I once applied for a job where one of the requirements was “minimum 5 to 10 years experience in X”. My friend told me to submit a CV saying I have 3 to 6 years experience in X and see if they shortlist me.
“Up to 50% off or more!”
That or when the range is so huge as to be meaningless - a $25k-150k range is completely useless.
Thankfully some states in the US have made this illegal, like Colorado.
Most IT job postings done by recruiters are hilariously bad, I scrolled through some and I’m just like “really? That’s all you’re telling me?”
“expert knowledge in NT, FreeBSD, Cisco IOS, Java, C#, Active Directory, Windows Server, Fortinet”. Uh huh. Just be an expert at everything, I see.
Then you do the interview and they want like 2 of those things and less experience is fine. 🙄
They want the unicorn, they will settle for a horse with a horn taped to its forehead.
“…will you accept a whale that thinks it’s a unicorn?”
A job I’m interviewing for now asked me if I had experience with libvirt, qemu,and KVM.
(For those not in the know, libvirt is a wrapper around qemu, KVM is the name of the technology, so if you have experience with one or both of the first two, you definitely have experience with the last one).
man would it be nice if I could just get to the fucking interview
This is my first interview after 3 months of applying (not every day, mind you, I’ve probably applied to like 300 jobs though). I have another one in the next few days as well, for another company.
LinkedIn Premium does actually seem to help, compared to sites like Dice. Good luck out there, it’s pretty rough right now.
Recruiting is the great leveller. Those who don’t have any skills can at least make it harder for companies to hire people who do have skills.
I think it means that if you have 10 years of experience you are welcome to apply, but they are only willing to pay commensurate to experience up to 10 years.
Probably right, and they don’t need the word minimum at all
I would have assumed that the minimum could change based on the candidates. So if they get a bunch of 10+ year candidates, any 5 year candidates would just be skipped.
“Minimum” in this could refer not to the number of years but to the criteria of eligibility. The sentence might mean “At minimum you have to pass the following eligibility criteria: between 5 and 10 years experience.”
If they then give other criteria that you have to match, that’s nonsense :)
Or I suppose it could mean they’re looking for someone with a minimum of five years, and while they’re not looking for someone with more than 10 years they will consider them. “We want someone with (hard minimum of 5) to (soft maximum of 10) years experience.
Is the job for someone to improve the clarity of their communications by any chance?
Your first interpretation wasn’t the case in this specific ad, because the “minimum 5-10 year experience” was on the list of “essential experience and skills” and there was a separate list of “desirables”.
Your second explanation just supports my original infuriation - just state the range that you’re interested in, without calling it a minimum.
Actually, I got that job, I’m still working for the company, but to your last point, I have to say it’s hilarious how bad our communications dept is at communicating to the rest of the company.
I once had a colleague update a shitty webapp we had written to add a message saying “pages loading may take up to a minute or more”
Or say “an average of” and give a range.
This is just non-math language describing a standard deviation.
You need an average of between 6 years.
Or just give the range.
I, too, am irritated by this.
Seems like a linear algebra question. Are they trying to test you on the optimal region?
Yeah it’s grammatically incorrect but don’t we know what they mean? They would settle for 5 years experience if they had to, but 10 years is very much preferred and if they felt they could require 10 they would.
Most neurotypical people don’t need everything to be ridigly perfect in definitions. We understand what they meant. I think the objection to this comes from the more autistic type folks. Which isn’t to say they are wrong for being different.
Eh, I am not autistic and I am bothered by a lot of language things. But I also appreciate creativity with words when it gets a point across, especially if it would take 50 more words to get across the meaning that 3 creatively combined words can also communicate.
And offer them that sweet fresh-out-of-college salary
The thing is that despite my original post I actually agree with you and quietly hate myself for being mildly infuriated by this.
I recommend you read my reply to another poster who is mildly infuriated by incorrect grammar.
That means you put it outside of the 70% who have to match.
Because there are uncertainties regarding the minima and maxima? It’s pretty obvious.
This comment is very dumb and frankly quite rude. The company is defining the requirements for the application themselves - so they have no reason to reflect scientific uncertainty or whatever you’re getting at in their ad.
If a candidate is smart, I’m willing to accept less experience. If a candidate is less smart, I want them to have more experience. There is uncertainty in the minimum experience I’m willing to accept.
While there are certainly cases where this annoys me (as another poster pointed out “up to 60% or more!”), this is not one of them as it could have an explanation.
The standard way to express that is to have the minimum reqs be 5 and the preferred reqs be 10.
I’ve seen it enough both ways to disagree with one being the standard.
For the scenerio you described, the minimum posted experience should be the bottom of the range. The top of the range could be used internally.
So you accept that there can be a minimum range, but they should just hide it.
Then provide the fucking standard error.
They are. It’s right there in the range 5-10.
No they aren’t, they’re obfuscating a bullshit arbitrary value and you’re buying it, as if it’s a goddamn statistic. That’s the point.
I’m sorry you’re struggling so much with the English language. No need to get angry with me about it.
I mean, you’re the one who doesn’t accept minimum as having a defined, discrete value.
You’d be surprised what kind of applicants you get when you don’t add that as a requirement.
OP isn’t saying not to add the requirement. They’re saying it should read “minimum 5 years”, not “minimum 5 to 10 years” which makes no sense.
Ahh. Got it. My mistake.
But - I wouldn’t be surprised actually. What I am surprised with is what kind of applicants I get even with requirements like that (although more precise) in the job ad.
It also infuriates me if the use ‘improving the optimum’ or claim something is optimal without the proof, for example ‘this is the optimal configuration of a production system’ after a comparison of 2–3 different variants.
Let me tell you about monitoring and alerting, son…
