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Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

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Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#11

This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…

Yeah this is not such a great signal once you're past a certain maturity level

But hopefully it stayed in the past

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#12
post #8

Insane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way. I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually cou…

On paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience. I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such. Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not. But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago…

Yeah...I applied when I was job hunting at the beginning of the year and I hard stopped on the high school question. I've got over 30 years of relevant experience and if that's what they're asking, I'm obviously not the sort of person they're looking for.

Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#13

While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side. Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.

At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#15

Here is the funny part: If you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.

I can't imagine how it would be otherwise! The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#16

This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…

Yeah this is not such a great signal once you're past a certain maturity level But hopefully it stayed in the past

Mark ran into some issues with clueless US officials and was not allowed in the country for a while.

Maybe that's what it said what it said.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#17

While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side. Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.

At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.

I am not against behavioral interview if it’s part of the loop, but these attempts to force candid to answer some standardized questions make no sense. Especially you can easily come up with many of the answers using GPT now a days anyways. I for one don’t even have access to these when I interview candidates and I am pretty sure HR doesn’t even look at them or even have a quantitative way to judge them or verify their authenticity.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#18

This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…

Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#19

While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side. Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.

Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible.

This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#20

This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…

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