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If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

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Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#301

I’ve been interviewing for 8 months. Getting to many final rounds, 1 lowballed offer, 1 rescinded offer, and it’s playing a mental toll. Today, I got a rejection that went along the lines of “everyone loved you and there was absolutely 0 negative feedback, but we just found a better fit.” I almost broke down, but hid behind a facade of positivity because the long weekend was starting and my kids can’t afford a bummed…

One thing to always remember, because it's the same for me as for you, remember that most jobs are already accounted for. They often interview for quotas, gotta try out 3 people or such. I've clearly been the best qualified candidate a few times, as a grizzled software developer going for devops jobs. Still don't get it. They often know who they want to hire before any interviews begin. While that's not always true,…

> They often know who they want to hire before any interviews begin.

I've seen the same thing as well. One company even flew me out to their headquarters to interview for a position they knew they were going to give to somebody internally. I found out because they left me alone with a senior developer on the team. I asked him what my chances were of getting the job and he told me.

I wonder if there's a good way to filter out these roles earlier in the hiring process.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#302

- If a job has more than 2 rounds, no thanks. - If they send me a leetcode or test before speaking to me, no thanks. - If the job ad says anything about "culture", no thanks. - If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks. - If the job ad or email mention anything about making a video of myself, I will delete that mofo with extreme prejudice. - If the job application requires me to sign up to your website, n…

> If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks I always think of these as a sniff-test. They just want to see if you are a real person, who can speak and recite whatever is on your CV/resume. If in-person, that you shower and dress. That's it. If you can pass that stage, you're on to the more expensive interviews.

I must stink, because I get most of my rejections at the HR stage.

But I also have no idea what to ask during them either. They always give their 10 minute spiel about what the company is, ask me to give my own 5-10 minute spiel about my work history, then ask if I have any questions. I give my 5-10 minutes of regurgitating my resume in sentence form, and then generally don't have any questions. what kind of questions would I have for HR during a first round interview that hasn't already been answered in a job posting or basic company research anyway?

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. But it really depends where you live and when (or if) you bought a house. I live in a city that has very expensive housing but bought in 2011 just before the prices corrected after the 2007/2008 crash. That single choice was the biggest we made. But aside from that, for ethical and lifestyle reasons, we are frugal. We use old phones and laptops, a 10 year old TV, don't fly, don't own a car and don't have kids.…

I mean it sounds comfortable, and minimally stressful, but if it’s not that you can’t have kids, you should start a family. You’re now in such a good position to do it! Then your life can be chaotic, messy, stressful, and you lose much freedom for many years! But on the plus side you learn to sacrifice everything you’ve done and earned for the good of children who don’t even know how to appreciate it!

How about you let them worry about what they wanna do?

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is super expensive to hire someone. The costs are enormous. Let's take a hire that will make $10,000 per month, nice round number. Someone in HR has to write the job description. This takes the HR person's time, the hiring manager, the hiring manager's boss just to get the information for a job description Job description cost with hiring manager: $500 Job description cost with hiring manager's boss: $500 HR perso…

> So a company hires 50 people and 20 quit because the were not vetted proper[]ly: that is $3,685,000 in wasted money. Now, realize that this $3,685,000 is in after tax dollars, so if the company's profit margin is 15%, it takes $24,566,667 in product and/or service sales to cover those wasted hiring expenses. Why would a company's operating expenses be in after tax dollars? The whole point of a "before tax" / "after…

Well, I'm looking at it like this, in my own viewpoint:

So what I am saying is that one has to have real actual dollars to pay. So if a business makes $100,000 per year, and out of that is rent, utilities,etc, but not including the hiring expense, you have 15% profit margin, or $15,000 left over. So if hiring a person costs $2,000, then you lower your profit margins to $13,000, or 13%. So to keep the profit margin at 15% you have to make extra sales to cover that hiring expense. This is the same with all expenses, but I'm only focusing on the hiring expense. What I'm saying is that for each expense, extra income has to be generated to cover the expenses and hopefully get a profit margin that is acceptable. There's a cost to each dollar earned. You can't operate a business without a profit, and the more the profit the better, and the best is to protect profit margins. But as I said in my original post, I'm not getting technical and/or exact. I'm giving the overall view on it.

>>Employee decides the job is not a good fit for him or her and quits 9 months later: $90,000 wasted.

>Interesting philosophy. By extension, if the employee decides the job is not a good fit and quits after 240 months, you just wasted $2,400,000.

Amortization. Buy a car for $100,000 and keep it for a month and you wreck it (without it being insured), then that car costs you $100,000 per month, if you just drove it out of the lot and wreck it .25 miles after purchase. If you keep it 100,000 months, and you wreck it on the 100,000th month, then it costs you a dollar (ignoring MACRS for kicks).

Point being that after only 9 months, a company would not have got full value out of the hire because of the learning process, but hopefully after 240 months (20 years), a company should have had that employee up and running, but if not, that's yet another hiring/firing error.

Long and short of it in my opinion: You are taking this WAY too seriously. The point is that companies take a long, long time to hire someone because it is super expensive to make a mistake, in cash. I didn't even mention the morale issue of hiring a suck employee and other non-tangible costs. Do you agree with that or not? All the other stuff is just quibbling.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#306
post #65

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach…

> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised I'm curious what you mean by over-promised? Unless you only do this for people who don't already have a job, this sounds more toxic than multiple interviews. "Oh yeah we want you to work for us, but quit your old company, we'll try you out for a few weeks and if not we'll go our separate ways" ... but they quit their previous company so it's not as nic…

As another datapoint, this is also pretty standard in Japan. However Japan's school-to-salaryman hiring pipeline is built around the idea that you're not changing jobs, and after the 3-month probationary period (though it can vary by company) you basically become unfireable and are expected to be at that company for life.

In the more western culture of recognising that company loyalty is severed both ways, a probationary period makes much less sense.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#307

I like especially the jump from May 5, 2022 "...we will follow up in two hours to two months" to the next letter dated September 10, 2022 , over 4 months later.

Went through a series of interviews back in March - May. Got several rejections recently, 4 - 5 months after my last communication from these companies.

Yeah, it's okay. I got the message already.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#308
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we put our mental health on the line for this industry? There must be other jobs that are fulfilling and pay the bills.

whose bills though? most people find one of the most high paying jobs they can, then adjust their lifestyle to that income, then if they miss the mark ('lowball offer') they have to keep looking. lifestyle regression is exceptionally hard for humans, especially if your friends/neighbors don't have to go through the same thing (e.g. there's no war raging in your country). the best thing to do would be to keep your spe…

Family of five, two engineers in Germany (normal engineers salaries there, nothing really big), we live with 1.1 to 1.2 salary.

And we enjoy our life, we rent (luckily not too expensive) and can do what we want. Of course we do not play the traditional "show off your nice stuff" game the society tries to force us into, but for us happiness is time well spent, not accumulated stuff.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my first interview is with an HR person, no thanks I always think of these as a sniff-test. They just want to see if you are a real person, who can speak and recite whatever is on your CV/resume. If in-person, that you shower and dress. That's it. If you can pass that stage, you're on to the more expensive interviews.

This is exactly what they are. The HR person just needs to rule out the weirdos and North Korean hackers! You would be foolish to not have that (very easy) chat with the Hr person just to progress

you have to ask, why are they getting weirdos and north korean hackers. that's the reason i dont want to engage with these kind of companies.

if you're talking to hr at stage 1, it just means the automated system validated your application has all the right keywords. its a red flag for me.

Re: If You Want This Job, We Must Interview You Forever

#310

These styles of multi-round interviews inspired by the FAANG collective started picking up in Australia before the pandemic, but it got to a point where most of my more talented colleagues and I all agreed it just wasn’t worth the time for the salaries being offered. 4 round interviews for a ‘senior’ developer position on $120k? When interviewing my own candidates, I use a 1 hour interview mostly focused on approach…

> We have a probation period to work out if they’ve over-promised That's what contracting is for and I tell everybody to turn down any position that starts as a "contractor". Commit or GTFO, stop wasting peoples time.

I disagree. Some of my best jobs were contract to hire positions. The interviews are much more humane because the company isn't so worried about making a hiring mistake.

I don't know why, but something about "not renewing a contract" makes HR and the C-Suite at most companies feel a lot safer than "we're firing you" despite the fact they're virtually identical with the standard US at-will employment contract.

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