4 ms·

I'm not sure arrogance factors in. If you compare interviews now with just five years ago it's like night and day. It used to be a short phone interview then an

by lj3 10y ago

I'm not sure arrogance factors in. If you compare interviews now with just five years ago it's like night and day. It used to be a short phone interview then an onsite. That's it. It was relatively quick and easy on both sides. It was also unreliable. The flood of unqualified candidates into the job pool has made the task of sifting through resumes and talking to potential candidates far more time consuming. The time requirement alone has made the old way of interviewing untenable. The hoops are a way for companies to limit their time investment and reduce perceived risk. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It alienates the very candidates they want to attract while doing nothing to deter the unqualified and it isn't any more reliable at telling us who's qualified than the old method was.

pyb 10y ago
Agree that adding more tests and interview is self defeating, but I wouldn't be so sure that there are many more candidates? It's not like the number of CS students has gone up X00%. Visas are harder to come by as well. OTOH Mozilla is remote, so there have literally the whole world sending over CVs.
- lj3 10y ago
  It's not just CS degree students who are applying. Code camps are pumping out junior programmers who are applying to every job listing they can find. It used to be you sifted through 10 resumes before finding 1 good one. I'm told that number has increased to 100 to find 1 good one. Now, I don't know for sure if that's hyperbole or not, but that's the impression I'm getting from talking to hiring managers.
  - dominotw 10y ago
    Def rings true . I interviewed with google last month. I met like ~20 people who were also interviewing at google at the hotel breakfast. Some of them said they have been prepping for the interview everyday for past 4 months ( didn't help with my confidence :)). Reception at google was filled with 100s of people waiting for their turn to be picked up. And this was just one building among of many, many buildings. Lady at the reception at Avis car rental told me that they get 100's of people coming everyday for interview at google. It was bizzare and surreal to experience 'interview industrial complex' first hand.
    - kafkaesq 10y ago
      Heavens. Doesn't Google see what's happening here? All they've managed to bring forth with their epic hiring process (now the de-facto gold standard, worldwide) is an epic... arms race. The higher they set their "bar", the more desperately people will cram their heads full of Boyer-Moore, A*, and countless other algorithms they (and their interviewers) couldn't otherwise begin to care about. Other than Avis, Airbnb, and the local hotels, it's hard to imagine who could realistically benefit from such theater.
      - titanomachy 10y ago
        Every agent in an arms race is behaving rationally, from their perspective. The only solution is cooperation, but corporations have less incentive to cooperate than, say, nation-states.
        maverick_iceman 10y ago
        Such a 'cooperation' may very well be illegal under antitrust regulation [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
        itaifrenkel 10y ago
        In Israel there is an HR as a service company for early stage startups, that succeeds in bring really good talent. They choose startups wisely, their employees actually work in that startup shoulder to shoulder with the developers (especially to avoid backward linkedin interaction) and they recommend good candidates that had issues in/with one company to try and fit in another. This makes everyone happy. They also have a good name so they have connections with good head hunters, friends of friends, manager's linkedin profile access. Their main problem is that their hr specialist take a long time to train, and since stationed in good startups they might want to become a FullTime employee themselves, instead of switching to a new startup as the existing one grows too big.
        10y ago

by lj3 10y ago

pyb 10y ago

Agree that adding more tests and interview is self defeating, but I wouldn't be so sure that there are many more candidates? It's not like the number of CS students has gone up X00%. Visas are harder to come by as well. OTOH Mozilla is remote, so there have literally the whole world sending over CVs.

lj3 10y ago
It's not just CS degree students who are applying. Code camps are pumping out junior programmers who are applying to every job listing they can find. It used to be you sifted through 10 resumes before finding 1 good one. I'm told that number has increased to 100 to find 1 good one. Now, I don't know for sure if that's hyperbole or not, but that's the impression I'm getting from talking to hiring managers.
- dominotw 10y ago
  Def rings true . I interviewed with google last month. I met like ~20 people who were also interviewing at google at the hotel breakfast. Some of them said they have been prepping for the interview everyday for past 4 months ( didn't help with my confidence :)). Reception at google was filled with 100s of people waiting for their turn to be picked up. And this was just one building among of many, many buildings. Lady at the reception at Avis car rental told me that they get 100's of people coming everyday for interview at google. It was bizzare and surreal to experience 'interview industrial complex' first hand.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    Heavens. Doesn't Google see what's happening here? All they've managed to bring forth with their epic hiring process (now the de-facto gold standard, worldwide) is an epic... arms race. The higher they set their "bar", the more desperately people will cram their heads full of Boyer-Moore, A*, and countless other algorithms they (and their interviewers) couldn't otherwise begin to care about. Other than Avis, Airbnb, and the local hotels, it's hard to imagine who could realistically benefit from such theater.
    - titanomachy 10y ago
      Every agent in an arms race is behaving rationally, from their perspective. The only solution is cooperation, but corporations have less incentive to cooperate than, say, nation-states.
      - maverick_iceman 10y ago
        Such a 'cooperation' may very well be illegal under antitrust regulation [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
      - itaifrenkel 10y ago
        In Israel there is an HR as a service company for early stage startups, that succeeds in bring really good talent. They choose startups wisely, their employees actually work in that startup shoulder to shoulder with the developers (especially to avoid backward linkedin interaction) and they recommend good candidates that had issues in/with one company to try and fit in another. This makes everyone happy. They also have a good name so they have connections with good head hunters, friends of friends, manager's linkedin profile access. Their main problem is that their hr specialist take a long time to train, and since stationed in good startups they might want to become a FullTime employee themselves, instead of switching to a new startup as the existing one grows too big.
        10y ago