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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

#141

Post by JoshTriplett »

kazinator wrote: post #129
JoshTriplett wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" "This position requires knowledge of programming, particularly in (C, Python, insert details here)." Dancing around that point is not a "politeness".

But this potentially opens an endless debate against a candidate who is absolutely convinced that they know how to program, and that you're wrong.

A debate can only happen if you continue to entertain their followups with responses. If someone is silly enough to claim they know how to program (or some other critical skill) when their interview demonstrated that they could not, you can simply stop answering their email. It's sufficient to have given them one explanation for why they're not getting the job; that's more than most potential employers offer.

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

#142

Post by sunstone »

How bad can it get? Several years ago I had a Russian team lead at a software company who ate code for breakfast (clearly the top guy amongst over 100 coders) and had excellent leadership qualities.

Later, when the financial crisis hit he was out of work and I found out that he was really bad at interviews. Ever since I've wondered if I was hiring would I be able the spot the diamond in the rough where evidently, very few companies/people can. I'm still not sure.

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

#143

Post by UberMouse »

courtf wrote: post #90
fecak wrote: post #43

I sometimes consult to clients on improving their hiring process. Candidate experience is now a topic that at least some companies consider. This isn't your typical candidate experience - applying for a vague job ad, being asked to answer 6 puzzle questions, invite to an open house, two days of free training and then left alone for three weeks, followed by a vote by the tribe to see who will get the job. It's definit…

Good points here. Some of those who left the process in the beginning may have simply had better things to spend the next month on, not because they were inferior candidates. I like the tone of the article in general, but it does smack of a certain entitlement on the employer's part whereby they feel justified in extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers. Despite the admirable inte…

>extracting many thousands of dollars of free work from unemployed job seekers I didn't get the impression that they provided any value to the person hiring them. To me it just seems like they got some interesting, hopefully fun training in APL over a couple weeks. If I was unemployed and had the spare time (Like I was a couple months ago) that sounds like something I would have loved to do.

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

#144

Post by kstenerud »

WalterBright wrote: post #119
midnightclubbed wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go into any specifics as to what was (allegedly) said to the candidates? 18 cases sounds like the company was either interviewing thousands of applicants or giving very strong reasons for legal challenges.

A person does not need 'very strong' reasons for legal challenges. They can be spurious, with the plaintiff hoping the company will find it cheaper to settle than defend themselves. A system where the loser pays the winner the amount the loser paid their own lawyers will stop most of this nonsense.

A "loser pays" system sounds great on the surface, but is fraught with unintended consequences:

- A complainant who loses on a technicality or procedural failure, and is now on the hook for hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

- A big company that bullies the complainant with legal shenanegans until the complainant is worn out, drops the case, and is now on the hook for hundreds of thousands in legal fees.

Just the fact that, after your own expensive legal fees, you'll be saddled with the big company's (much bigger) fees as well, would be enough to deter most people from suing, even if they're in the right. It would become a new tool for bullying the poor.

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

#145

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

sfilipov wrote: post #133
UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a polite way to say "I didn't hire you because you have no idea how to program?" I mean I've interviewed people who we didn't hire for that reason... You can't say that though because its mean... Instead you get "your skills didn't align with our needs."

As a CS student who's still not very confident in his skills and without enough experience to recognize his own weak spots, I would say that "you understand X's language well, but you need to improve your knowledge of algorithms and data structures" or "you have a good theoretical understanding X and Y Computer Science concepts but you need to work on side projects to gain programming experience" or "you have shallow…

I'm not talking about that...I'm talking about people who are confused about things learned in CS101. I am assuming you can program FizzBuzz.

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

#146

Post by kyllo »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired.

So you just admitted that you make your hiring decisions based on a snap judgment. OK. But that doesn't mean you can tell in 30 seconds is whether someone is actually going to be good at the job.

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

#147

Post by WalterBright »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #140
WalterBright wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person does not need 'very strong' reasons for legal challenges. They can be spurious, with the plaintiff hoping the company will find it cheaper to settle than defend themselves. A system where the loser pays the winner the amount the loser paid their own lawyers will stop most of this nonsense.

Loser pays sounds like a good system, and I'll admit your suggestion for amount makes a lot of sense, but what if the lawyer is working entirely on contingency, as many of these cases are?

The interesting thing about contingency is a lawyer isn't going to take on a frivolous lawsuit on contingency. A lawyer will only take one on that he knows he can win, otherwise it's a giant waste of the lawyer's time and money, which he won't do.

So I don't think it would be a problem.

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

#148

Post by jzwinck »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #128
jzwinck wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before interview, there will be an agreement needs to be signed by interviewee, recruiter, company involved, so that, after interview, recruiters can provide reasons for rejections and as long as the reason is with in the laws of the country or appears reasonable, then involved parties will not proceed legally. You don't need to sign an agreement: this is the status quo. The meat of the problem is when the candidat…

The thing is you can give the appearance of discrimination without discriminating. Consider this: You say someone [a minority] needs more experience in X so they didn't get the job. The person who did get the job [a white male] has the same amount of experience with X. But they have demonstrated other skills that just blow you away so you hired them anyways. Person 1 finds out and since they weren't in the interview…

Yes, but having signed an agreement in advance won't really help: Person 1 may still feel they were treated improperly and sue. Except now they might be suing for breach of contract on the basis that the company lied to them about the reason for their rejection. Or Person 1 will simply argue that signing away their rights was not legal in the first place (which is true in many places).

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

#149

Post by kyllo »

kazinator wrote: post #135
001sky wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you "interview" people that are blatantly incompetent , that's on you not on them. Just sayin.

That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper. Some blatantly incompetent people write themselves up to look good on paper. They have relevant education, skills, plausible-looking experience and so on. Following up on some references before calling people in for an interview isn't a bad idea. Man, I have seen some blatantly incompetent ones. You'd give them a white…

That is hard to avoid, because people are called in to interviews based on how they look on paper.

And (hopefully) how well they did in the phone screen...?

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

#150

Post by JoshTriplett »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #123
daniel_iversen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that is a super tricky one and especially since cultural fit is probably one of the most important things to consider in the hiring process!!

Can you elaborate on what you consider cultural fit and why it is so important?

"cultural fit" is a rather awful description of a hundred small factors, some legitimate and some not.

Sometimes it refers to statements like "commit early, commit often" or "move fast and break things"; that's fine. Sometimes it refers to office interaction, such as whether you tolerate interruptions and social interaction: an introvert in an office full of extroverts or an extrovert in an office full of introverts; that's fine too, though at some point you'll scale large enough that you can't necessarily keep being that selective.

On the other hand, sometimes it means "are you going to play foosball with us and drink with us", which is wrong. And sometimes it means "do you have exactly the same personality/likes/dislikes/ethnicity/gender/etc as us", which is wrong and illegal.

In general, "cultural fit" is a dangerously vague excuse without a concrete reason. Say what you really mean, and if you can't bring yourself to say it, perhaps you shouldn't be using it as a hiring criteria.

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