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>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

>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.

tidepod12 6y ago
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.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Why did the author experience this then? This should have been 1 phone call max to establish the author didn't have this experience. But instead, they sent him through multiple rounds and made them give a lengthy presentation. >They were 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. Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
  - tidepod12 6y ago
    They were likely willing to hire the author anyway, even without the experience. But they ended up finding someone that was better than the author. >Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"? They did say "we found someone better". From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
  - ng12 6y ago
    Unfortunately rejecting candidates and/or providing feedback can be a legal minefield. The most generic excuse is the best one and using objective facts is one of the safest ways to reject someone.
    - dghlsakjg 6y ago
      I see liability cited as a reason all the time, but I never hear about specific cases or settlements, or even a justification from an actual legal team (HR doesn't count, they are trained to never allow anything as far as I can tell). It comes across from the inside and the outside as pure laziness.
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      It's a legal minefield in the sense that there is legal trouble if a hiring manager says "I hired the other candidate because they were white", but there is no such trouble if they just privately think it.
    - collyw 6y ago
      Would there be anything wrong with "we really liked you but found someone else better"? That's been the situation in my company recently. None of the candidates were bad, all of them would have been capable of doing the job but we had to choose one.
      - tidepod12 6y ago
        That's what they said. From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
- uberdru 6y ago
  Sure they do. HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'.
  - tidepod12 6y ago
    I've worked at, hired at, and consulted at many companies. I've never once seen an HR department be incentivized to interview people just for the sake of interviewing. At my last two companies, recruiters are measured on the number of candidates that end up being extended an offer, and are negatively measured against the number of candidates that are rejected. If a recruiter is pulling in a large number of people that all get rejected, that's not due diligence, it's wasting everyone's time and is a signal that the recruiter is not very good at identifying suitable candidates.
    - thenightcrawler 6y ago
      Even if they make it to the onsite?
      - jayparth 6y ago
        Recruiters are not incentivized to get people to the onsite where I work. Not sure about the original commenter.
    - uberdru 6y ago
      I don't doubt you. I'm sure these metrics depend on industry and company size.
  - passivate 6y ago
    >HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'. Wait, is this really a widely prevalent practice? Any stats/data? The primary criteria at my company is retention. Once the HR forwards the resume, the interview only moves forward if the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. The hiring manager wont waste their time with multiple interviews when they know for sure that they're going to reject the candidate. What purpose would that serve?
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  They thought this candidate was worth asking to prepare an interview task, but not worth hearing the result of that preparation. That's mightily disrespectful and sounds a lot like 'shits and giggles'.
  - tidepod12 6y ago
    When they asked them to prepare the presentation, they likely had full intention to consider them for hiring. Then, another candidate filled the role, meaning the company no longer would be able to hire the author. Informing them of this and cancelling the interview is the most respectful thing they could have done. It's certainly better than wasting the author's time by making them give the presentation even though the company then knew there was no longer a position they could offer.
    - throwaway2245 6y ago
      I disagree with your statement that it was respectful. Accepting your scenario, this suggests that they did not really want to hire the candidate and at best thought they might settle - when it came to it, they were not even willing to compare the candidate at the next stage, despite already asking them to do this work. They strung the candidate along.
      - tidepod12 6y ago
        You say "strung along", I say "they were willing to give OP a chance at the job even though OP was not fully qualified for it, and when it was decided that the role was no longer available to OP, they told OP that rather than having OP waste their time giving a pointless presentation that wouldn't have changed anything".
        throwaway2245 6y ago
        I say "They asked OP to do a bunch of wasted work on the off-chance that their prize candidate was not available - even though they were not (under no circumstances) interested in considering the OP against the prize candidate" There's a simple and known solution to not have to do this - which is to conduct fleets of interviews at the same time, so that you can fairly and accurately compare the candidates.
- citizenpaul 6y ago
  Its the companies place to take the risk. The power imbalance is greatly in favor of the employer. At worst they hire someone not quite perfect but also have a pool of other candidates they looked at to move onto if it really is that bad of a choice.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- KoenDG 6y ago
  >It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone. True. Doesn't mean they're managing it properly. >no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person Again, assuming the company is carefully keeping track of this. Sounds like an "ideal world" fantasy to me. Yes, the situation you describe is how things would ideally be. But they're clearly not. This happens, a lot more than many feel comfortable admitting.
cryptocrypter 6y ago
You don't know the name of the company, just refuse when a company asks you to do unpaid work for the interview.
- danaliv 6y ago
  I understand that getting rejected is frustrating. What I don't understand is the apparently pervasive attitude that asking candidates to put in some effort is unacceptable. It reeks of entitlement. I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject. I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
  - luord 6y ago
    > It reeks of entitlement. Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion. > Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject. I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else. > someone who just walked in off the street. Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
    - tidepod12 6y ago
      >Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion. If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation. I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work". > the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".

tidepod12 6y ago

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.

vsareto 6y ago
Why did the author experience this then? This should have been 1 phone call max to establish the author didn't have this experience. But instead, they sent him through multiple rounds and made them give a lengthy presentation. >They were 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. Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?
- tidepod12 6y ago
  They were likely willing to hire the author anyway, even without the experience. But they ended up finding someone that was better than the author. >Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"? They did say "we found someone better". From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
- ng12 6y ago
  Unfortunately rejecting candidates and/or providing feedback can be a legal minefield. The most generic excuse is the best one and using objective facts is one of the safest ways to reject someone.
  - dghlsakjg 6y ago
    I see liability cited as a reason all the time, but I never hear about specific cases or settlements, or even a justification from an actual legal team (HR doesn't count, they are trained to never allow anything as far as I can tell). It comes across from the inside and the outside as pure laziness.
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    It's a legal minefield in the sense that there is legal trouble if a hiring manager says "I hired the other candidate because they were white", but there is no such trouble if they just privately think it.
  - collyw 6y ago
    Would there be anything wrong with "we really liked you but found someone else better"? That's been the situation in my company recently. None of the candidates were bad, all of them would have been capable of doing the job but we had to choose one.
    - tidepod12 6y ago
      That's what they said. From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."
uberdru 6y ago
Sure they do. HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'.
- tidepod12 6y ago
  I've worked at, hired at, and consulted at many companies. I've never once seen an HR department be incentivized to interview people just for the sake of interviewing. At my last two companies, recruiters are measured on the number of candidates that end up being extended an offer, and are negatively measured against the number of candidates that are rejected. If a recruiter is pulling in a large number of people that all get rejected, that's not due diligence, it's wasting everyone's time and is a signal that the recruiter is not very good at identifying suitable candidates.
  - thenightcrawler 6y ago
    Even if they make it to the onsite?
    - jayparth 6y ago
      Recruiters are not incentivized to get people to the onsite where I work. Not sure about the original commenter.
  - uberdru 6y ago
    I don't doubt you. I'm sure these metrics depend on industry and company size.
- passivate 6y ago
  >HR metrics are all based around pipelines, just like sales people. They get measured on number of candidates interviewed, and the more candidates interviewed for a specific position the better, as it makes them appear to be doing more 'due diligence'. Wait, is this really a widely prevalent practice? Any stats/data? The primary criteria at my company is retention. Once the HR forwards the resume, the interview only moves forward if the hiring manager is interested in the candidate. The hiring manager wont waste their time with multiple interviews when they know for sure that they're going to reject the candidate. What purpose would that serve?
throwaway2245 6y ago
They thought this candidate was worth asking to prepare an interview task, but not worth hearing the result of that preparation. That's mightily disrespectful and sounds a lot like 'shits and giggles'.
- tidepod12 6y ago
  When they asked them to prepare the presentation, they likely had full intention to consider them for hiring. Then, another candidate filled the role, meaning the company no longer would be able to hire the author. Informing them of this and cancelling the interview is the most respectful thing they could have done. It's certainly better than wasting the author's time by making them give the presentation even though the company then knew there was no longer a position they could offer.
  - throwaway2245 6y ago
    I disagree with your statement that it was respectful. Accepting your scenario, this suggests that they did not really want to hire the candidate and at best thought they might settle - when it came to it, they were not even willing to compare the candidate at the next stage, despite already asking them to do this work. They strung the candidate along.
    - tidepod12 6y ago
      You say "strung along", I say "they were willing to give OP a chance at the job even though OP was not fully qualified for it, and when it was decided that the role was no longer available to OP, they told OP that rather than having OP waste their time giving a pointless presentation that wouldn't have changed anything".
      - throwaway2245 6y ago
        I say "They asked OP to do a bunch of wasted work on the off-chance that their prize candidate was not available - even though they were not (under no circumstances) interested in considering the OP against the prize candidate" There's a simple and known solution to not have to do this - which is to conduct fleets of interviews at the same time, so that you can fairly and accurately compare the candidates.
citizenpaul 6y ago
Its the companies place to take the risk. The power imbalance is greatly in favor of the employer. At worst they hire someone not quite perfect but also have a pool of other candidates they looked at to move onto if it really is that bad of a choice.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
KoenDG 6y ago
>It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone. True. Doesn't mean they're managing it properly. >no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person Again, assuming the company is carefully keeping track of this. Sounds like an "ideal world" fantasy to me. Yes, the situation you describe is how things would ideally be. But they're clearly not. This happens, a lot more than many feel comfortable admitting.

cryptocrypter 6y ago

You don't know the name of the company, just refuse when a company asks you to do unpaid work for the interview.

danaliv 6y ago
I understand that getting rejected is frustrating. What I don't understand is the apparently pervasive attitude that asking candidates to put in some effort is unacceptable. It reeks of entitlement. I was asked to make a presentation for an interview last year. I did so happily. I was excited to get to tell the panel about something I was passionate about, and to go into deep technical detail on a project I'd put a lot of time into. Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject. I also understand that any sane company is going to do its due diligence before making a bet on someone who just walked in off the street. A bad hire has huge downsides, from simply wasting time and money to setting a whole team back. You're literally saying to the company, "hi, we just met; give me a bucket of money and make me a dependency in your roadmap."
- luord 6y ago
  > It reeks of entitlement. Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion. > Who wouldn't want to do this? Sure, it's stressful and it takes time, but it's also fun. You get to talk about yourself! That's everyone's favorite subject. I wouldn't, so there's that. And, mind you, I don't even consider myself particularly introverted, so I highly doubt that I'm the single exception to what you said. So what I'm trying to say is that one can't assume that one's sensibilities are shared by everyone else. > someone who just walked in off the street. Not only had the author already been through a process, the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that the company (or the recruiter) contacted him, not viceversa. So it doesn't seem like he "just walked off the street".
  - tidepod12 6y ago
    >Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion. If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation. I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work". > the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".