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I think you are completely missing the point I am trying to make. Imagine you have strong interest from Google, FB, Uber, Amazon etc. Google wants to waive the

by bitL 9y ago

I think you are completely missing the point I am trying to make. Imagine you have strong interest from Google, FB, Uber, Amazon etc. Google wants to waive their interview process as you are an open source contributor (they actually read your CV and clicked on the links). FB wants you to lead some ML team they have doing cool things etc. Other companies beg you to work for them even if you don't consider them interesting, willing to overpay you and pamper you. Now comes your unknown company/startup. In order to even talk, you require passing some HackerRank coding test. I look at your Glassdoor reviews, you either have none, or few, or your compensation seems to be low etc. You might be working in interesting area, maybe I should give you a shot? Or I just want to see what current crop of interviews in your industry looks like, maybe I agree on going through the process? Maybe I even visit some interesting city you are located in and scratch it off my bucket list? In the end I won't work for you. I won't consider anything you offer. I've gotten from you what I wanted - glimpse of the area you are working on for more ideas, keeping my brain up to date to interview requirements, visiting city I've never been before. You wasted time and money on me. You didn't get anything. I puzzled your head because you thought you'd have a shot at getting me. And that is the best outcome you'd get from this; most likely I wouldn't even talk to you after your initial requirements and go with other choices available to me.

dahart 9y ago
Please propose a better process! > Google wants to waive their interview process as you are an open source contributor. Other companies beg you to work for them even if you don't consider them interesting, willing to overpay you and pamper you. That's not a realistic scenario, your point seems contrived. Google doesn't waive their interview process, as the @mxcl example demonstrates. Companies only beg to throw money at you and overpay you if you're famous or have a niche skill. If that's true for you, this conversation is irrelevant to you. > Now comes your unknown company/startup. In order to even talk, you require passing some HackerRank coding test. As I said above, I'm assuming this process only starts when you express interest in the company. If you're complaining about having to respond to recruiter spam, I can't help you. Nobody is forcing you to take any tests. You should only do it when it's for a job you want. > In the end I won't work for you. I won't consider anything you offer. What you're doing is avoiding false positives by screening for something you care about. The same thing Google does. Except Google has statistics on how well their screens work. > You wasted time and money on me. Or, more accurately, they saved time and money by not doing lengthy and involved interviews or researching you heavily before discovering it's not a good fit.
- bitL 9y ago
  > Google doesn't waive their interview process They actually do. What they told me is that if you are an open source contributor for important open source, or you have 3 people within company that want you, you can skip the whole process. There are surely more ways to skip it. Not sure why they didn't do it for that Homebrew guy. > when you express interest in the company. I was mentioning that these days often HackerRank is step 0 of interviewing process, like what used to be technical phone screen. And that holds even for recruiting agencies if you want to have your CV featured there, even for underwhelming jobs. TopTal IIRC also does that. > they saved time and money by not doing lengthy and involved interviews I wouldn't be so sure here. You can be easily played, i.e. you are in Seattle, somebody wants to visit friends there, schedules an interview with you, you pay flights + hotels because you are happy to talk to them, they use you and extract whatever information they wanted to acquire from you and then tell you they decided for another alternative, but went there mostly to visit friends/relatives/handle some administrative business. It happens. > Please propose a better process! It's tricky. The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. With this you IMO cut the people you want/need the most as they usually value their time. Maybe if you offered compensated initial interviews to people you spent some time researching, that could help? That would be a signal you did your research already as you wouldn't want to waste money on random people, and that you appreciate them dedicating time talking to you?
  - dahart 9y ago
    > The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. You expect people to do research, but you clearly haven't listened to anything I've said about my process, which I've commented on multiple times in this thread. Your summary is a straw man unrelated to anything I do when I hire people. And you still haven't yet proposed anything better!
    - bitL 9y ago

by bitL 9y ago

dahart 9y ago

Please propose a better process! > Google wants to waive their interview process as you are an open source contributor. Other companies beg you to work for them even if you don't consider them interesting, willing to overpay you and pamper you. That's not a realistic scenario, your point seems contrived. Google doesn't waive their interview process, as the @mxcl example demonstrates. Companies only beg to throw money at you and overpay you if you're famous or have a niche skill. If that's true for you, this conversation is irrelevant to you. > Now comes your unknown company/startup. In order to even talk, you require passing some HackerRank coding test. As I said above, I'm assuming this process only starts when you express interest in the company. If you're complaining about having to respond to recruiter spam, I can't help you. Nobody is forcing you to take any tests. You should only do it when it's for a job you want. > In the end I won't work for you. I won't consider anything you offer. What you're doing is avoiding false positives by screening for something you care about. The same thing Google does. Except Google has statistics on how well their screens work. > You wasted time and money on me. Or, more accurately, they saved time and money by not doing lengthy and involved interviews or researching you heavily before discovering it's not a good fit.

bitL 9y ago
> Google doesn't waive their interview process They actually do. What they told me is that if you are an open source contributor for important open source, or you have 3 people within company that want you, you can skip the whole process. There are surely more ways to skip it. Not sure why they didn't do it for that Homebrew guy. > when you express interest in the company. I was mentioning that these days often HackerRank is step 0 of interviewing process, like what used to be technical phone screen. And that holds even for recruiting agencies if you want to have your CV featured there, even for underwhelming jobs. TopTal IIRC also does that. > they saved time and money by not doing lengthy and involved interviews I wouldn't be so sure here. You can be easily played, i.e. you are in Seattle, somebody wants to visit friends there, schedules an interview with you, you pay flights + hotels because you are happy to talk to them, they use you and extract whatever information they wanted to acquire from you and then tell you they decided for another alternative, but went there mostly to visit friends/relatives/handle some administrative business. It happens. > Please propose a better process! It's tricky. The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. With this you IMO cut the people you want/need the most as they usually value their time. Maybe if you offered compensated initial interviews to people you spent some time researching, that could help? That would be a signal you did your research already as you wouldn't want to waste money on random people, and that you appreciate them dedicating time talking to you?
- dahart 9y ago
  > The deficiency in your approach I see is that you expect candidate to spend time in convincing you without you spending time on researching them, pushing all externalities to the candidate. You expect people to do research, but you clearly haven't listened to anything I've said about my process, which I've commented on multiple times in this thread. Your summary is a straw man unrelated to anything I do when I hire people. And you still haven't yet proposed anything better!
  - bitL 9y ago