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Comment by fecak | Hacker News Reader

>some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did.

This is the key takeaway for me. This is IMO and experience probably based on a "sour grapes" type defense mechanism, where candidates will internally try to talk themselves out of wanting a job that they felt they didn't get. They walk out of the interview feeling they didn't perform, and instead of regretting the lost opportunity they start to focus on even the most minute "negatives" about the job/company.

The more time you give a candidate to stew about those reasons they don't want the job, the more time they'll have to find reasons that may not even exist.

Positive feedback should be given almost instantly. Some companies and candidates are reluctant to give positive feedback quickly because they feel it may hurt their negotiation leverage.

I don't have data on this, but anecdotally (over almost 20 years in recruiting) I've seen this countless times while collecting post-interview feedback from candidates. The ones that feel they did poorly are likely to mention a negative about the interviewer or company, which becomes somewhat awkward when we come back with a job offer.

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> This is IMO and experience probably based on a "sour grapes" type defense mechanism

It's not just going to be 'sour grapes' but also going to be preparing themselves for the rejection they now believe is coming. They're making it so they're not surprised when it shows up or when they don't hear back.

They're also making themselves more open to other offers instead of focusing on this one.

I absolutely judge a company by the interview process and the questions they ask.

"Would I want to work for a company where the employees pass their given process?"

>I absolutely judge a company by the interview process and the questions they ask.

And rightfully so.

The term these days is "candidate experience" for the overall interview process, which can include everything from a company's handling of logistics and time spent in a waiting room to the types of questions being asked.

That said, what I'm referring to in my comment isn't necessarily related to the interview process at all. A candidate can be asked questions that he/she felt were relevant and entirely fair for the job at hand, yet if he/she performed poorly there is still a tendency to try and find flaws in the overall opportunity.

My reference wasn't to candidates performing poorly and thus giving a bad review to the interview process. Rather, the candidate might perform poorly and say that the vacation time was inadequate or the commute would have been too long.

A company's bad interview process might have nothing at all to do with the rest of the company.

At this point, isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks, and companies would do better throwing darts at resumes?

If all interviewing is bad, and all companies are not bad, there's no benefit to judging a company based on that process.

All tech interviewing does not suck, just most. A company that had a good hiring process would definitely have gone a long way to selling me on working there.

I wouldn't 100% base my acceptance of a job on an interview, but I would use it as one of many factors.

Were they on time to the interview? Did it seem like a good culture fit for me? Do they seem positive about working there? Was the interview full of poor communication? or confused looks?

> A company's bad interview process might have nothing at all to do with the rest of the company.

Everyone who works at a company, got there by passing through the] interview filter. A bad interview process has everything to do with the company, particularly in organizations that have grown a lot in the recent past.

Yes and no. I have a large contingent of coworkers from another local firm that is shedding workers. As these are usually referrals, they either get a softball process or a rubber stamp.

At the company I work for, most of the employers were hired based on the strength of referrals from existing employees. The very first employees were people that the founders knew personally and thought highly of. I never had an interview because several of the employees had worked with me before and knew me. My first contact with the company was when they told me they wanted to hire me and extended an offer. I was very surprised by that because they hadn't even seen my resume or anything. That method of hiring seems to have worked out pretty well so far for employee hiring and retention. The employees we've been getting seem to be quite competent and stick around.

At the time I was interviewing with another company who seemed interested in me, but expressed a deep suspicion of new hires after having been burned in the past, and told me outright that they were skeptical of me, and that I could very well turn out to be lazy and unproductive. After three interviews in three weeks, they still hadn't made any offer. So when another company comes along unsolicited and asks me to join them because they know I'm good at what I do, I took their offer. When a company demonstrates that they value you, you're going want to work for them instead of the one that doesn't.

There are a few people at my current company that were hired with an interview based on the company needing skills that weren't available from referrals from employees, but that's uncommon. I don't even know if our company has any sort of standard interview process.

People have been talking about the terribleness of tech interviewing for years. If a company isn't able/willing to improve important processes, that's definitely a sign to me.

But then, apparently, there are virtually no good companies to work for. So most people shouldn't bother worrying about it.

Nope. I only have time for one job, and I want it to be the best one possible. It doesn't matter if most companies are shitty; I won't be working for most companies.

This has been a deepening mystery throughout my career. I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes, and are at the same time frustrated that most projects fail or don't quite deliver. Meanwhile, the best engineers I know have to look for a really long time to find suitable jobs.

> "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes"

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred.

Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind:

- Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal way to evaluate candidates.

- Whiteboard coding is an acceptable, reliable, and reasonably accurate way to gauge coding ability.

- Algorithms and data structure knowledge predicts overall software engineering capability.

- Culture fit (in however nebulous ways) is a stronger predictor of future performance than standardized evaluation.

The list goes on.

The tech industry overall seems very interested in improving recruitment and hiring, so long as these fundamental tenets are never violated. Suffice it to say, this stands in contrast to tech's (in)famous claims of thinking outside the box, breaking the rules, and holding nothing sacred to disruption.

I've personally seen companies try to improve candidate sourcing, scoring systems, interview scheduling, etc etc, but practically never any of the above. Companies try really, really hard to optimize within an extremely narrow band of parameters.

Agreed, but I'd put it that way: most companies I see are very interested in pretending to improve their recruitment processes.

What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.

Perhaps a more exact personal observation would be that hiring managers always hire the same type of person.

There are many different constraints here. Many companies that hire software developers aren't necessarily in the "business" of software which colors their approach to hiring. They aren't experts in hiring developers so they tend to outsource it. As someone who is part of hiring decisions at just such a company I regularly see things like:

1. Pushback on work sample tests from the recruiting companies.

2. Upper management wondering why it's so hard to find candidates that can pass our work sample tests.

3. Suggestions that maybe we should be using an online coding test. (multiple choice questions of poor quality)

It can be really difficult for companies that don't have a lot of in-house experience here to figure out how to hire good developers. Much of what is known in Silicon Valley style companies isn't really known by HR in a smaller company in the midwest. They don't typically read HN or follow the tech blogs. And unless they luck into hiring a vocal Senior Developer like me to specifically guide their recruiting and interviewing process they won't even realize how badly their hiring process is.

>At this point, isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks, and companies would do better throwing darts at resumes?

Except I've had good interview experiences. So, no, there are better and worse kinds of interviews. Just because it is an overwhelmingly neglected aspect of the industry is neither here nor there.

[Wouldn't] companies would do better throwing darts at resumes?

Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them. Really, it's not that hard.

"Throwing darts at resumes", OTOH, is exactly what many companies seem to be doing right now. Specifically, the practice of setting up a "chat" with an internal recruiter (who inevitably tells you that they think you'll be a "wonderful fit") before passing the resume over to the tech side (which is when you find out whether they really think you're a potential fit or not) comes to mind.

>Or perhaps by actually reading resumes instead of keyword-filtering them

This one is a two-way street. I launched a resume writing side-business a couple years ago (resumeraiders.com) because I saw how poor many developer resumes were and how they were getting ripped off by resume writers who had no experience in hiring or in tech. Most were just failed writers.

If you expect a recruiter to read a poorly-written 5 page resume when the yes/no interview decision could have easily been made based on a summary and a few decent bullet points, that's not on the recruiter. If you think the 5 page resume is some kind of anomaly, ask the recruiters at your company how common they are.

By all means -- skim the resumes first, and pull out all 5-pagers and other immediate fail cases (which are generally easy to spot). And save your reading skills for the 15% or so which might have something worth your time. That's what I meant.

This is fascinating to me. I recently did a resume swap with an American lady I know (I'm Australian). We're both around mid thirties. She's in SF.

Her resume was 1 page. It's the first time I've ever seen a 1 page resume in my life except for someone out of highschool with no history or experience.

Mine is 4 pages. I've worked really hard to cut it down to that while including relevant things and nice formatting/readability/white space. Compared to some of the 10 to 15 page resumes we get here for people who have done so little, it's positively succinct.

We had a chat, and we just had to agree that it was a cultural difference.

But still, I admit, if anyone asked me here, I'd say "you can't have a one page resume, unless you are literally applying for McDonald's and have done nothing with your life, this isn't twitter"

wtf... do ppl write essays on resumes? even 4 pages is too long nowadays. need to tl;dr.

Well, understand that it is not uncommon where I live to draft a cover letter at least.

For government jobs it's even worse, there you basically do have to write essays against the "selection criteria" (don't get me started on what it actually achieves, again, I'm not trying to advocate).

The general rationale is often on several grounds:

-to create a "merit" based document trail - to create a basic barrier to entry that has to be crossed for all but the most basic positions. Think of it like a spam filter/ensuring candidates who want THAT job as opposed to just A job. The very thing you don't want is to have hundreds of 1 page dot point resumes coming in. How would you possibly find the time to go through them? You want to stop people applying just by sending in a generic summary resume and clicking a button. You want people who are willing to put a bit of work in to apply specifically to the job you're advertising.

It is not uncommon for me, for instance, to write a cover letter for each job, and craft a specific version of my resume for each position, emphasising and exposing those parts of my experience most applicable to that particular position.

You can only really do one or two of these well per week, but that's kinda the point.

Honestly, I'm incredibly skeptical that you need 4 pages.

Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.

To this and some other comments saying essentially "you can cut it down".

Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p

One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some automated text search and no natural human reading. I admit after some discussion, I fell back to "wow...they're not even pretending they're nothing but a keyword search meat grinder", because I do respect her so I thought she was telling the truth. And now I've got additional corroboration from HN.

I think there are arguments for longer/shorter resumes. In my, and my jobs/culture defence, I need to see you can write in plain English, have some sense of aesthetics, prioritisation, presentation. By that age I expect you've worked in several jobs (about which your summary might be my first impression/knowledge) and dot points aren't going to cut it, because your job titles, product names and keywords are meaningless noise to me: I joke my grandmother is an entrepreneur/CEO and has worked with everything. Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture. I want personal details, but summaries, on your projects, products, papers, in plain communicable error free English. 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me. 2 - 4 pages unless you're 50 - 60 and have written 100 books, done something truly remarkable.

Now I'm not saying its right, I'm just saying that's my world.

Honestly, your comment is extremely rude and offensive. I'm willing to chalk up your preference for longer resumes to cultural differences, but then you come out with bullshit like this:

> Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture.

> 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me.

Your 4-page resume is unprofessional, overlong, self-centered, arrogant, and naive. You apparently are so bad at English that you can't even write concise summaries. A long resume screams that you have an overinflated ego and have no sense of professional decency.

A short resume doesn't imply a lack of aesthetics or English. I certainly paid attention to the design of mine. [0]

[0] https://www.morgante.net/resume.pdf

I do not mean any offense. I really don't.

If you can think of a nice way to convey the same sentiment/message, but without the offence, I'm all ears and would happily edit the post.

Again, let me stress, I think there are arguments for long and short. I do not advocate for right and wrong, merely try to convey the reality I'm in, given that it's so different apparently from SF.

Realise also, in good faith, how offensive the "1 page resume" sounds to my ears. There is not any hyperbole present when I say I haven't ever seen one. Indeed, the only reason I believe it exists is because otherwise intelligent people I respect have told me it does, and now hacker news backs that up.

Really though, is it so hard to believe that people think that summarising yourself down to a page (as opposed to three or four...lol) is also an offensive idea?

Are we really so departed from one another that we believe that we can't just agree that the way our two respective cultures do things is offensive, especially given the fact that neither of them appear to have much success with outcomes regardless of which culture is in play?

I'm replying to my own comment, since I unfortunately do not appear to be able to reply to the one below...

But...

You do realise what "mechanical Turk" is...as in...the Amazon service called "mechanical Turk" based upon the chess playing automaton, and that it's basic premise is often westerners paying people from poorer countries, say...India, to spit out quick small pieces of work for them.

There is no offense intended in these statements :/

I'm well aware of what mechanical turk is. Indeed, I've used it before.

It's offensive to imply that people with 1-page resumes just had it generated via mechanical turk. I've spent hours perfecting my resume to have a good layout and clear copy so it could fit on 1 page.

You really need to adjust your value system. Writing a short resume is harder than writing a longer one. In fact, I have a 4-page "master" resume which I pull from to build my 1-page version.

> There is no offense intended in these statements :/

Of course there is. You don't call skilled professionals "kids" unless you're trying to be offensive. Don't play dumb.

There is no offense intended in these statements.

One of the important lessons we learn in this life is that we're responsible for the offense we cause (or more specifically: the offense implicit in what we say), not the offense we intend.

There is a cultural element, and I've worked with candidates using longer form CVs to shorten them to the preferred US length. It's part formatting, part redundancy, and usually just sharing more information than is necessary.

The resume doesn't need to include everything you did. It's a highlight reel, not a bio. You don't need to list every responsibility or even every accomplishment.

If I forced you to tell me your background in one page, you'd be able to do it if you have any sense as to what is most impressive, what is important, and what isn't. The reason your resume is four pages is that it's acceptable where you are.

I once reduced a 26 page resume to a couple pages for a non-US client. It's usually just triage and deleting, some sentence "refactoring", and formatting. Not too tough, as long as my client doesn't have too much emotional attachment to every detail from their career.

> "Throwing darts at resumes"

That reminds me of another technique - that is you select roughly half of the resumes from the stack and bin it. Nobody wants to work with unlucky people ;)

That's kind of what a lot of companies seem to do these days, by default:

"Eh, I don't have time for this. Let's get the junior people to filter resumes and do phone screens. Especially when trying to hire senior people... Too many resumes? Just make them do a 3-hour HackerRank session first. It's what all the other places are doing..."

>A company's bad interview process might have nothing at all to do with the rest of the company.

The rest of the company didn't care enough to fix a bad interview process. That has plenty to do with the rest of the company.

>isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks,

No. The interview process I went through was phenomenal. And my job is very pleasant and rewarding.

When I was at Code for America I redid their hiring process to optimize for interviewee experience rather than hiring manager experience.

One of the things that really struck me at the time was that traditional interview processes are built around a notion of worker surplus and job scarcity. They make very little sense when the opposite condition applies.

Even little things like contacting all applicants within 24 hours really wowed people.

One of the things I've noticed is that scammers (ask for your SSN/birthday/etc, bad sales jobs, etc) are the most attentive with callbacks and 'hiring'. Because it's all they do and they actually optimize their hiring for applicant satisfaction.

I agree with you, but here's the thing. If the vast majority of companies are running like that and succeeding, does that not suggest that there really is a workeer surplus and job scarcity, and that impressions to the contrary are self-imposed?

Well, all it really shows is that the "market" in this instance is incredibly inefficient. People need jobs, and if the vast majority of companies have a poor interview process, and 1% have a good one, assuming that this is the only thing that people care about (it's not), all that's going to happen is the 1% get the employees they want, and the other 99% still get some employees.

The market is likely inefficient for the same reason that the advertising industry is inefficient - difficulty to show than any given change independently improves outcomes.

For some jobs, sure. But what I really think it suggests is a power asymmetry. A company can do without 1 worker much more easily than a worker can do without 1 job. Plus, current processes let hiring managers feel powerful. Given the high percentage of hiring managers who are social primates, I expect that's a big factor.

In tech, though, you hear endless complaints about how hard it is to hire, so I didn't hesitate to optimize the process for interviewee happiness. I expect it would make people more likely to apply, more likely to stay through the process, more likely to accept an offer, and more likely to refer friends.

Regardless, there's enormous waste to be removed from the process for anybody who's willing to put a little thought and work in.

Very true. Some well known companies, like Google, still have more applicants than jobs, and so they need to filter people out. Most companies have the opposite problem - they need to attract people. This shift means that the interview process has to be re-thought.

> "still have more applicants than jobs"

This is true for a lot of companies - but there's only a surplus of labor if the applicants are qualified.

For a company to be able to be frivolous with their process, they'd need to have more qualified applicants than jobs, and I think even for many name-brand BigCorps, this isn't the case.

I suspect most name-brand BigCos (including Google and friends) are pretty bad at first-pass decisions about what applicants are qualified. Has anybody stopped to consider that the root cause of their stream of Terri le interview candidates is a terrible filtering process for deciding who gets interviewed?

> worker surplus and job scarcity

I'm convinced that's the only reason why processes at places like google aren't considered completely broken.

Google, Facebook, Amazon are all a different category than most other companies that are hiring software developers. They care a lot less about false negatives because their hiring pool is so large. They are prestigious places that a lot of people really want to work at. As a result they have more candidates than they can reasonably get through without some massive filtering.

Some of that filtering, whether intentional or not, is how rigorous the interview process is. They can afford to be that rigorous though because the fact is that even if they miss out on one really good candidate there are 10 or more replacements in the pipeline.

The same does not apply for smaller companies with less engineering centric workplaces. If they try to do it Google's way they'll be shooting themselves in the foot.

Oh gosh, this is totally true.

I honestly find it almost disrespectful when you feel some company is putting you through a pipeline. They set up an interview day, line everyone up, grind through them one by one.

The other thing is the technical interview which is unreflective of the job itself. In one recently, I was told before going in I had to code on a whiteboard. I ask, "Can I have I use a text editor, not an IDE or anything, just a text editor?" I get told, no (for nonsensical reasons I won't list here). That sort of arbitrariness and inflexibility turn me off, not to mention the standoffishness of having people stare over your shoulder and judge you rather than work as collaborators.

So I walked away from the interview. I'm happy where I am and you're gonna have to woo me, just a little bit, to get me to care.

Sometimes I wish we were unionized so we could set some standards (for many other things, but this as well).

Lucky you, I was once asked to write code on a napkin and on another occasion to say lines of code over the phone :)

On the flip side, as an interviewer I give all candidates the opportunity to use a text editor, and less than 15% of candidates take it. The rest opt for whiteboard.

That really truly surprises me. I'm so much quicker and more in my element with a text editor.

This was my experience as well (actually, even more extreme). Here's a room with a whiteboard or a laptop+TV. All 10 people I interviewed in that room chose the whiteboard.

One of them mentioned feeling less pressure to have perfect syntax and everything at a whiteboard than in an editor. In retrospect, wish I'd asked more of them about their preference, although at the same time, it wasn't something I judged them on so I wouldn't want them to think I was nitpicking their choice.

I'd probably choose a whiteboard too, honestly, for spatial reasons (able to write up separate things off to the side, easily annotate stuff in a different color to step through the code, etc).

I think that's because a lot of people are already trained to use whiteboard during interview.

For what it's worth, one of the things I did with my interview process was to make all the coding involve an actual computer. I gave the interviewee their choice of editor, and was happy to let them use their own computer.

My theory was that in an interview I wanted to see people at their best. I wasn't hiring them to code on whiteboards or learn how to use new text editors; I was hiring them to spend a lot of time coding in an environment they liked.

More details here: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi...

>some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did.

Wait. They think they didn't do well, got an offer, but turned it down because they think they didn't do well on the interview?

I think the idea is that they think they didn't do well, decide that on second thought, they don't really want the job anyway, and move on to the next possible opportunity. Then if later they get an offer, they don't change their mind.

Yep. They had a bad experience during the interview. When they ask themselves "how do I feel about this company?", their main data point is negative.

No, that's not what he said. After they think they didn't do well, people subconsciously start looking for reasons why they don't want to work there anyway: commute is bad, maybe they won't fit the culture, no free lunches etc.

Usually, in my experience anyway, it doesn't get that far.

The blog post just refers to interviewees saying "I wouldn't want to work with the interviewer" when they mistakenly feel that they did poorly in the interview.

Anecdotally from the real world, when I (headhunter) get feedback from a candidate shortly/immediately after an interview, if they feel they did poorly they tend to add that there were things they didn't like about the opportunity (a person, the office, something). People that feel they did well don't usually go negative as easily.

But I also go back to the employer and get their feedback ASAP, and when that comes back positive I immediately pass that message to the candidate. Assuming the employer's feedback is somewhat prompt, the candidate doesn't get too much opportunity to go negative, and once they "feel wanted" by the employer they usually trend back positive. Offers come shortly thereafter.

It blows my mind that any applicant gives negative feedback to the company before finding out of they got an offer. Even if they hated the interview and would never want to work there, an offer is still fodder to get a better offer somewhere else. Being positive is a strictly dominant strategy before an offer is made.

My comment was as a 3rd party recruiter, and the blog post was based on feedback from anonymous interviewees after anonymous interviews. I don't expect that candidates would give negative feedback to a company directly without having a sense of the employer's opinion.

> Wait. They think they didn't do well, got an offer, but turned it down because they think they didn't do well on the interview?

Yup. Happened to me: I felt like I did poorly in one of the interviews and had to ask myself whether I'd be happy in the job if the day-to-day was like the interview.

It probably wouldn't have been, but I had another offer on the table and the negative experience swayed me in the direction of the other offer.

It doesn't have to be as extreme as that.

If I think I did poorly on an interview, I will probably stop following up with the company and will more aggressively pursue other options. In particular, I might accept another offer prematurely because I assume one isn't forthcoming from the company.

As the post mentions, this relates heavily to timing. It's the long delays which many companies introduce that force candidates to make assumptions/prune early, especially since some companies will never even tell you you were rejected. Speeding up candidate responses is one of the easiest ways to dramatically improve a hiring process.

My wife is currently in this situation. She's not a new job seeker by any means; she does mid-to-high-level management, leading complex projects. She recently applied for a new job that she's really enthusiastic about, but with them not responding, she's rapidly losing interest. She would be a perfect fit, but lack of a timely HR response could cost them a good employee.

Of course lack of a timely response also reflects badly on the company, so that could also be a very valid reason for people to lose interest.

My current employer has a great way of giving feedback about this. If you like the candidate her something along the lines of, "I really enjoyed our conversation." It's not a commitment to anything, but as you move through the process you know that you are doing well.

For candidates who don't do well? Thank them for the time and move on.

The company I work at has a good solution to this. We fly candidates out for an onsite interview and at the end of the day, if we decide we want to hire them, we give them an offer in person. Our goal is to get them to verbally accept before they head back home.

Kind of high pressure, no?

We don't pressure them, just give them the offer and continue to sell the company. It isn't like we hold the door shut until they accept :)

I'd be curious what percentage accept/reject on the spot, but I'd never ask a candidate to provide an answer either way if you present an offer right away. It's too important a decision for them not to at least take the night (especially after a day of interviews, a flight/hotel stay, an impending flight home). Even suggesting an immediate answer feels salesy ('whaddya think?'), and I'd think we'd see better results by presenting the offer and saying "take this home with you and get back to us when you're ready".

This approach should also tend to reduce counteroffer acceptances or accept/renege scenarios.

I like asking the question, "if we were to extend you an offer you like, would you accept it?" It's not perfect, but I haven't of a better approach that isn't pushy.

How about "Is there anything in your situation right now that would prevent you from accepting a solid competitive offer?" That's a little less salesy IMO.

If "not illegally confining someone" is all it takes not to be a "high-pressure sale tactic", then I confess I don't understand the term.

If you were to indicate, in any way, that you'd retract the offer unless I accept right there before I head home, I'd reject it right there before I head home.

In other words, I don't think that's a good solution at all.

That quote reminded me of something my mentor told me when I was training to interview people in-person. He said if they're really struggling, change it up with an easy question for exactly the reason you gave, but also to get their confidence up so they don't start the next interview feeling bad.

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