Very upbeat narrative, guy sounds so proud of himself. Also very short sentences, is it usual to write so naively, perhaps a kind of mannerism meaning to be true?
I Got Catfished by a Candidate
81–90 of 662 posts
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#82You'll never be able to trust a candidate who lies. Blatantly lying to a potential employer will never work out well in the long run. Just don't do it. Programmers are lucky in that they can take code they've written, and say "see, here's my proof that I can do the job".Other types of jobs (like sales), however, are reputation based, and you damn well better make sure the opinion of the person who is vouching for you…
"You'll never be able to trust a candidate who lies."
This also goes the other way. I have had companies lie to me about salary structure or working conditions and it definitely hurt my loyalty when I found out that I had been lied to.
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#83Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#84I know a guy who catfished Forbes for years about his net worth and parlayed that into a sweet job in federal government with lifetime benefits! [1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-lied-to-me-abou...
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#85I don't think we should use such stories as a reason to make the hiring process even more paranoid. In general people are pretty honest so I wouldn't like to see them having to jump through even more hoops because of a few fraudsters. Advice number 1 is probably best : "Trust your gut". If something doesn't make sense it's worth clearing that up.
Yes, this and reference checks. Plus, if a guy isn't working out, fire him. Not a huge deal. The current tech hiring process, at least what I read on here, is absurd.
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#86sigh
> Rule #2: Take a long hard look at a candidate’s social profiles.
Is not having a LinkedIn account going to come back to bite me, even when applying for dev roles? I've had even senior devs at popular local dev shops say LinkedIn is a "necessary evil" because it:
1. is easy to grep
2. you can find whether a candidate has similar connections to you
3. recommendations
I get New Zealand is small and the social graph for LinkedIn can be well utilised because of this but I just don't want a LinkedIn account. Is a traditional CV so bad?
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#87You just never know who might turn up from your past...
1999: I was a sysadmin at an ISP in Austin. One day we had a tour come through, people looking to see if they wanted to colo in our datacenter. In walks in the former CEO and most of the technical staff from the Oklahoma City-based ISP I'd started my career at and left in '96. We laughed, shook hands.. and they headhunted me away a couple months later with a 200% salary increase for their new Austin-based startup.
2015: interviewing for a remote sysadmin position at a firm in California. They knew of me through some mailing lists I've run for a couple of decades. A couple of interviews in, I mention that I'd need to get off early on Thursdays to attend Lodge as I was a Freemason. Turns out two other execs interviewing me were also Masons. It certainly didn't hurt my job prospects.. And then after I started the CEO asked "Weren't you mr_bill on efnet #unix IRC in the 90s?" I gulped and said "Yeah..." and he said "Cool! I was on there too..."
And, at my current job, after I got hired, my team lead said "Yeah, (other coworker) said you were cool and said you'd fit in well here..." - turns out the other coworker was another EFNet IRC buddy that I'd never met in person..
So, never lie about a contact or reference and never burn bridges if you can avoid it - you never know when someone from your past may be in a position to influence your future.
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#88This is not a catfish. This is a person lying on their resume
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#89> My team and I are a pretty savvy group.
Except for the repeated evidence of an overinflated sense of self, pretty fun reading. I'm left thinking, wow, this really happens?!?
Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate
#90Maybe the author should evaluate _why_ they got catfished. Recruiting processes are so convoluted and hard to break through, that someone who apparently otherwise would have been a great candidate, had to lie to get an interview. Was a good candidate really only one that had worked at the managers previous employer? How many great candidates are companies missing out on because of arbitrary filters?
This doesn't hold up. Unless a candidate is single-mindedly targeting the author's company -- like, they get rejected and come back with a fake resume -- then they decided to fake a resume before talking to the author. The author can't fix the societal experience the candidate has been having, and you have no sign that they filtered unfairly. I am sympathetic to candidates who feel they have skills but lack credentia…
> who feel they have skills but lack credentials, but it is no excuse for falsifying info.
Why is it no excuse? Because we work in a system where the majority of employees and employers are trying to do the right thing.
But that's becoming less and less true - I've interviewed with plenty of companies who have no problem with wasting days of a potential employees time with large take home tests and I've got no qualms about outsourcing those tests.