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Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

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Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#141

Post by dspillett »

sevagh wrote: post #123
optymizer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerey hope nobody reads this and thinks "I should start ghosting too". We want less ghosting in this process, not more.

Operating with integrity in a domain where nobody else is is a shortcut to getting fucked.

Responding with “Yeah, nah.” or a more formal equivalent is hardly going out of your way to operate with integrity in a manner that will get you massively fucked.

Yes, ghost those who don't take “sorry, but no” (or more succinctly just “no”) for an answer, especially those who have done so repeatedly (those are a time sink and deserve ghosting), but I wouldn't take it as my default position. Try not to become what you hate.

OK, so I tell a bit of a lie: ignorance is my default and only response wrt LinkedIn these days. I see the “you have messages/requests / people are looking at you” alerts regularly by mail, but I've not logged into the site in half a decade or more which anyone looking at my profile (rather than just being a gattling-gun invite spammer or similar) could probably tell with ease (the fact they bother contacting me is a good indication that they aren't a useful lead!).

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#142

Post by kdmccormick »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #136
kdmccormick wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: > The effect of getting ghosted for me, and likely others, is impactful. The narrative in my head played out like this: “was I really so bad that they wouldn’t even tell me no?” It was also a chilling effect for my projects that involved generative AI. I didn’t want to work on them. Every time I logged into my Github, I was reminded of the company because I still had a fork of the take home assignment. It took a…

Thanks for the implications on my character in the work place. Written very courteously yet not so nice.. maybe that's the key difference in perspective. I don't care about politeness I care about kindness. When someone writes a kind or genuinely useful letter with feedback when I get rejected, I greatly appreciate it. An automatic or generic rejection is the same as nothing to me. It has no actual information in it.…

> I don't care about politeness I care about kindness.

Your original comment is not kind either, my friend.

Genuinely useful feedback is the best, for sure. But hearing a generic "no" still makes it easier to take a deep breath and move on as soon as they decide against you rather than weeks later when you've decided it's appropriate to give up hope.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#143

Post by stevekemp »

tayo42 wrote: post #83
skeeter2020 wrote: post #54

This is NOT the new normal, and we should NOT accept it. Everyone here should do their part; for example, I'm more often a hiring manager and will not tolerate ghosting anyone who gets to any interaction with engineering. IME it's lazy recruiters who are responsible for this, and they're about as big of a part of tech as an accountant, i.e. very little. I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and sham…

> I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. The risk for repercussion isn't worth it. Your going to go online and stir up shit? Corporate culture is way to risk averse. If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.

In my experience companies with bad practices (be they recruitment, or otherwise) are named and shamed frequently - but only locally, and in-person.

I'm not going to relocate from my current city (Helsinki), though perhaps I could go back to working remotely 100% of the time in the future. So really the only companies I'm ever going to apply for are based locally.

I think via IRC, facebook, random geeky chats in pubs, and other face to face conversations I'm slightly familiar with most of the big players. There are certainly companies I've heard of that I'd never consider applying to, and would outright reject if a recruiter tried to head-hunt me for. And I think the reverse is true - some companies are well known locally for having fun challenges, awesome people, and a good environment.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#144

Post by 1920musicman »

LargeTomato wrote: post #120
drewcoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> treat candidates with respect > 95% of clowns out there you interview What's your company affiliation?

I worked at a rocket startup. 1/3 ex SpaceX. 1/3 ex Google/Facebook. I interviewed a guy and asked him, essentially, "find the biggest number in a 2D array". This guy spent half an hour struggling because he "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern". You'd be incredibly surprised who gets interviews.

Honestly, at this point I stopped making strong conclusions about candidates based on a single interview. I won't recommend to hire but also won't judge their abilities overall. Interviews can be very stressful, candidates overthink and often get fixated on a random solution they think the interviewer expects, etc.

I had several odd experiences myself in the past, as a candidate. The funniest one was when I interviewed at a prestigious company I thought was hiring only top talent. I spent an hour trying to come up with the most efficient Sudoku solver, got completely stuck on some arbitrary algorithm that I came up with on the spot. It wasn't a "circle pattern" but close to that. Wanted to impress the interviewer and also did not sleep the night before overthinking the process.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#145

Post by RobRivera »

zero-sharp wrote: post #101
TheChaplain wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess, you were not fast enough? Imagining myself as a recruiter, I would probably be working with a fair number of leads at the same time. Any of those who are a good fit and quick to respond would get sent to HR. My recent job I landed because I was pushy, I called the recruiter by phone and sold them on me, got the contact for the company manager, called them too and got hired. I got decent technical skills, bu…

I'm not sure what part of the story I just described was "bullshitting."

They were making a comment on the general case, not your specific case

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#146

Post by forinti »

kleiba wrote: post #33

This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do! These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn't get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens. It's indecent.

I once applied to a position in the IAEA. I didn't get the job, but they sent me a letter. I kept that letter for a decade because it was such an unusual occurrence in my carreer.

I got a nice letter from a UN agency, when local companies couldn't be bothered to send an email.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#147

Post by filoleg »

LargeTomato wrote: post #120
drewcoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> treat candidates with respect > 95% of clowns out there you interview What's your company affiliation?

I worked at a rocket startup. 1/3 ex SpaceX. 1/3 ex Google/Facebook. I interviewed a guy and asked him, essentially, "find the biggest number in a 2D array". This guy spent half an hour struggling because he "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern". You'd be incredibly surprised who gets interviews.

> "wasn't sure how to look through the grid in a circle pattern"

Now I am curious to know whether I am too dense to get it or if the candidate was just that off the mark.

Is circle pattern sorta like iterating through a 2d array like a spiral (i.e., outer layer of the 2d-shape first, then one deeper, etc.)? And if yes, why would that ever be useful for just searching for a specific value in a 2d array?

I get how it could be useful for some more niche/specific problems where the layering of the 2d array would actually matter, but is it just entirely off the chain to recommend it here? Because I cannot for the life of me figure out why you would want to do that instead of just iterating, especially considering how significantly less trivial it is to code-up that “circular” iteration (as opposed to just a regular linear iteration).

Sidenote: Is there even a more efficient way to solve that problem, other than just sequentially iterating through the 2d array and simply tracking the value/position of the largest number until you finish iterating over the entire 2d array (assuming it is non-sorted)? It seems way too simple, so I feel like either I am missing something about the problem statement or there is a better solution than the one I proposed.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#148

Post by 1920musicman »

realusername wrote: post #129
1920musicman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience. Interviews are very time consuming (prep 30 min, interview 1h, fill out the feedback form 30m-1h), and having several interviews each week means I spend ~1 day weekly on something that's not going to benefit me directly in any way (excluding the benefit of potentially working with good engineers I helped hiring). So unless the incentives change, I don't see this process improving in big te…

Yes exactly, the interview itself is a bit less than half of the work surprisingly and then you do need a real break after all of that very intense concentration anyways. 1 interview = roughly half a day gone, that's what I've experienced. And then it's indeed never valued inside the company, worse than that, it might be counted against you since you will achieve less in your team where all the evaluation will take p…

Agreed. I mostly conduct system design interviews which already have a smaller pool of interviewers at my company. This contribution has been included exactly zero times in the countless review cycles I went through.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#149

Post by mschuster91 »

ineptech wrote: post #102
plugin-baby wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% with you, but it’s not always easy to get control of your own recruiting. I’ve also seen HR get upset when their involvement is not what they expected.

Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".

It will be that way inevitably as an organization grows, usually it's an investor requirement to prevent outright nepotism hires or discrimination. No one cares too much for the first few dozen employees but anything larger usually will come with "ffs go and implement at least some basic hiring standards to reduce the legal risks".

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#150

Post by boltzmann-brain »

Beefin wrote: post #5

as a founder recruiting engineers of various skillsets/expertise i simply don't have the bandwidth to respond to every non-qualified candidate.

once you've identified an applicant is not suited, it takes zero time to to copy-paste thanksbutnothanksgoodluckinyourjobsearch.txt and hit send. don't be a dbag.
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