Exactly. Our recruiters aren't tech recruiters, they handle recruitment for the entire company (and we're not a tech company). As a result, a lot of our candidates have flashy resumes, but no actual skill. As in, I asked someone to write code in whatever language they wanted and they couldn't do it. And it wasn't some difficult assignment, this was a first round weeder task. The candidate straight up lied about having any development experience whatsoever. I even had an Information Systems background candidate say straight up that they're not interested in a dev role, which they were explicitly applying for.

And that's unfortunately far more common than not. People think that because they paid for a bootcamp that they're now competent enough to write code professionally, but it turns out, a lot of them didn't apply themselves at all.

There are good candidates in that mix, it's just hard to find them. We're happy to train a promising candidate, and we've hired interns that we've offered full-time positions to. We don't even particularly care about age, we had someone internally decide to transition to tech from a blue collar background, so we funded their education and now they write code for production on the side of their main job (they're our support person for our blue collar users, and they're really good at it).

If you're not a big flashy tech company, you're not going to get as much attention from qualified candidates, and you'll get a bunch of trash applicants who are looking for easy marks on the job boards.

It is not hard to hire someone, it is hard to hire someone who doesn't give you more work than they solve. I am not against hiring juniors, but they have to show initiative that they are passionate and able to improve. I don't want a person who will be junior for the rest of their career, because juniors usually require babysitting and that that away work and attention from competent people (the chads who actually build the core features and have to attend business meetings on why it is so good for customers to see additional offers during checking out).

It is a combination - incompetent HR, incompetent candidates, or bad hiring process. I am yet to apply to a company with a hiring process I'd call pleasant on all angles.

It's really not. Hiring was much easier 3-4 years ago as the pandemic nonsense was ending and people were bailing on companies forcing people to be back in office 5x/week. The competent devs knew they could do better, while the less competent devs held on to what they had.

Now with a bunch of layoffs, the candidate pool is completely flooded, and since we're not a big flashy tech company, we seem to get a ton of drive-by applicants who aren't qualified at all.