7 ms·
OAs aren't super widespread in "elite" companies for a variety of reasons. One is that sourcing recruiters are not equipped to handle technical screening logis
by lhorie 4y ago
OAs aren't super widespread in "elite" companies for a variety of reasons.
One is that sourcing recruiters are not equipped to handle technical screening logistics. They can't tell, for example, if a solution works but has O(n^2) complexity, or if the candidate failed because the tool was being stupid in some way or the question was phrased ambiguously.
Another is that OAs can be gamed much more easily than face-to-face phone screen sessions (see, for example, reports of indian "study" groups).
Another issue is that the evaluation criteria for OAs is often so coarse that it does not provide a reasonable level of filtering, compared to having a combo of a good sourcing team + an engineer "guarding the gate" so to speak via the phone screen session. An engineer's technical screening skill is considered non-automatable enough that companies would fly them into school fairs to vet internship candidates.
Teams may not even trust OAs that they didn't devise themselves, nor have the actual inclination to develop/maintain their own OAs.
OAs also tend to gravitate towards trivia-style quizzes that are often associated w/ "lesser" companies.
There may also be concerns about being respectful of candidates' time.
- scarface74 4y agoMy impression came from the lack of discernment with the BigTech recruiters I encountered over the past few years. I thought they would give anyone a chance to do at least the initial screening for an SWE role that applied. - my very light LinkedIn profile showed nothing but a history of working at no name companies and doing CRUD work before 2020 yet I had recruiters reach out to me from Facebook, Apple, Google, MS and I believe Netflix - I’ve had two internal recruiters reach out to me about “exciting opportunities at Amazon” while my LinkedIn profile clearly showed I worked at AWS. - I’ve had a recruiter from Facebook reach out to me about a senior engineer position repeatedly even though my LinkedIn byline doesn’t say anything about my being a current software engineer (“cloud consultant specializing in application modernization”) - I’ve had a recruiter from Google reach out to me about an “engineering manager” position even though I have never managed anyone in my life.
- lhorie 4y agoI can't speak for every company, but the impression I get is that recruiters at the FAANGs of the world seem to search for various coarse rubrics that may or may not correlate with whatever they are looking for, be it a high number of years of experience as a potential correlation to seniority or certain keywords as correlation for expertise in some subject matter. "Cloud" and derivative keywords are probably the ones landing your linkedin profile in the search results of these recruiters. Not everyone is getting recruiter spam because not all keywords are created equal and not all profiles look promising, but those of us who do get spammed, get a fair amount of it. The Amazon recruiter spam in particular is bad enough to be a running joke.