6 ms·

I noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is: - Initial screening (done) - Personal essay

by _t4za 4y ago

I noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is: - Initial screening (done) - Personal essay (this stage) - Standardized aptitude and personality tests - Meet and greet with an engineer - General interview(s) - Recruitment screen - Technical assessment - Role-specific interview(s) - Hiring manager interview - Senior leadership interview I highly doubt the initial screening is done by a human. So they want the essays and personality tests done before you speak to a human at the company, and they are probably not even on the team you're applying for. If you're unlucky, every human involved in the process will be on a different team until you get to the hiring manager interview, which is at the very end. Not only this but on Glassdoor I found dozens of people saying that they ghost you before the hiring manager interview so you could spend tens of hours interviewing and never speak to anyone on the team.

markshuttle 4y ago
To be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two. I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.
- Q3Jhenkh 4y ago
  Do you think it's normal for the CEO of a 800+ employees company to be reviewing resumes? It sounds like you don't trust the people you hired to do that job, and decided to do the job yourself... Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this? And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.
  - markshuttle 4y ago
    No, it's not normal. But your conclusion that I did this because I don't trust colleagues is mistaken. I did it to figure out how we should shape the hiring process, and so I could relate to the workload and problems that hiring leads face daily. When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;) We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding. When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further. As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard. Now, however, most see the benefits. Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns. You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer. Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :) To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
alistairSH 4y ago
Wait, they have SEVEN distinct interviews? Meet/greet, general, tech assessment, recruiter, role, manager, senior leader? Holy shit. Wow. That’s insane. What a waste of everybody’s time.
- sosodev 4y ago
  So many tech companies are bloating the interview process with seven or more interviews. For my current role I did several interviews and the record during my most recent cycle was ten IIRC. The particularly annoying part is that most of the time the rounds are almost complete duplicates of each other just with a different person. edit: I just checked my calendar and I had nine meetings/interviews with Cruise before they rejected me.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    That’s insane. FWIW, our normal process is 4 interviews… phone screen with the recruiter, 1 interview with hiring manager, a live tech screen (could be another manager, could be a senior IC), and a quick chat with director or VP. We try to get a candidate through to offer/decline within a week. I really can’t see the additional value of additional rounds of interviews.
- gurchik 4y ago
  At my current job, I did about the same number of interviews. Not counting an initial 15 minute screening call, I had a 30 minute phone call with two of the engineers on the team, a technical panel interview, and 3 exec interviews. So that's six interviews. I would be working with all of these people directly and I wanted to avoid "broken stair" coworkers I have had in the past. While I found this valuable, I didn't feel the same way about the Canonical process and refused to proceed. Each stage of an interview process needs to provide value to both sides. As a candidate, a personality test or an essay does not help me at all except to raise a red flag. And speaking to many people who I might never speak to again is useless to me.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
justinjlynn 4y ago
> Standardized aptitude and personality tests These are almost always extremely discriminatory when it comes to neurodiverse populations and I'm saddened that Canonical uses the equivalent of phrenology in its hiring process. sigh
- FabHK 4y ago
  > the equivalent of phrenology I mean, there are plenty of bad tests out there (Meyers Briggs etc.), but good aptitude and personality tests might well be the best (objective, reliable, valid...) tests of aptitude and personality there are, no?
  - RogerL 4y ago
    So, what training do you suppose anyone has in interpreting these tests? No one in the hiring loop is a trained psychologist, why would I want you to try to interpret the results of the MMPI or whatever? First of all, and I know the law says differently, but this is medical information. I'm not sharing the MRIs of my back (which you also can't interpret), and I'm not sharing mental health information either. But, suppose you did have a degree and specialized training in these tests. Do you think such a person can reasonably predict job performance and fit? It's reading tea leaves. The two biggest predictors of on the job performance is first, previous on the job performance and then general intelligence. After that it is all noise. You can go to an office and talk to a shrink for weeks and they still won't really grasp how you think or be able to make predictions about your future. If you dispute that, show me the research. It's phrenology and biases all wrapped under the blanket of "objectivity". Example of bias: Test X output Y shows correlation with OTJ performance (really, peer reviewed and all that). Cool! Correlation, not equivalence. Which means at least some portion of the population will do poorly on the test, but great at the job, and vice versa. What are the chances that neurodiverse people are in that category, or women, or blacks in a white culture, or.... And, regardless of that, suppose you are one of the people, in no particular protected or disadvantaged group, that does poorly. Should you never get hired, or get offered lower pay/responsibilities, because you do bad on this standardized test that gets run by so many companies? Is this what we want from society? Even pretending that the person seeing the results of the test in fact has the training and ability to interpret the results. There are cultures where they tend to show up as lying on these tests, but it is a cultural artifact. We know this. And a real medical professional consider the tests as indicative or suggestive - a point from which to start. Are you actually paranoid, or did you have a bad test day, or does your culture value something that pings poorly on the test? You don't know without a lot more investigation. HR is merely going to say "pass". Well, they'll ghost you, but anyway. I'm sure someone can come up with some good examples of tests (well, maybe not sure, but I'll credit it is possible), but these tests all seem to be someone's hobby horse, promoted because it makes things seem objective and fair (so we don't get sued!), or because it is woo. I've overstated my case a bit, but cmon. No one interviewing is a doctor, they shouldn't be using tests designed for medical relevance, and we should strive for inclusiveness. Can you code and not insult your interviewer while being questioned? Sounds like a hire to me. Oh, the MMPI says you are on the introverted side, or have issues with depression? Go fuck off, interviewee? I don't want to live in that world.

by _t4za 4y ago

markshuttle 4y ago

To be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two. I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.

Q3Jhenkh 4y ago
Do you think it's normal for the CEO of a 800+ employees company to be reviewing resumes? It sounds like you don't trust the people you hired to do that job, and decided to do the job yourself... Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this? And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.
- markshuttle 4y ago
  No, it's not normal. But your conclusion that I did this because I don't trust colleagues is mistaken. I did it to figure out how we should shape the hiring process, and so I could relate to the workload and problems that hiring leads face daily. When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;) We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding. When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further. As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard. Now, however, most see the benefits. Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns. You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer. Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :) To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

alistairSH 4y ago

Wait, they have SEVEN distinct interviews? Meet/greet, general, tech assessment, recruiter, role, manager, senior leader? Holy shit. Wow. That’s insane. What a waste of everybody’s time.

sosodev 4y ago
So many tech companies are bloating the interview process with seven or more interviews. For my current role I did several interviews and the record during my most recent cycle was ten IIRC. The particularly annoying part is that most of the time the rounds are almost complete duplicates of each other just with a different person. edit: I just checked my calendar and I had nine meetings/interviews with Cruise before they rejected me.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  That’s insane. FWIW, our normal process is 4 interviews… phone screen with the recruiter, 1 interview with hiring manager, a live tech screen (could be another manager, could be a senior IC), and a quick chat with director or VP. We try to get a candidate through to offer/decline within a week. I really can’t see the additional value of additional rounds of interviews.
gurchik 4y ago
At my current job, I did about the same number of interviews. Not counting an initial 15 minute screening call, I had a 30 minute phone call with two of the engineers on the team, a technical panel interview, and 3 exec interviews. So that's six interviews. I would be working with all of these people directly and I wanted to avoid "broken stair" coworkers I have had in the past. While I found this valuable, I didn't feel the same way about the Canonical process and refused to proceed. Each stage of an interview process needs to provide value to both sides. As a candidate, a personality test or an essay does not help me at all except to raise a red flag. And speaking to many people who I might never speak to again is useless to me.
- alistairSH 4y ago

justinjlynn 4y ago

> Standardized aptitude and personality tests These are almost always extremely discriminatory when it comes to neurodiverse populations and I'm saddened that Canonical uses the equivalent of phrenology in its hiring process. sigh

FabHK 4y ago
> the equivalent of phrenology I mean, there are plenty of bad tests out there (Meyers Briggs etc.), but good aptitude and personality tests might well be the best (objective, reliable, valid...) tests of aptitude and personality there are, no?
- RogerL 4y ago
  So, what training do you suppose anyone has in interpreting these tests? No one in the hiring loop is a trained psychologist, why would I want you to try to interpret the results of the MMPI or whatever? First of all, and I know the law says differently, but this is medical information. I'm not sharing the MRIs of my back (which you also can't interpret), and I'm not sharing mental health information either. But, suppose you did have a degree and specialized training in these tests. Do you think such a person can reasonably predict job performance and fit? It's reading tea leaves. The two biggest predictors of on the job performance is first, previous on the job performance and then general intelligence. After that it is all noise. You can go to an office and talk to a shrink for weeks and they still won't really grasp how you think or be able to make predictions about your future. If you dispute that, show me the research. It's phrenology and biases all wrapped under the blanket of "objectivity". Example of bias: Test X output Y shows correlation with OTJ performance (really, peer reviewed and all that). Cool! Correlation, not equivalence. Which means at least some portion of the population will do poorly on the test, but great at the job, and vice versa. What are the chances that neurodiverse people are in that category, or women, or blacks in a white culture, or.... And, regardless of that, suppose you are one of the people, in no particular protected or disadvantaged group, that does poorly. Should you never get hired, or get offered lower pay/responsibilities, because you do bad on this standardized test that gets run by so many companies? Is this what we want from society? Even pretending that the person seeing the results of the test in fact has the training and ability to interpret the results. There are cultures where they tend to show up as lying on these tests, but it is a cultural artifact. We know this. And a real medical professional consider the tests as indicative or suggestive - a point from which to start. Are you actually paranoid, or did you have a bad test day, or does your culture value something that pings poorly on the test? You don't know without a lot more investigation. HR is merely going to say "pass". Well, they'll ghost you, but anyway. I'm sure someone can come up with some good examples of tests (well, maybe not sure, but I'll credit it is possible), but these tests all seem to be someone's hobby horse, promoted because it makes things seem objective and fair (so we don't get sued!), or because it is woo. I've overstated my case a bit, but cmon. No one interviewing is a doctor, they shouldn't be using tests designed for medical relevance, and we should strive for inclusiveness. Can you code and not insult your interviewer while being questioned? Sounds like a hire to me. Oh, the MMPI says you are on the introverted side, or have issues with depression? Go fuck off, interviewee? I don't want to live in that world.