There are companies that think they are hiring, but aren't, because their interview process is a trainwreck that passes on great candidates, aims only at former employees at big tech companies, and don't offer those people competitive salaries, so their accept rates are under 30%.
There's plenty of startups up there working on trying to improve the state of hiring, but little has changed so far.
Interview processes aren't about ensuring 100% of the good candidates get hired, but rather about trying to ensure that the candidate finally selected is good.
Being several times on the hiring end of that conversation, there's a class of great people that are very hard to identify over an interview. It feels quite bad to suggest a no-go in those cases, but living through such choices, sometimes for years, increases the fear of mishaps.
These days I mainly look at track record. Involvement in projects, conversations, issues filed, quick hacks, etc. Often language or tech doesn't even matter, as long as there's flexibility and an ability to talk over problems.
If these companies aren't really hiring because they aren't offering competitive salaries, that means that someone else is hiring and offering competitive salaries.
> There's plenty of startups up there working on trying to improve the state of hiring, but little has changed so far.
Probably not much will change, because it's an internal culture thing, not an external "wish we had this tool" sort of thing. Yes, some tools/services can reduce friction to make it easier, but if someone still has a policy which is counterproductive, and will not remove the policy, you won't get the necessary change.
>Probably not much will change, because it's an internal culture thing
Is it even internal? This just occurred to me so it's not even well-formed in my head, but I would posit that the policy is (or appears to be) shared even if it's subconscious. Systematic bias is a thing and nobody thinks they're the bad guy, but emergent behavior can be mistakenly attributed to "internal culture" while nothing gets better. Blinders.
There are a lot of commonalities in the anecdotes in threads on this topic, and if it was code being analyzed by a programmer they might say these shared behaviors could be pull-up refactored (or extract superclass, or...) from a scattershot of presumed-local traits ("policy") into characteristics of the entire system.
There's plenty of startups up there working on trying to improve the state of hiring, but little has changed so far.