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How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

brookeallen.com

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Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#61

Post by sekasi »

fecak wrote: post #51
humanrebar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of , maybe start contributing to or experiment in and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?

Based on what you wrote, you're probably being paranoid. I deliver lots of 'No' answers as well, and I don't see any issues with what you wrote. Legal liability tends to be around the generic responses where candidates may assume the worst (race, gender/orientation, age, etc.). A specific response that points to a lack of experience in a certain area seems a safer bet than 'not a fit' in most cases.

"Not a fit" is another way of saying "We don't like you" in a strange way.

I stay far away from those sweeping personality statements personally.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#62

Post by halflings »

dustingetz wrote: post #25
tacostakohashi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please cons…

in my experience, if one understands and explicitly acknowledges their reasoning for not giving feedback, one can connect with their interviewers directly as a human and receive frank feedback. One just has to make it clear that they are not a risk.

Yeah, good luck with that. I've already had some extremely surprising interview results and tried really hard to get feedback from the recruiters. They would just keep repeating the same words: "Our policy is to refrain from giving feedback to the interviewees."

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#63

Post by lhc- »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #19
sosuke wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought so, and I figure it is a case of our sue-happy culture and a cover your ass tactic "anything you say can and will be used against you" kind of fear. I'd love to have reached out to some applicants in the past to offer help, but what if they don't want any?

It would be nice if, at the start of the application process, companies could ask you if you would like to agree not to sue them in exchange for open, honest feedback, e.g. notes from your interviewers. Sometimes its pretty clear if you are not a good match, but sometimes its really not, and it seems like it would be best for both parties if certain kind of feedback could be provided, e.g. you were close, please cons…

The problem is that, if their feedback is "you were a woman so we didn't hire you", then signing away your right to sue is a big problem. And you can't really know if their reason is legit or not until you sign.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#64

Post by wyager »

sekasi wrote: post #56
wyager wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve Many recruiters don't do this for legal reasons. Anti-discrimination laws make it very risky for companies to explain their hiring rationale, even if it's perfectly reasonable. It would be too expensive to have the lawyers check over every rejection.

I work in Australia, not in the US. I don't know the intrinsic legal differences here, but I do know a few things about my local market. I feel really strongly about trying to help people improve, and it's really challenging to do that if you can't bring up the reasons for rejection. If you're being dicky about it "You're not good enough in memory management", that instantly makes people defensive. If you're trying t…

>If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.

No doubt, and I know a lot of US recruiters wish very strongly that they could have these kind of interactions with potential hires.

However, the difficulty of friendly, open interviewer-interviewee discussions like this is one of those unintentional side effects of otherwise well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws. It's a good example of why trying to legislate a problem away can sometimes make other problems pop up in its place.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#65

Post by WalterBright »

hluska wrote: post #57
electic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened at my last company. It does in fact open you up to legal liabilities. The company had to settle 18 cases where applicants "disagreed" with the reason of their rejection.

I think it is a shame when trying to help people opens you up to liability. If that's not a sign that our society is too litigious, I don't know what is.

It's also why companies do not apologize, except as part of a settlement. An apology is an admission of guilt, opening the company to liability.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#66

Post by notahacker »

vonmoltke wrote: post #18
JeremyMorgan wrote: post #7

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who w…

> Even now with a programmer shortage companies are still unicorn hunting and making people jump through stupid hoops for jobs. What's worse is the companies who try to defend their unicorn hunts when called on it.

And arguably in some respects this was a unicorn hunt amounting to making people jump through even stupider than usual hoops (responding with a 500 page manual!) to prove their aptitude for learning. I'm surprised that, to the extent I can make it out from rather small pictures, the applicants don't appear to be in the sort of age bracket generally associated with unpaid internships...

Difference is, it balanced an unusually onerous assessment with the unusual reward of a de facto guarantee that anyone persistent and smart enough to get through it all would get a job at the end. I hope it paid as well as they presumably thought it would.

There are a few companies out there with a desire to build an ecosystem on obscure or unproven technology that could and probably should experiment with elements of this as a hiring strategy. Getting the class to vote on who gets the [first] jobs is particularly neat; it both selects the most effective team member(s) and leaves the rest with the impression they weren't ruled out of contention by the hiring manager and therefore shouldn't be deterred from reapplying in future

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#67

Post by kohanz »

sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

I can see how you would do this for a technical shortcoming, but sometimes the choice of one candidate over another comes based on a personality judgement and who would fit better with the current team. How do you explain those types of decisions without sounding arbitrary?

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#68

Post by kazinator »

sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no":

1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring activity (but this news can't be made public yet: even the fact that there is such news).

2. Don't take it personally.

3. Never press people for more information: waste of time.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#69

Post by scotch_drinker »

nostromo wrote: post #15

I have mixed feelings about this. It's easy to see what's to love: an open, honest, and collaborative hiring process with a boss willing to train employees. Awesome! But he also got about 30 people to spend four weeks building trading software for him. Collectively that's over two years of uncompensated work, the results of which the hiring manager may use for free. And from the perspective of the applicant, how many…

From a worst case cynical viewpoint, he got free labor and those people got free training. It wasn't like he chained them to a desk and then made them get jobs in PHP. Best case, it was a mutually beneficial relationship entered into rationally and with eyes wide open. Top applicants might avoid it but people trying to break in and show what they can do might jump at the chance.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#70

Post by bbcbasic »

smacktoward wrote: post #44
bbcbasic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the great candidate that you couldn't hire because you only have X positions? If you help those candidate by referring them to a job at another company then both the candidates and the other company will love you. Months or years down the track, when you need to hire more, you will have a list of good candidates, and companies that may refer candidates back to you.

> What about the great candidate that you couldn't hire because you only have X positions? Life's tough all over, you know? I mean, if you know of an opening they would be good for off the top of your head, sure, go ahead and refer them. But you're not obligated to go find them that opening.

Of course you are not obligated.

However if I ran a company I would have an eye on both the short term and the long term. It is good for the long term interests of the company to be loved (by customers, employees and the community).

Doing very cool things for people, especially when it takes little effort or money, is a great investment to create goodwill in the future.

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