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

The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

askamanager.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 623 posts

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#281

Post by toyg »

wccrawford wrote: post #167
hui-zheng wrote: post #39

> HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud. Though at this point they all know John is committing fraud, they still decided only to approach this guy claiming a poor fit for his resignation. I don't know why they do that. They have discussed a lot and considered many things. I am sure there are many reasons to do so.…

The phrase "walk softly and carry a big stick" comes to mind. There's no need to go into that interview guns-blazing. Soft-balling the questions at first is likely to do the job. If it doesn't, they can still bring in the heavy artillery later. This approach has worked very well for me in all kinds of adverse situations. Being nice and asking politely has resolved a lot of situations, and I can still fall back to bei…

> walk softly and carry a big stick

s/walk/talk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#282

Post by jlawson »

RankingMember wrote: post #238
commandlinefan wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tangible benefits to more diversity People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.

> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their…

Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are located in growing areas (or move there), which is where immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.

I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.

Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#283

Post by hraedon »

pedrosorio wrote: post #262
hraedon wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature. "Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones mak…

> Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?

This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.

If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#284

Post by JoeAltmaier »

The other side happens too: my business partner, early on in his career, interviewed and was hired into a video-processing software company.

He shows up, the building is empty but for a secretary and one guy on the third floor. A Japanese company had bought them for the customer list, and they were now just to support folks locally. He quit after a week or two, after finding a real job.

Some time later he met the guy who had interviewed him, and asked about it. His response: "I lost my hiring referral bonus when you quit! I'll forgive you for quitting, if you forgive me for hiring you!" See, the guy was already half out the door when he hired my partner, knowing he would report to a nearly empty building.

That was 20 years ago. Stuff like this has been happening forever. I guess now its on a production-line basis.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#285

Post by knodi123 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #160
pmarreck wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some ca…

I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing.

But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#286

Post by bradlys »

commandlinefan wrote: post #228
DoreenMichele wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity. But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

Probably hard to research.

How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#287

Post by kelnos »

Vrondi wrote: post #65
kurthr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people wonder why managers like hiring in person workers? It's not that you can't fake some stuff like this in person, but it's both harder (more expensive) and a lot more obvious.

Perhaps the most secure way forward is to make working remotely a "senior perk" that you earn after 6 months or a year of working in person.

Or just require that the person interviewing holds their ID up to the camera, and then do the same on their first day of work. I mean, I assume HR requires some form of ID when setting things up anyway.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#288

Post by kelnos »

clueless123 wrote: post #33

In my experience, At large companies that hire a lot of contractors, it is not that hard to pull this off. I've seen where the contractors A team do all the interviewing, then you get a C or C- team assigned to work in your project. By the time you "give them a chance", complain up the management chain, go sideways to HR and actually change the team, the contracting firm already got 6 months worth of salary from the…

> To add insult to injury, the "engineers" on the team will update ther CV's to show that they worked for "large company X".

And then when they apply to work at their next company, and that company wants to verify previous employment, the previous company that got screwed over is too worried about the possibility of getting sued to accuse the person of lying about who they were... so they'll just say "yes, Y worked here for 6 months".

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#289

Post by Slaminerag »

kelnos wrote: post #250
sombremesa wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example of what happens when you "speak out" (read: do anything but be servile) in India: https://twitter.com/Reashiee/status/1484811188844199936 > Many times, I wish that our Indian contract workers, would speak out when they see something wrong, about process, quality, or business requests. > our US-born hires are way quicker to say something to management if they feel something is wrong Apparently the obvious a…

> Apparently the obvious and easy solution here is to only get US-born hires. So why don't you? This seems to be an unnecessarily aggressive take on it. If I (an American) were working for an Indian company, I would plan to learn and understand what the culture is like in Indian companies, and then do my best to conform to that. If I didn't believe I'd feel comfortable in that environment, then I wouldn't take the jo…

I remember reading about a team (I think in Japan) which had a "brash foreigner." If someone noticed something, they'd mention it to the foreigner, who would bring it up with higher ups. Everybody won. Problems got fixed, the foreigner was safe because they "didn't know better," and their coworkers felt safe.

Re: The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed

#290

Post by peter303 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #74
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #40

I've been a hiring manager for remote positions for a long time. If your recruiting channels are good, most of your candidates are going to be honest and good intentioned. But interview enough people, and you'll start encountering people trying to abuse remote work. They're not interested in contributing to your company. They're only interested in collecting paychecks while they do as little work as possible for as l…

> Always makes me wonder how many dysfunctional companies are out there letting deadbeat remote employees collect paychecks and do as little work as possible because nobody cares enough to press the issue. I'll take a stab at it, and predict... all of them. Or nearly so. There seems to be an ever-present fraction of employees at any large corporation that are essentially worthless. Just along for the ride, raking in…

"Where's my red stapler?"
Post reply on HN