Comment by justincpollard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justincpollard | Hacker News Reader

My main takeaway from this article is that the author wasn't necessarily frustrated with spending 12 hours to prepare a 1-hour long presentation - though this does seem like a big ask - but was more frustrated that they didn't even get the opportunity to present it because the company was

> looking for someone with a few years of experience working with a specific technology I had never used. But… they knew that from my resume. And from my first interview. And from my second interview. And when they told me that I needed to prep a talk.

Shouldn't the company have seen this deal breaker before the interview process started? Or at least after the first interview or two? Acknowledging that the author wasn't the right fit would have saved both the company and the candidate the time and effort of going through an interview process that the company should have known wouldn't yield an offer.

I'm not sure if this is common practice, but I've encountered something similar, going through multiple rounds of interviews over many hours only to have the recruiter tell me that "based on your resume, you don't have the skills we're looking for in a candidate for this position". Why waster my time, and yours, going through the interview process then?

I don't think any of these rationales are very satisfying, but here are some possibilities: 1) The company didn't know what it was looking for when it started the process and came to a different understanding of the job requirements as the candidate moved deeper in the process. 2) The company is covering up the real reason they didn't want to move forward and "lack of relevant skill" is an easy excuse. 3) The company's recruiting process is immature/messy/sloppy/ineffective and they literally missed the lack of required skills until the very end. 4) The position had to be filled and the company wanted to maintain a backup candidate in case their first choice didn't work out.

I'd love to hear from those with experience on the recruiting/hiring manager side to see whether any of these reasons ring true or if something else might be at play.

My guess is that it wasn't actually a deal-breaker, and if there were no other candidates or if the other candidate ended up not being a good fit, the company wanted to go ahead with the presentation to see if they would be a good fit even without that specific experience.

It's a complicated situation from both side. If you're the company, you have to anticipate that the other candidate might get another offer, or turn you down, or turn out to be a flop, so you want to interview other candidates at the same time to have a back-up plan. And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now. And it's great if it works out... but shitty when it doesn't.

It's worth realizing that it's a losing situation for the company, too. It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it. But unfortunately "wasting a bunch of time interviewing" is just how job hunting/hiring works these days.

> And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now.

I think you're right on here, but I also think the benefits diminish the further a candidate goes in the process only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?

> It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it.

It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.

>only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?

The explanation likely wasn't known at the beginning. The thing that changed was the other candidate, and the company almost certainly had no way of knowing if this other candidate was going to fill the role up until the moment they did, at which time (I'm assuming) is when the company cancelled OP's presentation. The company likely had full intention to hire OP until that point.

>It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.

That's opposite my experience as a hiring manager. If we're "iffy" on a candidate, we'll likely give another interview to see if the first interview was a fluke. But if it's already known off the bat that the candidate won't be hired, we certainly don't waste time interviewing them anyway. Interviewing someone that's already a "no" means wasting multiple peoples' entire day in interviews, meetings, debriefs for no progress. That's something I want to avoid as much as humanly possible, and although I'm sure it happens some places, it's definitely not incentivized at any of the companies I've worked at.

I'm guessing #2 is probably closest (to be charitable). The required skill may have been a soft requirement for a candidate who otherwise wowed them but, as they moved through the process, that just wasn't the case.

A few years ago we were interviewing for a position, and one of the candidates was very up front with what the knew / didn't know -- however everything about this candidate showed that they would excel in the skills that were listed. Another candidate matched up with the skills we were looking for, and on paper was very impressive (same with the technical answers in the interview). However this person came off as a bit arrogant and inflexible. So we went with the less qualified, but better personality fit candidate, and that was one of our better hires.

So I can easily see the tables being turned the other way -- a candidate that doesn't have all the skills, but failed to wow us, would lose out to a candidate that better matched the skill set we were looking for.

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