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Noticing You're Confused

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#71

Post by UseStrict »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #68

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of…

I don't think it was just the resume inflation, it's the fact that he meticulously went out and created a number of fake individuals with fake references. That's not something a normal person does when looking for a job.

Beyond that, the back-channel check where he "wasn't a culture fit" becomes a lot more alarming once you learn that he went through that level of effort to lie to get the position. I had a boss like that at a previous job. He always had an answer, confident, well liked by the higher ups in the company. But a menacing sociopath to all of his reports. Calling employees on weekends, micro-managing, belittling. It took the entire team quitting for the company to realize its mistake.

And that was just some mid-level manager, not a VP of Engineering whose behaviour may impact the entire company.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#72

Post by ChuckMcM »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #20

That is a uniquely scary story. I have only had the displeasure of hiring one person who effectively lied their way into the position. It was really obvious after they started that they had grossly overstated their skills and experience. My point of 'confusion' was that their reference checks were people who had worked with them, liked them but not for very long because they were leaving when that person joined, Etc.…

We once hired a contractor through a phone interview which went pretty well. Then he started working and I noticed that all his work always was done the next morning. It was almost impossible to have a conversation with him about coding. He seemed to have no clue about the most basic things but when you described what you wanted it was done the next day. We started to suspect that the interview was done with another…

Ha, reminds me of the guy who outsourced his own job : https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579...

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#73

Post by rainyMammoth »

Austhou wrote: post #69
rainyMammoth wrote: post #68

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of…

Because it's a VP position and not an entry level job?

It is a VP position for a small, medium startup. The equivalent of a middle manager anywhere else.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#74

Post by rainyMammoth »

zodiac wrote: post #70
rainyMammoth wrote: post #68

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of…

It's true that he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him, but would you hire someone who lied to the extent that he did?

Of course I would not hire him, but I left this comment because this artificial gate-keeping that pushed the hire to lie is a ridiculous trend.

Let's say that this hire didn't lie on his resume, he would still successfully pass the interview but he would never get to that point anyways.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#75

Post by mjevans »

rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office?

Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help.

I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees.

A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc).

There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#76

Post by frenchyatwork »

Austhou wrote: post #69
rainyMammoth wrote: post #68

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of…

Because it's a VP position and not an entry level job?

The problem is not that there are barriers, but that the barriers are artificial.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#77

Post by mjevans »

Tenoke wrote: post #10
oefrha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I certainly Noticed I Was Confused while reading this story.

The interviewee passed the questions, was well liked and the only note of confusion he mentions was 'Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam'. For what is worth I also don't have a LinkedIn for the same reason any more..

I've still never had an account on many social media sites, but that's because I avoid most forms of social media period.

(Technically a couple niche discussion sites might count, this being one of them, but the closest thing I've got to an actual social media account is a Reddit account I mostly used in respect to one sub-forum on that site where content creators I liked had a sort of news aggregator for their content).

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#78

Post by palebluedot »

Yessing wrote: post #40

if the best candidate you interviewed is a fraud: - either the candidate was competent: then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up your supply, maybe it's not an effective one. moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent…

I think that "competent/not-competent" is a false dichotomy. The candidate could be exceptionally qualified technically and competent, but have significant ethical / integrity issues that are difficult to notice in an interview, for instance. So a technical interview may not catch that, but past references may.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#79

Post by jonathlee »

mjevans wrote: post #75
rjkennedy98 wrote: post #61

I don't think this is as rare as you might imagine. When I started doing engineering interviews at our last company I was startled about how obsessive they were about doing video interviews because I hadn't ever remember doing them in previous jobs. If video resolution was bad they would simply cut the interview and ask to reschedule. When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by p…

Or maybe some people just don't do well in an interview setting that is inherently completely unlike a real day at any office? Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help. I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees. A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's n…

I have personal experience with this type of situation. Twice we had excellent phone interviews for an onsite contractor position. Then, when the supposed person we interviewed showed up, they turned out not to be able to do the work (not an onsite interview, the actual work). One was so bad that they had no idea what a variable was.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#80

Post by 013a »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #68

And yet the sad conclusion is that even though that hire lied on his resume he might very well be an excellent match for that job given he passed the interviews and everyone seemed to love him. If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways? I'm getting mad at all of…

Ok, let's forget about the deception part.

Interviews are horrible. They round-down to being useless at actually determining whether someone will be good at a job. I think we all mostly agree with this, at least to a degree.

To be clear on why I bring this up: this cuts both ways. If someone does poorly during an interview, this is a poor signal as to whether they'll actually perform poorly at the job. But, similarly: if someone does exceedingly well during an interview, this is also a poor signal as to whether they'll actually perform well at the job. It works both ways, you see?

I love the quote from Andy Grove at the bottom of the article. We all know interviews suck, from both perspectives. Its easy to just jump to a conclusion there: Well, lets kill the interview, they're pointless, why do we do them? Its a signal. Its not a very useful signal, but it isn't useless.

There are two signals that are, generally, characteristic of a much higher signal-to-noise ratio: references and work history.

This isn't bullshit gatekeeping. This is prioritizing the signals that have the highest probability of accurately predicting how well a new hire will do. He wouldn't have gotten an interview had he told the truth. That's probably because, at this point, there's very little information at the hiring manager's disposal to conclude that the hire would be a successful one. Even at the end of the interviews, he probably wouldn't have gotten hired.

It is gatekeeping. But its not bullshit.

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