Comment by nxsynonym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nxsynonym | Hacker News Reader

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I think the bigger issue is that the interview-to-hire process is not fool-proof, and never will be.

It's a gamble, no matter how in depth or complicated your hiring process is (from personality interviews to whiteboarding to take homes). Being interviewed and doing well is a skill set and it's very different from a full time work-place skill set.

All of these interviewing processes that get refined and more lengthy just create a new class of people who are good at being interviewed.

I don't know what the solution is, but making candidates jump through 3-4 interview rounds, memorize algorithms just for the sake of it, and go through 4 to 8 hour on sites probably isn't it. Even if it happens to give you a better-than-average employee, what are you sacrificing (as a business) in terms of man-hours, productivity, and focus?

Personally I'd like to see more companies institute a temp-to-hire process. Bring in new candidates for a two or three week contract, see how they fit in, pay for the their time (at a discount), and then go from there. If it doesn't work out, you get some work done for your company, and they get some relevant experience for their resume.

Writing the perfect resume and re-reading CTCI for the 10th time won't tell you how well the candidate will perform, but seeing them actually work might.

As to your point about marketing - I agree. Not one of these approaches are really novel or helpful to anyone but the company themselves, and is just a glorified "look at how we took a chance" tactic.

This idea of temp-to-hire places a disproportionate amount of risk on the employee to be hired -- they will need to leave their current job (where they likely have decent job security) in order to attempt being hired at the new company.

In the real world, people generally don't put in their notice until they've accepted an offer at another company.

It also abuses the system by not paying the going short term contractor rate some non tecnicaly savvy companies think that wanting some one to work a 4-6 month contract and only pay you as if you where an employee and not self employed rate.

Huh? Pay is negotiated by supply and demand and skills and match. There is no "going rate"

There is for technical contact work in the uk 3x to 2.5x the FTE rate.

The going rate is what the market sets eg for developers in London its £400-500pd for grunt devs in Java or Perl

In the real world there are a lot of people who don't currently have a job. Sure unemployment percentage is low (even if we discount accusations that the percentage is miscounted), but there are still a lot of people looking for a job. When someone doesn't have a job temp-to-hire isn't nearly as risky because if it doesn't work out you are back where you were - sometimes with renewed unemployment benefits.

Actually your downside is a side benefit to employers: you don't risk hard feeling by hiring somebody away from their old job if you latter need to work with them. (these shouldn't happen, but they do)

Generally people who would make good employees are already employed (assuming there is demand for their labor). Hiring unemployed people is usually targeting the bottom of the market, or finding diamonds in the rough, which is risky.

I'm not sure if this is actually the case. I'm starting to meet more and more people who aren't that keen on amassing wealth, and they tend to spend decent stretches of time unemployed (traveling, working on side projects, bootstrapping companies etc)

Temp to hire wouldn't be so bad, if there was a guarantee from the company that they will either hire you, or replace you with another contractor with the intent to hire them. In that case it is about the same as having a 6-month probationary period.

I wonder if there are statistics on contract to hire positions that don't get hired, and out of those that don't, is it because the person really didn't work out or was there really no intent to hire to begin with?

As a point of reference, where I work they almost always to contract to hire. I've seen a few contractors leave (they found other work), some didn't get converted to full time (those weren't actually to-hire though, and specifically short-term, although in one case a contractor was brought back twice to fill in). But in almost every other case the person was hired eventually (even if it took a couple extra months to push it through HR).

We are talking about an entry level position with the understanding the candidate's skill set are not truly refined yet in the real world.

Maybe my view is warped because I don't work for an SV startup, but I would consider anyone with less than 5-10 years "entry level". I rarely see job ads for anything except interns/entry level and "senior engineers". Someone with 3-5 years of experience probably has some job security but definitely doesn't count as "senior" in my mind.

I don't think it's just SV, I've seen job postings in Boston for 3+ years experience and it was listed as a senior engineer. I think it's because many companies try to use titles as compensation. I've gotten the "senior engineer" title 3 times in my career. Two of those times it was given to me in the same conversation where I was told there was going to be no raises that year.

“We’re rewarding you this year by making it easier for you to find another job” sounds insane when you say it like that, but that’s what they did!

For an entry level position? Nah

Contrary to the analogies being drawn by sibling and child comments, work is different from dating or interviewing potential roommates, in that you typically have to give up a previous job when accepting a new one and if you don't make it through the trial run, you're unemployed.

It would be great if the only reason people could be let go were legitimate, but that's hardly the case.

It is impossible because it is always possible to game the system.

If you devise an interview framework or a hiring profile, no matter how many traits you want to evaluate(as the article points out), they will lump those together and measure in some scale of how likely they are to hire the candidate(sometimes that is even just binary), if a candidate can emulate their desired profile he gets a high "score" and gets an offer, the bigger the financial incentives to do this, more people will game the system(prepare for specific interviews), think, if you can play the part for a couple of 1-hour interviews, you can get a 6-figure salary at a tech startup, that is a high ROI.

Most companies can't stop that, there isn't limitless budget for interviewing so the interview process has limited resources to evaluate people, which leads to false positives. There are also a lot of talented people that don't practice their interviewing skills enough and end up as false negatives.

It's human nature, people need to evaluate things on a single criterion and you can game that. The same thing happens with school, you can work your way through school material to maximize your grades without learning much.

An interview is like dating and sometimes you think you found the one but maybe it doesn't work out in the end. Do you stop interviewing (or dating) people? No, you try again and hopefully take lessons from the last failed hire. A "failed hire" could actually be a failed process in your organization.

Also, every person you are interviewing has the option to interview with other companies. With that in mind, you should always be interviewing even if you aren't actually looking to hire at that moment. Sometimes you might find a really good candidate but, most importantly, you will have options yourself.

Last, I really like your idea of a paid temp position to assess fit. This will benefit everyone tremendously.

paid temp work, as has been said before, is a great excuse for companies to expand the gig economy. or better yet, an excuse to get some good quick expendable labor and then dump the employee when his work is done. I've seen it happen time and again.

I can't imagine a company spending the time and money marketing a position, going through an interview process, offering a temp-to-hire position and then letting the person go shortly thereafter. That is such a waste of resources.

If it was the company's goal to crank out gig workers then there are some really big problems happening below the surface at that company and it was in the candidate's best interest not to get a full time offer.

man, let me introduce you to the world of consulting. it's pervasive.

Hilarious example to me, because while I’ve been a consultant or contractor seen as an exellent and valued member of a team (being the only contractor) they still insist (perhaps even on the hr level now) that I pass the interview process which is all of the first part that you describe. I’d say it’s their loss but I like it where I am. There is no recourse and everyone around me acknowledges that it’s broken, but nobody wants to change it.

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