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The rise of never-ending job interviews

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Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a hundred times over. I still remember in 2020 multiple places asking me "I see you've used .NET core, what *version* have you used?". I had a kind of career crisis/breakdown, where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. Accepting that it wasn't working for me was one of the best things I've done for my career.

> where I realised no one gave a shit about anything except my utility as a walking set of tech keywords. I am genuinely asking. Why is this objectionable? Why do people find it so horrible that their labour is a commodity? To me that just tells me I should treat my labour like a merchant treats his goods. Always be checking the market to ensure you have something worth selling and while you might sign long term deal…

Because people have brains, can learn new things and technologists don't need experience with particular technology to be successful using or working on it.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#94
post #66

I recently agreed to go through a 5-round process which totaled to about 6 hours. I'm the first person to bitch about the ineffectiveness of leetcode/hackerrank bullshit for people with 10+ of verifiable experience, but I went through this one because it was a field I had never worked in before, and the personnel I was speaking with were truly interesting. Sans all of those qualifiers, anything more than 3 rounds is…

Devil's advocate.

Every bad hire costs the company $50,000 - 200,000. Sometimes more. They can also sink or demoralize teams.

Many of the people conducting interviews are new to the process and don't know how to extract signal. Sometimes scales don't line up.

When you have a revolving door of employees (because that's the way things are these days), have trouble scheduling interviews (busy engineers trying to get their own work done), and can't get enough skilled interviewers on a panel, then of course the process will be a suboptimal experience for candidates.

To a degree, companies would rather a good candidate was passed over than a bad candidate was accepted. Type I and II errors.

Companies also don't like telling candidates how they did because that opens them up to lawsuit liabilities.

You have to do enough interviews to get signal yet not piss off candidates. (Or your employees in the interview pool!)

It's a hard problem for companies too.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#95
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

How? I have seen people with 25 years service (electrical engineer) walked out with zero notice. Unless you are unionized, you can be fired on the spot.

Increasing risk of liability for firing is real, as is increasing oversight of discrimination law. You can be fired on the spot for breaking company policy, or doing something illegal. Without more info, that’s what I might assume you saw. But getting fired for mildly low performance without notice is not normal, at least not among engineers in large companies, and assuming it’s not because a division or the company is being shuttered. Companies have to give people feedback and give them time to respond. Failure to do that can and sometimes does result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing and that the company did not unfairly discriminate even unknowingly, which is costly, difficult, and risky. Plus, most companies aren’t capricious with firing engineers, and are also aware that hiring is expensive and employee ROI can take time.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#96
post #14

> The National Business Research Institute study shows that a bad hire can have significant costs to an organization – between $25,000 and $300,000 5 . Asking a candidate to partake in four interviews may seem like overkill, but it seems trivial compared to the cost of a “bad hire.” Organizations that hire the best data science talent ensure they spend the time to use the best hiring practices.[0] It's a risk mitigat…

Are you (or they) suggesting that the 4th interview meaningfully reduces the number of bad hires?

I’m guessing not.

It’s poorly designed and/or poorly implemented hiring strategies that lead to bad hires, mostly through a lot of noise being collected during the interview process.

This is a very solvable problem.

Edit: I will add that this is an ad for Booz hiring, so of course they want more process.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.

I have experienced the exact same thing. In fact, the worst person I have ever worked with consistently aced interviews wherever he went.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#99

For everyone saying that it's risk mitigation, I recently asked about something similar[0] for a junior position, and the process still hasn't finished. For context, the company is a medium-size tech company with presence mostly in Europe and Asia. I don't know these things well enough but it makes no sense to me. For starters, in the tech sector in my country the salary for fresh grads like me actually come mostly f…

> I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions.

It's harder to deal with emotional kids than it is to deal with incompetent engineers. Maybe that's why those non-technical HRs might not be as useless as you think.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#100
the best jobs I've had were at most three or four interviews and then hired. The worst ones were more than 5 interviews and they still couldnt make a decision or one guy out of six didn't like you so you don't get hired...
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