6 ms·

"If hiring is broken, what else is broken?" I've seen quite a few articles on HN recently where what we call "candidate experience" during the hiring process w

by fecak 12y ago

"If hiring is broken, what else is broken?" I've seen quite a few articles on HN recently where what we call "candidate experience" during the hiring process was a theme. Whether this writer chose to list "Recruiting" as the first topic because of chronology (recruiting was first experience with company) or to emphasize the importance is unknown, but candidates today seem to assume that a broken hiring process is indicative of flaws in culture and how the company values employees. Companies that simply play the numbers game and don't consider improving candidate experience are running the risk of reducing their brand as an employer, regardless of how the public regards their products or services.

mathattack 12y ago
Customer satisfaction is disproportionately tied to the sales experience. I still resent the guys who sold me my Toyota. It stands to reason that how we are recruited also directly impacts how we feel about the company after we join.
- sandworm 12y ago
  I'm still angry about about a 96 Jeep I bought new. A little untruth by the sales guy about a minor feature, that was important to me, has turned me off all jeep products ever since. Nearly twenty years later I cannot look at any jeep one without remembering that profound disappointment when my new vehicle was not as I had expected.
brendangregg 12y ago
It's chronological, although I did want to emphasize this issue in recruitment. First impressions count. It's hard to know what a company is really like without knowing some insiders. Searching on the Internet may find opinions pointing every which way. And then, you meet their recruitment team, and get your first -- and maybe last -- firsthand exposure to the internal workings of the company. Hiring the right staff is obviously very important. So any issues with the hiring process that cannot be fixed is deeply worrying. Does the company not value hiring? Why can't it be fixed? Who will my co-workers be? What else is broken? etc. I regret that I didn't walk out during the misaligned interviews, to save everyone's time. I did eventually tell recruiters not to contact me anymore, but that seemed to make them more interested, and I was handed to a different team. (In the end, I picked Netflix anyway, and am very happy I did.) Netflix recruiting was awesome, and I think other companies can do the same. Don't put up with recruiting problems -- help fix it. It may be your company's first and last impression.
- fecak 12y ago
  I've dealt with many companies large and small (retained recruitment, tech) that have admitted early on to flaws in their hiring process. Typically, I find it's someone in engineering all the way up to the CTO that admits the process is broken, and they generally want to circumvent internal HR processes to get the candidate to their potential boss and co-workers as efficiently as possible. HR typically wants to control as much of the process as possible, which often means an HR screening first. This tends to turn off engineers considerably, as it's deemed a waste of time, so the first step in the process is perceived negatively and that negative first impression is hard to overcome. The clients I've represented that have the smoothest process are those that use HR to facilitate and provide answers to questions, but to try and limit involvement beyond that.
- UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
  Do Netflix's interviews have any trick questions (e.g. manhole covers) or coding questions that have nothing to do with the job (e.g. Write a function that can detect a cycle in a linked list)? I would never interview at major tech' companies because from what I've read of their interview process, it is all about knowing random Computer Science trivia and studying a book of trick questions. I like more traditional corporations/business who give you questions actually applicable to the job and your experience. Silicon Valley interviews are pretty insufferable, due to their pseudo-intellectual elitism. Companies should take their interview, and then give it to what they consider their most successful employees. If the employees wouldn't be "hired" then the interview process is completely broken.
  - mjr578 12y ago
    As always, it depends on the group or team you are applying for. Some groups actually have a lot of applied computer science concepts and benefit from these type of questions. On my team, Web UI, we typically try to ask questions that pertain to the tasks they would encounter day to day.
  - jghn 12y ago
    I feel your pain on coding questions which have nothing to do with the job, but this can be difficult. We recently tried to identify such a question, with a scope such that the candidate should take about an hour and a half to complete - where complete also implies documentation, tests, etc. We couldn't find an appropriate question which would be something that would be highly indicative of the specific work they'd be doing that a) Didn't require a ton of domain knowledge (we don't expect people to have that domain knowledge coming in) or b) Would be too specific to particular technologies such as which ORM type library one is using, which type of DB, what libraries, etc. Typically when I've seen examples of these questions where they are fully relevant they're in a space that's tightly defined - you're using say RoR, MySql, etc and candidates are expected to be proficient in those. That's not us.
toddsiegel 12y ago
Hiring is a two-way street. The candidate is obviously trying to sell himself or herself, but the company should do the same. Some companies like they are doing you favor by hiring you. I cannot imagine they get great talent.
- daemin 12y ago
  I think a lot of candidates also forget this, partly because they "need a job".
dap 12y ago
It's important for candidates not to over-emphasize the smoothness of the hiring process. I almost didn't work for a company because my experience during an internship was that HR, payroll, and other departments that were not part of my day-to-day job were painful and bureaucratic. I was talked into the job anyway, and it was without a doubt the right decision for me. I learned an enormous amount, worked with some terrific people, and helped ship a very successful product. You could argue that the ancillary stuff reflected company issues that ultimately led to the company's demise. But I would certainly not have passed up the 3 years I spent there even if I'd known that in 3 years I'd end up looking for a new job. And that's not least because so everyone I worked with did the same thing, and now I'm still working with many of those same people on much of the same technologies. What was important about the candidate experience? It was clear that the team was interested in working with me and developing me as an engineer, and that they were very bright and working on important problems. That trumped basically everything for me.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Because we spend so much time at work and because a bad workplace is such a miserable experience, I think candidates should pay close attention to negative signals, even if they could turn out to be anomalous. Of course, when things go wrong it's certainly important to pay close attention to how that is handled. Basically everything that happens during the interview and recruitment process should be treated as signal even though some of it will be noise. For employers evaluating a candidate, "if it's not yes it's no" - I would suggest job seekers to have the same attitude. (Unless your current job already sucks.)
ryguytilidie 12y ago
I'm a recruiter and have worked at a few startups. My wife is looking for a new role and recently had an interview where they sent her questions and asked her to record answers and send them back. This blew my mind. What a horrible experience. For me, the interview is absolutely 2 ways. I spend just as much time answering questions and talking about our team as I do asking questions. There are times where I walk away wishing I had done a better job, but you always HAVE to care about candidate experience.
jghn 12y ago
I've been beating this drum for a bit now at my company. My employer is extremely prestigious for it's main field but largely unknown in the software engineering world. It doesn't help that we're literally across the street from a handful of household name level software companies. And yet, a common complaint (I had it myself when I joined) was that people feel put off by the hiring process that we have. To make it worse, I know for a fact that this sentiment is spreading via word of mouth locally. My point to the folks at my company is that we need to be improving our brand in the eyes of software professionals, not making it worse. To do this we need to present an image that's not just bog standard, mid-sized bureaucracy style hiring.
- RogerL 12y ago
  Have to agree with this. I've turned down offers, or stopped the process, due to a bad interview experience. It's not a good signal, necessarily, but it is the only one that we have, as to what it might be like to work for you. If you can't get this together, what else do you do badly? I recognize from all these comments that companies can be quite nice internally but just suck at interviews, but what else do you have to go on. If my potential future boss finds his phone more interesting than talking to me during the interview for example, why would I accept that job offer, especially in today's market when my phone is literally pinging with interview opportunities as I interview with you? And I that perhaps a bit more subtly than it appears. This frantic search for warm bodies can make you feel pretty desirable and important, and I think it is easy for that to skew your thinking a bit and to over-interpret small things that happen during interviews. But, that is the reality of human behavior, and you cannot ignore it.
Blackthorn 12y ago
What other big companies have awful candidate experiences? I recently went through a job hunt and two stand out in my mind: Red Hat and Rackspace. Neither one of them insulted me or anything, per se. Rather, I saw that they were looking for engineering people on a couple different job boards and instructed you to apply through their 3rd party system. I had done a lot of work lately in virtualization and distributed computing and these guys are good open source citizens there, so I figured I'd apply. Two months have gone by now and still no word -- my status on their website remains "resume received". Makes me wonder how they ever manage to hire anyone at all. It's really soured me both to them and companies that use that shitty application system in general. At this point I figure anyone who uses it (including Amazon and Oracle) aren't even worth wasting my time messing around with.
- skuhn 12y ago
  The reality is that most job postings aren't tied to actual jobs that need to be filled right now. These postings just hang out there on websites and passively gather resumes. Occasionally someone actually looks at the applicant pool for 10 minutes and picks a few. The rest are never responded to or dealt with in any way. You'll probably never get a response, or you'll get one three months after you've started another job. My personal favorite experience was being called (on my desk phone) by a recruiter in response to an application that I submitted, for a different job at the same company. I had applied 4-5 months previously, and had been working there for at least 3 months. One hand seriously has no idea what the other hand is up to. I sympathize with you, this can feel pretty bad as an applicant (especially if you've done a lot of work on your resume / cover letter just for that job). Once I realized how things work on the back end, I stopped caring or even thinking about jobs until an actual human reached out to me.
- lil_cain 12y ago
  Current rackspace employee - ime, we want you to apply through our system (here http://rackspace.jobs/ http://rackspace.jobs/). If you're getting no reply from us at all, then there's a good chance that no one here has got your CV. (Or the US does thing entirely differently - I only work in the UK business unit, so you never know)

by fecak 12y ago

mathattack 12y ago

Customer satisfaction is disproportionately tied to the sales experience. I still resent the guys who sold me my Toyota. It stands to reason that how we are recruited also directly impacts how we feel about the company after we join.

sandworm 12y ago
I'm still angry about about a 96 Jeep I bought new. A little untruth by the sales guy about a minor feature, that was important to me, has turned me off all jeep products ever since. Nearly twenty years later I cannot look at any jeep one without remembering that profound disappointment when my new vehicle was not as I had expected.

brendangregg 12y ago

It's chronological, although I did want to emphasize this issue in recruitment. First impressions count. It's hard to know what a company is really like without knowing some insiders. Searching on the Internet may find opinions pointing every which way. And then, you meet their recruitment team, and get your first -- and maybe last -- firsthand exposure to the internal workings of the company. Hiring the right staff is obviously very important. So any issues with the hiring process that cannot be fixed is deeply worrying. Does the company not value hiring? Why can't it be fixed? Who will my co-workers be? What else is broken? etc. I regret that I didn't walk out during the misaligned interviews, to save everyone's time. I did eventually tell recruiters not to contact me anymore, but that seemed to make them more interested, and I was handed to a different team. (In the end, I picked Netflix anyway, and am very happy I did.) Netflix recruiting was awesome, and I think other companies can do the same. Don't put up with recruiting problems -- help fix it. It may be your company's first and last impression.

fecak 12y ago
I've dealt with many companies large and small (retained recruitment, tech) that have admitted early on to flaws in their hiring process. Typically, I find it's someone in engineering all the way up to the CTO that admits the process is broken, and they generally want to circumvent internal HR processes to get the candidate to their potential boss and co-workers as efficiently as possible. HR typically wants to control as much of the process as possible, which often means an HR screening first. This tends to turn off engineers considerably, as it's deemed a waste of time, so the first step in the process is perceived negatively and that negative first impression is hard to overcome. The clients I've represented that have the smoothest process are those that use HR to facilitate and provide answers to questions, but to try and limit involvement beyond that.
UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
Do Netflix's interviews have any trick questions (e.g. manhole covers) or coding questions that have nothing to do with the job (e.g. Write a function that can detect a cycle in a linked list)? I would never interview at major tech' companies because from what I've read of their interview process, it is all about knowing random Computer Science trivia and studying a book of trick questions. I like more traditional corporations/business who give you questions actually applicable to the job and your experience. Silicon Valley interviews are pretty insufferable, due to their pseudo-intellectual elitism. Companies should take their interview, and then give it to what they consider their most successful employees. If the employees wouldn't be "hired" then the interview process is completely broken.
- mjr578 12y ago
  As always, it depends on the group or team you are applying for. Some groups actually have a lot of applied computer science concepts and benefit from these type of questions. On my team, Web UI, we typically try to ask questions that pertain to the tasks they would encounter day to day.
- jghn 12y ago
  I feel your pain on coding questions which have nothing to do with the job, but this can be difficult. We recently tried to identify such a question, with a scope such that the candidate should take about an hour and a half to complete - where complete also implies documentation, tests, etc. We couldn't find an appropriate question which would be something that would be highly indicative of the specific work they'd be doing that a) Didn't require a ton of domain knowledge (we don't expect people to have that domain knowledge coming in) or b) Would be too specific to particular technologies such as which ORM type library one is using, which type of DB, what libraries, etc. Typically when I've seen examples of these questions where they are fully relevant they're in a space that's tightly defined - you're using say RoR, MySql, etc and candidates are expected to be proficient in those. That's not us.

toddsiegel 12y ago

Hiring is a two-way street. The candidate is obviously trying to sell himself or herself, but the company should do the same. Some companies like they are doing you favor by hiring you. I cannot imagine they get great talent.

daemin 12y ago
I think a lot of candidates also forget this, partly because they "need a job".

dap 12y ago

It's important for candidates not to over-emphasize the smoothness of the hiring process. I almost didn't work for a company because my experience during an internship was that HR, payroll, and other departments that were not part of my day-to-day job were painful and bureaucratic. I was talked into the job anyway, and it was without a doubt the right decision for me. I learned an enormous amount, worked with some terrific people, and helped ship a very successful product. You could argue that the ancillary stuff reflected company issues that ultimately led to the company's demise. But I would certainly not have passed up the 3 years I spent there even if I'd known that in 3 years I'd end up looking for a new job. And that's not least because so everyone I worked with did the same thing, and now I'm still working with many of those same people on much of the same technologies. What was important about the candidate experience? It was clear that the team was interested in working with me and developing me as an engineer, and that they were very bright and working on important problems. That trumped basically everything for me.

serve_yay 12y ago
Because we spend so much time at work and because a bad workplace is such a miserable experience, I think candidates should pay close attention to negative signals, even if they could turn out to be anomalous. Of course, when things go wrong it's certainly important to pay close attention to how that is handled. Basically everything that happens during the interview and recruitment process should be treated as signal even though some of it will be noise. For employers evaluating a candidate, "if it's not yes it's no" - I would suggest job seekers to have the same attitude. (Unless your current job already sucks.)

ryguytilidie 12y ago

I'm a recruiter and have worked at a few startups. My wife is looking for a new role and recently had an interview where they sent her questions and asked her to record answers and send them back. This blew my mind. What a horrible experience. For me, the interview is absolutely 2 ways. I spend just as much time answering questions and talking about our team as I do asking questions. There are times where I walk away wishing I had done a better job, but you always HAVE to care about candidate experience.

jghn 12y ago

I've been beating this drum for a bit now at my company. My employer is extremely prestigious for it's main field but largely unknown in the software engineering world. It doesn't help that we're literally across the street from a handful of household name level software companies. And yet, a common complaint (I had it myself when I joined) was that people feel put off by the hiring process that we have. To make it worse, I know for a fact that this sentiment is spreading via word of mouth locally. My point to the folks at my company is that we need to be improving our brand in the eyes of software professionals, not making it worse. To do this we need to present an image that's not just bog standard, mid-sized bureaucracy style hiring.

RogerL 12y ago
Have to agree with this. I've turned down offers, or stopped the process, due to a bad interview experience. It's not a good signal, necessarily, but it is the only one that we have, as to what it might be like to work for you. If you can't get this together, what else do you do badly? I recognize from all these comments that companies can be quite nice internally but just suck at interviews, but what else do you have to go on. If my potential future boss finds his phone more interesting than talking to me during the interview for example, why would I accept that job offer, especially in today's market when my phone is literally pinging with interview opportunities as I interview with you? And I that perhaps a bit more subtly than it appears. This frantic search for warm bodies can make you feel pretty desirable and important, and I think it is easy for that to skew your thinking a bit and to over-interpret small things that happen during interviews. But, that is the reality of human behavior, and you cannot ignore it.

Blackthorn 12y ago

What other big companies have awful candidate experiences? I recently went through a job hunt and two stand out in my mind: Red Hat and Rackspace. Neither one of them insulted me or anything, per se. Rather, I saw that they were looking for engineering people on a couple different job boards and instructed you to apply through their 3rd party system. I had done a lot of work lately in virtualization and distributed computing and these guys are good open source citizens there, so I figured I'd apply. Two months have gone by now and still no word -- my status on their website remains "resume received". Makes me wonder how they ever manage to hire anyone at all. It's really soured me both to them and companies that use that shitty application system in general. At this point I figure anyone who uses it (including Amazon and Oracle) aren't even worth wasting my time messing around with.

skuhn 12y ago
The reality is that most job postings aren't tied to actual jobs that need to be filled right now. These postings just hang out there on websites and passively gather resumes. Occasionally someone actually looks at the applicant pool for 10 minutes and picks a few. The rest are never responded to or dealt with in any way. You'll probably never get a response, or you'll get one three months after you've started another job. My personal favorite experience was being called (on my desk phone) by a recruiter in response to an application that I submitted, for a different job at the same company. I had applied 4-5 months previously, and had been working there for at least 3 months. One hand seriously has no idea what the other hand is up to. I sympathize with you, this can feel pretty bad as an applicant (especially if you've done a lot of work on your resume / cover letter just for that job). Once I realized how things work on the back end, I stopped caring or even thinking about jobs until an actual human reached out to me.
lil_cain 12y ago
Current rackspace employee - ime, we want you to apply through our system (here http://rackspace.jobs/ http://rackspace.jobs/). If you're getting no reply from us at all, then there's a good chance that no one here has got your CV. (Or the US does thing entirely differently - I only work in the UK business unit, so you never know)