61–70 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I told the last recruiter who had a six week interview process “I’m not waiting that long when I can literally clone your product in a weekend for $50
That's nice. But a lot of people looking for professional jobs may take a year+ to find a position.
> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…
> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem. Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world? I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the intervi…
In the Olden Days [tm], jobs were advertised through recruiters, physical media (eg the paper) and connections. You had to review applications and conduct interviews. The cost of applying was relatively high, your reach was relatively low and the investment per applicant was relatively high. So imagine that there were enough jobs for everyone in a simplified model. 10 people applied for 10 jobs. It's not the same 10 people for each job. But there was a decent ROI on effort. It kinda just worked.
Fast forward to now and the cost of applying is essentially zero in terms of registering interest and submitting a CV. And you apply for a lot more jobs so instead of 10 applicants for 10 jobs, you have 200 applicants for 200 jobs. Still the same applicant to job ratio but way more inefficient for everyone involved. Applicants can't put in the same effort for 200 applications that they did for 10 and employers can't review 200 applications the same way they did 10.
So what happens? Employers, who have the power in this relationship, put up roadblocks in the name of efficiency. Now you have to survive ATS before ever going in front of a human. That ATS uses inscrutable logic that may filter you out for not including enough keywords or some other specious reason. You now have hiring assignments.
The net effect is that an applicant puts in 200 applications, get automatically filtered out from 180 of them and then has to do upwards of 20 take home assignments.
Plus there are more and more layers added. More rounds of interviews. Phone screens. Remote interviews then on-site interviews. All of this wastes time and, like you allude to, I don't think it's effective. But it's a natural response to the illusion of choice.
Let me give an online dating analogy. In years gone by, you'd rely on meeting people in person. Now, less so. And speaking in a strictly heteronormative sense, how it tends to go is that women on average have hundreds of choices and men have on average far fewer. A gender imbalance plays into this.
So what does a woman in this scenario do? They start adding filters to just make the numbers more manageable. Height, salary, location, same interests and so on. So the net effect is that that a lot of people are indepndently applying filters and filtering down to a pool with a lot of crossover. Conventionally attractive men, for example, will tend have far more options.
So I think the same happens with hiring. If you're a Big Tech company, you start adding filters. Did this person go to a top school? What internships did they have? Do these things matter for on-the-job performance? Barely (IMHO). But what you'll probably find is that a handful of people have a ton of options while others struggle. And it's simply the product of employers trying to make their applicant pool manageable but they're all doing it in very similar ways.
And I honestly don't know what the solution is.
Isn't this already easily faked with an ordinary general-purpose consumer $20/month AI tool?
> Cultivate a culture of intellectual honesty over polished perfection.
This is one good idea I saw in the advertorial. Or, better yet, start with honesty at all.
But you have to understand and believe in it, or it will immediately be twisted into yet another gamed performative bit of interview theatre, like most other aspects that emerge from big-corporate mentality of herding worker drones.
(Perhaps the authors, coming from Meta and Microsoft, appreciate that reality.)
> “There is a growing gap between the candidate’s written persona and their live presence. I’ll see a cover letter that is poetic and a résumé that is flawlessly structured, but then the person on the video call struggles to explain their own bullet points. This has always been a problem: Candidate applies with an amazing resume but then flails when you ask them questions or “can’t remember”. I can remember a few int…
Yeah, but it's now 1000x worse. Before you needed actual skill (or luck) to create a good looking CV, especially for niche positions.
Now you take their job description, the company's "About us" webpage, your old CV and have LLMs generate a CV with pretty solid grammar and most of the verbiage they expect.
In the past the average unqualified person wouldn't even know the right words for a specific niche domain, let alone how to use them.
Oh, and single LLMs are kind of inherently multilingual, this makes it even worse, because you can have people that barely understand the target language generate a reasonable CV in that language.
The CV quality floor has been raised but the candidate floor has fallen through the pits of hell.
Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
It's both hard and doesn't scale.
Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.
Bill Gurley has a great line about this:
"I use LinkedIn like this:
If Person A reaches out to me and there is a Person B that is a common connection between A and myself, I want to be able to call Person B and have 100% confidence in their evaluation. That's the bar I set to connect with someone on LinkedIn."
From:
Are there any battle-tested strategies for hiring that are generally known to be good, but aren't often used because it's hard or doesn't scale? Asking because my business is growing and we've gotten lucky with our hires so far, but I'd like to add my discipline to hiring well.