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Comment by heyadayo | Hacker News Reader

Jason: Take this down. You will almost certainly not get the job if your interviewers find this, for almost any tech company of scale. Especially:

"If I am selected for more interviews, I will definitely write about them."

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Maybe he just doesn't care/has already something else lined up.

A friend of mine goes to interviews quite frequently without being the slightest interested in changing his job. His idea is to just follows some practice-makes-perfect motto - almost like dating. But it has of cause its downsides and especially the scheduling seems often to be the ticky issue.

I really don't understand why Jason should take this down. I'd never look down on a candidate for blogging about the interview process with my company.

Compare the upside of writing about his experience with the potential downside.

I don't think many companies are going to say "hey that's great that he did that" and it will help him land the job. But it is entirely likely that any number of companies that he might interview with would be turned off by it and it could cost him the job.

For the author, weeding out employers with that culture might be an upside. It depends what he's looking for.

Assuming names and other identifying details were omitted, would you think it's fine for a company to blog about every candidate they interviewed?

Do you honestly think that the interview processes of tech companies are so secret that posting about them online means instant disqualification from consideration?

I mean, we already know about how Zuckerberg takes prospects on an enchanting walk through the forest. There was nothing negative or damning in Jason's report. Chill out.

Even more so, I would not even interview Jason for our company after seeing this. It isn't like anything was said that is negative... it is just that the hiring process (or anything HR-related) is private. Posting it online shows a lack of professionalism that would make me go to other candidates.

Interesting interviews from Google, Facebook, Microsoft gets reviewed and talked about frequently by my friends and colleagues. I did not know that interview process should remain confidential.

Companies are kind of weird about what's public and what's private.

In this case, the worry is that candidates will see common interview questions in advance. It's an open secret that most interviewers at most companies reuse interview questions to a ridiculous degree.

The right answer is to fix that, probably. Glassdoor is going to change this over time whether we like it or not. But the traditional answer is "crack down on people talking about it."

It is not quite that simple. In most jobs, you will learn confidential and proprietary information. Posting about your interview shows that you care more about publicly sharing your internal knowledge of a company than you do about providing value to that company. That choice is not a trait that I want in my employees.

That's a kind of mechanistic thinking and attention to irrelevant details that might be restricting your talent pool.

Thank you for the caution.

I decided to contact the recruiter directly to discuss the matter honestly. If it is a problem for LinkedIn that the interview process is made known public, then the damage has been done already (I got over 1800 page views as of now). I should be responsible for my action and rightfully be exempt from further selection process.

That's a very high-integrity way to handle this problem. Well done.

If LinkedIn responds poorly after you did this, write about that :-)

I would still strongly suggest that you take the page down temporarily until you hear back from the recruiter. The damage has been done, but can still be minimized.

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