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It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons (1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems.
by hansvm 3y ago
It's a long day for sure, but honestly I don't really mind it as a candidate, and that boils down to a few reasons
(1) The time cost isn't as high as it seems. If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer, nearly guaranteed. The flow chart then looks like (a) if I don't get a phone screen, that awful process is no worse than the status quo, (b) if I do, I just find out in the phone screen if the battery of interviews has high latency (an 8hr day is fine, 8hrs over 2 months greatly complicates a job search) and drop out early the 20% of the time that happens, and (c) from there I have an 8hr day to a guaranteed job. Each offer then costs roughly 0.95/0.8~1.2 full interview processes, or 1.2x 4-8 hours.
(2) That time cost is a bit annoying when it comes to competing offers (a single solid day isn't crazily expensive when you're about to get a 40% pay boost, but 5 solid days for a job search is ... 5x as expensive ... fine, but not ideal, and hard when you have finite vacation days). Somewhere around 1/2 of employers don't actually seem to care about producing proof of competing offers though. If they make an offer, you counter that you're worth some fixed XYZ instead (ideally doing enough research to choose the levers they're most likely to accommodate) and will sign immediately if they can make that happen, they'll go above and beyond to agree to your counter-offer. It's a waste of time for the whole industry to require counter-offers in the cases where everyone knows what you're worth (admittedly, when that's not the case, counter-offers are an unfortunate necessity to prove your worth).
(3) The average tech interview is 10-20min solving the techno-babble and 30-50 probing what they know about the company and the team. New companies are very risky, and they work fairly hard to keep damning evidence out of the face of the public. You can mitigate a lot of risk by background-checking the executive team, but a present-day boots-on-the-ground view of things, ideally with the several overlapping/competing views you get from multiple team members, allows you to bounce out of problem situations early.
- brailsafe 3y agoSeems like a very personal and fortunate take depending on what you do or when in time that experience is based on, not that it's irrelevant, just far from generalizable, especially right now. Companies are looking for almost any reason to turn someone away, so a guaranteed offer coming from a phone screen, or for that matter even getting a phone screen, is either exaggerated, you're consistently incredible, or/and you're consistently incredible and in a niche with very little competition and big names on the CV. Even the author of the article admits they got quite lucky with the low numbers they experienced before getting an offer. I don't mean to be dismissive, but the markets are quite varying and intensely either saturated, competitive, or/and sparse right now, depnding on which market you're in and what your CV or skills look like, to the point where as a frontend dev I'm considering just switching to knitting or something more lucrative
- singron 3y agoFwiw our hiring pipeline has 30%-70% of candidates make it to the next stage once past the phone screen (it has varied somewhat as we re-ordered or changed process). Assuming 3 stages until offer (e.g. HM interview, tech screen, full-day interviews), and offer-acceptance, with 50% success rate at each stage, 1/8 get an offer and 1/16 accept it. At 60% it's 1/4.6 and 1/7.8, so the exact rate makes a huge difference. The corollary to this sensitivity is that if you are just slightly better or worse at interviewing, you can see a huge difference in the number of companies you need to pass screening at to get a job. In practice, companies get more people into the pipeline than necessary to reduce the chance that it dries up without making the hires, so as a candidate, you will also have to take that into account. You can play around with the variables on this graph to see number of phone-screen-passes: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+where+x+in+%5B0.3%2C0.7%5D https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=y%3D1%2F%28x%5E4%29+whe...
- commandlinefan 3y ago> If I get as far as a phone screen I'm getting an offer Wow, I didn't observe this myself even back when the market was "hot". I had a _lot_ of phone screens that didn't lead to offers.