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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

I think we all like to complain when we don't get the job we want.

It doesn't matter what the process is, some form of song and dance is needed.

I think the thing people are "on about" is that we have become so cynical about the current status quo, that there's no oxygen left to have a real conversation about what constitutes a true "false negative".

It would require some sort of longer-term data gathering around the rejection / ghosting process.

For example, Google claims to be very objective and data-driven about their hiring process, but once a candidate is rejected there is no further data.

How would one solve such a problem?

If we agree that it's just window dressing around a "song and dance" (I prefer to call it "the rituals of gate keeping"), there is no problem to be solved.

But I still feel like giving in to cynicism is the wrong answer.

It's a really interesting point you raise. Road not taken etc. I wonder if google quantifies the impact of hires over the long term. How productive are you? How much does your contribution make the company and if you weren't here would google notice?

If google could know when it was about to deny a speculative false negative it could hire them exclusively into a part of the company where everyone is a speculative false negative. Then you could just watch them compete with those who pass and try and measure something objective.

I’ve been rejected from Google, and a year later they reached back out asking if I wanted to try again. The recruiter even told me over the phone that most people they hire these days have already been rejected at least once before. So they openly acknowledge that a lot of times their best bet is to get people back in the door who they know were close. I’m curious how they determine the timing. Why wait a year vs 6 months vs 1 month?

Similar situation; I was rejected around 2007-ish. Many years later when they reached out the recruiter told me that they changed their process and they believed their newer process was bringing in better hires.

For what it's worth: Someone who works well in an established company isn't always the right person to hire in a young company.

Would you put more weight on complaints despite getting the desired. I got the job I wanted and I still think it's a terrible system.

Once you're inside the company there is data about your performance.

My point is that there's no control group and therefore no way to test the process in an empirical way and possibly improve it.

But the idea of finding a way to measure the performance of people who didn't get hired seems ludicrous, so we're back to being stuck in the status quo.

That's what I'm on about. I would love to see an article that talks about this rather than the screeds and diatribes that show up on HN so often.

The trouble with the idea of false negatives in hiring is that you can't really define what they are.

Every job is likely to legitimately reject good candidates.

Most hiring is for a specific position. If you get 10 viable, or even excellent candidates, you can often still only hire one of them.

The one that gets it will take the job in their own direction. Almost by definition, the winning candidate is therefore the best fit.

Whatever roles the other candidates end up in will go in their own directions. Even if, a year on, you can objectively compare the performance of the one you hired against the one you didn't, their performance was within the context of the role they did win. They may not have been as good a fit for the role you didn't offer them.

If the interview sucks I decline before an offer is made. Why work for someone with a bad interview?

Yeah this approach doesn't make sense in my experience. The quality of my jobs has not been at all correlated with my opinion of the interviews to get those jobs. I think one of the reasons the system still lumbers along is that it's still a good trade to go through the hazing in order to get a well compensated and challenging job. But I think it's still worth expressing dissatisfaction with the system in hopes of seeing improvements.

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