This is the #1 problem I see in companies today. They have a HR department, and the HR department is using software to scan resumes for human evaluation. The software cleans out anything that isn’t a perfect buzzword match.
Example: I’ve been programming computers since I was 15. I know and have programming in something like 14 languages, not including assemblers.
Do I know all the ins and outs of (I’m going to pick a fashionable recent language) Ruby on Rails? No.
Can I learn it? Yes, in less than a week. After you’ve done as many programming languages as I have, they’re all either re-writes of Pascal/C or Lisp, pick one. Ruby is, I’m sure, just a re-spin of Lisp. All these modern nifty languages are efforts by kids today to make Lisp without the (...) syntax, with the exception of SmallTalk-80. And then there are some languages that are basically re-spins of SmallTalk. Perl always looked like a morphadite mash-up of SNOBOL and Rexx to me, but WTF, right? For many of the Unix crowd, they’re convinced that there were no other languages on mainframes than COBOL.
But for the HR departments... oh, no, that’s not good enough.
I went off on one of our HR people when I worked in the valley. She wrote up a job opening posting that required “three to five years programming Java.” I pointed out that Java had not been out for more than a couple years at that point. She said that was the requirement. I said “Bullcrap” and whipped my phone off the cradle (and I almost never used my phone), called up the hiring manager... who said “WTF?!!” and he went off on the HR drone too. He wanted a position filled, and he was never going to fill it with a posting like that.
Oh, that got me sidewise with HR management - I was “picking on” this poor woman, you see.
I replied that I had a reputation of picking on stupid people.
That really lit things up right there, lemme tell you.
I went off on one of our HR people when I worked in the valley. She wrote up a job opening posting that required “three to five years programming Java.”
A common idiocy. I laughed with my friends in the 90’s about a Visual Basic position requiring 5+ years of experience in VB. I had been using a private beta copy of Visual Basic 1.0 three years earlier.
On the other hand, I once interviewed with a company who challenged my resume’s statement, “I have used almost all publicly available dialects of BASIC”. So, the president of the company asked me if I had used Axolotl (or whatever) BASIC. I looked dumbfounded and sheepishly said that I had never even heard of it, much less used it. He responded “Good - because I just made it up”. I got the job offer.
Great story. You are right, HR people in general are IDIOTS, put there by lazy management so that they really don’t have to manage. It’s a racket.
The other reason IMO is that they don’t want those jobs filled. Why would they when the have the hired schmuck to work a little overtime to get it done? And they keep telling him that ‘no just seems to want the job Bill, but we’re trying to fill it’.