Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

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It's not clear to me why this problem couldn't be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records.

Because anti-discrimination laws around criminal records will work about as well as anti-discrimination laws regarding all the other protected classes (race, gender, age, etc.). Companies will very quickly figure out how to work around them, and will find ways to reject candidates for being a member of said protected class without making it apparent that this is the true cause for rejection.

If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says "no", then you sue them.

If this law passes, that will happen about as often as a company telling you to your face, "We're not hiring you because you're {black| a woman| over 40, etc}." What will probably happen is that companies will move the background check step ahead of the interview step. Then, after they've done the background check and had the interview, they can tell you, "Well, sorry, we've decided to go with a different applicant," just as they do today.

>What will probably happen is that companies will move the background check step ahead of the interview step.

The cost of doing interviews to screen candidates is much lower than background checks. Why would a company want to do that step first?

Googling someone is a longer process than an in-person interview?

Googling someone is not even close to as effective as paying for real background check services, which can be very costly and take days or weeks. For example, how can you be sure that your new employee didn't change their name after committing a crime? How do you know if the John Smith applying to your open position is the same one as the murderer in some article? Google searching isn't good enough for these cases or any company that takes pre-employment screening seriously. Source: Me. I work at an employment screening company.

Do professional background checkers use the same public sources more exhaustively or do they have special access to private databases and other sources?

How much does an outsourced background check? Running an interview pool on someone using a bunch of skilled employees costs probably $4K or so. Figure 7 interviews, 3 hrs each (prep, interview, feedback, hiring meeting) plus someone to arrange the onsite. If those are $150K employees, the fully-loaded cost of 20 hrs of work is going to be over $4K.

Interview prep for one candidate is 10 minutes, plus 20 minutes for postinterview discussion.

Subjecting someone to 17 hours of interviews borders on the inhumane.

Plus, interviews are done iteratively; you don't run the whole process for every candidate.

Moreover, background checks are the least likely to actually disqualify candidates, so they are always done last.

I've done 150+ interviews for Google.

A single candidate will do 1-2 screens (this changes over time / role), plus at least 4-5 on-site interviews. That's about 7-8 hours of meetings, minimum. Having interviewed at a number of other SF tech startups, almost all of them had about the same # of interviews.

Once you're past the screen interview, you'll almost always get all 5 interviews in the pool unless you're terrible - it's more efficient to just have the candidate come in once.

Google recommends a 1:1 ratio of prep/feedback time to interview time, so it's ~2 hrs per interview even if you're not involved in the hire / no hire discussion.

The discussion here was specifically that it was likely that background checks would start disqualifying candidates, so maybe it's better to do them up front as that's cheaper than having the interviews done first... I'd say that still makes sense, at least before the pool, if you think there's a reasonable chance they'll get punted.

Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have roughly the same interview process. One hour phone screen, 5 hour on-site interviews, then a decision.

I have never encountered a situation with 7 interviews.

Bear in mind that many wash out during the phone screen, so no, a fully loaded interview schedule is not that sort of commitment at all.

I think he means 7H of interviews in total in order to find the right candidate for the position.

In that case, it's not an amortized cost of the time it takes to interview each person that comes in the door.

Lol, no. It's higher than that because 70% of screener interviews end up not resulting in a hire, and probably 50-70% of on-sites don't. I think the last estimate I saw was about 50 hrs of interviewing total per hired candidate, and that feels about right to me.

7 interviews just for the hired candidate (1-2 screeners, 5-6 on-site pool interviews.) Maybe less than 7 hrs if they're cut to 45 mins each.

To remove the risk of potential lawsuit of course.

>The cost of doing interviews to screen candidates is much lower than background checks.

I highly doubt that. An engineer-hour costs roughly $100. A background check probably costs roughly as much as a phone screen, and an order of a magnitude less than an on-site. It'd be pretty easy to do the background check step in between the phone screen and the on-site, and it wouldn't appreciably raise costs to the company.

Most interviewers aren’t engineers, in tech sure, but their are lots of other industries

A low level BG check costs that but that's probably just checking they are on the electoral register an don't have any outstanding judgements against them.

Also spending money externally appears to the company to cost much more than using internal resources

They don't have to do the actual bg check though, just ask you do you have a criminal record. If you say no, then they do the check at the end and you do, you get passed over for lying, not for having a record. This is how many low paying front line jobs have always hired.

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