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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

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ctvo

The current interview process is expensive for giant tech companies.

In one hour chunks, per candidate:

- Engineers for the phone screens or coding assessment reviews: 1-2

- Interviewers for the on-site: 6-7. 3-4 engineers, 2-3 managers

- Reviewers for the feedback sessions: Interviewers + 0-2

This doesn't take into account the cost of HR, flights, hotels, on and on.

Giant tech companies have data going back decades now on the performance of this method vs. alternatives. The position that they blindly incur this expense for no benefits is hard to believe.

If you have a cheaper, more accurate way of identifying candidates that also improves the candidate experience it sounds like you have a winning start-up idea. Please go execute.

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> The position that they blindly incur this expense for no benefits is hard to believe

You really find it hard to believe that giant companies like Google spend money needlessly?

You are assuming companies "did" try different methods of recruiting.

You will see, there are companies in bay area that actually differ on how they do interview.

Some are better than others.

Also remember this: google started hiring crazy in 2008 shortly after crisis when noone else was hiring. So google didnt probably try hard to sharpen its interviewing process...

They're weighing the cost of all this up front work vs the cost of making a "bad" hire, onboarding them, and then firing shortly after they start or being stuck with them in the long term.

Google has so much "demand" to work for them that they can be this picky.

> Giant tech companies have data going back decades now on the performance of this method vs. alternatives. The position that they blindly incur this expense for no benefits is hard to believe.

I am not so sure about this. People change, HR fads come and go, leadership always has their own ideas. A company is always ascendant, in plateau, or declining. There's a lot of factors in hiring. It's intrinsically and necessarily subjective.

I think the FAANG's benefit far more from having an appeal to candidates (people really want to work there) than by using some kind of home-grown data-driven algorithm for candidate evaluation.

Ultimately, if these companies can afford to offer compensation in multiples of what others do in other domains and other parts of the world, they really will attract competitive candidates. Does an elaborate selection process help? Sure, but it's only part of the picture and I think it's a relatively small part.

> If you have a cheaper, more accurate way of identifying candidates that also improves the candidate experience it sounds like you have a winning start-up idea. Please go execute.

This statement seems to imply that no one else has any new ideas, which is flagrantly wrong- there's at least Triplebyte in this space, and probably others as well.

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