Comment by kzhahou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kzhahou | Hacker News Reader

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Companies keep files on candidates, which generally makes sense for tracking purposes, but they can be counter-productive at the big companies.

I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn't work out, for any of <n> reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I'm given a polite but non-informational "it's not a fit" and sent off to a competitor.

Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren't considered final. If you're good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn't work out (but there was lots of reasons to think it would have), then you get happily scheduled for another round in a few weeks or whenever, and Company tries to not leave you with a stigma of rejection.

This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven't seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV/portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.

Are you sure?

At my previous company (a relatively small startup, admittedly), one of the indisputably best engineers (a 10xer if I've ever worked with one) was hired after such a "second shot". A few weeks is probably too rapid a turn around, given that a "failed" interview is a negative signal (or at least, should be That's the point, after all). But say, a year later for engineers in that wide fuzzy area between "Hire!" and "Oh god no!"? I think plenty of companies do do that.

Further anecdata: Friends who've been rejected from Google have told me that they were explicitly encouraged by their Google recruiter to re-apply in ~a year.

if you have competencies in areas A, B, C and apply for several positions and due to the vagaries of HR you get interviewed by team A which is not a good fit for some reason, why should you have to wait for a year to apply for teams B and C?

This is like meeting a group of friends going on a first date with one of them, getting shot down and not being able to date any of the others for a whole year even if you could be a good fit for them instead.

We've seen here plenty of times however how we all consider the interview process pretty much random and broken, so it shouldn't be too surprising when companies are not operating efficiently and shrugging off false-negatives as if they don't matter, it's just basic human behavior, just like if you are extremely attractive you're going to be extremely picky and not care if you don't give somebody a shot because no matter what there will always be a line of potential suitors waiting at the door.

afaik, you can interview for a different team/function right away, no need to wait one year. The one year waiting period is for re-applying to the same position.

This happens at the developer level too. Of course, occasionally there may be a candidate who is just not there yet. So companies ask you to wait, some for X months other for X years and then reapply. An engineering position is sometimes about the skill sets; my team looks for ML and Data folks. But sometimes it is also about solid engineering chops and some people just need to work more on those. That is not a bad thing; it is just a thing.

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