The Secret Rules For Getting Hired
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
Example: Recruiter mispronounces my name. I don't say anything. This can be because:
1) I'm a coward. 2) I don't care. 3) I care and am not a coward, but think it would be petty to interrupt the conversation to point this out. 4) I'm overly practical and don't care about this kind of details. 5) I think the other person may feel bad if I correct them. 6) I accept that people make sometimes mistakes. Maybe I'll point it out if they do it 3 times or more. Etc.
Which is it? You'd have to know the person better to know.
Even if the person is just a coward, this could be based on specific traumatic experiences other persons didn't have and which affect only minimally the rest of the personality.
Same applies to thank you emails, coming late to the interview etc. With such subtle situations, you need to know _why_ somebody act the way they did, and without knowing the person, which you usually don't, when interviewing, you just can't.
These are just BS rules with which recruiters try to make their work easier. Similar to Codility & co. tests for software developers. Well, bad news, recruiting is hard. You'll have to take the time to listen to and think about your candidates.
I usually don’t bother correcting people unless they ask— and even if they do I usually tell them it’s truly not a big deal, and they can call me whatever they would like. (I say / word this in a way that makes sure it’s humorous).
My last name is not pronounced correctly by English speakers (even when they assume the name is French, which it isn't). Only twice has someone interviewing me gotten it correct, and in both cases it turns out they knew a distant relative of mine.
I only bother correcting people when we are going to have a lasting relationship. In an interview? We aren't there yet.
I have no idea how this would even play out for "Bob Anderson."
"When interviewing, I go for lunch with the candidate. I ask the waiter to subtly get their order wrong. A great test of the interviewee's character!"
Or the waiter's character.
"We always leave candidates waiting half an hour before calling them in. How do they cope with delays?"
I cope with delays of longer than 15 minutes by first trying to communicate about the delay and then by leaving. Dear recruiter, what do you think that says about me?
If I find out a recruiter has intentionally done any of these, the interview is over. I'm looking for a good fit. Duplicity, manipulation, lack of integrity... these are not qualities that ingratiate me to anyone.
Some people might say, "Well, yeah, but you can afford to do that. Not everyone can." But I did it when I couldn't afford to do it too. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of my employers have been awesome.
Before you answer, keep in mind that even smart dedicated Chinese people that study English for years have a hard time pronouncing a lot of words, the sound systems are simply too different.
People often 'mispronounce' my first name (can't even pronounce last name). Honestly, I don't care. I don't blame them because they pronounce it from English point of view which is obvious as they are native speakers.
Some people ask me how would I say my name (I am Russian, but live in NZ), I tell them. Some people then try to say it that way, sometimes they 'forget' and fallback to English pronunciation. What's the big deal?
I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or what?). Same goes the other way: NZ is a diverse country, we have people from all around the globe here, and I bet I mispronounce every second name/last name.
"Offended" as in perceiving the speaker to be giving offense; that is, perceiving the speaker to be intentionally not respecting the listener. Being able to pick up on that is quite adult, and the exact opposite of childish.
I recently went through a short job search for programming work in Austin. I made it all the way to the final, on-site interview at three places before landing an offer.
Every time I did not get an offer, I would get an email saying "thank you so much for your time, please reply with your concerns or questions!"
And so, each time, I sent and email asking "what did I do wrong, and what could I improve?" making it very clear I was just looking for a quick, single sentence answer like "more github projects" or "you smell."
I didn't get a single reply. Not one.
After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that.
If anything, the whole experience convinced me that no one maybe outside of sales or filling an executive position really cares about this kind of business etiquette - either in giving it or receiving it.
I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews.
Oh, for sure.
I hadn't interviewed for over a decade, and was super keyed up for the first few this time around. After my attitude changed to more of a "meh, I can take this or leave it" they got a whole lot easier.
when i conduct interviews, i have not once had anyone ask for feedback. however, i offer it unsolicited and candidates seem to appreciate it.
They'd rather be safe.
If you added this line to every follow up email, that would at least remove the uncertainty about whether or not you would get the offer.
Such and such corporation is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate the candidates based on their race, age, gender, veteran status or smell.
Regards, A poor HR guy who now has to send these emails to all candidates.
It may be theoretically possible to say that not forewarning a person about certain requirements may put some people in disadvantaged position.
Mostly likely it will be thrown away in the court, but why would you risk?
Your best bet might be to ask about how you did at the end of the interview. I had some luck with interviewers explaining me a solution to an interview problem that they would consider perfect.
I've tried it both ways. Not giving feedback works much, much better.
There's no upside for the company in giving any substantial answer to questions like this, and significant potential downside.
Among other things it's generally not going to be that you were rejected for the position, it's that someone else was chosen over you. "Rejected" would be "we'd rather leave the position vacant than hire you" and if that's the case there's even more reason to not tell you unless it was for purely technical reasons.
However, if the company is dealing with a recruitment agency it might be useful for the company to let the agency know why a candidate was not suitable, so that they get better candidates in future, and the recruitment agent (who is a "double agent" really) might pass the information on to the candidate (probably not in writing). I've heard of that happening.
Also, in cases where there isn't a position to be filled, but the interviewee is trying to persuade the company to create the position, in those cases the company can be a bit more open in saying why they have decided not to proceed. I've heard of that happening, too.
The problem I have is that a lot of these rejection letters are worded in a very touchy-feely way where they actually write some version of, "if you have any questions don't hesitate to message back!"
That is what bothers me.
Like, if you're not going to answer my questions, just say so upfront.
(side note: I don't just say "why didn't I get the job" - I follow the advice of the countless "how to ask why you didn't get the job" articles out there that tell you to frame it in terms of questions they can safely answer like, "was someone more qualified than me" or "would it have helped if I had more experience with...", etc.)
Surprisingly (to me), I was able to get permission to share feedback with candidates we reject. I only do this when people ask, but I take the time to summarize & sanitize the feedback from our internal reviewers and try to phrase everything very neutrally ("we thought that your decision to do X was not the best way to approach this" as opposed to "X was a terrible idea").
That said, I don't think I'd be able to get permission to give feedback on the interview parts of the process. That's a bit more subjective and it's _really_ easy for any sort of feedback there to become lawsuit fodder.
That manager ended up being all about power trips and it made for a very toxic culture in his team and in interactions with others outside of the team. I left after less than a year despite not having a job lined up.
The only bright side is having found a position at a place that is the complete opposite.
1. First class people hire first class people.
2. Second class people hire third class people.
3. People like to hire people similar to themselves.
4. Not getting a job does not really say anything about you, but the guy they hired says a lot about the company.
PS:
5. Most companies, when offered unexperienced talent and an experienced idiot, will hire the experienced idiot. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and he had the experience on his resume.
I've heard it before from folks who were putting themselves in the #1 category, and also, it appeared, exhibiting Dunning–Kruger effects.
Personally, I still shocked - and am mindful of the red flag - when they don't realize I'm interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me.
When we make a bad hire we do a post-mortem just like we would for a critical production bug. We adjust the interview process or evaluation criteria every time a bad hire is made.
We also give the same interview for every role. We spend 80% of the time asking the same questions, and leave 20% of the time for the free flow conversation and interviewee questions.
You cannot do a postmortem for failing to hire top talent, because you will never know.
What I want to say is that a bad hire is probably less important than missing out on a top candidate. Because you can always fire as soon as you find out. The other error cannot be corrected.
How would I know that during a round of interviews I failed to give an offer to Top Talent? What can I do if someone I think is Top Talent gets another offer we cannot match?
Sure, I can try my best to work against those very costly situations, but I never know how good someone is going to be until they are hired, so I don't have enough data to determine if I'm failing to hire the best.
I can, and we do, determine which candidates we hired that we really like and talk to them about why they choose the company and try to appeal to and find more candidates like them.
https://twitter.com/jessicaliebman/status/111416052358150144...
The goal of a job interview for me used to be twofold:
Can the candidate do the job?
Would I want to work with the candidate?
Unfortunately, I have got the second one wrong as often as not in the past, so now I just try to find anything that would mean that I wouldn't want to work with the candidate, in other words, are there any red flags?
If there aren't then that's good enough.
Another red flag for me is when candidates are asked about their level of expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 on a technology and they reply with anything above 7.
Statistically there are people that are going to be able to claim 8 or above out 10 on any technology, they just probably can command a higher salary that the company I work wishes to offer (we put salary ranges on our job ads), which means that they are exaggerating, can't judge their skills (either because of self delusion or because they just think the technology doesn't have that much more to offer) or worse lying.
The thing is we were asking this to be able to tailor the questions that we would ask. No point in asking somebody who says their skill level in sql is 2 about pivot tables.
Of course its a problem if you are actually running low on money and need to find a job soon because that might tempt you to try to work there even though you can tell some of them may be jerks.
As long as interviews are consistent and polite I think it's reasonable to push candidates in non traditional ways to understand if they have the soft skills required for a role.
This reminds me of this old BBC comedy sketch:
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4iFzweRf3E
Eddit: Another comment beat me to it, but provided link for posterity.
> Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman’s New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see whether your inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.
Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.
It's just something that happens, and I don't blame them for it after so long. I get the feeling that Anglicizing or Deutchifying names is universal.
That sounds like a dialect, not mispronunciation.
> Americans are simply incapable of pronouncing anything even remotely foreign even if I enunciate it for them.
Ditto every other nationality, naturally.
Probably because they insist upon using dictionary respelling schemes instead of IPA, so they can't even notate the phonemes English speakers have trouble with. Of course, trying to learn how to pronounce a phoneme your native language doesn't have without one-on-one instruction is a doomed endeavor for most people, and I daresay you likely mispronounce any number of English words, given how idiosyncratically large the English phonological inventory is.
Quite contrary to the "startup" culture where there is a limited amount of candidates for each opening and where it's acknowledged that candidates might get multiple offers (e.g. a more balanced employer/candidate power)
And if I had to hire a developer, I would want someone with great coding skills, not someone that makes a good impression at an interview.
Wow, my GF just related this to me literally last week. She liked the team she interviewed with as well.
(I'm relieved actually as she got a job offer in hand for a place much closer to home).
One time I was told I was great, but they needed someone with XYZ experience. It was very important.
They ended up hiring my friend, who had even less XYZ experience than I did.
1) Puzzle questions not related to the work they'd be doing. It's ok to have a somewhat puzzling geometry puzzle if they're doing, say, 3d work, but for a web dev? Etc. etc.
2) Coding on a white board. Can't you just setup a laptop in a conference room? Or have them bring in a laptop and show some of their work? Nobody ever codes on a white board!! Plus seeing them use a computer tells me way more. Can they type? That's important. I know some really good coders that can't type well, but it's more the exception than the rule. Do they know their tools well? Those things are all actually relevant to the work.
Also here's the other thing: there's essentially no cost or barrier to writing code (IE, you're not using up precious materials or something), so I don't understand why employers want to PROJECT how someone MIGHT write code via puzzles and white board writing when they can literally just pair up and watch the person solve an actual real world problem on an actual computer, with google and stack overflow like they'd actually have access to, and then they don't need to project anything, because they know what it looks like when the person actually writes real world code! Spending a grand on a cheap laptop for this with a few software/IDE licenses is a lot cheaper than making a bad hire.
Regardless, most modern offices have a projector or a TV in conference rooms. I just don't understand why you'd use a white board when you can easily project a text editor. The problem with writing code in handwriting is you can't move it, so you have to do it all linearly. If you need to introduce a variable or a new scope it gets messy incredibly quickly. When I code I almost am never thinking linearly, and I'm constantly adding things above and below, and doing that on a white board is a NIGHTMARE.
Morevover, testing a candidate on whiteboard is like expecting all your candidates to be good with Emacs, even though that says zilch about their coding skills. Whiteboarding is just a tool like any other, and you(the interviewer) are limiting your talent pool by expecting everyone to not only be comfortable whiteboarding but to approach whiteboarding just like you do.
Working through approaches to solving a problem at a high level, or workshopping a schedule for a feature. That sort of thing.
It’s also a decent skill to test someone on if your team uses it and the role requires it. But coding on a whiteboard is pointless, don’t do this to people please.
Do people send thank you emails after going to an interview but before they are offered/not offered the job? Or when is it? And why?
I'll silently pass such a company because I cannot stand working with psychopass.
> "We always leave candidates waiting half an hour before calling them in. How do they cope with delays?"
That is a traditional technique for fraud. Getting them tired and lose the decision making ability. If not, the company are horrible at time-keeping. Not worth it.
If that disqualifies me from some jobs, that's a feature. Uneven expectations here comes across as demanding respect while showing none, which speaks poorly of the work environment. Hard pass.
In everyday life people understand that there are individuals they won't get on with. Not everyone is going to be your friend. You don't want to be everyone's friend (if you do, that's an ephemeral state that will likely bite you eventually).
When it comes to careers I often see expressed on here the attitude that somehow if the interview process were better; if the interviewer were different; etc; then it'd all be different, they'd get the job and live happily ever after.
Realistically? You'd end up working with a bunch of people who at best make questionable business decisions; at worst are completely opposed to your personality and make work a hellish place to be.
Maybe I'm missing something entirely and this is intended to be some bizarre sort of humour.
I agree that you shouldn't hire people who may not be the right fit and whom you have reason to believe may not succeed or thrive on your team. However, it seems apparent that most people (and I would include myself) may not really be good judges of that. There may be things that are "Red Flags" or "something's off" to us, simply because of the way we were brought up (cultural differences), the way we speak etc. I guess what I'm saying is that in an increasingly diverse world, the markers of success that we look for (or conversely the markers of failure) may not be accurate and we thus miss out on candidates who might actually be a great fit.
Personally, I used to judge interviewees pretty hard on the things I thought weren't appropriate, or things I considered unprofessional. But then I realized that isn't really my job as a technical interviewer. As long as the folks demonstrate the technical skills and a thirst for learning, that's good enough for me.
Which isn't to say there aren't red flags. Lying for instance; pathological liars will totally wreck your organization.
That happened to me. I suspect the experience requirement somehow changed during the interview process. So at the end of the multi-week interview process they realized they were looking for something different than what was listed on the position requirements. I'm not very upset about it. The time was wasted, sure. But I made some connections that may help later.
It's not. Nature is not fair. School is not fair. Dating is not fair. And so on. We try to build fair societies, but right now, they are not.
And interview processes are really, really unfair. Being disappointed they are not and writing a rant about how to them more fair is very naive.
Interviews are most of the time social evaluations packed with negotiation. Very often, even the ones that pretend to be technical interviews.
Why ? Because humans are imperfect and limited. Most interviewers are just not capable of an effective recruitment process, no matter how they believe they are, not to mention a fair one.
So the advice to send here is not "make your recruitment process better". People that are able to will, and don't need this article to do so. People that can won't, and the article won't change their mind.
No, the advice is to the people looking for a job: don't take it personally, randomness takes big role in the process. But if you want to maximize your chances, you need to work on your social skills. Especially the ones that make them feel good about the interview, and value you.
You need technical skills to be good at your job. To be able to apply at high skill ones, to network with people with alike skills, to have fun, to negociate money.
But to nail the interview, you need more.
if this is the thing you're responding to, you're misunderstanding the post entirely. "fair test" here is not about morals, it's about results. if i want to evaluate 2 candidates, i want the test to be as "fair" as possible so that i have the most relevant, fine grained information as possible. i want to render the candidates commensurable so i can make a better decision for my own purposes.
"life's not fair" in this context sounds like some kind of systems pessimism. it sounds like you're saying "stuff doesn't work." but of course it does. of course asking this question and not that question gives me more relevant hiring information. it's totally insane to think otherwise.
As to saying thank you, that's not sycophantic, it's common courtesy. It's not that hard.
Anyway, what's with the hangup on names lately in the "tech" community? Every other podcast I listen to people keep excusing themselves for "mispronouncing" peoples' names. Newsflash: unless your name is English, people are guaranteed to mispronounce your name. You know they don't speak your language, so how could you expect them to pronounce your name in your language? I have never ever had a foreigner pronounce my name correctly in my language, and it doesn't bother me at all. I would be extremely surprised if they did, and my name is just outside of the comfort-zone of English orthography.
Could someone from the easily offended camp please explain your reasoning to me?
Or ask how they would prefer to be referred to. (Many of my asian relatives have an anglo pronounciation they'd be willing to offer).
When I lived in China I certainly didn't expect anyone to even come close to pronouncing my name in proper Swedish. That would have been absurd. My name is Gustaf and that simply can't be rendered in Chinese, so how would they be able to do it, even if they wanted to? Most people at my school ended up calling me Difdif.
When exchanging the usual pleasantries, it's often the interviewer who is the first one to attempt the name, not the interviewee.
If I were to answer my phone every time, "Hi, this Nguyen, my last name is pronounced pronounced S-- E--- O--- whatever", it would come off as a little odd. And possibly as annoyance or haughtiness on my part.
All this goes to show that the "rules of politeness", themselves, are part of the secret hiring process.
And even if they ask, how would an interviewer be able to actually pronounce all these names? They would have to be polyglot geniuses.
Interviewer: So hello Mr Bezwzględny, how do you pronounce your name? Interviewee: Bezwzględny Interviewer in perfect Polish: Ok Mr Bezwzględny, can you tell me a bit about your background?
I can be polite enough to ask for a pronunciation (and apologize if I get it wrong).
When an interviewer doesn't even attempt that, it reflects poorly on their ability to view a candidate on their own worth.
But this precise problem, and that of spelling the name correctly, is why I was named Daniel. Same spelling in English as in Spanish, everyone has some idea of how to pronounce it...etc.