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The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

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Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#41

Post by Aurornis »

ElProlactin wrote: post #28

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…

> It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B The cost of a bad hire they're referring to includes things like opportunity cost of not having a good hire in that position, damage they've done to the product (codebase, design, etc.), and second-order effects like demoralizing the rest of the team.

The actual hiring costs of a bad hire are a rounding error compared to the damage they can do.

Have you ever been on a team that was great until they hired one wrong person who made every work week a miserable slog? Attrition goes up as the good employees start to leave. The codebase starts accumulating a lot of tech debt. Even after they're gone it can take a long time to recover.

This is why it's so important to be able to fire fast, but that's another topic rife with difficulties.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#42

Post by mrmarket »

hard to be sympathetic here when the candidate experience has been such a mess in tech for years now. i appreciate that remotely and efficiently judging future success based on a resume is now basically a wash, that sucks. but no one seemed to treat it like an emergency that perfectly qualified candidates have been getting filtered out after tripping various invisible wires for years (due to ATS systems but also not having word-for-word experience across the board, or not having big enough logos on your resume, which in turn makes it harder to get bigger logos in the future, etc.) and that's to say nothing of the rampant ghost postings, which someone else mentioned here, which STILL happens all the time. it's cruelty.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#43

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #39
ElProlactin wrote: post #28

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…

In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.

Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#44

Post by ericol »

What is means is that now hiring is symmetrically broken.

Hiring has always been broken. May be not completely at the FAANG level, but below that, and more importantly across the globe it's seriously broken, and there's a high variance when it comes to hiring consultants quality.

The widespread use of AI vy applicants is very likely surfacing how comfortable consultants were doing the bare minimum when hiring.

Source: I've been working for 10+ years for a company that has an ATS for mostly European clients.

I know for a fact how crappy work around hiring is.

P.S.: the article focuses mostly on one direction of hiring. The opposite direction is also suffering from this (briefly explained in the article about AI fueled hiring bias). In my opinion, that is an even greater problem.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#45

Post by ghaff »

maccard wrote: post #17
dasil003 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Hiring being broken has nothing to do with cost, it's a filtering problem. Even when there's no HR or bean counter in sight it's still hard. There's fundamentally limited signal you can extract from interviews, so there's very loose correlation to on-the-job performance. Saying it's a cost-cutting problem would just encourage more and longer interviews, which could actually work against you because high performe…

> High performers tend to have more options and will not jump through infinite hoops. Biases are a strange thing. “High performers” aren’t one homogenous group; take a staff engineer at a FAANG and plop them in a role at a startup or vice versa and you’ll find very quickly that high performers are a product of environment (IME). The people you need to ship something at a big company will sink your startup, and the pe…

It doesn't even need to be startups versus FANNG. I've seen first-hand how people hired into various roles aren't a great fit for roles as a company grows and changes. Of course, they can adapt to various degrees but they'd probably never have been hired for the roles they're now in.

The problem with trials is that people often have a current job of some sort and having things not work out puts them in a difficult situation. May happen anyway but, generally, a new job is assumed to be at least a somewhat stable situation.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#46

Post by Aurornis »

somenameforme wrote: post #35
Aurornis wrote: post #11

> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…

It goes the other way as well though. Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another. Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

> Companies are increasingly filtering resumes/candidates in a sufficiently aggressive fashion to the point that they're strongly incentivizing, if not actively selecting for, people that are gaming the system in some way or another.

Which itself is a symptom of companies getting drowned in AI generated resumes. It's becoming more common for people to use AI tools that will operate browsers to mass-submit resumes for them. When you receive 1000 resumes you have to start filtering somewhere.

What I'm worried about now is that we're moving to a situation where some level of proof-of-work that an AI can't easily do is going to become necessary to have some filtering. I don't know what that looks like, but I don't like it.

> Quite odd this is all happening when ostensibly the unemployment rate is very low, which should make it an employee's market.

Unemployment rate is not evenly distributed. If you were a licensed electrician or qualified as a home healthcare aid then you could walk from one job to another in many cities.

If you're trying to get a $200K or more tech job, then you're competing with everyone else for a shrinking pool of openings.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#47

Post by ElProlactin »

Aurornis wrote: post #41
ElProlactin wrote: post #28

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…

> It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B The cost of a bad hire they're referring to includes things like opportunity cost of not having a good hire in that position, damage they've done to the product (codebase, design, etc.), and second-order effects like demoralizing the rest of the team. The actual hiring co…

But that's the point.

If the cost of a bad hire is huge (which I agree it is), why is the hiring process optimized, in part, around reducing the travel costs? It would seem that these costs are modest in comparison.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#48

Post by late2part »

Here's how you fix hiring... Have them demonstrate competency.

It's really easy to screen out people when you say "Hey - login to this VM and show me how to import raw data into postgres and run a report."

Or do whatever you're going to do.

My favorite story is from a particular sean who had a candidate that said they'd been using VM for 20 years, and when he went into a document the candidate hit j 200 times to go line 200.

Re: The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

#50

Post by Aurornis »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #39
ElProlactin wrote: post #28

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…

In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.

In my anecdotal experience talking to people applying for jobs right now, this practice has come back in full force. You can expect final round interviews to be on-site unless otherwise specified. The days of getting hired entirely remotely are over.

A friends' company has even ended remote hiring altogether after auditing their remote hires and discovering a lot of connections from countries they didn't expect.

There's even a growing scam where people get recruited to lend their identities and bank accounts to someone else to get the job. Then they're asked to install some software on the company laptop and leave it open and powered on during the workday so someone can operate it remotely. Remote work is wild right now.

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