61–70 of 157 posts
More than anything else, the number one reason that an otherwise good candidate doesn't get to continue is because of a disconnect around what the word "Senior" means. Every company has a different bar set for what qualifies as "Senior", but in most places I've been that bar is relatively high, so if we advertise for that position externally it means we don't have someone internal who's met the bar for promotion yet. We can't in good conscious hire someone in as a "Senior" that is not at least as qualified as the people we already have who didn't make the cut for promotion. Title inflation hurts because what happens is you might have been "Senior" at your last three employers but you don't make the bar for "Senior" or sometimes even "Mid" where you're applying.
As the interviewer there's very little I can actionably provide you that addresses the above without getting into a conversation about the possibility of hire at a lower level, which I don't have the authority to offer since I'm not the hiring manager. Additionally, I try to do everything I can to respect the candidate and preserve their dignity during the interview process. If they're bombing it, I don't want them to feel like they're bombing it. It's not possible to both do that and tell them at the end that they aren't good enough to cross the threshold for the role. This is especially difficult for me and many of my peers because we're engineers and not really "people persons", so we err on the side of saying nothing vs risk saying something that crushes someone.
Not only does fear of lawsuits prevent companies from disclosing no-hire reasons, it prevents them from even recording those reasons internally. If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.
We keep a record of all coding exercises performed by people who want to come in for an interview. We reference it for those who reapply to see if there has been improvement. All of our interview questions are in a github repo and peer reviewd so you don't get those brain teaser useless questions. I wish we took notes during interviews. On well. We still remember candidates who apply multiple times.
Not only does fear of lawsuits prevent companies from disclosing no-hire reasons, it prevents them from even recording those reasons internally. If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.
You have to keep in mind that if a candidate is rejected and comes back and says it was illegal discrimination, those forms are valuable evidence to show why the candidate was not selected. Get rid of the forms and it's basically your word against theirs in court.
That said, I've also been told that no one every goes to the trouble to dig those up later on. Even for current employees. You could get a letter of reprimand put in your file and nobody would probably see it again (this comment came from HR).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We keep a record of all coding exercises performed by people who want to come in for an interview. We reference it for those who reapply to see if there has been improvement. All of our interview questions are in a github repo and peer reviewd so you don't get those brain teaser useless questions. I wish we took notes during interviews. On well. We still remember candidates who apply multiple times.
If people are graded based on improvement, does that mean you could play the long game and intentionally fail the first time, then win the award for "most improved" next year? To get this out of the way, here's my implementation for this year: int main() { return 1; } Let me know when you're ready for next year's submission.
If you had the acting skills to convincingly give off the impression that you're a novice programmer, you've also got the skills to convincingly give off a more directly useful impression.
I get it, lawsuits. There's very little upside for the employer, the benefit would go to the candidate, and the liability is on the employer. I suppose one benefit for the employer might be that the candidate could improve, should there be an opportunity to interview again later. It's a problem, though. I once did a 7 hour take home exam, didn't hear back for a month, and finally got the one line rejection listed in…
All I got was a 2 line email with "not a good fit" in it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In case of discrimination alegations (race, disability and veteran-related matters in the US), the burden is on the accused to provide proof of non-discrimination. In this case, the usual practice for proving innocence is to show that the statistical distribution of hires is similar to the statistical distribution of applicants. For example, if I had 50% latino applicants, 50% of my hires should be latinos. That bein…
I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws for this and other reasons. I suggest a compromise of limiting it to manual labor jobs and the like for which the anti-discrimination laws were actually designed for.
I've interviewed and hired hundreds of people and the real reasons are usually pretty banal, e.g. not a good match between skills and requirements, wants too much money, etc. so in cases where somebody does hear something and they hear "not a good fit" that honestly is usually the case. It's hard to provide more specifics because interviews don't really uncover deep specifics about candidates.
On occasion I've rejected people for less common reasons also, e.g. behavior problems during the interview, poor attitude, etc. and we have to keep those things pretty confidential from the candidate because it would be used in a lawsuit even if it's not an example of discrimination. All the "culture fit" notions in startup-land would be other examples of this kind of rejection.
There's of course all kinds of discrimination in hiring and companies hide behind these practices all too often. I've never been part of this kind of thing thankfully, but I can imagine.
tptacek's old company has more rigid hiring practices that produce what I would guess are strong metrics that help them find good candidates but also might protect them in the case of a lawsuit.
I've also been on the receiving end of rejections of course. Before the second dot-com boom/bust companies used to actually contact you back with a "not a good fit". After that you usually just don't hear anything unless you really press the recruiters.
On occasion, when the recruiting department isn't as well put together as might be expected, real reasons will leak out and those are also surprisingly interesting:
- salary demands are too high and exceed even senior execs. I don't make all that much out of the ordinary for my experience level and position, so that brought a lot of insight into how they function as a company
- bad culture fit - depending on the company I actually felt relieved by some of these rejections and perturbed by others.
- the weirdest one was where the company's internal hr processes were so broken, and they had some sort of internal clock on candidates, that they were not able to process me through the interview rounds in a timely fashion, so they rejected me because it was taking too long to process me. I can say that the interview and hiring process was a real shit show so it didn't surprise me at all, but I found it impressively annoying. I did think about suing them, but then I thought about what I wanted out of the lawsuit and decided not to bother.
Ive always offered to give detailed feedback to my candidates that didn't pass a technical screen. I'd say about 80% of them were eager to hear it, and were grateful to get information that could help them get better at coding, or at least interviewing. It leaves people with a good impression of the company, and you get the satisfaction of knowing you helped someone. You aren't going to get sued for telling someone w…
Wait a minute, 1 candidate out of 5 wasn't eager to hear about the technical feedback? Any idea why?
Some candidates have other offers to fall back on and just don't care that much, and some just don't want to discuss technical details with someone in a non technical role, which is understandable.