Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The early hiring funnel is now breaking on both ends

hbr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 223 posts

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

#201

Post by ralferoo »

jghn wrote: post #178
lovich wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US. 2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn…

A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.

Even if they also put in the effort, doesn't mean it's worth it.

When interviewing for a FAANG, I had 13 hours of video call interviews with different people ranging from HR to managers of different teams. I was then invited to fly over to the US for formal interviews, where I had 3 days of interviews with different teams, about 5 hours each day (not helped by the fact that they had 3 teams interested in me, and they all wanted to go through their full interview process separately).

When I got back home, I then had another 3 hours of phone interviews for some reason, one of which was "from a manager I'd be working with extensively if I got the job" (I got the job, and in 2 years never even spoke to his team once).

I later learned that I'd aced all my interviews and they thought I was perfect, and they still insisted on yet more phone interviews even after 15 hours seeing me in person. The irony was as the HR manager was arranging the last one, I was very close to saying "if they still haven't decided after this many interviews, I'm not sure one more is going to make any difference, so I'm not doing it".

I actually wished I had refused that last interview because I got the job and hated it. Every other job I've had has required at most 2 one-hour phone interviews or 1 one-hour phone interview and a couple of hours on-site interview, and every company I've worked for has been better than that FAANG. For me now, having more than 2-3 interviews would be a major red flag.

There's some research that the bulk of an interviewer's impression of you is made in the first 10 seconds of meeting you, and the rest of the interview is just finding evidence to support that decision, good or bad.

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

#202

Post by thomascgalvin »

runamuck wrote: post #200

I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they…

> I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they couldn't.

That could be a valid test, but I do a lot of government contracting, and that industry is absolutely rife with acronyms nobody knows the expansion of, as well as names that were chosen because somebody thought they were cool but aren't acronyms, but everyone else assumes are acronyms, so they get the capslock treatment.

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

#203

Post by aakresearch »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #163
II2II wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The gaming of the system has been happening for a very long time. When I was a teen looking for my first job, companies were being flooded by resumes due to cheap laser printing (either…

I’ve worked with HR in order to assist at a job fair. I don’t think people truly appreciate how inundated with resumes HR can be once a position is announced. About a fifth of the way through the pile I started zoning out because they all seemed to blend together. We wound up trudging through the stack. In order to lighten the mood I told I joke I heard from somewhere else: “We should shuffle the pile and throw half…

> We should shuffle the pile and throw half of them in the trash. I don’t want to hire unlucky employees

Modern filtering using "AI" and ATS of all kinds is such a loaded dice that I believe an honest randomizing like you described would be a significant improvement for both ends of the funnel. Beyond jokes.

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

#204

Post by MikeNotThePope »

Aurornis wrote: post #46
somenameforme wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if you don’t filter at all? What if you just interviewed 10 random people? They’re probably all smart enough on some level.

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

#206

Post by maccard »

ralferoo wrote: post #199
maccard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is - that’s unlikely to be true. If we make a miss, or the candidate(s) pull out we don’t want to re-list and re-funnel. So we keep the job open while we’re hiring. Usually we close it out once we have anyone at the final stages of 5-6 people in the interview loop. But every job posting I’ve set up, I’ve configured an auto response template. It’s just a generic “sorry we decided to proceed with someone el…

I hope of those 5-6, 4-5 are at least told something like "we are intending to proceed with another candidate, but we were impressed by your interview and may contact you again in the future". That at least gives them an understanding that they are probably not going to get the job, but there's a slim chance they may be offered it in the future (although as I've said before, I'd rather be a different company's first…

I’m not in the businesd of keeping tethers out just in case. The way we do it is leave the role open for 1-2 weeks, choose our top 10 or so, and start proceeding through initial screen, hiring manager call, panel, director call, and done. If we get to a few people at panel level, we stop reviewing new applicants, but we continue with everyone who is at panel level.

We’re open with candidates saying that we’re interviewing multiple people and that we’ll keep them updated. It’s usually 5-6 weeks _in total_ so realistically you’ll have had maximum 2 weeks where we will have said “we’ve got three candidates at the panel level, we’re speaking to next week. We’ll make a decision by friday the 31st April”. If I could wave a scheduling magic wand and get everything wrapped in a Fortnite I would.

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

#207

Post by ralferoo »

maccard wrote: post #206
ralferoo wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope of those 5-6, 4-5 are at least told something like "we are intending to proceed with another candidate, but we were impressed by your interview and may contact you again in the future". That at least gives them an understanding that they are probably not going to get the job, but there's a slim chance they may be offered it in the future (although as I've said before, I'd rather be a different company's first…

I’m not in the businesd of keeping tethers out just in case. The way we do it is leave the role open for 1-2 weeks, choose our top 10 or so, and start proceeding through initial screen, hiring manager call, panel, director call, and done. If we get to a few people at panel level, we stop reviewing new applicants, but we continue with everyone who is at panel level. We’re open with candidates saying that we’re intervi…

I guess I misunderstood what you were saying. The post I replied to sounded like you told most of the candidates no, but kept the other 5-6 waiting until your chosen hire had accepted.

But this clarification makes it sound like you do actually do what I was suggesting - telling those others they weren't successful as soon as you've actually chosen one.

If you haven't finished making your selection yet, you obviously wouldn't tell the people still in the running either way. I was specifically talking about once you have made the decision and informed the successful candidate - because many companies don't bother telling the other candidates at that point just in case the candidate you chose doesn't accept the job, they still want to keep those other people live. I think it's better to tell them that you've offered the job to someone else and will only contact them again if that person doesn't acecpt.

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

#208

Post by ralferoo »

runamuck wrote: post #200

I asked Candidates (who claimed to work at site) to describe the parking at their office, Garage or Flat? Some of them couldn't answer that question. If they did answer, I would ask the name and purpose of the organization (accounting, HR, tech etc.) they supported and screened some more that way. I got some people who mentioned an Acronym (the project they supported "for years") and asked them to define it, and they…

Haha, I get what you're saying but I've worked on several projects for many years where nobody knew what several key acronyms meant. We could guess what they might mean, but nobody actively working on the project knew what the original programmers thought they meant.

One example was a file extension called .phtm - the best I could guess it meant (and how I thought of it) was "parsed HTML", but that's kind of stupid because every HTML file is parsed. Maybe it meant "proto HTML" because not all of HTML was supported. Maybe it meant "Phil's HTML" or "perhaps HTML". Nobody had any idea. There wasn't an obvious P that related in any way to the business needs or function of the file format.

As a programmer, do you need to know what XML, SOAP or REST mean to be able to use them? Not really. And to give another example, back in the days when I also did sysadmin work and had to deal with both IDE drives and SCSI drives, I wouldn't have remembered what the initials meant, nor would I probably know what the e in NVMe is if I hadn't just googled it even though I've used them for years.

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

#209

Post by ralferoo »

clates wrote: post #177
paulbgd wrote: post #31

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

> Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not…

I have done programming assessments, but I've probably only done 3 in the last 20 years, and those I strictly limited to 1 hour and told the recruiters that I wouldn't spend any longer than that.

I've also flat out refused to proceed with least 5 jobs when recruiters have contacted me, tried to tempt me with a job and then sent through a 3 hour coding test. I've got better things to do with my free time than toy programming puzzles.

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

#210

Post by paulbgd »

clates wrote: post #177
paulbgd wrote: post #31

As an engineer working on my company’s top of funnel it’s tough. Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Async technical challenges are obviously gamed but you’d be surprised at how few people both cheat + take longer than 3m to submit the solution

> Currently we’ve switched to a short (15-30m) technical problem that we hand grade before candidates get a call. Funny because I do the same; I don't commit to doing any work/assessments before at least an honest interview round. Businesses have to understand that _they_ are the ones who have to solve for the filtering problem. Most great candidates that you are hoping to snipe are already in a stable job and do not…

We’ll skip it based off other signals (referrals notably) of course, but if we offered an interview to every candidate based off their resume we’d never get around to interviewing the good candidates. I don’t like the idea of a technical challenge at the start, but as someone who was discovered way back via skills and not a fancy resume I want to continue offering others the same chance as me.
Post reply on HN