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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself.

It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you.

Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route:

"I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed."

Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.

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The term "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." rings so untrue to me. I'd have to resist the temptation to roll my eyes.

What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer.

At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.

It's not "callous desire to exploit employees" to prefer not to hire candidates whose ego isn't so enormous they think interviews should consist of employers begging them, or indeed to prefer to hire the candidates that have enough motivation to take the job or at least basic social skill to be able to think of a reason it might be interesting or suited to them.

Candidates usually get the opportunity to ask the employer what's good about working for them at the end of the interview if the interviewer hasn't spent the entire interview emphasising it anyway, and also have the opportunity to say no if they're not impressed. If their answer was "we're the ones with cash, and you're the one who's short enough of cash to be interviewing here", I suspect quite a lot of candidates would pass....

These two positions ("employer is trying to exploit me", "candidate expects employers to beg them") are both ridiculous strawmen.

Employment is little different from dating. If someone asks "tell me why you want to date me", you're well within social norms to demand they answer the same question first. It's a rude question that attempts establish a mental framing and nobody over the age of 25 should be swayed by stupid jedi mind tricks like this.

Any employer who expects candidates to beg for positions is probably an abusive prick. Any employee who demands to be treated like a primadonna is probably too annoying. Great, now let's move on to the part of the interview that matters: Do we like each other? That's a two-way information exchange.

If someone fed me that "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed" line in an interview I'd struggle not to write them off as a B-school ass-kisser. There's nothing genuine about it.

I'd have said "candidate expects employers to beg them" was a straw man if I wasn't replying to someone literally insisting that's the role of the interviewer. Would have said much the same about comparing interview questions to Jedi mind tricks! And tbh if someone asked me interview style questions during a date I'd run a mile...

It's not a "stupid Jedi mind trick" to ask people why they want a job, it's a pretty straightforward way of finding out whether they have a particular skill, interest or aspiration that might lead to further relevant questions and a filter to remove people who either don't want the job, haven't read the job spec, think they're too important to answer questions or somehow both realise that framing matters and think framing themselves as uninterested is a good move. "I am here to find out how I can help you succeed" or regurgitating the list of the company's "principles" off their website probably comes off as fake, "no, you tell me why I should take the job" certainly comes across as egotistical: perfectly acceptable answers include talking about being good with their tech stack, knowing their market, looking for a more senior role or wanting to find a new employer that values x more (do you value x?) and can include followup questions.

I go back to my earlier point: if you get to the inevitable point in the interview where you're asking them questions and their answer to what's good about the job or what they like about the company is "no, what's good about you" or "um....", the alarm bells start ringing. The whole point of interviews being a two way information exchange is not setting off the same alarm bells in employers' minds

> You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint.

I'm not trying to do that at all. The question makes sense if I apply to your company. The reality is that it's a recruiter who contacted me cold. They need to tell me what their needs are and why they contacted me.

What you describe makes sense if there is a 2-way conversation and 2-way data sharing. In most of my interviews, it's always going in one direction, and then the company perfectly describes this sentiment of yours:

> You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself.

with "you" being the company/manger/interviewer. I'm happy to have a detailed conversation on how I can help the company, if you're ready to have a detailed conversation about how you can help me. When they ask me if I have any questions, I often say "Sell this position to me." They never have a prepared answer. In fact, they never have good answers to any behavioral question I ask them, but somehow they expect me to have good answers.

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