5 ms·

I'd be embarrassed to admit to these metrics. This guy has wasted not only his own time by bringing 5x the candidates needed onsite, but his team's, his employ

I'd be embarrassed to admit to these metrics. This guy has wasted not only his own time by bringing 5x the candidates needed onsite, but his team's, his employers', and the candidates themselves'. A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite. A phone call or one-hour Skype, or even 3 supplemental ones, is a lot cheaper than the onsite. It says a lot about the industry that not only is it common practice to have a "concave" funnel where you don't winnow people out early enough and end up making your engineers spend half their workday conducting pointless interviews instead of doing actual work, but also that management writ large is too clueless to be embarrassed. If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, would you consider them "only the best"? Even if their appraisal of the top 10% of candidates was accurate and reproducible (it's not even close), I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire. Sure, the guy can point to his numbers as some sort of merit badge, but if I told you I washed my hands 400 times a day, you wouldn't consider me some kind of expert on handwashing, would you? You'd rightly think I'm some kind of crazy person.

kookiekrak 8y ago
Facebook's guidelines were 25% confidence they could pass an onsite and they would be given one. I'd personally rather give the candidate AND the company a chance at hiring a potential candidate than missing out on one. The longterm impact on your company is huge.
- mchannon 8y ago
  This fails to consider the fact that with 25% confidence, 3 out of 4 candidates have no chance, and you're just wasting time, theirs and yours. There are two kinds of hiring managers- those who think the system works and they're skillfully picking the best talent, though at the last minute, without formal education on the subject, without metrics, without reproducibility, without accountability, and with minimal prep time; and those who recognize the system is deeply flawed and go along to get along.
  - ozim 8y ago
    That is only wasted time if there was next best opportunity. People are looking for work so going for on-site interview is not waste of time. What would you do, go to the beach, hang out in a bar? So your time would be spent better. Maybe you would go to other interview where you would be hired but you cannot know this in advance. The same with company they don't know if other candidates would be better until they actually do on-site. If you can predict future then yes. But most don't.
    - mchannon 8y ago
      > That is only wasted time if there was next best opportunity. People are looking for work so going for on-site interview is not waste of time. What's the unemployment rate for top-end talent in Silicon Valley? 2%? 1%? This foolish strategy of candidates-time-is-free is designed to turn off people who already have jobs and want an upgrade. Not only are you _not_ hiring the best, you're limiting your applicant pool to the worst. <sarcasm>Why, sure, I'll blow 7 hours including 2 hours' roundtrip commute to audition for a 20% chance of a $10k raise.</sarcasm>
pmiller2 8y ago
He says he interviewed X candidates to hire X/5 engineers. That means they probably selected more than X/5, but that’s the number that accepted offers. Maybe the problem is their offers aren’t competitive. I totally agree that seems like an excessive amount of interviewing for engineers on the team.
- mchannon 8y ago
  Let me take you further in this direction of thought- many offers aren't accepted because the candidate, after having been through a dysfunctional interview gauntlet, realizes a different opportunity is better (sometimes after waiting weeks to get the start date). If interviewing has been skillfully conducted, and the candidate gets an offer in 24 hours, there's substantially less likelihood they'll turn it down, because they won't have had as much time to interview elsewhere, or wonder what organizational deficit is causing the delay.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    That is certainly true. Since you had already jumped to implicate the interview process as the reason it took so many candidates to make a hire, I was simply offering an alternative. In fact, it could be that both the interview process and the offers are flawed; there can be any number of reasons why a candidate doesn’t convert to an employee, and you’re solely focused on one.
rhacker 8y ago
I don't know he did mention there are phone-screens ahead of time. Also mentioned that the reason they are bringing in more is to figure out who they are before simply disqualifying the candidate because they don't meet the specs. If you simply don't agree with that premise, suggest that, rather than you would be embarrassed to admit those metrics. That's more of an insult than describing how the method he describes specifically and the reasons behind them are wrong. Also those 400 interviews happened in 7 years, which is one per week. I am currently in a hiring phase and we do 1 or 2 per week.
- mchannon 8y ago
  The process is usually one person doing one 20min behavioral phone screen, and maybe one technical person doing one 60min technical phone screen, give or take. Maybe a homework. Then maybe 3-6 one-on-one interviews for a 5 hour onsite. Fiddle with the numbers if you need, but this covers 90% of companies interviewing today. That's way too few phone screens and way too many onsites if you don't get rid of enough candidates at the phone screen stage. Simply disqualifying the candidate because they don't meet the specs happens anyway- the question is, are you a highly skilled hiring manager by coming to this realization quickly, or only after you have the candidates come in and you waste an afternoon introducing them to everybody? I personally feel this industry could use more insults going the other way. Until hiring managers realize they have been trying to source talent with their middle finger out the whole time, they're not going to realize they need to change.
dahart 8y ago
> A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite. After having done a decent amount of hiring interviews and managing in my life, I don't think it's possible to have 50% confidence before you meet someone. The way you gain that much confidence is by 1- talking and listening to them, and 2- comparing them to other candidates. > I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire. This seems hyper-focused on the minor efficiencies of interviewing, at the expense of employment efficiency; it's feels like an engineering approach that might not have all the requirements at hand. The employee is (probably) going to be paid a six figure salary, and will have a large impact on the team. Great candidates can improve the efficiency of the people around them for years and years. Bad candidates can slow entire teams down. I've watched some excellent and prolific and opinionated engineers do major productivity damage -- millions of dollars worth, and I've watched some young CS graduates outlearn and outperform some veterans. Resumes & github accounts simply don't have enough information to know whether a candidate can help your company. In my experience, it has been worth the time to let the hiring process go slow enough to be able to compare people's personalities, and not just their on-paper engineering credentials. I think far too many engineers here on HN and out in the workforce dramatically underestimate how important attitude and people skills are in the hiring process, and dramatically over-estimate how important specific math & programming skills are.
- mchannon 8y ago
  On the last point we agree, but you're missing the main point here. Videoconferencing and phone calls can take care of not all but a large measure of the personality issues that can crop up. Many a brogrammer ends up wasting an onsite by skipping this step when the candidate could have saved them both the trouble, had they just taken the 5 minutes to have a Hangout. The efficiencies of interviewing are anything but minor, and I find it odd how the wrong six-figure hire is bandied about but the existing 2-six-figure manager spending half his workweek interviewing nonhires instead of working is overlooked.
  - dahart 8y ago
asah 8y ago
this! At Google, saw this and signed up for 100% phone screens, where I could have much more impact on improving the process, esp for experienced engineers with 7-10+ yrs experience. Conveniently, most people hated doing phone screens, so HR was appreciative as well. Given standardized questions (with depth - impossible to memorize), you can quickly calibrate to the organizations expectations by following candidates that you approved for interviews.
tchaffee 8y ago
Not in my experience. I used to try to screen resumes and to pre-screen on calls. And it mostly doesn't work. Some people ace the pre-screen and are assholes in person. Some people totally fail the pre-screen because it's the first ever call they had in weeks and they get super nervous. I will use a 15m pre-screen to verify some basic tech skills but I also then offer candidates to follow up in an email if they think they could have done better. > If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, They don't have a 20% success rate. The success rate is 100% if they hire the number of developers they need and to the standard they want. Saying it's a 20% success rate is like saying interviewing 100 people to determine the best among them is a 1% success rate. But it's a 100% success rate if you did actually figure out who the best programmer is among the 100.
- mchannon 8y ago
  So you pre-screen on calls, but do you get any of your co-workers to do it? There's no hard and fast rule that you have to spend 30 minutes to an hour per whack, either. You get most of your signal in the first 5 minutes (first impressions and all that). Offering a "grievance process" where nervous candidates can plead their case for a mulligan telegraphs a (probably deserved) lack of confidence in your own company's hiring practices. The only thing worse than a first date that went bad, where they want to submit to you in writing how they could do better if given a second chance, is where they want you to submit that to them in writing. Your last paragraph totally makes my point. The purpose of an interviewing process for any serious business is not to find the best candidate, but to fill the position with a qualified hire who works well with others. The 98th percentile score should not be a failing score. You're not picking Miss America, and most of the other 49 candidates are pretty enough, especially when pretty is so subjective.
  - tchaffee 8y ago
    > You get most of your signal in the first 5 minutes (first impressions and all that). One of the best things I ever learned from an experienced interviewer is to spend the rest of the interview trying to disprove your first impression. Otherwise, you're just making yourself a victim of confirmation bias. > Offering a "grievance process" where nervous candidates can plead their case for a mulligan telegraphs a (probably deserved) lack of confidence in your own company's hiring practices. I have a great deal of confidence in my hiring practices. I've rarely had a candidate reject an offer, so I'd guess the candidates also like it. I've even had candidates tell me that they think the interviewing process I've designed is really good and they learned how to be a better interviewer. It's not a really a grievance process. It's a simple "Here is why we don't think you're qualified (e.g you don't actually know any JS in reality) but if for some reason you think we got that wrong, please let us know." Once in a blue moon someone will come back with a legit response. > The purpose of an interviewing process for any serious business is not to find the best candidate, No true Scotsman? I sometimes have extremely specific hiring goals. I may for example want to hire the best JavaScript person available in town because the company needs to be a thought leader in that area. Every company is different. Don't assume your hiring needs are my hiring needs. For sure when my hiring needs are to find any qualified candidate, that goes pretty quickly.
ryandrake 8y ago
1:5 and 1:10 do seem atrocious, but looking back on my tech career, I probably applied to about 100 companies for every 10 interviews I got, for every 1 offer, so it sounds realistically atrocious.

kookiekrak 8y ago

Facebook's guidelines were 25% confidence they could pass an onsite and they would be given one. I'd personally rather give the candidate AND the company a chance at hiring a potential candidate than missing out on one. The longterm impact on your company is huge.

mchannon 8y ago
This fails to consider the fact that with 25% confidence, 3 out of 4 candidates have no chance, and you're just wasting time, theirs and yours. There are two kinds of hiring managers- those who think the system works and they're skillfully picking the best talent, though at the last minute, without formal education on the subject, without metrics, without reproducibility, without accountability, and with minimal prep time; and those who recognize the system is deeply flawed and go along to get along.
- ozim 8y ago
  That is only wasted time if there was next best opportunity. People are looking for work so going for on-site interview is not waste of time. What would you do, go to the beach, hang out in a bar? So your time would be spent better. Maybe you would go to other interview where you would be hired but you cannot know this in advance. The same with company they don't know if other candidates would be better until they actually do on-site. If you can predict future then yes. But most don't.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    > That is only wasted time if there was next best opportunity. People are looking for work so going for on-site interview is not waste of time. What's the unemployment rate for top-end talent in Silicon Valley? 2%? 1%? This foolish strategy of candidates-time-is-free is designed to turn off people who already have jobs and want an upgrade. Not only are you _not_ hiring the best, you're limiting your applicant pool to the worst. <sarcasm>Why, sure, I'll blow 7 hours including 2 hours' roundtrip commute to audition for a 20% chance of a $10k raise.</sarcasm>

pmiller2 8y ago

He says he interviewed X candidates to hire X/5 engineers. That means they probably selected more than X/5, but that’s the number that accepted offers. Maybe the problem is their offers aren’t competitive. I totally agree that seems like an excessive amount of interviewing for engineers on the team.

mchannon 8y ago
Let me take you further in this direction of thought- many offers aren't accepted because the candidate, after having been through a dysfunctional interview gauntlet, realizes a different opportunity is better (sometimes after waiting weeks to get the start date). If interviewing has been skillfully conducted, and the candidate gets an offer in 24 hours, there's substantially less likelihood they'll turn it down, because they won't have had as much time to interview elsewhere, or wonder what organizational deficit is causing the delay.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  That is certainly true. Since you had already jumped to implicate the interview process as the reason it took so many candidates to make a hire, I was simply offering an alternative. In fact, it could be that both the interview process and the offers are flawed; there can be any number of reasons why a candidate doesn’t convert to an employee, and you’re solely focused on one.

rhacker 8y ago

I don't know he did mention there are phone-screens ahead of time. Also mentioned that the reason they are bringing in more is to figure out who they are before simply disqualifying the candidate because they don't meet the specs. If you simply don't agree with that premise, suggest that, rather than you would be embarrassed to admit those metrics. That's more of an insult than describing how the method he describes specifically and the reasons behind them are wrong. Also those 400 interviews happened in 7 years, which is one per week. I am currently in a hiring phase and we do 1 or 2 per week.

mchannon 8y ago
The process is usually one person doing one 20min behavioral phone screen, and maybe one technical person doing one 60min technical phone screen, give or take. Maybe a homework. Then maybe 3-6 one-on-one interviews for a 5 hour onsite. Fiddle with the numbers if you need, but this covers 90% of companies interviewing today. That's way too few phone screens and way too many onsites if you don't get rid of enough candidates at the phone screen stage. Simply disqualifying the candidate because they don't meet the specs happens anyway- the question is, are you a highly skilled hiring manager by coming to this realization quickly, or only after you have the candidates come in and you waste an afternoon introducing them to everybody? I personally feel this industry could use more insults going the other way. Until hiring managers realize they have been trying to source talent with their middle finger out the whole time, they're not going to realize they need to change.

dahart 8y ago

> A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite. After having done a decent amount of hiring interviews and managing in my life, I don't think it's possible to have 50% confidence before you meet someone. The way you gain that much confidence is by 1- talking and listening to them, and 2- comparing them to other candidates. > I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire. This seems hyper-focused on the minor efficiencies of interviewing, at the expense of employment efficiency; it's feels like an engineering approach that might not have all the requirements at hand. The employee is (probably) going to be paid a six figure salary, and will have a large impact on the team. Great candidates can improve the efficiency of the people around them for years and years. Bad candidates can slow entire teams down. I've watched some excellent and prolific and opinionated engineers do major productivity damage -- millions of dollars worth, and I've watched some young CS graduates outlearn and outperform some veterans. Resumes & github accounts simply don't have enough information to know whether a candidate can help your company. In my experience, it has been worth the time to let the hiring process go slow enough to be able to compare people's personalities, and not just their on-paper engineering credentials. I think far too many engineers here on HN and out in the workforce dramatically underestimate how important attitude and people skills are in the hiring process, and dramatically over-estimate how important specific math & programming skills are.

mchannon 8y ago
On the last point we agree, but you're missing the main point here. Videoconferencing and phone calls can take care of not all but a large measure of the personality issues that can crop up. Many a brogrammer ends up wasting an onsite by skipping this step when the candidate could have saved them both the trouble, had they just taken the 5 minutes to have a Hangout. The efficiencies of interviewing are anything but minor, and I find it odd how the wrong six-figure hire is bandied about but the existing 2-six-figure manager spending half his workweek interviewing nonhires instead of working is overlooked.
- dahart 8y ago

asah 8y ago

this! At Google, saw this and signed up for 100% phone screens, where I could have much more impact on improving the process, esp for experienced engineers with 7-10+ yrs experience. Conveniently, most people hated doing phone screens, so HR was appreciative as well. Given standardized questions (with depth - impossible to memorize), you can quickly calibrate to the organizations expectations by following candidates that you approved for interviews.

tchaffee 8y ago

Not in my experience. I used to try to screen resumes and to pre-screen on calls. And it mostly doesn't work. Some people ace the pre-screen and are assholes in person. Some people totally fail the pre-screen because it's the first ever call they had in weeks and they get super nervous. I will use a 15m pre-screen to verify some basic tech skills but I also then offer candidates to follow up in an email if they think they could have done better. > If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, They don't have a 20% success rate. The success rate is 100% if they hire the number of developers they need and to the standard they want. Saying it's a 20% success rate is like saying interviewing 100 people to determine the best among them is a 1% success rate. But it's a 100% success rate if you did actually figure out who the best programmer is among the 100.

mchannon 8y ago
So you pre-screen on calls, but do you get any of your co-workers to do it? There's no hard and fast rule that you have to spend 30 minutes to an hour per whack, either. You get most of your signal in the first 5 minutes (first impressions and all that). Offering a "grievance process" where nervous candidates can plead their case for a mulligan telegraphs a (probably deserved) lack of confidence in your own company's hiring practices. The only thing worse than a first date that went bad, where they want to submit to you in writing how they could do better if given a second chance, is where they want you to submit that to them in writing. Your last paragraph totally makes my point. The purpose of an interviewing process for any serious business is not to find the best candidate, but to fill the position with a qualified hire who works well with others. The 98th percentile score should not be a failing score. You're not picking Miss America, and most of the other 49 candidates are pretty enough, especially when pretty is so subjective.
- tchaffee 8y ago
  > You get most of your signal in the first 5 minutes (first impressions and all that). One of the best things I ever learned from an experienced interviewer is to spend the rest of the interview trying to disprove your first impression. Otherwise, you're just making yourself a victim of confirmation bias. > Offering a "grievance process" where nervous candidates can plead their case for a mulligan telegraphs a (probably deserved) lack of confidence in your own company's hiring practices. I have a great deal of confidence in my hiring practices. I've rarely had a candidate reject an offer, so I'd guess the candidates also like it. I've even had candidates tell me that they think the interviewing process I've designed is really good and they learned how to be a better interviewer. It's not a really a grievance process. It's a simple "Here is why we don't think you're qualified (e.g you don't actually know any JS in reality) but if for some reason you think we got that wrong, please let us know." Once in a blue moon someone will come back with a legit response. > The purpose of an interviewing process for any serious business is not to find the best candidate, No true Scotsman? I sometimes have extremely specific hiring goals. I may for example want to hire the best JavaScript person available in town because the company needs to be a thought leader in that area. Every company is different. Don't assume your hiring needs are my hiring needs. For sure when my hiring needs are to find any qualified candidate, that goes pretty quickly.

ryandrake 8y ago

1:5 and 1:10 do seem atrocious, but looking back on my tech career, I probably applied to about 100 companies for every 10 interviews I got, for every 1 offer, so it sounds realistically atrocious.