15 ms·

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but yo

What’s happening is that companies want to completely remove risk from the hiring process. In the real world, you cannot remove risk. You can manage it, but you cannot remove it. Asking candidates to go through 6 interviews before making a decision and not telling them when a decision will be made signals a risk adverse culture that cannot make decisions.

DSingularity 5y ago
The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.
- chunkyks 5y ago
  And they're also in the situation where good talent isn't going to tolerate that rubbish.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    The worst performer you tolerate on your team sets the tone for the whole team. The best teams embrace and level up their low performers and make the whole team better. The delta can’t be too big.
- hnzix 5y ago
  They'll miss most of the good talent if they're doing 6 interviews for a standard role. The candidates with skills and options will go elsewhere and you'll be left with the desperate dregs.
- madengr 5y ago
  How? I have seen people with 25 years service (electrical engineer) walked out with zero notice. Unless you are unionized, you can be fired on the spot.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Increasing risk of liability for firing is real, as is increasing oversight of discrimination law. You can be fired on the spot for breaking company policy, or doing something illegal. Without more info, that’s what I might assume you saw. But getting fired for mildly low performance without notice is not normal, at least not among engineers in large companies, and assuming it’s not because a division or the company is being shuttered. Companies have to give people feedback and give them time to respond. Failure to do that can and sometimes does result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing and that the company did not unfairly discriminate even unknowingly, which is costly, difficult, and risky. Plus, most companies aren’t capricious with firing engineers, and are also aware that hiring is expensive and employee ROI can take time.
    - learc83 5y ago
      > result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. It’s perfectly legal for a company to fire an employee because they the employee likes the wrong football team. The employee or people pursuing legal action on behalf of multiple employees has to prove that the company fires the employee(s) because they were a member of a protected class. Assuming there are no incriminating emails stating that that was the reason, the only realistic way to do that is to show a pattern. If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor.
      - dahart 5y ago
        > The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. They do if the employee sues claiming age discrimination, for example. At least, they have to defend the accusation to show it’s not discrimination. When someone has been at the company for 25 years like in the parent’s example, and they get fired abruptly without notice for liking the wrong football team, it’s likely the stated reason is untrue and inviting a challenge. > If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor. It certainly helps show that the company isn’t discriminating arbitrarily, and gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation. BTW actual legal action isn’t necessary for firing to be getting harder. The fear of legal action is all you need, and that is in fact going up.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Taking years to prune bad talent is another sign of a problem in the organization.
- 2001lodyssee 5y ago
  In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire. In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.
    - duped 5y ago
      Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.
      - Rapzid 5y ago
        Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.
        tfehring 5y ago
        Even if they can just pay for health insurance out of pocket, they’d be switching plans twice, and each time they’d reset their deductible and possibly need to find a new doctor. When I was an actuary we used to do “intern to hire” for unemployed recent grads, but I can’t imagine leaving a full time position for a contract-to-hire position. I think for me personally the opportunity would have to be really interesting and the comp upon converting to FTE would need to be at least double my previous comp (meaning the contracted rate would probably be something like 4x my implied hourly).
        5y ago
- zhte415 5y ago
  Do you have probation period where you work? i.e. if an employee doesn't live up to expectation, release with short notice? Where I am, a 3 year contract typically carries a 3 month probation period, and a 1 year contract carries a 1 month probation period. The problem is management are often too busy or overwhelmed with other stuff to observe and provide feedback until someone's passed the probation period then releasing them becomes a bureaucratic nightmare - and when the new hire's not getting feedback, you can be sure not a lot of the rest of the team are.
  - sgerenser 5y ago
    Probation periods in the US are rare, especially for white collar positions like software engineers. Of course, that’s mostly because of at will employment where either side can choose to part ways at any time.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      That sounds like infinite probation period to me
- technofiend 5y ago
  Isn't that one of the things Netflix is famous for getting right? Generous severance but quick to exit you if you're not a good fit.
- caoilte 5y ago
  I don't think it's that at all. It's very easy to fire people in US. I think they are trying to hire cultists. The harder it is to get in the more people think they're special once they do and the less likely they are to leave.
  - finolex1 5y ago
    The difficulty isn't with regards to the process/legality. It's more behavioral/organizational
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  > The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent. I've never understood this given that the hiring is so often at will.
- postalrat 5y ago
  They could prune that talent overnight if they wanted.
twelve40 5y ago
I don't know if you've been through the firing process on either side, but after you go through a couple of dozen of these, and the hit to the morale/performance they entail, not to mention emotions involved, you tend to at least try to vet better to avoid such huge distractions in the future (a lose-lose for everyone involved!)
- bb88 5y ago
  One Fortune 500 company I worked for was honest enough to admit that the number one reason employees left was because they didn't like their boss. It's a huge risk on the other side as well. Not to mention that management usually gets to control the narrative and not the employees.
- analyst74 5y ago
  I'm not sure if people prefer Amazon's PIP culture. That's what it'll lead to if companies hire more loosely and have to fire people more frequently.
alephnan 5y ago
I left a hedgefund interview loop for this reason. I finished the 7th on-site interview. After I left NYC and flew back home, they wanted a 8th ( phone screen ) interview because one the interviewers lost the results. On the one hand, this space’s modus operandi is more data is always better. On the other hand, they have to trade and make decisions in a fast paced environment with imperfect information.
- thrwaway122 5y ago
  funny same experience here. I interviewed for four months at a very select and under the radar fund. Once a week I would go in from 730 am to 9 am and speak with a member of the fund. I got all the way to the end, and in a bout of emotional torment, I turned the offer down. In hindsight, its one of the biggest regrets I have. Would have retired long ago
  - kortilla 5y ago
    Why did you turn it down if I may ask? I’ve made the decision several times to go with lower paying offers because I ended up deciding there was more to life than just a paycheck.
- marto1 5y ago
  > because one the interviewers lost the results. yeah, no. You dodged a bullet with that one.
sp332 5y ago
Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
  Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
      Contacts in what sense? Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.
      - xcambar 5y ago
        I think GP meant "reference check"
        jimbob45 5y ago
        I meant “contract” but you’ve brought up another good idea.
      - jimbob45 5y ago
        *contracts In the sense of offering signing bonuses for term lengths that get repo’d if the contract length is broken.
wyager 5y ago
The risk is artificially inflated by how hard it is to fire people.
- jt2190 5y ago
  This is actually true. A bad hire, once in the door, can be very expensive and time consuming for an employer to rectify. This is what leads to all sorts of weirdness like “contract to hire”.
hiyer 5y ago
Almost every single tech company I've interviewed at (ranging from medium-sized startups to FAANG), I've given at least 5 interviews, going up to 7. The only exceptions were very small startups and a couple of large Chinese organizations, where they stopped at 3.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  I remember interviewing for some grad roles. No hackerrank, no bullshit, very straightforward companies with "easy processes". Both had one "interview day", and five/six interviews total. I read your comment and I was thinking in my head...wow, five seems like a lot, and then I realised that even these places I liked went pretty hard...I think they call this conditioning. I didn't get either job btw, the work was trivial but I get terrible interview nerves so tanked both of them...in both cases, I also had a 6-hour take home...the results of which were largely ignored. Neither company is ever fully staffed...ofc.
- worker767424 5y ago
  Interviews or rounds? Phone screen and 4-5 on-site is pretty reasonable, but that's only two rounds.
  - hiyer 5y ago
    I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)
      - hiyer 5y ago
        > To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. My experience has been that if you clear the engineering phone screen the company asks you to go through all the rest of the (4-6) interviews, even if your performance in one or more of them has been sub-par. And at least here in India the post-screen interviews are spread out over several days to 2-3 weeks - there is no "onsite" as such, even over Zoom.
hogFeast 5y ago
I was going to say that there are tons of parallels with how some fund managers approach investment. I have met lots of people who have this trait for over-analysis, not one has ever made consistently profitable investments. Over-analysis is a failure to understand what information is important. This is going to become more and more common though. In fund management, there has been a huge move towards "professionalisation"...which, ofc, means doing lots of pointless exams that select for the wrong thing. MBAs are the same. It is very hard to solve because the system selects for people who will play into this self-image (in my experience, this isn't solvable...you can either handle the risk of being wrong or you can't). This also overlaps with a lot of the issues that a lot of companies are having with hiring. A company which frames hiring as a risk rather than opportunity and has these very long, negative process of hiring (be real, the point is to uncover "weakness", not learn more about someone) is going to fail to hire people of different backgrounds. The amazing thing about the "candidate shortage" is that it isn't more severe. Companies are so bad at hiring, it is surprising they end up making any decisions at all.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  Does any fund manager make consistently profitable investments? Most don’t even seem to make sporadic profitable investments.
andrewflnr 5y ago
I think this is a problem our whole society will have to learn. Reducing risk is probably good, but we have to reach the point where trying to eliminate is universally seen as a pathology. It's already kind of a meme in consumer products ("warning labels these days, right?"), but it crops up in hiring, movie production, etc.
marto1 5y ago
Reading this it just seems to me we're in for a really bad time with the new managerial class.
slickrick216 5y ago
Salesforce have ever green roles which they casually do interviews for but never actually act on. The roles can be easily spotted as they’ll be posted and reposted on job boards like LinkedIn every 4 days.
dan-robertson 5y ago
I find attitudes towards risk in hiring very strange. Many companies seem to treat it like an opportunity for massive downside without much thought to the potential upside. I think the downside potential is mostly less than companies seem to worry (an argument against me is that a ‘bad’ employee negatively affects their teammates too). I also think the normal interview processes aren’t even very good at filtering out those feared candidates. Instead I think companies, especially large companies where small numbers of employees aren’t a massive proportion of spending, should try to see the potential for upside more. Especially in a world where everyone does a similar interviewing process, a candidate who performs poorly at those interviews could be cheap and an excellent hire who is undervalued by the market because of their poor interviewing skills.

DSingularity 5y ago

The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent.

chunkyks 5y ago
And they're also in the situation where good talent isn't going to tolerate that rubbish.
- Swizec 5y ago
  The worst performer you tolerate on your team sets the tone for the whole team. The best teams embrace and level up their low performers and make the whole team better. The delta can’t be too big.
hnzix 5y ago
They'll miss most of the good talent if they're doing 6 interviews for a standard role. The candidates with skills and options will go elsewhere and you'll be left with the desperate dregs.
madengr 5y ago
How? I have seen people with 25 years service (electrical engineer) walked out with zero notice. Unless you are unionized, you can be fired on the spot.
- dahart 5y ago
  Increasing risk of liability for firing is real, as is increasing oversight of discrimination law. You can be fired on the spot for breaking company policy, or doing something illegal. Without more info, that’s what I might assume you saw. But getting fired for mildly low performance without notice is not normal, at least not among engineers in large companies, and assuming it’s not because a division or the company is being shuttered. Companies have to give people feedback and give them time to respond. Failure to do that can and sometimes does result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing and that the company did not unfairly discriminate even unknowingly, which is costly, difficult, and risky. Plus, most companies aren’t capricious with firing engineers, and are also aware that hiring is expensive and employee ROI can take time.
  - learc83 5y ago
    > result in legal action compelling the company to prove the employee was failing The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. It’s perfectly legal for a company to fire an employee because they the employee likes the wrong football team. The employee or people pursuing legal action on behalf of multiple employees has to prove that the company fires the employee(s) because they were a member of a protected class. Assuming there are no incriminating emails stating that that was the reason, the only realistic way to do that is to show a pattern. If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor.
    - dahart 5y ago
      > The company doesn’t have to prove that the employee was failing. They do if the employee sues claiming age discrimination, for example. At least, they have to defend the accusation to show it’s not discrimination. When someone has been at the company for 25 years like in the parent’s example, and they get fired abruptly without notice for liking the wrong football team, it’s likely the stated reason is untrue and inviting a challenge. > If an employee decides to sue, whether you had them on a documented performance improvement plan for 6 months or 6 days isn’t going to be the deciding factor. It certainly helps show that the company isn’t discriminating arbitrarily, and gave the employee notice and a chance to improve the situation. BTW actual legal action isn’t necessary for firing to be getting harder. The fear of legal action is all you need, and that is in fact going up.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
Taking years to prune bad talent is another sign of a problem in the organization.
2001lodyssee 5y ago
In my long and storied career, well long at least, every single truly heinous, project-killin', crazy person actually interviewed pretty well. Honestly, I don't have a good solution to the problem.
- Rapzid 5y ago
  Fire fast. Use that 90 day try out period. Contract-to-hire. In the past I would never have been interested in a contract-to-hire. These days though if the company and role is right, and this an option to short-cut a ridiculous interview process, I might spring for it.
  - duped 5y ago
    Just personally I would never accept an offer that was contract for hire and think it's downright insulting a suggestion. My family needs health insurance and the market has never been so cold that I'd be desperate enough to take such a garbage offer.
    - Rapzid 5y ago
      Nothing about contracting precludes having health insurance though? For the roles and situations I'm talking about this would all just be factored into the rates.
      - tfehring 5y ago
        Even if they can just pay for health insurance out of pocket, they’d be switching plans twice, and each time they’d reset their deductible and possibly need to find a new doctor. When I was an actuary we used to do “intern to hire” for unemployed recent grads, but I can’t imagine leaving a full time position for a contract-to-hire position. I think for me personally the opportunity would have to be really interesting and the comp upon converting to FTE would need to be at least double my previous comp (meaning the contracted rate would probably be something like 4x my implied hourly).
      - 5y ago
zhte415 5y ago
Do you have probation period where you work? i.e. if an employee doesn't live up to expectation, release with short notice? Where I am, a 3 year contract typically carries a 3 month probation period, and a 1 year contract carries a 1 month probation period. The problem is management are often too busy or overwhelmed with other stuff to observe and provide feedback until someone's passed the probation period then releasing them becomes a bureaucratic nightmare - and when the new hire's not getting feedback, you can be sure not a lot of the rest of the team are.
- sgerenser 5y ago
  Probation periods in the US are rare, especially for white collar positions like software engineers. Of course, that’s mostly because of at will employment where either side can choose to part ways at any time.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    That sounds like infinite probation period to me
technofiend 5y ago
Isn't that one of the things Netflix is famous for getting right? Generous severance but quick to exit you if you're not a good fit.
caoilte 5y ago
I don't think it's that at all. It's very easy to fire people in US. I think they are trying to hire cultists. The harder it is to get in the more people think they're special once they do and the less likely they are to leave.
- finolex1 5y ago
  The difficulty isn't with regards to the process/legality. It's more behavioral/organizational
CogitoCogito 5y ago
> The reason they want to remove the risk is because it takes years to prune bad talent. I've never understood this given that the hiring is so often at will.
postalrat 5y ago
They could prune that talent overnight if they wanted.

twelve40 5y ago

I don't know if you've been through the firing process on either side, but after you go through a couple of dozen of these, and the hit to the morale/performance they entail, not to mention emotions involved, you tend to at least try to vet better to avoid such huge distractions in the future (a lose-lose for everyone involved!)

bb88 5y ago
One Fortune 500 company I worked for was honest enough to admit that the number one reason employees left was because they didn't like their boss. It's a huge risk on the other side as well. Not to mention that management usually gets to control the narrative and not the employees.
analyst74 5y ago
I'm not sure if people prefer Amazon's PIP culture. That's what it'll lead to if companies hire more loosely and have to fire people more frequently.

alephnan 5y ago

I left a hedgefund interview loop for this reason. I finished the 7th on-site interview. After I left NYC and flew back home, they wanted a 8th ( phone screen ) interview because one the interviewers lost the results. On the one hand, this space’s modus operandi is more data is always better. On the other hand, they have to trade and make decisions in a fast paced environment with imperfect information.

thrwaway122 5y ago
funny same experience here. I interviewed for four months at a very select and under the radar fund. Once a week I would go in from 730 am to 9 am and speak with a member of the fund. I got all the way to the end, and in a bout of emotional torment, I turned the offer down. In hindsight, its one of the biggest regrets I have. Would have retired long ago
- kortilla 5y ago
  Why did you turn it down if I may ask? I’ve made the decision several times to go with lower paying offers because I ended up deciding there was more to life than just a paycheck.
marto1 5y ago
> because one the interviewers lost the results. yeah, no. You dodged a bullet with that one.

sp332 5y ago

Companies don't want to do job training anymore. Instead of a general background and attitude check, they need to know if the candidate has all of the individual skills that will be used on the job.

kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
Job training is not as much worth it for companies when employees can switch jobs at the drop of a hat.
- jimbob45 5y ago
  You say that and I’ve seen several companies in practice echo what you’re saying. However, I fail to understand why they don’t simply make better use of contracts and probationary periods to solve that specific problem.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 5y ago
    Contacts in what sense? Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.
    - xcambar 5y ago
      I think GP meant "reference check"
      - jimbob45 5y ago
        I meant “contract” but you’ve brought up another good idea.
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      *contracts In the sense of offering signing bonuses for term lengths that get repo’d if the contract length is broken.

wyager 5y ago

The risk is artificially inflated by how hard it is to fire people.

jt2190 5y ago
This is actually true. A bad hire, once in the door, can be very expensive and time consuming for an employer to rectify. This is what leads to all sorts of weirdness like “contract to hire”.

hiyer 5y ago

Almost every single tech company I've interviewed at (ranging from medium-sized startups to FAANG), I've given at least 5 interviews, going up to 7. The only exceptions were very small startups and a couple of large Chinese organizations, where they stopped at 3.

hogFeast 5y ago
I remember interviewing for some grad roles. No hackerrank, no bullshit, very straightforward companies with "easy processes". Both had one "interview day", and five/six interviews total. I read your comment and I was thinking in my head...wow, five seems like a lot, and then I realised that even these places I liked went pretty hard...I think they call this conditioning. I didn't get either job btw, the work was trivial but I get terrible interview nerves so tanked both of them...in both cases, I also had a 6-hour take home...the results of which were largely ignored. Neither company is ever fully staffed...ofc.
worker767424 5y ago
Interviews or rounds? Phone screen and 4-5 on-site is pretty reasonable, but that's only two rounds.
- hiyer 5y ago
  I'm not sure where the distinction lies - both seem same to me :-)
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. If I talk to HR on Monday, take a phone screen with an engineer on Wednesday, and come on-site (or Zoom now) with 4 engineers next Monday, that’s 2 rounds and 5 interviews (or 3 and 6 if you count HR)
    - hiyer 5y ago
      > To me, rounds imply a decision point (and delay) in between. My experience has been that if you clear the engineering phone screen the company asks you to go through all the rest of the (4-6) interviews, even if your performance in one or more of them has been sub-par. And at least here in India the post-screen interviews are spread out over several days to 2-3 weeks - there is no "onsite" as such, even over Zoom.

hogFeast 5y ago

I was going to say that there are tons of parallels with how some fund managers approach investment. I have met lots of people who have this trait for over-analysis, not one has ever made consistently profitable investments. Over-analysis is a failure to understand what information is important. This is going to become more and more common though. In fund management, there has been a huge move towards "professionalisation"...which, ofc, means doing lots of pointless exams that select for the wrong thing. MBAs are the same. It is very hard to solve because the system selects for people who will play into this self-image (in my experience, this isn't solvable...you can either handle the risk of being wrong or you can't). This also overlaps with a lot of the issues that a lot of companies are having with hiring. A company which frames hiring as a risk rather than opportunity and has these very long, negative process of hiring (be real, the point is to uncover "weakness", not learn more about someone) is going to fail to hire people of different backgrounds. The amazing thing about the "candidate shortage" is that it isn't more severe. Companies are so bad at hiring, it is surprising they end up making any decisions at all.

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
Does any fund manager make consistently profitable investments? Most don’t even seem to make sporadic profitable investments.

andrewflnr 5y ago

I think this is a problem our whole society will have to learn. Reducing risk is probably good, but we have to reach the point where trying to eliminate is universally seen as a pathology. It's already kind of a meme in consumer products ("warning labels these days, right?"), but it crops up in hiring, movie production, etc.

marto1 5y ago

Reading this it just seems to me we're in for a really bad time with the new managerial class.

slickrick216 5y ago

Salesforce have ever green roles which they casually do interviews for but never actually act on. The roles can be easily spotted as they’ll be posted and reposted on job boards like LinkedIn every 4 days.

dan-robertson 5y ago

I find attitudes towards risk in hiring very strange. Many companies seem to treat it like an opportunity for massive downside without much thought to the potential upside. I think the downside potential is mostly less than companies seem to worry (an argument against me is that a ‘bad’ employee negatively affects their teammates too). I also think the normal interview processes aren’t even very good at filtering out those feared candidates. Instead I think companies, especially large companies where small numbers of employees aren’t a massive proportion of spending, should try to see the potential for upside more. Especially in a world where everyone does a similar interviewing process, a candidate who performs poorly at those interviews could be cheap and an excellent hire who is undervalued by the market because of their poor interviewing skills.