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Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

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Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#121

Post by Teever »

freedomben wrote: post #93
claudeganon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to make companies pay people for their time during interviews, at an hourly rate equivalent to compensation for the position. Everyone else in the interview is getting paid by the company, after all. Suddenly, managers, hiring committees, and recruiters will stop wasting people’s time and everyone will know what to expect to get paid!

That's an interesting idea, tho I expect it would have the unintended consequence of making it really hard to get an interview.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that prospective employers would stop wasting the time of applicants.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#122

Post by _hardwaregeek »

jrockway wrote: post #32
hardwaregeek wrote: post #4

Also get feedback from candidates, especially rejected ones. The people who get offers will assume that the process works, since it validates their self-worth. Even if the process is very stupid. I've had processes that were so so bad from top companies. Like "here's a repo, clone it, write a program that will be judged by automated tests that you can't see". I had to basically guess what the tests were going to do,…

I think it's instructive to look at this from the other side to see why these processes exist. At my last job, I wanted to hire a frontend engineer with some experience beyond tweaking HTML and CSS (we used gRPC/Web and Typescript, so some actual programming experience was going to make them pretty productive, and that's what I was looking for). Anyway, I wrote up a req and posted it to the usual career sites, and wi…

I agree and sympathize with what you're saying. Coding screens are a necessary evil. But perhaps they can be omitted in certain situations. I know I completed the Google foobar challenge far enough to alert a recruiter, only for the recruiter to send me a snapshot test. Like c'mon, I just solved a whole slew of harder problems than this.

I wonder if companies like TripleByte are actually successful in solving this issue. I've avoided them because I'm skeptical of recruiting companies, but it might be a good idea to have people take one coding screen and have it apply to multiple companies.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#123

Post by csunbird »

wilsonrocks wrote: post #104
csunbird wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours. Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)

In the UK at least, it's not this generous, even with the legislation from the EU working time directive. What country are you in?

I live in Germany and it seems like I am incorrect (I looked it up), it is actually 30 minutes, for 9 hours of work. But my contract states it is 1 hour per day, which I assumed was the law. Sorry about the confusion!

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#124

Post by ativzzz »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #80
Huggernaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not hard to understand, but that doesn't do you any favours. I'm not saying that someone needs to be so desperate to work somewhere (that would probably be bad), but if a candidate can't express why they have an interest in a particular role then that's of note, especially if I'm comparing to someone who can. Pretty much everyone wants to exchange their time and knowledge for money, but they could do that an…

I'm not sure what to reply. I was going to be snarky but prefer not to. From their website 'We help people create digital experiences their customers love.' Has anyone been 6, day dreaming in school, 'when I grow up, I want to help people create digital experiences their customers love.'? My interest in the role is it matches my experience and I want money. Again, if you are a FAANG, fine, if you are a startup no one…

Honestly, it's just part of the game. If you want a job at a company, you have to play the game of interviewing.

> My interest in the role is it matches my experience

This is a great reason to want to work at a company.

"I specialize in X technology and I see that you use X technology as well and I believe my expertise in it can help your company solve problem Y, and in particular I'm looking to join a company of Z size because blahblahblah"

Yea you have to stretch it a little bit sometimes, but that's life. You don't get paid to write code, you get paid to solve human business problems using code, which comes with the baggage of dealing with humans.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#125

Post by renewiltord »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #120
renewiltord wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would feel a little awkward for me to ask for someone to do work for me after I've determined that they're not a good fit for the company. And if it's post-interview pre-result then the problem is that they'll feel pressured to be positive. Perhaps if it were a third party.

Agreed that it's tricky, but there needs to be some feedback loop. Otherwise you end up with seriously broken processes that never get fixed. Companies tend to care about false positives more than false negatives, but there's a decent possibility that some companies have an extremely high false negative rate.

This is true, but perhaps you could do that passively by placing candidates in a re-sample queue and seeing where they work and for how long.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#126

Post by renewiltord »

twic wrote: post #35
axegon_ wrote: post #10

Perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion but as far as interviews go, I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect. You see their ability to adapt and improvise, which is far more valuable then being picky about a particular library or technology. Yes, the quality of their tests will be lower, but that's fine and you can take that into a…

> Perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion but as far as interviews go, I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect. You see their ability to adapt and improvise, which is far more valuable then being picky about a particular library or technology. I agree that you want to see someone thinking on their feet and tackling a new problem. B…

> I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?

If a senior engineer, at no part of the process, asks questions about the company, I would question that. To be clear, my experience is exclusively startups, but everyone I know would be very discerning about where they're going to be working for the next x years (x ≥ 2) and that's a long time with great opportunity cost. I'd be using every part of the interview that I can to extract information about how the company is run, who makes what decisions, and how long it takes to get a trivial feature out (mean-time-to-copy-change haha).

If they don't ask, then they either already know (which can only mean they're familiar with someone on the inside or someone who left on good terms, both of which are worth mentioning) or they don't know at all and don't care.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#127

Post by dilyevsky »

greggyb wrote: post #107
dilyevsky wrote: post #11

All of that sounds like you’re just going to favor people who are slacking at their current work, unemployed or have a ton of free time outside of work to prepare. How is that “leveling the playing field”? Obviously if you’re google or whatever your process is going to leak anyway so better to tell candidate upfront what to expect (and they do). If you’re smaller/unknown co may as well get genuine reaction rather tha…

I disagree. I've interviewed an abnormal amount: roughly every 8 months since getting my first job, and for more than one job at a time.[0] Based on my experience, the best interviews have been the ones with the most detail shared up-front. When I say best, I don't just mean my own performance has been best, but I also feel that the interviewer has been most satisfied and that they have learned what they meant to lea…

I don’t really understand how few hours of prep work can correct for crappy interviewer. Also not talking about few hours - people spend months grinding leetcode and if you don’t you’ll be at disadvantage

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#128

Post by pdimitar »

jameshush wrote: post #109
jrockway wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's instructive to look at this from the other side to see why these processes exist. At my last job, I wanted to hire a frontend engineer with some experience beyond tweaking HTML and CSS (we used gRPC/Web and Typescript, so some actual programming experience was going to make them pretty productive, and that's what I was looking for). Anyway, I wrote up a req and posted it to the usual career sites, and wi…

I 100% agree. I used to be in the boat of "I shouldn't have to study to pass a job interview" when I was younger. Now that I'm older and I've interviewed a lot of people too, I realize sometimes life is un-fun and kinda sucks but you gotta do what you gotta do. There's a strong co-relation between people who spend two hours a night for three months studying algorithm questions and people who are willing to spend 8 ho…

This is all true, I just wish people didn't put that much weight on some pretty random and oddly specific tech interview questions.

I've practically [re-]invented Redis back in 2008 while working for a company, and wrote something very akin to the Google crawler bot in 2009 yet at some point 2 months ago I "fail" an interview because I didn't do the best possible optimization of a basic stock storage system that has packages at different weights (and valued in different currencies) and since I had to fit a whole mini web project in 2h I of course didn't pursue perfect optimization. But the thing was working pretty well and ticked all boxes that were required -- and perfect optimization wasn't mentioned otherwise I'd probably skip 1-2 features to achieve it and fit in the [arbitrary] schedule of the homework assignment.

And then boom, you are no good because of a hidden requirement and unclear communication which aren't my fault.

I do get your point. Really. But people put too much value on some pretty random questions / assignments as well.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#129

Post by pdimitar »

lmilcin wrote: post #114
pdimitar wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad…

I conduct interviews with candidates almost every other day. Believe me, interviewing is a huge cost for the company and nobody wants to organize interview to "fish" for the candidates. We have screening process to remove candidates that don't have chance passing next stage so that we can spend more time with candidates that pass screening. It is really difficult to figure out if you want to work with somebody after…

I can't find a single point of disagreement with you. :)

The problem with these HN discussions is that they attract the good apples from both sides while the bad apples won't ever read and correct their practices by participating in these threads. We kind of put ourselves in a rather positive filter bubble here and that can skew our reality a bit.

I wish I've met more interviewers like you during my nightmarish 4 months of job hunting that just finished 1-2 weeks ago.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#130

Post by Huggernaut »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #88
molsongolden wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one approach and way that people feel about work and job hunting but (anecdotally) many others, including myself, do care about things like culture fit and company vision. Beyond a threshold salary level, these intangible things matter much more than money since I am going to be spending every single day working on these things and with these people. I want to work with skilled technicians but I also want to…

> do care about things like culture fit and company vision. And you know this from a job post in a job board/website how? This is what I mean. A no-name company can't say 'we want people to be motivated to work with us' when 99.99% of the world have no clue what they do/how they work. If you are Uber, or Microsoft, 37 Signals, or even Doctors Without Borders you know in general their motives/how they work (from the 2…

> And you know this from a job post in a job board/website how?

I don't need to know it from a job board or website because I don't apply to companies that I'm not already familiar with. When I apply to those listings, I already know how I will answer this question, because that's why I'm applying to the company.

> Has anyone been 6, day dreaming in school, 'when I grow up, I want to help people create digital experiences their customers love.'?

No but that's a strawman and I'd be surprised if you don't recognise that.

> My interest in the role is it matches my experience

I doubt that's the only reason. You could have experience doing a billion things but you probably enjoy what you do a lot more than that, and when we break it down, there are almost certainly subsections within what you do now that you enjoy and hope that the company aligns with that. When a listing asks "why are you interested in working here", you hopefully already know and can express that.

There are a large number of ways from location, culture, processes, technical decisions, people, problem domain, etc that you can discover about a company before applying.

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