Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#51

Post by shadow-banned » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #34

shadow-banned wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside: marketers, engineers, whomever. Don't do free projects for companies. It's never worth it. I monitor their site to make sure they never use the work I presented. Waiting to pull the trigger on a lawsuit!

> Don't do free projects for companies. It's never worth it. In my experience, I'd never get hired if I took this approach. Work samples are quickly becoming the interview standard for engineering. In fact, I find they're often completely replacing all day onsite interviews. I'd much rather do 8 hours of self-directed, self-paced work than get grilled on a whiteboard during an on-site.

Let me be clear: I'm okay with NON-business specific challenges. AKA, from a marketing perspective:

How would you position a new SaaS service that allows you to track your children's school performance? (but the hiring company is in SaaS business tools)

Vs. doing work that is directly actionable and can be taken by the business, "How would you update our homepage?"

That's the line now. Not opposed to challenges.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#52

Post by shadow-banned » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 5:59 PM UTC

timw4mail wrote: post #9

shadow-banned wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside: marketers, engineers, whomever. Don't do free projects for companies. It's never worth it. I monitor their site to make sure they never use the work I presented. Waiting to pull the trigger on a lawsuit!

I did a programming test for where I currently work. The biggest difference is that it would not have worked for many realistic use cases, and the code was fairly trivial. If you have to implement an entire application or system, that should be an automatic red flag.

That's the differentiator; I have no problem with that.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#53

Post by hinkley » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

wgerard wrote: post #10

We interviewed a lot of hiring managers/etc. while we were working on a previous business in the hiring space. As part of that, we asked them this very question. The fear of litigation was by far the biggest reason we heard, but there were some other popular reasons (mostly relating around conflict avoidance): * Notably, giving feedback feels like an opening for the candidate to submit a rebuttal instead of ending th…

We give people actionable feedback at work because we expect the team to benefit from the feedback.

What's the benefit of feedback to someone you already decided won't be on the team?

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#54

Post by wgerard » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #50

wgerard wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people don't give candidates feedback, FWIW. It's a bit like arguing with a potential romantic partner who doesn't want to go on a second date: You might win the argument logically, but you're not getting another date unless there was a comical misunderstanding.

potential romantic partners call the people they reject and tell them why they don't like them? I was asking why gp was doing this ^, seems weird.

Yes, people frequently request justification when they're rejected romantically.

This is also why people get ghosted while dating nowadays. Many of the same reasons at play.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#55

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #16

muststopmyths wrote: post #3

Years ago I interviewed at a startup in SF. It went well except for one ex-FAANG asshole who spent the entire whiteboard interview thumbing his phone while I went down the wrong rabbit hole on the problem he gave me. No attempt to guide me back, critique my approach or anything of the sort. I didn't get the job, as expected. But the memorable thing about the process was that the recruiter made a point of calling me t…

The one time I got some feedback on why I was rejected it was also over the phone. I assumed the California ban on recording phone conversations without consent made the conversation legally non existent.

When I followed up an email rejection from Google asking if they had feedback, I got email back saying "yes", and setting up a phone appointment specifically to provide it.

So... I'd say they have something like that in mind.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#56

Post by wgerard » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #53

wgerard wrote: post #10

We interviewed a lot of hiring managers/etc. while we were working on a previous business in the hiring space. As part of that, we asked them this very question. The fear of litigation was by far the biggest reason we heard, but there were some other popular reasons (mostly relating around conflict avoidance): * Notably, giving feedback feels like an opening for the candidate to submit a rebuttal instead of ending th…

We give people actionable feedback at work because we expect the team to benefit from the feedback. What's the benefit of feedback to someone you already decided won't be on the team?

It's not meant to be a benefit for the company, other than good PR I suppose.

It's meant to be a gesture of good faith towards the candidate that invested their time and energy to interviewing with you, i.e. at least the candidate didn't walk away with nothing from the process.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#57

Post by BuddyKallipygos » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

I just went through this process looking for a job in a VP of Engineering role after spending the last 15 years running my own startups and doing my own hiring. And man it really made me rethink how I will do hiring going forward. Feedback as a candidate would be great, but based on my own experience hiring it’s difficult to have that conversation go well. Maybe 1 in 10 people would say “hey thanks, I appreciate the feedback” and the rest wanted to debate their worthiness. So there is no ROI for this effort. But having just been looking for a job I can confirm that almost all of the companies I talked to sucked at communication. They were just awful.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#58

Post by tpmx » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #8

I'm a software developer turned temporary recruiter for a startup (just hired last position yay!). The number one reason why I don't give feedback anymore is the candidate's response. It is almost universally negative. Candidates want to get into an argument about their skills or performance. Now, everyone gets a form letter, and I don't deviate from that.

I've been interviewing job applicants for a very long time (15 years or so).

I've never given any detailed feedback, but I have made sure that they at least get a "sorry, we can't offer you a job" form letter quickly.

Noone has ever complained, except:

At one job, we did run into a pretty annoying situation. We were recruiting mostly from a particular pool of uni grads, and everyone was communicating via the same particular "forum". (Late 90s/early 00s.)

We interviewed a particular person in depth. He wasn't nervous. He was just not able/smart enough. So, we didn't hire him. We were very polite and friendly through this entire process. Gave him plenty of graceful exits from the problems we posed to him.

We sent him the usual polite email how he unfortunately bla bla.

Later that day, he started a major propaganda campaign against us, in the local forum.

We felt trapped - how could we say (semi-publicly) that we just rejected him because he was well.. not that intelligent? We ended up just ignoring (ghosting) him.

A few smart people there who could have joined us probably took this clown seriously though. :(

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#59

Post by noblethrasher » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

SkyPuncher wrote: post #29

shadow-banned wrote: post #6

Experienced this at a local tech company that will remain nameless. They're in the logistics space. They enable fast shipping for merchants. Did 10+ hours of a challenge project - something I would have charged $5,000+ for, including a channel-specific attribution model (with defense of my choice), a complete onboarding campaign flow with timing, and sample email creative, lead scoring model, and a bunch of pedantic…

I had a similar thing happen with a well-known messaging app startup I interviewed with. This company had me do an initial technical screen (2-hours of work) and expressed great interest in the work I did. They asked me to complete a follow on "work sample" which I promptly completed with extras (error handling, specs, etc). After completing the work sample (a non-trivial amount of effort), they suddenly decided they…

That’s disgusting, and I’m really sorry to have read that happened to you or anyone else.

My policy is that anyone that completes the technical screen (2 – 4 hours of work) gets an on-site interview.

Just this morning, I had to spend about 20 minutes debugging a candidate’s code to get it to both build and run, but he’s still getting invited for an on-site.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#60

Post by hinkley » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

shadow-banned wrote: post #6

Experienced this at a local tech company that will remain nameless. They're in the logistics space. They enable fast shipping for merchants. Did 10+ hours of a challenge project - something I would have charged $5,000+ for, including a channel-specific attribution model (with defense of my choice), a complete onboarding campaign flow with timing, and sample email creative, lead scoring model, and a bunch of pedantic…

Fragile egos foster ageism.

I didn't work anywhere near this hard, but the outcome reminds me of the One that Got Away last cycle.

Literally up the street from me, a company doing mapping software was looking for a lead. They had a lot of junior to mid-level people and they were having some code quality concerns. But they were looking for someone who could lead, mentor, and was already a GIS expert (which I am not). There are a lot of reasons that should not be too much of a problem for me but they weren't buying my pitch.

Now, I was far from the first person to reply to their initial ad. I took a chance that the position was still open. A month later the position is reposted, so they clearly found nobody after at least 6 weeks of looking. I contact them, again with another pitch, get a curt reply. Then again a month later (no reply at all this time). By that point I accept a position somewhere else and I can't recall but I may have seen it pop up a third time. (I may have to go through my sent folder to try to figure out if they're still around.)

In retrospect, this is just the sort of job description that sucks me in but then leaves me feeling like I haven't achieved my goals. I should count myself lucky they said no.