6 ms·

> * If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates t

> * If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later. My experience with being hired at non-FAANG places over a career of more than two decades is that I'm usually through a process and hired within a week. Often, like three days, from first contact to offer. I think my single longest job search was maybe a month, total. Companies that have these weeks- or months-long processes but don't pay FAANG-tier wages to make it worth the wait, I have no idea how the hell they manage to hire anyone at all. You've got to move or I'll already be looking at two other offers before you set the date for your second round or WTF ever.

indymike 4y ago
I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I'm starting to come around to the TikTok suggestion for those tense closers. "Have the day you deserve."
- wintogreen74 4y ago
  How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent". For me a clear understanding of the process steps and how long it will take start to finish is more important than absolute speed. Example: "These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur." My last employeer was really good at communicating promptly with those that were not progressing, which is also very important. I think we should all agree that limbo/ghosting is totally unacceptable and these companies (or people) should be called out by name.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    You read the candidates CV, you ask them what they last worked on, ask them why they want to work at your company, if they are okay with the posted salary range. Maybe have them write a short bit of code to make sure they aren't totally bullshitting you. That takes about one or two hours. Then you think about it, and if you want to hire them send them an offer the next day. First 3 months of the contract is trial period (you can fire them without severance in the trial period if it doesn't work out). Not sure why you need weeks to evaluate a candidate, either they are a fit or not.
    - jvvw 4y ago
      Agree - most of the interviews I have had have been 1-2 hours plus some sort of coding test or similar. I guess if you are trying to recruit people already in a job, you can't get away with that much more than that - unless the job is super-amazing, you can expect people to take a day off work but not more than that. I don't know that longer interviews etc. would actually have told the interviewers massively more about me, perhaps a tiny bit more but not a lot.
  - runako 4y ago
    Consider the number of hours you actually spend interacting with a candidate during the interview process. If it's 40(!), bring them in for a full week and decide at the end of Friday. If it's closer to 10, bring them in Monday morning and decide by close of business Tuesday. All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.
    - anon7725 4y ago
      This is a good process to ensure you don’t hire anyone who is currently employed. I would not sign up for this even if I was between jobs unless I was desperate. I don’t mind coding challenges, etc, but the first few weeks at any job is mostly scut work getting things set up, meeting people, etc.
      - runako 4y ago
- endtime 4y ago
  I started a new job in April. The hiring process was quite slow and disorganized, but included in that were three separate "interviews" with my now-manager. I thought this was great - I felt like I really understood who I'd be working for and what I was getting into. And now that I've joined I understand that he was simply doing the same thing: getting to know me; making sure I wasn't someone good at technical interviews but with misaligned values. Hiring the wrong person can be very expensive. I wish the whole process had taken 2 weeks rather than 6, but I'd view an offer in 24h as a huge red flag.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    3 times with the same person? Yikes.. this is a much bigger red flag than getting hired in 24 hours. That tells me they are unsure of me or themselves getting an offer on the spot is a sign they actually need to fill the position and they believe you can
    - xyzelement 4y ago
      To me it just sounds like a small scale operation and the manager is being careful which is great. Perhaps what happened after the first two meetings, the manager sat down and analyzed his list of reasons he's excited about the candidate as well as any potential concerns that he saw. The subsequent rounds may have in part been structured to dig into the areas of concerns to assure themselves they aren't real issues or can be lived with. This wouldn't scale at a FAANG but for a smaller shop it's probably close to optimal. I didn't marry my wife after our first date :)
    - endtime 4y ago
      It was for a pretty senior role. Having joined, it was clearly not a red flag in hindsight; it didn't hunt at any actual dysfunction AFAICT.
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  How do you deal with people lying on their resume? I'm curious what your hiring process looks like.
- hellweaver666 4y ago
  In most small companies you send in your CV, they bring you in for an interview, chat for an hour or so and get an offer the next day. The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    This is true, but I'd still rather come in for an entire day and interview with 6 different people and get a thumbs up/down the same or next day versus come in for a single 1 hr interview then get called back for a second interview a few days later and then a third interview a week after that and then not get a decision for a week or two after the final interview. The latter used to be way more common with non-tech companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
  - id00 4y ago
    > The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person. This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason
    - mejutoco 4y ago
      It is a structural property of committees. They dilute blame. Not OP, I do not mean that there is an evil confabulation for this to happen, but if you have a hiring committee, this is happening. Even if it would reduce the amount of bad candidates (which is not a given at all), both effects can happen simultaneously.
- _benj 4y ago
  This! It happened to me on my last job search. Was talking with three companies and two of the had the usual 4-6 meetings across 2-3 weeks stuff… the one I accepted did two interviews (technical and with PMs) and had an offer for me about 1 hour after I finished the last interview. I was blown away and the other companies couldn’t really compete, nor they were affecting anything so much better that would be worth the wait!
- ungerik 4y ago
  There also seems to be a scam industry forming to take advantage of those quick moves plus remote work. If one such scam employee makes it to the first salary, it already more than paid for the few hours spent on interviews and communicating excuses why he doesn't get anything done. Also interviews and pretending to work can be spread out to specialists within a team. Now do the math for multiple interviews per working day for someone who is decent in interviewing... We had the same guy show up to scam interviews under different names twice! LOL
ollien 4y ago
I have been through a process that took 4 months, from start to end, with almost two months of silence between. The only reason I knew I wasn't rejected was I had a friend on the inside.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I've been on the other side of a hiring process like that. It literally went like this: "Oh shit, didn't we interview so and so for that like 3 weeks ago? Oops! Are they still available?"
- JackFr 4y ago
  I had a 4 month hiring process - but in fairness they were very transparent. Early on in the process I was warned it would take a long time, and at each step along the way it was made clear what was happening. There was never a feeling of being half ghosted. Wasn’t a bad experience at all.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I got a new job long before COVID--so mostly in-person process--and it was about a 3 month process. But a lot of it was I was interviewing with people who traveled a lot and getting on calendars even with flexibility on my part (I was very local) just took time.
vsareto 4y ago
They hire closer to average talent, who will typically wait because they don't have offers swarming in. The places that hire fast and choose good talent often screen those folks out.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
It would help things immensely if people were more honest. Sometimes it takes more than a week to verify everything on their resume. References often don't get back ASAP. It's not like we won't ever find out that they were lying about their previous job. There are always some applicants who talk a lot, take credit for others' work, but can't actually anything.
swiftcoder 4y ago
Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.
- xpe 4y ago
  Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?
  - anon7725 4y ago
    Not the person you responded to, but same story for me in 2007. Loop and verbal offer the same day. I was/am not a big get, just a regular engineer.
  - Matthias247 4y ago
    I think it's rather the opposite: If it's a very generic position, to which a lot of applicants could match. In this case big companies often do hiring events, where a lot of applicants are interviewed at the same day, and potentially in the same physical location. Since for those hiring events all decision makers (interviewers, hiring manager, recruiting) are available at the same day, the process can be faster.
hoosieree 4y ago
By the time a previous employer got around to making an offer, I had already interviewed and accepted a different job and been working there for 2 months. Still, I took the job for the 1.5x salary increase and better benefits.
AdrianB1 4y ago
I work in such a company; it is easy to hire, there are people that FAANG does not hire, other companies don't hire, but somewhere at the bottom someone does. The entire industry that I work in (non-IT, but very large companies) do this, it is the practice for the past ~ 15 years and there is a non-compete agreement on this.
soneil 4y ago
I've seen the other side of this and it's not pretty. We had a round with a very indecisive manager who seemed to be apprehensive that an even better candidate might come along next week. We interviewed 15-20 people over the run of 3 months, finally decided on someone and got in touch with them. They'd already taken a role. Tried our second choice. Then our third. Then we just started over. Unless the candidate is looking for you in particular, the better than candidate, the sooner they'll be off the market. The only candidates still waiting 3 months later are the ones everyone else has passed over. (This isn't particularly recent, and wasn't in the US. It's just stuck in my mind as a particularly educational experience.)

indymike 4y ago

I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.

falcolas 4y ago
I'm starting to come around to the TikTok suggestion for those tense closers. "Have the day you deserve."
wintogreen74 4y ago
How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent". For me a clear understanding of the process steps and how long it will take start to finish is more important than absolute speed. Example: "These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur." My last employeer was really good at communicating promptly with those that were not progressing, which is also very important. I think we should all agree that limbo/ghosting is totally unacceptable and these companies (or people) should be called out by name.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  You read the candidates CV, you ask them what they last worked on, ask them why they want to work at your company, if they are okay with the posted salary range. Maybe have them write a short bit of code to make sure they aren't totally bullshitting you. That takes about one or two hours. Then you think about it, and if you want to hire them send them an offer the next day. First 3 months of the contract is trial period (you can fire them without severance in the trial period if it doesn't work out). Not sure why you need weeks to evaluate a candidate, either they are a fit or not.
  - jvvw 4y ago
    Agree - most of the interviews I have had have been 1-2 hours plus some sort of coding test or similar. I guess if you are trying to recruit people already in a job, you can't get away with that much more than that - unless the job is super-amazing, you can expect people to take a day off work but not more than that. I don't know that longer interviews etc. would actually have told the interviewers massively more about me, perhaps a tiny bit more but not a lot.
- runako 4y ago
  Consider the number of hours you actually spend interacting with a candidate during the interview process. If it's 40(!), bring them in for a full week and decide at the end of Friday. If it's closer to 10, bring them in Monday morning and decide by close of business Tuesday. All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    This is a good process to ensure you don’t hire anyone who is currently employed. I would not sign up for this even if I was between jobs unless I was desperate. I don’t mind coding challenges, etc, but the first few weeks at any job is mostly scut work getting things set up, meeting people, etc.
    - runako 4y ago
endtime 4y ago
I started a new job in April. The hiring process was quite slow and disorganized, but included in that were three separate "interviews" with my now-manager. I thought this was great - I felt like I really understood who I'd be working for and what I was getting into. And now that I've joined I understand that he was simply doing the same thing: getting to know me; making sure I wasn't someone good at technical interviews but with misaligned values. Hiring the wrong person can be very expensive. I wish the whole process had taken 2 weeks rather than 6, but I'd view an offer in 24h as a huge red flag.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  3 times with the same person? Yikes.. this is a much bigger red flag than getting hired in 24 hours. That tells me they are unsure of me or themselves getting an offer on the spot is a sign they actually need to fill the position and they believe you can
  - xyzelement 4y ago
    To me it just sounds like a small scale operation and the manager is being careful which is great. Perhaps what happened after the first two meetings, the manager sat down and analyzed his list of reasons he's excited about the candidate as well as any potential concerns that he saw. The subsequent rounds may have in part been structured to dig into the areas of concerns to assure themselves they aren't real issues or can be lived with. This wouldn't scale at a FAANG but for a smaller shop it's probably close to optimal. I didn't marry my wife after our first date :)
  - endtime 4y ago
    It was for a pretty senior role. Having joined, it was clearly not a red flag in hindsight; it didn't hunt at any actual dysfunction AFAICT.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
How do you deal with people lying on their resume? I'm curious what your hiring process looks like.
hellweaver666 4y ago
In most small companies you send in your CV, they bring you in for an interview, chat for an hour or so and get an offer the next day. The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  This is true, but I'd still rather come in for an entire day and interview with 6 different people and get a thumbs up/down the same or next day versus come in for a single 1 hr interview then get called back for a second interview a few days later and then a third interview a week after that and then not get a decision for a week or two after the final interview. The latter used to be way more common with non-tech companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- id00 4y ago
  > The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person. This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    It is a structural property of committees. They dilute blame. Not OP, I do not mean that there is an evil confabulation for this to happen, but if you have a hiring committee, this is happening. Even if it would reduce the amount of bad candidates (which is not a given at all), both effects can happen simultaneously.
_benj 4y ago
This! It happened to me on my last job search. Was talking with three companies and two of the had the usual 4-6 meetings across 2-3 weeks stuff… the one I accepted did two interviews (technical and with PMs) and had an offer for me about 1 hour after I finished the last interview. I was blown away and the other companies couldn’t really compete, nor they were affecting anything so much better that would be worth the wait!
ungerik 4y ago
There also seems to be a scam industry forming to take advantage of those quick moves plus remote work. If one such scam employee makes it to the first salary, it already more than paid for the few hours spent on interviews and communicating excuses why he doesn't get anything done. Also interviews and pretending to work can be spread out to specialists within a team. Now do the math for multiple interviews per working day for someone who is decent in interviewing... We had the same guy show up to scam interviews under different names twice! LOL

ollien 4y ago

I have been through a process that took 4 months, from start to end, with almost two months of silence between. The only reason I knew I wasn't rejected was I had a friend on the inside.

nsxwolf 4y ago
I've been on the other side of a hiring process like that. It literally went like this: "Oh shit, didn't we interview so and so for that like 3 weeks ago? Oops! Are they still available?"
JackFr 4y ago
I had a 4 month hiring process - but in fairness they were very transparent. Early on in the process I was warned it would take a long time, and at each step along the way it was made clear what was happening. There was never a feeling of being half ghosted. Wasn’t a bad experience at all.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I got a new job long before COVID--so mostly in-person process--and it was about a 3 month process. But a lot of it was I was interviewing with people who traveled a lot and getting on calendars even with flexibility on my part (I was very local) just took time.

vsareto 4y ago

They hire closer to average talent, who will typically wait because they don't have offers swarming in. The places that hire fast and choose good talent often screen those folks out.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

It would help things immensely if people were more honest. Sometimes it takes more than a week to verify everything on their resume. References often don't get back ASAP. It's not like we won't ever find out that they were lying about their previous job. There are always some applicants who talk a lot, take credit for others' work, but can't actually anything.

swiftcoder 4y ago

Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.

xpe 4y ago
Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?
- anon7725 4y ago
  Not the person you responded to, but same story for me in 2007. Loop and verbal offer the same day. I was/am not a big get, just a regular engineer.
- Matthias247 4y ago
  I think it's rather the opposite: If it's a very generic position, to which a lot of applicants could match. In this case big companies often do hiring events, where a lot of applicants are interviewed at the same day, and potentially in the same physical location. Since for those hiring events all decision makers (interviewers, hiring manager, recruiting) are available at the same day, the process can be faster.

hoosieree 4y ago

By the time a previous employer got around to making an offer, I had already interviewed and accepted a different job and been working there for 2 months. Still, I took the job for the 1.5x salary increase and better benefits.

AdrianB1 4y ago

I work in such a company; it is easy to hire, there are people that FAANG does not hire, other companies don't hire, but somewhere at the bottom someone does. The entire industry that I work in (non-IT, but very large companies) do this, it is the practice for the past ~ 15 years and there is a non-compete agreement on this.

soneil 4y ago

I've seen the other side of this and it's not pretty. We had a round with a very indecisive manager who seemed to be apprehensive that an even better candidate might come along next week. We interviewed 15-20 people over the run of 3 months, finally decided on someone and got in touch with them. They'd already taken a role. Tried our second choice. Then our third. Then we just started over. Unless the candidate is looking for you in particular, the better than candidate, the sooner they'll be off the market. The only candidates still waiting 3 months later are the ones everyone else has passed over. (This isn't particularly recent, and wasn't in the US. It's just stuck in my mind as a particularly educational experience.)