#JobRequirements #RidiculousJobRequirements #ModernJobMarket
🤔 Have you ever come across a job posting that made you scratch your head and wonder, “Why are job requirements so stupid nowadays?” It’s not just you – many professionals in various industries are feeling the frustration of unrealistic and unrelated job requirements.
In today’s competitive job market, many job seekers are left feeling baffled by the laundry list of qualifications and skills that seem completely unnecessary for the role. If you’ve been nodding your head in agreement, you’re not alone. Let’s take a closer look at this perplexing issue and explore why job requirements seem to be getting more and more absurd.
## The Absurdity of Hyper-Specific Requirements
For one, if I meet all the ridiculously hyper-specific requirements in my current role, I would most likely already be within the same pay rate being offered, and would have no reason to want to leave. How many times have you come across a job posting that requires an IT professional to be an expert on Kodak press printing machines? What is the correlation between the two? It seems like many job posts want candidates to have a range of experiences across different roles, functions, concepts, and technologies that have no correlation with each other.
## Unrealistic Expectations for Experience
Perhaps one of the most baffling aspects of modern job requirements is the demand for years of experience in entry-level positions. Why do they want 5 years of experience for entry-level positions? It seems unreasonable to expect someone who is just starting their career to have such a lengthy track record. How can one develop expertise in programming, Azure Cloud, Salesforce, and medical billing and coding within a short span of time? It’s no wonder many job seekers are left scratching their heads and wondering what is really going on out there.
## What’s the Solution?
As job requirements continue to become more and more unrealistic, it’s important for job seekers and employers alike to address this issue and work towards a more rational approach to hiring. It’s clear that the current system is not only frustrating for job seekers, but it’s also hindering the ability of companies to find the right talent for their needs.
Here are a few potential solutions to consider:
– Emphasize transferable skills: Instead of focusing solely on specific technical qualifications, employers should place more emphasis on transferable skills and the ability to learn and adapt.
– Revise job descriptions: Employers should take a closer look at their job descriptions and eliminate unnecessary requirements that don’t directly relate to the role.
– Provide training and development opportunities: Companies can invest in training and development programs to help employees gain the skills they need to excel in their roles.
## In Conclusion
The current state of job requirements in the modern job market is undoubtedly perplexing. However, by addressing this issue head-on and working towards more rational and realistic job requirements, we can create a more efficient and effective hiring process for both job seekers and employers.
So, the next time you come across a job posting with seemingly irrelevant and unattainable requirements, remember that you’re not alone in your frustration. It’s time for a change, and by working together, we can pave the way for a more reasonable and fair job market.
Job descriptions are wishlists. Always apply if you think you can do the job and if you meet some of the requirements.
Odds are good that they’re not going to find anyone who checks all the boxes.
Companies who are sponsoring an H1-B visa need to document that they advertised the job and no qualified applicants applied. An easy way to do this is to create a job listing that exactly matches the experience of the person they are hiring. Unsure if this is the case here, but it might explain a really weirdly specific job posting.
Also, it could just be a wishlist to cover multiple needs with one position.
People like me who are just tired of bs and want an easier job and are willing to take pay cut.
I think they sort of get worse over time too. By that I mean they don’t remove anything old from a lot of places, and just keep adding on new requirements. So maybe before it was that you had to know AD, servers, some networking and troubleshooting. Enter the cloud, OK and all the cloud stuff, and SaaS apps, and also mobile devices, and all the security around all of it… and…
Yeah they are crazy… I dont mind dealing with the company itself but recruiters from contract IT companies are the worst. I had a lot of certificates but they needed this obscure Microsoft one (I dont remember which) and I said I have like 4 Microsoft admin certificates and 10 years of experience but no they need 100% to be aligned. Stopped taking requests from recruiters from contract companies now- they have no idea what to look for since they are not technical so your resume would never reach a hiring manager who actually doesnt need more than 60% of the requirements. Anyway that is my experience…
It’s all copy pasted from hr Karen’s word doc from 1999.
What? You don’t know voice, routing email servers, servers, application programming, project management, troubleshooting and haven’t had experience as a director with a CCIE and a BS and a PHD?
You don’t know what you’re doing.. <smirk>
For specific knowledge of things, it depends on the company. For example, the one I work at would probably ask for Toshiba/HP printer knowledge, Epson kitchen printer knowledge, InfoGen knowledge (food POS software), IGT software knowledge (gambling), Office 365, with a bit of Powershell.
But again, like a lot of folks are saying here, it’s just a wishlist. The job, no matter what, and specifically in IT, will have you train you for 1-3 months. They will want to train you on how to talk to end users, how to present fixes and setup expectation, ticketing systems, policies, other procedures. My two previous repair shop jobs were very different from each other. And currently I have 2 IT jobs and both are different in terms of work culture and communication.
IT job posts tend to demonstrate that the poster is clueless. And why those same people expect you to work 365/24/7, on-call for peanuts.
I wonder if construction jobs ask, “must have 5yrs experience driving a white Ford F150 with slight dent in right fender”
> why would an IT professional with the education and years of experience, and then also be an expert on Kodak press printing machines? What is the correlation between the two?
Some of these with very specific requirements are for jobs where they already have a person in mind.
Company policy, however, means they have to put up a job ad for the public. But in reality they likely have no intent of actually hiring outside the company. It’s in case they magically find someone that’s more qualified than the person that’s already in-house that is ready to move up.
job descriptions aren’t specific requirements unless stated. So for example they mention Salesforce, it doesn’t necessarily have to be Salesforce. it can be another comparable CRM. Same goes for an IT professional and medical billing or printer pressing. those fields have IT generalists who come from manufacturing or healthcare IT and are aware or and possibly more familiar with those avenues of IT. Not every IT shop is copy/paste. There were a number of things i did in Manufacturing IT, that I never touched in Healthcare IT. And some of the things i talked about were foreign concepts to the people around me – even lifers.
I used to wonder this all the time. I believed no one like that really exists. Until I met someone like this. And he fulfilled so many more requirements than was on the wishlist for a job opening advertised at the company I used to work for.
Here’s why and how he did it: he was a NERD. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. He was in his mid 40’s and had no life. He was always like this. This was his life and he worked out of love for this stuff on the regular 12-18 hours a day or more. Definitely a committed dude! I have respect for him on being committed like that. He does not know everything but enough to get the job done in mostly any role. For me, I like to take vacations whenever possible or weekend visits to family or watch tiktok videos or play video games. I do put in the time on the side when I’m learning something new but I would not dedicate 12-16 hours a day to it for my entire life to learn everything to meet someone’s wishlist just to get underpaid for it and never be able to really enjoy my life. He likely didn’t also but did so for his own satisfaction.
Edit::: IMO he does not set the bar:::
these posts pop up 3 times a month
> For one, if I meet all the ridiculously hyper-specific requirements in my current role, I would most likely already be within the same pay rate being offered, and would have no reason to want to leave.
that is not a given. they are going to pay you whatever they think they can, as a way of keeping costs down, and that means ignoring things like inflation bonuses. new hires, meanwhile, have to get market rate. that’s why you get, on average, 15% more, when you jump.
so why would someone with these skills be willing to take this shit job? Layoffs, got fired, is local and doesn’t want to move, or doesn’t meet all of the requirements but is close enough — a motivated 70% is often a better pick that a toxic 100% match.
> Two, why would an IT professional with the education and years of experience, and then also be an expert on Kodak press printing machines? What is the correlation between the two?
That is the ideal candidate that they want; it’s a list of must + nice to haves. You can usually pick out the must-haves by the details, number of systems listed, acronyms, etc. For example, if they say “must know cloud platforms” then it’s a nice to have, but if it’s “must know IDL, SAP S4/HANA MySQL, and Exadata” then you can guess that’s a main focus.
In practice, they may compromise on some / most / all of that expertise. Some roles, like deep SMEs may not.
> Why do so many job posts want you to have a range of experiences across different roles, functions, concepts, and technologies that have no correlation with each other?
They might have a relationship and correlation at this particular job. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to babysit cloud, SCADA, windows, linux, SAP, and random MDM crap, all shoe-horned together through integration platforms like Mulesoft. It may also be they can’t afford SMEs for each domain, so you get to handle all of it.
> Why do they want 5 years of experience for entry level positions? Why would someone who has all of that experience accept that pay rate?
1) that’s all they can pay. they need expertise, but they can only pay X. IT dept’s don’t have unlimited budgets.
2) in low COL the pay may be decent.
3) Experience could be defined in several ways; someone with a legit 4 year degree from a tech school + some internships might qualify. However, 5 years IT experience post-school is something I’d classify as mid-level.
4) our offshore Indian contractors, with 5+ years experience, start at ~$4/hr, and more like $14/hr for competent staff. Offshore Engineering is more like $35-50/hr. Point is, there are people who will take it, and these adverts may be for them, or to say “we can’t find domestic hires, we must offshore, etc.”.
5) massive layoffs + COVID driving a lot of workers to IT means there is a glut of labor, and they can offer shit because people will take it.
Often when the job listing is very specific they already have someone internally they want to move to that position and just need to publicly announce it just so they can say they tried.
>Two, why would an IT professional with the education and years of experience, and then also be an expert on Kodak press printing machines? What is the correlation between the two?
So those kinds of things are put in the listing to entice someone who would have that knowledge to apply. If that is a system that they would need to touch, it would be a plus for an applicant.
>Why do so many job posts want you to have a range of experiences across different roles, functions, concepts, and technologies that have no correlation with each other?
Some companies want generalists more than specialists. The smaller the org, the more this is true.
>Why do they want 5 years of experience for entry level positions? Why would someone who has all of that experience accept that pay rate? In 5 years, how can one develop expertise in programming, Azure Cloud, Salesforce, and then also be a medical billing and coding expert?
Generally they want x years of experience in IT work, not necessarily those items. Also, job reqs are wishlists, not “you must have 100% of these items to get an interview”
People on here get the wrong idea about ”experience“.
It seems obvious that employers would prefer someone who’s experienced at help desk to work a help desk job, and they want to pay them helpdesk wages. They don’t care about potential candidates’ career progression, and their perception of what is or isn’t entry level. And they can probably find candidates that don’t care about career progression either! Plenty of people work helpdesk their whole career, or at least the first decade of it.
Idk, this sub is funny sometimes. Bunch of recent grads who can’t imagine the indignity of still working help desk in their. . . late 20s. This rant kinda got away from your specific question OP, just saying that five years of experience doesn’t really mean much unless it was very progressive job experience.
If it’s a government job, it’s being done so only one (already selected) person qualifies. With few exceptions, all jobs need to be posted and by making it ludicrously specific they ensure that only the person they want is qualified.
If it’s a non-government job, take it as a wish list. Be prepared to discuss it at an interview. If you’re familiar with a similar program bring that up. For example, they want excel experience but you’ve comfortable with and used google sheets a lot. Probably good enough.
>What is really going on out there?
In not necessarily any particular order:
* Whomever’s writing requirements *should* write in, for requirements, what’s actually *required*. Many don’t get that right. Can put in pretty much as much as one wants for, e.g. preferred, strongly preferred, good to also have, ideal candidate will have, etc. But requirements should only contain what’s actually required, and the bare minimums of what is or would actually be required to hire person for the position (notably for legal and other practical reasons)
* Many will (ab)use “requirements” as a filter – not so much to filter out those that don’t meet actual requirements, but to trim applicant pool to those more highly qualified or that additionally have more desired/preferable experience/knowledge/skills, etc. Again, not the way to do that (e.g. many will look at stated requirements, and if they don’t strictly meet them, won’t even bother to apply – which can cause employers to miss out on potentially very good candidates – even very possibly the one(s) they’d want to hire … if they actually applied).
* Tighter market, folks will (ab)use stated requirements, either as (poor) filter as noted above, and/or they may, in such markets, with oversupply of well qualified, in fact actually raise the requirements of what they’re actually willing to consider for the position.
* Sometimes for legal/regulatory/policy reasons, an employer will be required to post an open position, even if they already know exactly who they want to hire for the position. So, in such cases, they may tailor their writeup of the “requirements” so they only and exactly just fit the one person they want to hire for that position.
>Why do they want 5 years of experience for entry level positions?
Not all entry level positions require zero knowledge/skills/experience … in fact almost none do. So, entry level, quite depends on entry level for *what*, exactly. E.g. entry level for a nuclear plant operator isn’t just gonna grab some person off the street – they’ll need to be quite qualified, and generally have some type(s) of relevant experience. Well, similar holds true for IT. So, entry level for X may not require 5 years of work experience with X, but it may require some year(s) or other experience or work experience with X, or things reasonably closely related to X.
>In 5 years, how can one develop expertise in programming, Azure Cloud, Salesforce, and then also be a medical billing and coding expert?
Uhm, “expertise in programming”, “coding expert” … got redundancy and duplication covered, at least twice? 😉 Anyway, feasible to have all that, but not so common. All of those are *relatively* common, combining Azure + Salesforce, less common, but certainly exists. Add medical billing to that, and definitely won’t be so common, but certainly exists.
So, yeah, e.g. had a manger once, basically wanted to hire a “clone” of me. Said manager wrote up the description of the opening. I told said manager I wouldn’t apply, as I didn’t meet all of what was stated as required. Yeah, I then helped that manager rewrite that (draft) description/posting for the job opening.
Because they can get away with it.
That’s not new.
When I was fresh back in the late 90s it was already like this.
They wanted someone with a decade of experience for 15k (~1.5x min wage for the time). I kinda felt sorry for the recruiter, especially since IT people with a decade of experience *in the late 90s* were kinda rare.
Sometimes the people writing the job descriptions don’t communicate directly with the people who actually manage the teams.
Many years ago, I took a Unix Engineering job that listed “Windows administration” as one of the skills that they needed. After joining the team, my manager told me that “We will NEVER run Windows on our servers!”.
Basically, just send them your resume, if they like you and you have an initial screening call, that is where you would ask them what the role is really like and what the day to day tasks really are.
My current role (broadcast engineering) required a bunch of niche networking and communication experience and a degree. I flunked out of 2 universities, but had a lot of the niche skills that other candidates didn’t. Got the gig.
My rule of thumb when applying was if I felt good about 60% of the bullet points, then I’d send an app (if I liked the organization)