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Who do you recruit for? I'm soon to be a new grad, looking for a job, and if you reject me.. you could literally berate me for things I didn't actually do and I

Who do you recruit for? I'm soon to be a new grad, looking for a job, and if you reject me.. you could literally berate me for things I didn't actually do and I wouldn't find it appropriate or productive to argue with you about it. Let's set up an interview, you can record my reaction to the rejection and send it to those who argue for reference on how not to be a moron.

jldl805 5y ago
I don't recruit new grads so it would never happen. Similar to OP's post, it's almost always a situation where it's painfully obvious to everyone else involved why the person isn't getting hired, but it would be awkward or a waste of time to try to tell the person. It's also virtually always social skill related... if you weren't up to the task technically, you wouldn't have been asked to interview. The in person interview is normally to decide "do I want to see this person 40+ hours a week for the next 5 years" rather than "can they do the job." Lots of exceptions obviously but mostly true across the board.
- macksd 5y ago
  For what it's worth, that's definitely not my experience. I've interviewed or phone-screened at least 200 people over the last few years, and yes, there's been a handful of rejections where the major concern was social skills: abrasive, over-confident, poor communication or lacking the appearance of motivation. But I've had far more people who simply couldn't perform well enough on the technical problem or who had obviously over-stated their qualifications and knowledge on their resume. I actually distinctly remember several interviews lately where I really liked the candidate as a person and had a very enjoyable chat with them, but I just didn't think they would do the job well. There are a lot of flaws in the way interviews are done in our industry that make it more subjective than it should be, but I still wouldn't consider the latter set of problems to be social skill related.
  - jldl805 5y ago
    The only thing this tells me is you have an error in your hiring process that is leading you to interviewing people in person that cannot do the job. This should never happen.
    - macksd 5y ago
      Do you know of a way to screen out people who inflate their expertise on a resume or who fail to demonstrate competency in those areas during an interview, without actually interviewing them? Because if you do I'd love to hear it. But I thought that was the point of interviewing them. I don't expect recruiters and HR people who focus exclusively on hiring to have more than a shallow knowledge of what we're hiring for. I definitely don't encounter those more qualified to evaluate qualifications on LinkedIn, that's for sure. And LeetCode isn't nearly that good at eliminating crappy candidates. Plenty of people do it and then seem to lack those same skills when they show up. That's why we have discussions like this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. If validating their technical qualifications is not the point of the interview, are you really only interviewing candidates to see if people like their social skills? That sounds legally shady for most cases, and honestly for extreme cases where there's a valid concern that IS the kind of thing I'd expect to be filtered out by an introductory call with a manager or something.
      - jldl805 5y ago
        Yes you interview them over the phone in an initial phone screen before you invite them in for an in person interview. The phone screen should cover lots of technical areas with deep follow up questions and examples. I work in a specific niche (not coding) and can tell you that I bat .1000 on technical fit... cultural fit cannot be assessed until you meet the person and they meet the team, or at a minimum, hiring manager.
        macksd 5y ago
        Sorry, but your whole comment history sounds like you believe you've 100% figured out problems everyone else seems to have but you're unable to share details beyond No-True-Scotsman arguments.

jldl805 5y ago

I don't recruit new grads so it would never happen. Similar to OP's post, it's almost always a situation where it's painfully obvious to everyone else involved why the person isn't getting hired, but it would be awkward or a waste of time to try to tell the person. It's also virtually always social skill related... if you weren't up to the task technically, you wouldn't have been asked to interview. The in person interview is normally to decide "do I want to see this person 40+ hours a week for the next 5 years" rather than "can they do the job." Lots of exceptions obviously but mostly true across the board.

macksd 5y ago
For what it's worth, that's definitely not my experience. I've interviewed or phone-screened at least 200 people over the last few years, and yes, there's been a handful of rejections where the major concern was social skills: abrasive, over-confident, poor communication or lacking the appearance of motivation. But I've had far more people who simply couldn't perform well enough on the technical problem or who had obviously over-stated their qualifications and knowledge on their resume. I actually distinctly remember several interviews lately where I really liked the candidate as a person and had a very enjoyable chat with them, but I just didn't think they would do the job well. There are a lot of flaws in the way interviews are done in our industry that make it more subjective than it should be, but I still wouldn't consider the latter set of problems to be social skill related.
- jldl805 5y ago
  The only thing this tells me is you have an error in your hiring process that is leading you to interviewing people in person that cannot do the job. This should never happen.
  - macksd 5y ago
    Do you know of a way to screen out people who inflate their expertise on a resume or who fail to demonstrate competency in those areas during an interview, without actually interviewing them? Because if you do I'd love to hear it. But I thought that was the point of interviewing them. I don't expect recruiters and HR people who focus exclusively on hiring to have more than a shallow knowledge of what we're hiring for. I definitely don't encounter those more qualified to evaluate qualifications on LinkedIn, that's for sure. And LeetCode isn't nearly that good at eliminating crappy candidates. Plenty of people do it and then seem to lack those same skills when they show up. That's why we have discussions like this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. If validating their technical qualifications is not the point of the interview, are you really only interviewing candidates to see if people like their social skills? That sounds legally shady for most cases, and honestly for extreme cases where there's a valid concern that IS the kind of thing I'd expect to be filtered out by an introductory call with a manager or something.
    - jldl805 5y ago
      Yes you interview them over the phone in an initial phone screen before you invite them in for an in person interview. The phone screen should cover lots of technical areas with deep follow up questions and examples. I work in a specific niche (not coding) and can tell you that I bat .1000 on technical fit... cultural fit cannot be assessed until you meet the person and they meet the team, or at a minimum, hiring manager.
      - macksd 5y ago
        Sorry, but your whole comment history sounds like you believe you've 100% figured out problems everyone else seems to have but you're unable to share details beyond No-True-Scotsman arguments.