Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rise of never-ending job interviews

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#121

Post by Analemma_ »

silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

Google is infamous for jerking people around in the interview process. I had a very similar experience, as did several people I know.

They do it because they know they can get away with it, but I do wonder if they have a backup plan if the lustre of working for Google ever fades, because it's an open secret that their interview process is a fucking nightmare for no reason.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#122

Post by echelon »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #109
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they shouldn't be doing interviews alone. If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone. You say that a bad hire is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but if that's the case, then most of what you said is irrelevant because a company that is smart enough to recognize this would be smart enough to never put…

> If they don't know how to gather information from a resume, then they shouldn't be reading resumes alone.

You would be shocked how many people blatantly lie or overstate their roles on resumes. Senior, junior, it happens all over.

A good practice is to ask candidates to go in depth about recent resume items and explain the technicals, business needs, etc.

> If someone is new to the interviewing process, then they shouldn't be doing interviews alone.

Most don't. But are you really calibrated after five interviews? Ten? And what about all the other folks that need to shadow / train?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#123

Post by mitsuchen »

jijji wrote: post #105
mitsuchen wrote: post #90

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…

On all job responses you should spell out your minimum salary requirements before you agree to the interview, unless you are ok with wasting time on interviews only to get low balled on the salary side or it doesn't match your minimum requirements.

Most of us don't have the privilege to negotiate, we are fresh grads. Who doesn't want to work for larger companies in the hope for a better career path? And don't forget about power asymmetry.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#124

Post by bschwindHN »

silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

But think of how smart he felt after telling you the answer! That confidence boost alone was probably worth their time to interview you, mission accomplished.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#125

Post by austincheney »

I remember the one time I worked at a design agency. 6 separate interviews in one day. The account managers were thrilled with me and absolutely did not want anybody else. The technical people were far less confident because nobody in their right mind could possibly hate jQuery. That meant some more interviews.

What’s maddening about that is that this was for a consulting position not a developer position. It didn’t matter though because the contract written one way, the management at the client refused to accept the terms of the signed contract, and the developers I was there to help thought I was their subordinate to dictate.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#126

Post by adventurer »

100-xyz wrote: post #85

I have recently been through this. Google took 3 months. 1 month was from the virtual onsite final interviews to the Hiring Committee decision. It was a miserable month and even my wife hated Google by the end. Second was for a Director of Engg position at a mid sized company. It took 2 months and finally I had to force them to answer. It was a company with weak leadership and it showed in their inability to make a d…

It's odd. I'm tending to think going through recruiters is the answer. The recruiter can be the bad guy and actually get a yes or no by putting pressure on otherwise I'm emailing multiple times and lucky to even get a response. If you weren't sure what the next steps were then why are you even hiring?

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#127

Post by ojbyrne »

tomrod wrote: 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…

That’s quite the range. It suggests a strategy: worry less about hiring false positives (with all the concomitant issues not hiring anyone brings) and worry more about reducing the cost of those false positives.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#129

Post by axaxs »

bschwindHN wrote: post #124
silisili wrote: post #119

My one and only Google interview went this way years ago. Each round they'd send me more books to study, which frankly I couldn't be bothered to read given the circumstances. My experience ended when an interviewer in round 3 or 4 asked me an obviously scripted question. I answered sarcastically, he got peeved, and I never heard from them again. I'm not claiming I'm Google caliber, whatever that means. Obviously I'm…

But think of how smart he felt after telling you the answer! That confidence boost alone was probably worth their time to interview you, mission accomplished.

LOL. He was obviously way smarter than me. He probably told his colleagues about how some dummy was talking about dinosaurs in an inode.

I feel the smartass part of my brain eternally dooms me...

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#130

Post by s5300 »

echelon wrote: post #94
andrew_ wrote: 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 the…

The lower end of that, and honestly, the higher end, is just about complete rounding error to any FAANGM+ caliber company.

I have seen a fairly small amount of employees hit the lower end on a singular dining bill when they had a company card and were meeting with business partners they were trying to "impress"

(obviously, the joke is free nice food and drink for all involved at the companies expense)

If you were fickle you could perhaps justify that as priced in to keeping good relations... but in the same light I'd call your figures priced into the talent acquisition process.

Post reply on HN