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Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

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Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#331

Post by 1123581321 »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #157
adamredwoods wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not asymmetrical, in my opinion. Companies are holding all the cards, otherwise I wouldn't be looking for a job in the first place. I believe that someday there will be too few jobs for all the people on this planet.

someday there will be too few jobs for all the people on this planet There are too few jobs now. Paul Krugman called it a "savings glut". There are no opportunities to invest the cash you are holding productively, consequently interest rates are low and the best thing you can do is buy back your own stock.

Investors who sell to a buyback deploy the money elsewhere, including new issues and private investment, which leads to hiring.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#332

Post by eropple »

Thorentis wrote: post #252
eropple wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that people are too sensitive, is it? Or is it that "culture fit" excuses...uh...suck? The hand-wringing sorts who are simultaneously so protective of a company's "culture" but are so unable to substantiate how someone might not fit in in a way that isn't telling on themselves should be worried, but not because somebody might get mad at them on Twitter. It's because they're at best losing out on good candidates…

Yes, that feedback isn't very useful. It was just an example. But people would be offended at almost anything these days. Not educated enough. Not skilled enough. Not personable enough. Whatever. People can't look at themselves honestly and take on board criticism, and it is making us worse people.

This is, to put it--well, honestly--is nonsense. It is the okeydoke of a regressive casting of a history that never existed in comparison to a present that differs only in the breadth of unwilling to take quite as much shit as prior generations because they know that maybe they don't, on all axes, have to do so. (Just on so many others.)

The galaxy-brained fear that makes people act as you are acting right now is a worse thing for all of us than some mythical inability to take criticism.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#333

Post by anongraddebt »

NaCl_af wrote: post #219
Koshkin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rejected from hundreds of jobs Sounds extreme. Were you applying to random jobs?

This year alone I’ve applied to over 800 C# or .Net related positions and have yet to get any offer. It’s incredibly difficult for some of us unfortunately. Precisely 886 if anyone was interested

Are having trouble getting interviews, getting offers, or both?

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#334

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

qes wrote: post #303
boring_twenties wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is simply letting the bad employee go not mentioned as an option? We had a new hire that didn't work out at a place I used to work at. Fired after 3 months. No hard feelings, he took it well and found a good job a few weeks later. Everyone is happy.

> Fired after 3 months. Which means you probably went 6 months or more without a role properly filled. On a small team that's a huge dent. For half a year. Not to mention the time spent in the hiring process itself, which you now get to repeat.

You can’t have it both ways though. If you have a more selective process than the one that hires-then-fires-after-3-months, you’re _already_ going more than 6 months without filling the role, because by being risk averse to hiring “bad” candidates, you’re passing on good candidates.

So either you pay the cost by trying more people more quickly, or you pay the cost desperately waiting and waiting because you’re so confident your interviewing filter is tuned correctly and that you know better regarding who to hire.

(In a small company, the process of hiring is often quite poor because it’s idiosyncratically controlled by the early employees and founders, and usually reinforces their cultural views and their biases of interviewing, so having a restrictive filter is even more harmful to small companies.)

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#335

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #242
mc32 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google for example does not hire when they think it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the hire is a good one. They rather let a good candidate pass. 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…

> “ This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly.”

Why? I do not agree that Google’s hiring practices have anything to do with “bad hire” costs.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#336

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

tempestn wrote: post #196
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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…

Why do you assume the quoted phrase implies some ridiculous fizzbuzz HackerRank memorization-based hiring process? I agree with Spolsky that generally it's safer to err on the side of false negatives when hiring. I guess the exception would be if truly skilled people in your industry are extremely rare, so you essentially have no choice but to deal with false positives if you want to be able to hire at all. But none…

The screening process is what generates the true/false positives & true/false negatives.

Any policy about the relative importance of true/false positives vs negatives is a policy about screening processes.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#337

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

solveit wrote: post #156
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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…

How large is your company?

The policies in question have worked well for me doing team building in 4 companies, 3 were medium/large ecommerce companies (~1000-8000 employees), one was a 40 person start-up.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#338

Post by tpmx »

xenihn wrote: post #210
tpmx wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

>We were recruiting mostly from a particular pool of uni grads, and everyone was communicating via the same particular "forum". (Late 90s/early 00s.) Any chance it was Something Awful?

No, it was a regional forum.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#339

Post by tpmx »

HALtheWise wrote: post #182
lostapathy wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think the failed candidate wouldn't also have lashed out at your company had you just ghosted him after the interview and not told him he was rejected? There's a good chance he/she would have been even angrier by the time they decided they were out of the running.

I think they would be reluctant to publicly lash out if they think they're still some possibility they're in the running. After that time, hopefully it has been long enough that their emotions have died to down.

Yep. The lesson is sadly that it makes sense to delay the reply with at least a week.

Re: Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback

#340

Post by Jagat »

zymhan wrote: post #312
Jagat wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's not likely they're going to sue you regardless of what reason you give for not accepting their offer. There's asymmetry from the other side too.

Can people just drop "fear of being sued" as a catch-all reason for any behavior? It is incredibly expensive and time consuming to file a lawsuit. The average person doesn't go around suing other folks regularly.

Filing a lawsuit can be quite profitable for the lawyers involved.

What's preventing someone from trying to extract $3M in settlement money from a rich company that doesn't want its reputation tarnished in a long running discrimination lawsuit?

And $3M is a lot of money that lawyers would eagerly represent someone that has an evidence of discrimination.

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