This is not unusual. My spouse works for Glassdoor. Entry level programmer jobs in Texas will get 2000 applications (not bots) within about 72 hours. Desperate people from all over the US.
I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.
Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in 48 hours if someone forgets to take it down (is only supposed to go up for 60 mins max but things happen).
Not to hijack, but do you or your spouse have an opinion on the WSJ story about companies intensely curating their reviews (maybe even paying/threatening the employees and/or Glassdoor)?
I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star reviews stay.
Great clickbait. The first sentence provides crucial context - Amazon wants to hire 30K. So they had, on average, about 7 applications for every job.
That actually doesn't seem so great.
It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting.
So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive way so as to get a ton of poor quality matches. And I'm willing to bet this is exactly what they did.
This actually makes me a lot less inclined to work at Amazon - it seems like they're just playing a numbers game, not really trying to recruit for cultural fit.
I wonder how many of these people will be laid off within 3 years of being hired.
They were hiring in 6 cities, so that's an average of 30k applicants per location. That's a heck of a lot for a single community, even in a large city. How many businesses get tens of thousands of job applicants at a single location?
One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!
Amazon has a huge amount of churn. Most employees only stick around for 2 years and then leave shortly afterwards (once the cash bonuses stop and they start dribbling out stock instead).
but were all 30k jobs listed? I'm assuming the positions listed were nowhere near close to the positions they need to hire for. As in, they probably havent even listed for a lot of the roles.
on the other hand - I can't imagine I'm the only person to have been getting quite a few "come work for us" emails from Amazon via LinkedIn recently (two in the last month, six in the last year). The solicitations do not appear to be very carefully targeted - they seem to mention everything from machine learning to mobile app development.
I figure it's similar to applying to colleges. Stanford, Yale, etc send you info packets and ask you to apply but then reject you. Although some schools figure that if it takes $20 to acquire someone's attention and get them to apply to you (and pay a $90) fee then they can pocket the $70 (minus reviewer expenses) and look more exclusive when it comes to acceptance rates, but that's not the case with companies.
I get so many solicitations from recruiters that clearly didn’t look at my profile (i.e. “looking for Java architect” and I have zero java experience) that I’ve started reporting and blocking them.
Sounds more likely jobs offered in one of the rural areas. I love shopping Amazon and I love their technology even more but their work/life balance is terrible. Their tech guys live in fear, real fear, of being someplace without WiFi. I’d probably only last a year - I go to all the parent/teacher conferences at my kids school and that clearly goes against the grain at Amazon.
Everyone I know at Amazon works 8 hour days, completely disconnect when they finish with work, and have tons of flexibility for working from home when family related issues arise.
I don't doubt that you know specific people who are having the opposite experience - Amazon culture varies a lot based on which vp/director you work for. But your friends' experience isn't indicative of all tech employees.
Only slightly related: If I open the link on my iOS device, music playing stops (Spotify). Somehow CBS manages with their useless auto play videos to kill my background music playing. Should this be possible? I thought there is no auto play video on IOS?
On Android, in Firefox, they cover the bottom third of the screen with a permanent notification that you can't close and contains two links: open in CBS app, and open in Chrome.
Looks like they don't really want my traffic. Oh well.
In chrome you can often force auto play by playing a sound (and having that fail) and then playing another sound right after that. Maybe IOS has a similar loophole?
That is actually a surprisingly good ratio. I work for a company that deals with this kind of data and the applicant to hire ratio at some companies, especially in retail or unskilled jobs can easily hit much, much higher than that.
When I see people complaining about the hiring processes for many low qualification jobs they often have no idea just how many people they are up againt. They get annoyed because they didn't get an interview, but if you are getting 50 applicants for every position you're not going to interview even half of them.
As my boss likes to say, bulk recruitment is an exercise in saying "no" as efficiently and quickly as possible, whilst pissing off as few as possible (you want them to reapply or not hold a grudge against your brand).
My friend’s wife took almost 8 months to find a production support job. Why are jobs so hard to get these days? Is it because competition is so high and for a single job there are 20 applicants?
- H1Bs are cheaper to hire and take the place of American jobs (though to a far lesser degree than you'll hear during this upcoming election
- Everyone is preparing for a recession (for the last three years now)
- Jobs are posted online and get tons of applicants now. That makes it easier to switch cities and not have to go through a period of unemployment but that also means they get tons of applicants. Are many of them bots? You bet.
I don't get it either. I found myself involuntarily out of work a couple years ago (company shut down), and it took a month before I finally found something after > 20 applications. Out of at least 20 applications, I only ended up interviewing with two - and I'm qualified as hell for software development. One thing I wonder, though - there's some anecdata that certain qualifications can actually work against you. For example, this lady (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...) suggests that you consider rejecting anybody with an MS in CS. I've seen many people on here and on Slashdot suggest that they would never consider hiring anybody with an MS certification, for example (and some even saying they'd never hire somebody who went to college!). You never know what weird filter somebody is applying to your resume.
I assume it looks bad if a candidate someone hires ends up being a terrible fit. This is basically how it goes everywhere else at larger companies. Visibility is more important than getting things done.
Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.
Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.
Great question. No one seems to know why. The worst part about the job search, is not even getting a response. most companies don't even have an HR function so it's cheaper to just not answer. It's also cheaper not to get into a lawsuit by giving an answer as well which kind of sucks. I wish there was a way to protect companies in their speech so that's not discriminatory to tell them why we didn't choose the candidate.
> Amazon said all of the openings are for full time positions and come with benefits. And the company said the openings are not related to the usual increase in hiring it does to prepare for the busy holiday shopping season.
That's what I thought, I live near one of the Big Amazon distribution centres in the UK and adds for Amazon Christmas workers are all over the Busses and billboards at this time of year.
I had a recruiter reach out to me 3 times now about the job in the new HQ at the alexa team. I'm not interested but I am not surprised so many are applying. Amazon is hiring really aggressively right now.
I'm just glad their new headquarters isn't in New York or California: that would've been terrible. Arlington housing prices are already at 500$/sq foot. i really think they could've still picked a better place.
People are listening to too much government propaganda. The percentage of Americans employed is actually EXTREMELY low! The gov press releases EXCLUDE all those unemployed pesky minorities with a category called "discouraged"(= non white) workers! Excluding this recovery, employment is at a 35-year low!
Even in Virginia they only forecast 25 jobs related to the new HQ next year, and maybe, just maybe if their PR magic ball says yes, there might be 25k jobs.....over the next decade PR firm fingers crossed
[+] [-] rshnotsecure|6 years ago|reply
I think at one time the advice to “play the numbers game” was correct for online job apps. Not anymore.
Even more saddening, Glassdoor uses a temp/test sample job ad. It’s for cat sitting. $15/hr. That will get hundreds of apps in 48 hours if someone forgets to take it down (is only supposed to go up for 60 mins max but things happen).
[+] [-] cdolan|6 years ago|reply
I noticed a local company I follow had fluctuating review counts between 30-45. I wrote a web scraper to see if reviews were being taken down, and for this company, over 20 1 or 2 star reviews have been taken down, but any new 5 star reviews stay.
[+] [-] tryitnow|6 years ago|reply
That actually doesn't seem so great.
It's even less impressive when it's incredibly easy to get a ton of low-quality matches when recruiting.
So if Amazon execs wanted to tout a big number of applications they could just advertise these positions in a wildly aggressive way so as to get a ton of poor quality matches. And I'm willing to bet this is exactly what they did.
This actually makes me a lot less inclined to work at Amazon - it seems like they're just playing a numbers game, not really trying to recruit for cultural fit.
I wonder how many of these people will be laid off within 3 years of being hired.
[+] [-] simonh|6 years ago|reply
One of the locations is Arlington Virginia, the future location of HQ2, but they're only hiring 400 there now. In future they expect that will go up to 24k, which is about 10% of the population of the city!
[+] [-] GreenJelloShot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshlegs|6 years ago|reply
That said, I really didn't read the article :o
[+] [-] df|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Washuu|6 years ago|reply
1.) Used the wrong name repeatedly even after correcting them.
2.) Asking me to apply to a role that is a step down.
3.) "The position you are applying for is in Seattle." - After saying I was not interested in Seattle.
[+] [-] aripickar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JCharante|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fins|6 years ago|reply
And that when the first line of my profile very explicitly states that I would never work for Amazon.
Not sure if they are so desperate to get any warm bodies in, or just general Amazon's incompetence.
[+] [-] save_ferris|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harry8|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noego|6 years ago|reply
I don't doubt that you know specific people who are having the opposite experience - Amazon culture varies a lot based on which vp/director you work for. But your friends' experience isn't indicative of all tech employees.
[+] [-] theomega|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobsoap|6 years ago|reply
Looks like they don't really want my traffic. Oh well.
[+] [-] fuzz4lyfe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] domnomnom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noneeeed|6 years ago|reply
When I see people complaining about the hiring processes for many low qualification jobs they often have no idea just how many people they are up againt. They get annoyed because they didn't get an interview, but if you are getting 50 applicants for every position you're not going to interview even half of them.
As my boss likes to say, bulk recruitment is an exercise in saying "no" as efficiently and quickly as possible, whilst pissing off as few as possible (you want them to reapply or not hold a grudge against your brand).
Recruitment is very easy to screw up.
[+] [-] TrackerFF|6 years ago|reply
The last back-end position I applied for had like 15 applicants
[+] [-] rokalakt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnmandal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astura|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindfulplay|6 years ago|reply
I am a lifelong Amazon customer but choose never to be an employee of theirs.
[+] [-] mcv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hi41|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbob45|6 years ago|reply
- Everyone is preparing for a recession (for the last three years now)
- Jobs are posted online and get tons of applicants now. That makes it easier to switch cities and not have to go through a period of unemployment but that also means they get tons of applicants. Are many of them bots? You bet.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notTyler|6 years ago|reply
Like, I'm staffed at a company that isn't Arthur Anderson right now on an internal project and our SM/PO came back from scrum of scrums and said everyone was massively overestimating tasks to make sure they got them in on time. If you finish early you get pushback on starting something else because it looks 'so bad' if work goes from one sprint to the next.
Slow work and hitting metrics > everything, I guess.
[+] [-] bob_theslob646|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|6 years ago|reply
A lot of people get filtered out.
[+] [-] peter303|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brosinante|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowsandmilk|6 years ago|reply
> Amazon said all of the openings are for full time positions and come with benefits. And the company said the openings are not related to the usual increase in hiring it does to prepare for the busy holiday shopping season.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avgDev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thorwasdfasdf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] williamDafoe|6 years ago|reply
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO
[+] [-] apexalpha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamDafoe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flyGuyOnTheSly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hon3ybadg3r|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] NoblePublius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delfinom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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