>A company that will remain nameless (unless someone convinces me otherwise)
I'll give it a shot. They're going to keep doing it because they keep getting away with it. You've tied this to (I'm assuming) your real identity, so that makes it a little more difficult to call them out because they can respond. But if you don't let us know, we can't know to avoid them. Even avoiding spending time getting to a final round, only to be asked to do this, would be helpful.
They got you to work for free. They probably didn't benefit directly unless you gave them new ideas they didn't know about before, but you still put the time in. It was work to you. And they obviously didn't respect it at all, much less take the time to read your resume. Maybe they weren't even interested in hiring you?
The only saving grace for that could be an exceptional position with great responsibility and great pay. But even if that's true, they flippantly sent you through interviews for that position, so they're likely a bad company from the inside. They only way they would face consequences is if they're named.
Companies don't just interview people for shits and giggles. It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone. The notion that "they didn't even read the resume and had no intention of ever hiring this person" is silly - no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person unless they were at least willing to hear them out. They don't want to waste their own time any more than you want to waste yours.
The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.
Companies these days expend way too much energy interviewing people, and people then fail to prepare for the interviews or communicate internally afterwards. When I went for interviews I hated it when people did not even read my resume and sometimes did not even know what position it was for. Companies demand so many interviews from their existing people that they become jaded and no longer care.
I once went for an interview as a contractor and they scheduled 8 consecutive interviews in a row. Half never showed up, or asked the same lame questions. Also what they were looking for was actually different than what they had told me, so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing. I didn't get (or want) the job.
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
I did some interviewing last year. I've been in my current position for about 5 years; I enjoy it, but was looking to see what else was out there. After going through about 5 interviews I decided to call it quits. The entire process of tweaking resumes, writing cover letters, and applying eats up your post-work hours. Once you get a call back, preparing for the different interview stages will take up the rest of your nights, or weekends if you are assigned a work project. Working from home makes it easy to schedule calls during lunch hours, but that just makes your regular work day more stressful.
After my fifth interview I decided to take a break. It was a good experience for me; I was incredibly rusty during my first few interviews, but gained a lot of confidence by my last one. Overall though it was incredibly stressful. This authors experience sounded terrible, but not at all surprising. I think job hunting while out of work would be stressful for other reasons, but being able to commit your full attention to searching and preparing would be advantageous in my opinion.
I feel like the main blind spot for companies in the hiring process is that they expect candidates to already be caring about and deeply invested in what the company works on, and the more specialized the sub-field or tech the more the company expects candidates to have familiarity or expertise.
My main takeaway from this article is that the author wasn't necessarily frustrated with spending 12 hours to prepare a 1-hour long presentation - though this does seem like a big ask - but was more frustrated that they didn't even get the opportunity to present it because the company was
> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.
Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?
I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities:
1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process.
2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse.
3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end.
4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.
I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.
I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that hiring is terribly, atrociously, and disastrously broken. It's been talked about ad nauseum. But I don't think I've ever seen (nor do I personally have) any practical solutions to improve it.
Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.
This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
I think you're way underselling the existing methods, or maybe I'm misunderstanding your words. To me if something is terribly, atrociously, disastrously broken you must stop using it immediately, because its harmful to use it any further. Are we really at that stage? I think having an honest dialogue about hiring is also about accepting that there are things that are working about the current system - even if it needs changes.
Broadly, I feel like we need to work to get better at most processes that involve humans. Managers need to get better at setting expectations, giving feedback, appreciating people's work, etc, etc. Employees need to improve their communication skills, reliability at forecasting, etc, etc. HR needs to make sure employees feel comfortable, welcomed, valued etc. Leaders need to better convey a vision for the company, etc. Basically everyone needs to improve in whatever job function they're responsible for. Hiring is no different - its just one of the many functions of a company.
People love to base arguments in data, but in what cases will data/models lie to you? If a company has been around for a while, has no obvious problems keeping their employees, does that mean that another company can simply adopt their model and be successful? Specifically, should we expect that companies which measure identically on key metrics (employee churn/turnover rate, employee work/life balance perception, employee retention, etc) are also similarly great at hiring?
I'll give you the best interviewing experience I had as some inspiration for improving it. (I have had far more with people wasting time or rejecting technical tests because of ridiculous reasons than pleasant experiences).
The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me.
Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.
I’m working on a tiny piece of the broken hiring process, Job Descriptions. Many of them (esp non technical role) are essentially illegible and absolute garbage.
Hopefully it reduces the wasted time upfront by improving the quality of matching between job postings and job seekers
A few years back an SF startup asked me to prepare a presentation as part of the final round of interviews. It was supposed to be something I like to do. I chose making pizza on my charcoal grill using my KettlePizza [0]. At the time, our family tradition was to make homemade pizza on Friday nights so it wasn't much of an imposition to snap a few photos during the process and slap it together into a Powerpoint.
Overall the presentation portion was a decent experience. I presented for 10-15 minutes and the folks in the room asked questions for about that long.
I didn't get an offer because of "concerns around culture & team fit." I'm pretty sure that wasn't a result of my presentation, but, rather, that I indicated I didn't care much for death marches (and they were clearly on one at the time).
Had I put 10 hours into the presentation like Op I would have been annoyed. But an hour wasn't bad. Altogether, I think it's not a bad way to facilitate conversation and allow a broader group of folks to participate.
While I'm not generally a fan of test projects, etc., I have to admit that a writing and/or presentation sample is pretty much necessary for some jobs. That said, I probably wouldn't assign one so if a person already had examples, that would probably be fine. (And for a job that requires such things, they typically would.)
Sure, the presentation requirement is worth discussion, but what about the appalling tone of the email itself? It's a laundry list of ways they hold you in contempt.
Prepare for interruptions. Manage your time wisely. Prepare perfectly and be perfect.
I'll never be able to reconcile this industry's complaints about engineer shortages with the way so many companies talk to us like we're shit on their shoes.
Where you see condescension I see a recruiter being genuinely helpful by clearly laying out expectations for what will happen during the presentation and how it will go. Some of that stuff might seem obvious for some people, but my experience is that if you don't provide info like that, then you'll get people that show up completely unprepared, presenting the wrong info, unable to handle questions from the audience, etc. And I think letting that happen to someone is doing a bigger disservice to the candidate than possibly offending their ego by giving them too many directions.
The task is bigger than I would personally consider doing unpaid, and I think that is the problem being identified here. It's an assessment of Public Speaking skills that don't immediately seem to be related to the job - I'd judge the company harshly for this.
But, if I had agreed to do this (if it was a paid, professional task), I would find the setting out of expectations extremely useful and appreciate it.
I want to know what to expect, so I can prepare for it, i.e. spend less time preparing for the unknown elements.
That email was normal to me for small audience talks. Also, as a professor, I encourage students to ask questions during lecture (my class sizes are small enough so that it works fine).
I ran for office. Lots of endorsement interviews. It's just as bad as you'd expect. Comparable to our industry's hazing rituals.
The better interviews were recorded. The best were shown on TV, available online.
Somehow everyone's better behaved when there's witnesses. (I quickly learned to make and release my own recordings of endorsement interviews.)
--
We should practice interviewing. Just like public speaking, stump speeches, etc.
Ages ago, I worked at a place that took recruiting and interviewing seriously. We had agendas, checklists, scripts, surveys. We practiced on each other, switching roles. We did all hand's debrief after each candidate.
We treated our interviews as seriously as our usability labs.
Though we mocked the term at the time, I miss "learning organizations". When some of us at least tried to get better.
A few years back I did a phone screen with an org that seemed interested in me; the phone screen went really well so they asked for an onsite. But they warned me that they wanted to take advantage of having me onsite, so the onsite would last all day. Ok, I thought, fair enough. I took a day off of my then-current job and showed up at 9 AM and spent the next 6 or so hours interviewing with various people (nobody ever thought to ask if I'd eaten lunch, which I didn't that day). The recruiter said it went well, but a few weeks later told me that there were some other people who wanted to talk to me in person. So they wanted another all-day on site. At that point, I figured I had already sunk so much time into this interview that I might as well go ahead and do it and - surely! - they wouldn't invite me back for a second all-day onsite interview if they weren't nearly positive they wanted to hire me by that point.
I was wrong. After another all-day onsite (this time I had the foresight to bring some snacks because, again, there was no break for lunch although I spent quite a bit of time sitting by myself waiting for interviewers to show up), I never heard back from them again.
This happened to me as well. A recruiter told me that I had done very well in the PS, and would move me forward to the virtual onsite. I prepared for a week, including a whole weekend. Then I received a call from the recruiter telling me that the team that wanted me to interview changed their product direction, and would not move forward with me anymore. I was pretty upset, I just said thank you for letting me know since I did not know and do not know what else I could say. It was a totally waste of my time. I was actually pretty busy in that week, I could have done something else over that weekend. I guess this is how life goes.
it is, its kind of unfortunate, but things are always in a state of flux. Can happen the other way around, a company goes through an entire elimination process, gets the final choice, and they turn it down.
Feels like we constantly talk about how interviews suck, but we kind of all know why.
1. It's tough to fire people (in that, if you ask someone to move and it turns out they aren't a good fit, it's kind of a jerk move to then drop them like a hot potato).
2. Performance indicators are tough. How do you know someone is doing bad vs good?
3. Keeping on a bad hire (especially one you can't identify), is damaging as heck. Best case scenario they don't get much work done, worst case scenario they suck away the time of all your good hires through bad decisions.
So while I agree that interviewing sucks, I've come to terms with why it is so bad.
Those aren't directly reasons why interviews suck. IMO it's more that interviews, no matter how done/how well done, are a very imperfect tool. So we try to make up for quality with quantity--for the reasons you say. What you probably really want is internships and referrals from employees who have actually worked with the person, i.e. they're not just a college buddy. But you can't come close to filling every position that way.
If these ridiculous interviews don't produce top notch performance reviews after a year on the job, then the interviews are worthless.
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
But is the "process" making it better at finding good hires? I know for myself I did big interviews at one stage, and realized most of it was redundant, I wasn't really learning more that would change my decision, I quickly learnt most of what I needed with a conversation and writing a small amount of code ( not tricky code either ). Students are a bit harder, but we participate in a summer intern program, and give most anyone a chance . We have taken on a few people from that, and that's worked well.
The only company I encountered recently who wanted me to give a presentation when applying for a software engineering job was Snowflake. I guess asking everyone to jump through that hoop is one way of cutting down on the number of candidates.
It's one way to bias the interview towards extroverts. Based in the percentage of extroverts to introverts developers they will probably end up with less technically able development and the amount of meetings will be higher than average and meetings will be filled with people who need to add in something so meeting length will increase.
Should have more people wanting to come into the office.
Back before the plague, we used to include a short presentation round for senior hires on the final day. After all, a senior engineer is expected to occasionally explain and simplify potentially complex issues to people outside their immediate circles.
But we never made it a gauntlet. Presentation was for 15-20 minutes, on a technical and hopefully interesting subject of the candidate's choosing. It was also the first "real" interview slot, because the idea was always that by allowing the candidates to warm up on a topic they were familiar and comfortable with, they would be more relaxed afterwards. And of course we explained the reasoning to the candidate, upfront.
Sure enough - we have people who enjoy being exposed to new, interesting, technical things. If they learned something new, great. If they found the topic interesting enough to ask further questions thanks to their own curiosity, even better.
On the other hand, Spotify used to require an on-the-spot adlib presentation during their initial interview a decade ago. That was disturbing.
I remember a fintech here at my country contacted me for a possition and they asked me to perform a technical assessment which I diligently executed even since I though that the technical things they were trying to test could be easily asked during an interview, and that it going to cost me some money because they were asking me to use an AWS account, anyways. After finishing the technical thing, I sent an email to notify and proceed with the process, after that they were so difficult to provide availability for the next interview, they wanted a single time which I told them I wasn't able to meet at that time because I was working on that time so they took more days and I ended up loosing 20 bucks and so frustrated because they didn't provide the actual time to proceed with the process, I told the recruiter that if they don't have enough time to get more people with their team then maybe they don't have enough time to actually spend on different things than working. Anyhow, I just wanted to rant that.
Good riddance, if they don't respect your time probably it is not a company to sink some portion of your life into it.
Unfortunately people on the other side of hiring process have less respect for the candidates. Somehow they feel more powerful than the interviewee and forgetting that they were and will be on the other side one day.
Years ago, after doing well on regular interviews, I was once asked to do a presentation like this and I withdrew instead. For a regular interview, both candidate and employer give equal time. But for take home assignments, the employer is not putting in an equal amount. They're asking for more commitment than they're willing to put in (sometimes significantly so).
Maybe fixing the technical interview process starts with the highly qualified candidates decisively saying no to these things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to do this, but those who are should just say no and maybe it will help fix things (the takehome assignment fad and other brokenness).
They just have a organizing issues, its normal to give a presentation for a high level competitive job, but they should have gone through with it regardless if they found a better candidate. They don't know how to make a situation a win/win.
At the end of the day you never know what you're getting from an interview, some great candidates turn into duds and vice versa. It's amazing how many people in hiring positions are just really shit at judging character, instead they rely on some bullshit metrics and process to fill in their lack of intuition.
Never really had to deal with interviews as been lucky all my career but recently looking for new work I've had to do a few, it's extremely frustrating.
The last one I went through 3-4 hours worth of remote interviews.
In the first interview I made it clear I'm in no rush to move, I get payed well, they contacted me, i'm only listening as looking for new interesting work. They where a bit fuzzy about the role/salary saying they are looking for smart people then decide the role for the person etc etc so I said in order not to waste both our time this is my current salary, I'll happily move for that if it sounds interesting, not interested in less, can't afford to live on less.
I get to the end of the interviews, recruiter: so where do you want to start negotiation on your salary, then announces a value 30% less than what I am now. After me replying "you want me to take a 30% pay cut, a substantial risk moving job with no reward from the risk and leaving me worse off, I can't accept that", I haven't heard back since.
The annoying part is I mentioned several times, if they want me to do more interviews I don't want to get to the end to find out salary range is not in the same ballpark as don't want to do remote skype calls after working all day for nothing. I was assured yes it's fine multiple times. The only thing I can think off is they thought I was bluffing on the salary so thought I'd go for the low ball.
The company might not have considered their request a burden (though it was -- company's mistake and author is right to be upset). Here's an example where that could be true:
My gf has a PhD in $FIELD. She always has to give a 'job talk' for every job (since I've known her that's been all of FAANG plus some non-early-stage startups -- so most of the gamut). The talk isn't that different from the post doc job talk or faculty job talk, except the content is a bit more industry focused. Of course this is a function of the kinds of jobs she looks for. Every time she's decided to change jobs she worked on her job talk first (as Jessime had done for her talks as well). And to have the audience be more than just the engineering side is consistent with that. So the hiring team may have just assumed this was a "job talk" position, and assumed that the candidate would already have it ready to go.
Clearly the company was quite wrong, and that lead to an unreasonable burden on the candidate. It's a good reason to avoid the company: if they can't get the first impression right, well, perhaps the first impression is actually accurate as to how everything else in the company is run.
Again, I'm not trying to defend this unknown company in the slightest, just trying to imagine how this kind of thing could happen. Sounds like Jessime dodged a bullet, job-wise.
From their website, the poster also has a recent PhD (2019), so I'm a little surprised that the talk request caught them so flat-footed.
I gave job talks at ~85% of my interviews after grad school, and those talks were usually adapted from my PhD defense. I did make some changes: add in more background, emphasize parts of the project that are more similar to the job, etc. However, this certainly wasn't weeks of work; more like 1-2 evenings to edit the slides, plus a few run-thrus to practice.
It's really hard to tell if the company was "wrong" here based on the available information. I'm tempted to say the company is, because I certainly have personal experience with companies that do shitty things during interviews, but I'm not so sure the presentation is an automatic indicator of that.
It's possible that the presentation was not meant to be a burden at all. I've done similar interview presentations in the past, and it only took me 2-3 hours to prepare for it because my job experience is in a field where giving hour-long presentations with only a day's notice is commonplace. 2-3 hours preparation is annoying, but it's about what I expect to spend preparing for any interview. If OP was interviewing for a Solutions Engineer or Consultant role, for example, then asking for a 1 hour presentation isn't that unreasonable and it's likely that the company would expect OP to be able to prepare for that without it being a burden.
OTOH, if it was for a software engineer role and they were requiring a presentation even though it has nothing to do with the job function, then yea that's absurd. But which is it? I can't tell from the OP.
Giving a talk is normal for many academic and "scientist" level positions. Being interrupted with questions is also normal, and I'm personally completely fine with it. The only annoying thing is that the company canceled at the last minute, but that's probably because they had multiple candidates "in-flight" at the same time.
To be fair, whatever time you prepare for this specific company is useful preparation for your current job search cycle anyways.
My job search cycle is once every 2-4 years. Within each cycle, I've always found my later interviews go much smoother than the early ones, due to incremental preparations adding up to much smoother execution.
The first new interviews are always rough, after a long hiatus. I generally look at those as warm-up interviews...
So it's not necessarily a net-zero reward, for the story portrayed by the author.
[+] [-] vsareto|5 years ago|reply
I'll give it a shot. They're going to keep doing it because they keep getting away with it. You've tied this to (I'm assuming) your real identity, so that makes it a little more difficult to call them out because they can respond. But if you don't let us know, we can't know to avoid them. Even avoiding spending time getting to a final round, only to be asked to do this, would be helpful.
They got you to work for free. They probably didn't benefit directly unless you gave them new ideas they didn't know about before, but you still put the time in. It was work to you. And they obviously didn't respect it at all, much less take the time to read your resume. Maybe they weren't even interested in hiring you?
The only saving grace for that could be an exceptional position with great responsibility and great pay. But even if that's true, they flippantly sent you through interviews for that position, so they're likely a bad company from the inside. They only way they would face consequences is if they're named.
[+] [-] tidepod12|5 years ago|reply
The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.
[+] [-] cryptocrypter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|5 years ago|reply
I once went for an interview as a contractor and they scheduled 8 consecutive interviews in a row. Half never showed up, or asked the same lame questions. Also what they were looking for was actually different than what they had told me, so I flew to another city (they paid) for nothing. I didn't get (or want) the job.
Good thing too, a month later the entire division was shut down.
[+] [-] ssully|5 years ago|reply
After my fifth interview I decided to take a break. It was a good experience for me; I was incredibly rusty during my first few interviews, but gained a lot of confidence by my last one. Overall though it was incredibly stressful. This authors experience sounded terrible, but not at all surprising. I think job hunting while out of work would be stressful for other reasons, but being able to commit your full attention to searching and preparing would be advantageous in my opinion.
[+] [-] itronitron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincpollard|5 years ago|reply
> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.
Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.
I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?
I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities: 1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process. 2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse. 3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end. 4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.
I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.
[+] [-] tidepod12|5 years ago|reply
Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.
This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.
[+] [-] passivate|5 years ago|reply
Broadly, I feel like we need to work to get better at most processes that involve humans. Managers need to get better at setting expectations, giving feedback, appreciating people's work, etc, etc. Employees need to improve their communication skills, reliability at forecasting, etc, etc. HR needs to make sure employees feel comfortable, welcomed, valued etc. Leaders need to better convey a vision for the company, etc. Basically everyone needs to improve in whatever job function they're responsible for. Hiring is no different - its just one of the many functions of a company.
People love to base arguments in data, but in what cases will data/models lie to you? If a company has been around for a while, has no obvious problems keeping their employees, does that mean that another company can simply adopt their model and be successful? Specifically, should we expect that companies which measure identically on key metrics (employee churn/turnover rate, employee work/life balance perception, employee retention, etc) are also similarly great at hiring?
[+] [-] collyw|5 years ago|reply
The interviewer asked me to bring in a laptop with some code I could discuss. I did, we discussed. He asked me some questions, I added a simple feature at his request. No time wasted on my part (ok, I was in a position that I had code I could bring in). It was code I knew, so no gotcha or anything fancy. Relaxed, friendly, the interviewer learned something rather than trying to one up me.
Like I say the only downside I can see to this approach is that people may not have a side project that they can share easily. In which case they will have to do the equivalent work of a normal technical test. So the worst case scenario using this method is the same as the standard scenario.
[+] [-] mguerville|5 years ago|reply
I’m working on a tiny piece of the broken hiring process, Job Descriptions. Many of them (esp non technical role) are essentially illegible and absolute garbage.
Hopefully it reduces the wasted time upfront by improving the quality of matching between job postings and job seekers
[+] [-] redshirtrob|5 years ago|reply
Overall the presentation portion was a decent experience. I presented for 10-15 minutes and the folks in the room asked questions for about that long.
I didn't get an offer because of "concerns around culture & team fit." I'm pretty sure that wasn't a result of my presentation, but, rather, that I indicated I didn't care much for death marches (and they were clearly on one at the time).
Had I put 10 hours into the presentation like Op I would have been annoyed. But an hour wasn't bad. Altogether, I think it's not a bad way to facilitate conversation and allow a broader group of folks to participate.
[0] https://www.kettlepizza.com/
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yashp|5 years ago|reply
Prepare for interruptions. Manage your time wisely. Prepare perfectly and be perfect.
I'll never be able to reconcile this industry's complaints about engineer shortages with the way so many companies talk to us like we're shit on their shoes.
[+] [-] tidepod12|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2245|5 years ago|reply
But, if I had agreed to do this (if it was a paid, professional task), I would find the setting out of expectations extremely useful and appreciate it.
I want to know what to expect, so I can prepare for it, i.e. spend less time preparing for the unknown elements.
[+] [-] anon946|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
We should record job interviews.
Then both sides can review at their leisure.
Maybe then we can start improving.
--
Origin of Idea:
I ran for office. Lots of endorsement interviews. It's just as bad as you'd expect. Comparable to our industry's hazing rituals.
The better interviews were recorded. The best were shown on TV, available online.
Somehow everyone's better behaved when there's witnesses. (I quickly learned to make and release my own recordings of endorsement interviews.)
--
We should practice interviewing. Just like public speaking, stump speeches, etc.
Ages ago, I worked at a place that took recruiting and interviewing seriously. We had agendas, checklists, scripts, surveys. We practiced on each other, switching roles. We did all hand's debrief after each candidate.
We treated our interviews as seriously as our usability labs.
Though we mocked the term at the time, I miss "learning organizations". When some of us at least tried to get better.
Okay, rant over.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|5 years ago|reply
I was wrong. After another all-day onsite (this time I had the foresight to bring some snacks because, again, there was no break for lunch although I spent quite a bit of time sitting by myself waiting for interviewers to show up), I never heard back from them again.
[+] [-] jgwil2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordache|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] just_random|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diob|5 years ago|reply
1. It's tough to fire people (in that, if you ask someone to move and it turns out they aren't a good fit, it's kind of a jerk move to then drop them like a hot potato).
2. Performance indicators are tough. How do you know someone is doing bad vs good?
3. Keeping on a bad hire (especially one you can't identify), is damaging as heck. Best case scenario they don't get much work done, worst case scenario they suck away the time of all your good hires through bad decisions.
So while I agree that interviewing sucks, I've come to terms with why it is so bad.
[+] [-] ghaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jennyyang|5 years ago|reply
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
[+] [-] keithnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnanabkchsbxb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devlopr|5 years ago|reply
Should have more people wanting to come into the office.
[+] [-] bostik|5 years ago|reply
But we never made it a gauntlet. Presentation was for 15-20 minutes, on a technical and hopefully interesting subject of the candidate's choosing. It was also the first "real" interview slot, because the idea was always that by allowing the candidates to warm up on a topic they were familiar and comfortable with, they would be more relaxed afterwards. And of course we explained the reasoning to the candidate, upfront.
Sure enough - we have people who enjoy being exposed to new, interesting, technical things. If they learned something new, great. If they found the topic interesting enough to ask further questions thanks to their own curiosity, even better.
On the other hand, Spotify used to require an on-the-spot adlib presentation during their initial interview a decade ago. That was disturbing.
[+] [-] razeonex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mengibar10|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trimbo|5 years ago|reply
Maybe fixing the technical interview process starts with the highly qualified candidates decisively saying no to these things. I understand that not everyone is in a position to do this, but those who are should just say no and maybe it will help fix things (the takehome assignment fad and other brokenness).
[+] [-] wyck|5 years ago|reply
At the end of the day you never know what you're getting from an interview, some great candidates turn into duds and vice versa. It's amazing how many people in hiring positions are just really shit at judging character, instead they rely on some bullshit metrics and process to fill in their lack of intuition.
[+] [-] tiew9Vii|5 years ago|reply
The last one I went through 3-4 hours worth of remote interviews.
In the first interview I made it clear I'm in no rush to move, I get payed well, they contacted me, i'm only listening as looking for new interesting work. They where a bit fuzzy about the role/salary saying they are looking for smart people then decide the role for the person etc etc so I said in order not to waste both our time this is my current salary, I'll happily move for that if it sounds interesting, not interested in less, can't afford to live on less.
I get to the end of the interviews, recruiter: so where do you want to start negotiation on your salary, then announces a value 30% less than what I am now. After me replying "you want me to take a 30% pay cut, a substantial risk moving job with no reward from the risk and leaving me worse off, I can't accept that", I haven't heard back since.
The annoying part is I mentioned several times, if they want me to do more interviews I don't want to get to the end to find out salary range is not in the same ballpark as don't want to do remote skype calls after working all day for nothing. I was assured yes it's fine multiple times. The only thing I can think off is they thought I was bluffing on the salary so thought I'd go for the low ball.
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
My gf has a PhD in $FIELD. She always has to give a 'job talk' for every job (since I've known her that's been all of FAANG plus some non-early-stage startups -- so most of the gamut). The talk isn't that different from the post doc job talk or faculty job talk, except the content is a bit more industry focused. Of course this is a function of the kinds of jobs she looks for. Every time she's decided to change jobs she worked on her job talk first (as Jessime had done for her talks as well). And to have the audience be more than just the engineering side is consistent with that. So the hiring team may have just assumed this was a "job talk" position, and assumed that the candidate would already have it ready to go.
Clearly the company was quite wrong, and that lead to an unreasonable burden on the candidate. It's a good reason to avoid the company: if they can't get the first impression right, well, perhaps the first impression is actually accurate as to how everything else in the company is run.
Again, I'm not trying to defend this unknown company in the slightest, just trying to imagine how this kind of thing could happen. Sounds like Jessime dodged a bullet, job-wise.
[+] [-] mattkrause|5 years ago|reply
I gave job talks at ~85% of my interviews after grad school, and those talks were usually adapted from my PhD defense. I did make some changes: add in more background, emphasize parts of the project that are more similar to the job, etc. However, this certainly wasn't weeks of work; more like 1-2 evenings to edit the slides, plus a few run-thrus to practice.
[+] [-] tidepod12|5 years ago|reply
It's possible that the presentation was not meant to be a burden at all. I've done similar interview presentations in the past, and it only took me 2-3 hours to prepare for it because my job experience is in a field where giving hour-long presentations with only a day's notice is commonplace. 2-3 hours preparation is annoying, but it's about what I expect to spend preparing for any interview. If OP was interviewing for a Solutions Engineer or Consultant role, for example, then asking for a 1 hour presentation isn't that unreasonable and it's likely that the company would expect OP to be able to prepare for that without it being a burden.
OTOH, if it was for a software engineer role and they were requiring a presentation even though it has nothing to do with the job function, then yea that's absurd. But which is it? I can't tell from the OP.
[+] [-] anon946|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordache|5 years ago|reply
My job search cycle is once every 2-4 years. Within each cycle, I've always found my later interviews go much smoother than the early ones, due to incremental preparations adding up to much smoother execution.
The first new interviews are always rough, after a long hiatus. I generally look at those as warm-up interviews...
So it's not necessarily a net-zero reward, for the story portrayed by the author.