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Comment by fooboy | Hacker News Reader

This cuts both ways: looking for work takes a substantial, non-zero amount of time, and it's extremely frustrating when startups decide to speak with you even though they know hiring you is "a long shot."

Searching for work at a startup has been a protracted, fruitless process. They have no problem conversing with you and checking out your background over coffee, lunch, whatever. After a few conversations and a technical interview, you find out there isn't a good fit.

Rinse and repeat for any number of tech startups, and you'll be waving goodbye to a month or two of your life.

Has anyone else had this experience? To me, the whole recruiting process is f'kd on both sides.

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It's time for some tough love: If you're getting shot down repeatedly after technical interviews, then maybe you need to expand your search to other areas. That's not a process problem: you're not getting the jobs you want because they don't think you can do them. So the solution to avoid wasting time is not to apply to jobs for which you aren't qualified.

I wish someone had told me this sooner, because after going through the above scenario again and hearing "we'd love to hire you if you had a bit more experience" for the umpteenth time, I realized you're right.

Thanks for the tough love--I'm going to focus on getting that experience.

I've seen it done as a way to avoid openly age-discriminating candidates. You're not a long shot as long as you're young, regardless of experience.

I regret not saying anything. The company's idea was to disregard experience in favor of people who put in long hours. Unsurprisingly, the people in charge were young and inexperienced. The company no longer exists.

My opinion: if startups aren't serious about hiring you, they shouldn't go through the dance. Why are they wasting everybody's time?

Interviewing is a tricky thing. I have been on both sides of the court, and it is very difficult to get a good idea about a candidate's potential simply from the resume/cover letter.

If you keep getting contacted by companies for interviews, but fail to get past that stage, I would recommend two things. 1. Make absolutely sure that your resume is accurate. If, in the interview, it looks like you 'embellished' your qualifications on your resume a bit too much, it is guaranteed to get you tossed into the 'no' pile. 2. Work on your interview skills. It is surprising how bad some people interview. It took me a couple practice tries before I really became comfortable with the process.

I go through this dance a fair bit. At least for us, we're totally serious about hiring. It's just that we're very fussy.

To understand why, think about what we hope to happen. If we do things right, then anybody we hire today will be a de-facto leader two years from now, because they're one of the people who's been around since the early days. Any code they write will be in core parts of the system. And they're going to have a big effect on who we can hire next, because potential hires are going to judge our company partly by them.

We definitely try not to waste anybody's time. But we also don't want to miss a good candidate; some really solid programmers don't interview well. But as soon as we're sure, we politely stop the process and thank them for their time.

Fair point. I suppose it depends what you considerable a reasonable amount of time to evaluate a potential employee. All in all, it took me about two weeks to run the gauntlet at my current job (a startup), and I don't think that's unreasonable, given how busy everybody is.

If you keep getting passed over, however, I can see how that starts to really mount up.

Given the costs involved in making a bad hire, at what point does it become unreasonable to turn a candidate away?

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