Who Wants The Job?

Sounds like you used the perfect hiring strategy - offering a salary low enough to get exactly one good applicant from the whole pool - and then were surprised that the ratio of good to bad applicants was near 0, which is an expected result of that strategy regardless of the pool. That's why employers always complain that hiring is hard, even when there are throngs of people begging for jobs.

Zvi posted the following comment:

Yeah, I likely should have been more explicit about the whole ‘the ones who are any good already got hired’ thing. Which has the same implication, of course – that if you can simply display what we’d instinctively think of as ordinary competence, you’ll get hired reasonably quickly once you start putting in effort. Which matches my experience on both sides.

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To put it mildly, the above does not match my experience at all. And I know a ton of rationalist programmers having trouble finding a job. These people are usually not super expereinced and didnt go to the ICPC final. But they certainly seem at least 'ordinarily competent'.

FWIW I had similar frustrations but as an applicant - when I tried to apply to jobs using the procedure of sending my CV and covering letter in response to job postings, most of the time there was no response at all: no acknowledgement or rejection communication.

You are much more employable than you think.

Employable in what capacity and for what compensation, though?

For example, I’m sure I could get a job flipping the proverbial burgers, if I really wanted to (or perhaps even managing people who flip said burgers). However, jobs that pay very well, such as coding / development / design / etc., generally have obstacles that look more like “pass a bizarrely contrived coding interview” than “show up on time or at all”.

Then again, it’s not just high-paying jobs that have this issue. Here’s the key bit of your post, in my view:

As a result of all this, we only ended up doing two in person interviews. … One of them seemed acceptable in a punch. The other we hired.

Consider that first of these two people. Would you tell this person, “you are much more employable than you think”? Consider the matter from their perspective. I gather from your post that they did everything right, like having a profile without errors, responding to phone calls, not being rude, etc. Yet it seems like they turned out to be less employable than they expected. Hmm.

Furthermore:

We ended up with a wonderful woman we found through a personal recommendation on a local mailing list.

Now imagine—as seems like it plausibly could’ve happened, and no doubt does happen many times in analogous situations—that you got this personal recommendation before you went to Sittercity. Consider, then, the situation from the perspective of an aspiring nanny who reads this post, takes your message to heart, and makes a profile page on Sittercity, spelling and grammaring everything correctly, intending with all sincerity to be polite to inquiring callers, to respond promptly, to arrive punctually to interviews, etc.

In this plausible scenario, this person has zero chance of being hired by you. Hm.

Note that there's a very significant selection effect at play. Incompetent and unmotivated (for instance, those wanting to signal that they're seeking a job but who don't actively want it) people will apply for many positions, while the competent get hired relatively fast, after having applied only a few times.

Your point remains that there are a LOT of people who don't have the conformity, conscientiousness, and/or social skills needed to get and hold a standard job. It's really unclear, as a society, how to get them into a position where they can provide as much value as the resources they take.

Do you know anyone who got a job via SitterCity?

The vast majority of people who were on a job site, seeking a job, were not capable of tasks like: Write a profile page in English without major mistakes. Respond promptly when an employer contacts you to respond to your application. Talk politely on the phone and sound like you are listening and care about the job. Show up to your interview.

If there are several jobs open, and the chances of being hired after jumping through the hoops is 50%, some of the candidates probably found something better, and stopped wasting their time on a lower position.

There are some other factors that might justify their behavior as impolite, but not incompetent. For example: If there is no expectation of an answer if you failed to progress to the next step, the candidates might use their silence/unresponsiveness to signal that you "failed" as a hirer.

It also feels like a waste of the hirer's time to have to read a notice that you dropped out of the selection, if you expect that they have other candidates and you haven't set an interview.

It also looks like there are no costs to apply to several positions (in monetary terms and also as a punishment for future hirings), and the best strategy is to apply to anything and then select the best one later.

Hiring is about as pure a one-shot prisoner's dilemma as is encountered in daily life. Both sides almost always defect.

Out of curiosity, how did you handle delivering the news to people that they did not pass a given step? Did it get boring or tedious? How did they take it?

A friend does advertising for small businesses in Massachusetts. He says that his clients have trouble hiring people for low skilled jobs who are not on drugs.

So wouldn't this be solved by requiring people to pay for the chance to apply?

I'm curious if anyone has recollections of what it was like trying to hire for similar positions in recent years, when the unemployment rate was much higher. That is to say, how much of this is base-rate human flakiness, and how much is attributable to the tight labor market having already hoovered up almost all the well-functioning adults?

This is simultaneously horrifying and incredibly comforting. One would hope that people would be orders of magnitude better than this. But it also bodes very well for the future prospects of anyone remotely competent (unless your boss is like this...)