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The rise of never-ending job interviews

bbc.com

131–140 of 1001 posts

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#131

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

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

Isn't that one of the things Netflix is famous for getting right? Generous severance but quick to exit you if you're not a good fit.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#132
A family member went through five interviews for blockchain.com at 4-5am (they were in England). For the last one they (blockchain) were asked to do 6-7pm their time but couldn't be assed to have a call after hours and suggested another 4:30am (to us) interview, yet they had no problem asking people who didn't work there to be up at ridiculous hours week after week. The cherry on top was being offered the job at half of what the position should have paid and at a $20k pay cut from what they were told my family member was already making.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#133

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.

That lustre has faded already.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#134

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

I think this is a problem our whole society will have to learn. Reducing risk is probably good, but we have to reach the point where trying to eliminate is universally seen as a pathology. It's already kind of a meme in consumer products ("warning labels these days, right?"), but it crops up in hiring, movie production, etc.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#135
post #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.

6 interviews increase the chances of a bad hire (or at least decreases the chances of a great one). It restricts your hiring pool to those who are willing to be abused by the company. That's not the top-tier talent.

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#136
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…

[deleted]

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#137
post #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 the…

Yes, every bad hire is really bad. However, companies generally don't put in any effort into seriously evaluating your publicly available work. I have reams and reams of open source code companies can take a look at, and I've never seen any evidence that any company I've ever interviewed at has looked at that work. That's a result of companies being completely incompetent at evaluation and disrespecting their candidates time. Its wasteful and stupid. Its honestly flabbergasting how many companies don't put in the effort to make their hiring process passible, much less anything near "good".

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#138
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…

So they can learn from experienced interviewers who just make you leetcode and answer dumb stock questions (my biggest weakness is…)? What we need is for people to interview with zero experience and figure out a better way on their own, not copy a bunch of bad processes out of insecurity

Re: The rise of never-ending job interviews

#140
post #79

I interviewed with a company out of SV that did this. They started with 3, added another 3, one hour interviews and finally another 3. 9 interviews over the course of almost a month. I was being interviewed for a principal engineer. I was very clear and kept saying I wanted a management track position. They kept saying we love your background we can work with you on this. Ninth interview was with the CTO. He said the…

I think it's time to name and shame not sure why you are being coy when they jerked you around so much.

I'm too shy to name and shame, but my former company would ask us to advertise and interview for jobs, but only after countless hours of interviews decide they didn't want to increase headcount. I lost about 1 day week for months doing our best to find great people. We would fly them in from all over the place. This happened multiple times. I think I left to make indie games after the third time.
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