241–250 of 348 posts
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But you are not your business. There are more things to life than making profits, like helping fellow humans. If the risk is very low and the cost basically null, doing nice things is a positive externality.
But the risk is not very low when you adjust for magnitude of secondary effects.
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> “It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.” After a decade of building teams in machine learning, I regard this as one of those hallowed mythical pieces of wisdom that is just totally wrong. It dramatically over-estimates both the chances and costs of hiring a bad employee, while discounting the huge, huge opportunity cost of not hiring rare, exceptional candidates. I’d much rather spend a ye…
A large company can afford bad hires. You can shuffle them around or find something they can do. A small company can not afford that luxury so they have to be more careful in their hiring. A bad hire completely distracts a small team.
This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly. Google's policy is also not to give feedback. 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.
I would say large companies do not need that exceptional candidate since they have so many great ones already. Exceptional won't make a difference unless it is executive role or something like that.
At that point I have likely mentally moved on, and probably moved on in very real terms.
I think most job seekers would simply appreciate a "no thank you" response and not get ghosted. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common to just go silent on candidates. What a cowardly thing to do.
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…
Definitely. Send feedback from a no-reply box and make this apparent.
It was just a personality conflict that few people would admit to in writing (e.g. "You're kind of an asshole, I don't want to work with you" isn't something you tell a candidate).
Nothing wrong with pointing out a perceived deficit in written & verbal communication skills.
There just isn't much actionable feedback to give. "Nobody felt excited to potentially work with you" isn't really actionable feedback, and sharing that just feels kinda mean for no reason.
If you stress during the interview that culture fit is a large component of the hiring process, simply stating that there wasn't a strong enough culture fit should be enough. No need to go into further detail, there are a lot of applicants.
Someone better came along to fill the role and nobody wants to tell a candidate "We found someone better than you".
It can be relieving to know that the fault doesn't lie with your character or presentation, and that management simply decided to hire the person with more experience.
Barring liability cases, it's all about managing expectations.
As a candidate, I've always preferred polite "thanks, but no thanks" responses in a timely manner. The other kind of feedback that I like is things like, "we need people with a different background / experience than you have." IMO, judgement feedback (you screwed up how you handle your yak shaving, or I don't think we'll get along with each other) is too subjective to be constructive. And, I get it. As someone who's…
> “It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.” After a decade of building teams in machine learning, I regard this as one of those hallowed mythical pieces of wisdom that is just totally wrong. It dramatically over-estimates both the chances and costs of hiring a bad employee, while discounting the huge, huge opportunity cost of not hiring rare, exceptional candidates. I’d much rather spend a ye…
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While that's all very understandable, at the very least give some kind of generic rejection. This was many years ago, but one time I did an all-day onsite interview (~6 hours long) and I was ghosted and never heard from the company again. That infuriates me even to this day. At least give me some kind of news that it was a no.
Not too many places will straight up ghost candidates that have done on-sites, that's pretty unusual. Sometimes they'll dangle candidates if they're waiting to hear whether their first choice accepts, but even then it's rare not to communicate at all once you've done an on-site.
I was expected to prepare (in advance) a number of things including a technical presentation and detailed answers to a large number of questions, which took me several evenings and most of a weekend. I flew there on a monday for what was an exhausting full day of interviews before my return flight that evening. The recruiter phoned me the following day to say they were very impressed and would be making an offer, but there were some other people who wanted to meet me.
So a few days later I took another day off work to fly down for a second round of meetings. At the end of this second day I was told that the senior manager was abroad and they would finalise the offer when he returned.
I flew back home and waited a week or 10 days before emailing to hear how things were progressing. The recruiter responded "to recap, we are waiting for $manager to return before finalising the offer".
That was about 7 years ago, and it was the last thing I heard from them. I get that employers can't be bothered responding to every CV that crosses their desk, but this was a demanding process that cost me several days effort and 2 days salary. Maybe they lied when they said they liked me, I have no idea and don't really care. But I certainly didn't expect to be ghosted after all that.
A year or two later I had a new colleague who had been working there around the time of my interview, and I told him this story. His response? "You dodged a bullet".
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…
Here's another one: * We already had a candidate in mind but our hiring process requires us to publicly post the opening and interview other candidates before we hire the person we already decided on.
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I interviewed at twitter for a job working with their infra team. They had an Atlanta data center and they were interviewing me for that role to be remote out of Atlanta. I had to fly to SF to interview via video calls with the team in Atlanta because the manager was in SF. He told me he would prefer someone local in SF over lunch so I knew I was just filler. After lunch interview was with a xoogler and everyone earl…
hahahahahahahah :D I don't think it's possible to have a finite number of primes though? But it's a programming interview, so really, who gives a shit?!