Zero Gap Recruiting |
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25 January 2024 - Zürich
This week I attended a networking event put on by a local job board and a recruiting company. The theme was trends in the Swiss IT job market. One of the terms thrown around was one that was new to me, so-called zero gap recruiting. That means that a company is only considering candidates who match 100% of the items on their job description. I've done a lot of hiring and I've been applying for jobs even longer than that, and I don't think I've ever seen candidates (including myself) fit 100% of the items on the job description. And I've hired some great people over the years! One of the panelists pointed out that this also leaves the candidate little room to grow in a position. Right now the job market is heavily tilted against job seekers here though, so companies are pressing that advantage. Job postings are reportedly seeing an average of twice as many applicants as they did this time last year. Startups are also experiencing a funding crunch while big tech (e.g. Google) is still doing layoffs.
Everything is cyclical though in the tech industry. I was just getting started in college when the Dotcom bubble burst, so I focused on physics for a few years thinking academia was a safer bet. But of course I got sucked back into the tech industry, as the marketing problem of finding customers turned out to be reather similar to the problem of finding resonances in high energy electron-positron collisions. And I didn't have to worry about causality anymore. Then once I caught the startup bug I was hooked. Looking back over the past decade I've solved some interesting problems and helped a lot of people solve theirs. But I don't think I'll ever go for the zero gap recruiting trend, because I don't think any job description I've written fully encapsulates what a person who ends up becoming a great contributor looks like. It's more of an opening line in a conversation. And anyone who's been through a six or eight step interview process knows that it's an in-depth conversation! It's important to remember too that developers are people and they need room to grow. A job that they have all the skills for today may not be so interesting to them in two years when the job market again favors job seekers.
