in my paycheck? Blah mentioned it.” But I don’t wanna seem passive aggressive.
As someone who has read a lot of cvs, i wish more people thought like this. We didn’t list the requirements just for fun. Quit wasting people’s time by applying for stuff when you don’t match the requirements
Blame all the companies with ridiculously high requirements just to hire people who don’t meet all of them. It’s a common advice to apply even when you don’t meet all the reqs, because it works out so often.
As someone who has applied to a lot of jobs, I wish more job posters thought like you. It would take me 1 minute to find you a job posting for an IT position where they ask for a minimum number of years using a technology that hasn’t even existed for that many years.
I think this happens because some manager says “we want an expert in this technology” but then the job poster slaps some arbitrary number on that like “oh 5-10 years should be enough for an expert” with no awareness that it’s a brand new technology.
It would take 15 seconds to look up “<technology> release date” and use that as a reference.
I mean to be fair, it’s a struggle between terms like “expert” or “senior” being too ambiguous and a time interval of experience being a poor indicator of actual proficiency. The corporate world doesn’t care though and ties the two together as a general rule because middle management isn’t smart enough to tell the difference. Thus, it boils down to “we’re hiring a senior level, it takes X years to reach that at our company, thus we expect someone to have that many years of experience at any other company doing a job similar to what we do”. Some HR peon then words it like “you need X years of experience using [exact technologies we expect applicant to use]”.
To tie this back to the OP: Most (?) people understand this is what is happening in basically all job postings where they list years of required experience to match their expected proficiency (i.e. I’m as good as someone who has been doing this for X years), but there are people who interpret this literally and think that if they have X-0.1 years of experience in that exact thing that they will be automatically rejected because it said X is required and they do not have X.
In every instance where I’ve been reading cvs for a job, the requirements have always been requirements. If we had nice to have features, they were listed as nice to have.
I work at a university. When hiring, if someone doesn’t have one of the “Required Job Qualifications”, they are immediately disqualified. We can wiggle a little if we can infer one of the qualifications from other experience, but that is pretty frowned upon.
If we have things that we’d like to have but are not required, they are listed as “Preferred Job Qualifications”. We then create a rating scale for each based on their relative importance and grade candidates one each of the preferred qualifications. We use the resulting rankings to determine who we will interview. We MUST interview every candidate above the lowest ranked candidate we interview.
When I have hired people, I rarely find someone that meets all the requirements. I think a wishlist is a good way to look at it. If someone hits 9/10 things at best and I need someone for the job, then they get it.
Ultimately, there is no standard way to do this as it is up to the person doing the hiring.
I’d also add that someone once specifically applied in a way that I said not to apply, but I was wrong and receiving the application through those means was actually very helpful and they met the other reqs so I hired them.
So much of this stuff is just based on intuition and your ability to demonstrate certain technical skills.
I took a job as a medical assistant. I was not certified. It was during COVID, and the manager was woefully understaffed. I had zero experience or training. They still hired me, because in her words “we can teach you everything you need to know, and your resume demonstrated you were a good learner so that’s all that matters.” (I had taught myself Chinese and coding, and put that on the resume).
I worked my butt off, and after two years when I had to leave to go back to school they offered me a massive raise, more training to get me a promotion as an actual technician to start making 80k/year, and they even said when I finished grad school I could be taken on as a partner and own the business (it was a small clinic). They wanted to do anything to get me to stay.
All these companies these days care too much about certs. They don’t know how to hire. They should look for resume’s that demonstrate learning, initiative, responsibility, and commitment. Because at the end of the day: almost anyone can learn any job that isn’t a PhD-level.
Like, having managers be required to have a college degree is moronic.