Jobs Nobody Qualifies For

I wonder how many other job postings with impossible requirements LXer.com readers have seen lately. I'd bet it's more than a few...

These requirements are perfectly sensible. It doesn't matter if there's no one on the planet who's truthfully qualified for them, since SQL Server 2008 has been out for less than 10 years; they already have a candidate they want to hire, who DOES have 10 years of SQL Server 2008 experience (really! it's on his resume, so it must be true), and they want to hire him. But because of company policy or somesuch, they're required to advertise for the job.

Seen very similar scenarios in academia, too.

Ethics. Wouldn't it be nice if more people had them?

that's 8 years in regular time. we all know that extraordinary people work more than the required 40 hours a week. assuming 50 weeks at 40 hours, 8 years comes out to 16000 hours. squeeze that into 5 years and you get 64 hours a week or 12 hours a day not even counting weekends. come on, that's doable. which linux lover doesn't spend that much time in front of their computer? if you have been working for the past 5 years, you qualify.

and for office 2010, that was released almost exactly 2 years ago, and we all know that working with that stuff robs you off your sleep, therefore you get to count, say, 20 hours per day. (4 hours for meals and other breaks) if you worked through weekends and holidays it's only another 285 days until you qualify. congratulations!

greetings, eMBee.

Quoting:and for office 2010, that was released almost exactly 2 years ago, and we all know that working with that stuff robs you off your sleep, therefore you get to count, say, 20 hours per day.

Perhaps. But shouldn't that be productive work?

In which case they have zero years of experience. Truly, I have yet to meet the person who works productively with MS Office (where did they hide that feature this year?). It's just a more expensive version of Solitaire.

(Which may in no small way explain the malaise in U.S. businesses today.)

well, if we assume that no one can do productive work, then those who require that experience shouldn't be able to tell the difference, since after all, they are already using it thinking that they are productive themselves.

greetings, eMBee.

There was an interesting comment on my blog post this morning, an angle I never thought of. Let's say you want to hire a young, white male candidate. If you have an impossible requirement you can eliminate anyone you want by simply claiming they don't meet that requirement.

Do I agree with that comment? Not really. I attribute this to stupidity rather than malice. I also think that those who want to discriminate can pretty much do what they want anyway since proving discrimination is almost impossible. Still... it's an interesting thought even if I doubt that it's in any way accurate.

@caitlyn: Maybe, but any random young, white male candidate probably won't meet the impossible requirement either (that's why it's "impossible"), unless you tell him to make a "special" resume just for them that satisfies this requirement.

I think it's more likely that they have a particular candidate they want to hire no matter what; his age, skin color, and sex aren't important, what's important is that he's the son or daughter of one of the managers, or the nephew of the CEO, or similar.

I agree with Caitlyn here. A set of over the top criteria can be used to rule out any candidate you like. Making exceptions to the criteria is of course at the discretion of the hirer and all kinds of plausible excuses can be made in any formal document. Thus you hire who you like and the failed candidates have no come back.

Of course not hiring the best candidate is always dumb but who said employers are smart?

that is only the tip of the iceberg.

I don't know how much of the problem is sheer inability to understand what it actually takes to do a job, how much is fear of getting stuck with a bad employee you can't (or, more realistically, are too cowardly to) fire, and how much is not wanting to run afoul of anti-discrimination laws that really aren't as tricky as people seem to think.

Whatever the case -- nobody seems to know how to hire anybody any more. And then -- they complain because they can't find good employees.

I wistfully remember being hired for three different contracts, being acclaimed as a rock star at all three, and being offered permanent employment in each case. All without having much of anything in the way of qualifications except for a long history of being a go-to guy who would get the job done, without regard for what the job was.

In one case, my qualifications fell so far short of the job description that the HR system refused to let me be entered for the job. We had to figure out creative non-lying ways to fill in the info so that I could be hired on.

Those were the days. Good people do good work. Resumes don't do much of anything.

Interesting points Dino. My impression is that things have become ridiculously formal and common sense is absent. Perhaps that is because those sorts of jobs no longer are regarded as highly by management as they once were. For many in management manipulation has replaced getting a job done efficiently as a Modus Operandi

/Grumpymiddleagedguy

@ dinotrac

Its worse than that -- all to often when an employer (who is constantly complaining about the difficulty of finding qualified, competent, reliable people) do hire promising staff who can do the job (or easily learn to), they treat the employee(s) so badly that they inevitably up and leave on the sensible grounds that they can readily find reasonable employment elsewhere -- which of course is interpreted as more proof that good, well-qualified people can't be found.